SEO line up
10 Jun 2016

What is link baiting?


If you want to attract more visitors to your website, then one effective approach is “link baiting”. This is where a website features content that is so compelling that people want to link to it through their own websites or social media accounts.

This not only increases your visitor potential, but also boosts your website's overall performance in search engines, as sites receiving more links are ranked higher in search engines like Google.

Blogging is a great platform for this. I've recently been working on the new FBU and Prospect websites, and we've made blogging far more prominent in both redesigns.

Another approach is to create a useful tool or interactive widget. An example of this is the TUC’s Economic Dashboard widget on the Touchstone blog.

This gets links not only from people who want to share the tool, but also from websites like leftfootforward.org that can embed the dashboard into their own site. Often a website contains content that many people want to read, but website owners aren't making enough of it.

 One example is Fire and Rescue Service pay rates. On the previous FBU website, pay information was hidden away in a PDF circular that was hard to find, both through the site navigation and through search engines.

When we developed the new website, we  included comprehensive pages on pay scales for each the last 12 years, ensuring the pages are easy to find through site navigation and search engines.

The latest pay scales page is now one of the most read pages on the site. Occasionally, people employ questionable tactics in order to create link bait. Some blog posts are purposefully controversial, in order to garner attention and  secure links. This can increase their profile and boost their search engine presence.

Other strategies for creating link bait include giving away free guides and useful information, focusing on a topic people want to read about, personalized content (such as tests), using infographics, and ensuring that content can be shared easily through social share buttons. Lastly, and by no means least, people love lists.


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