Link baiting helps drive traffic
Before you start optimizing your site and adapting headlines, text and so forth to accommodate your keywords or increase accessibility, it is worth standing back for a moment to ask yourself whether your content is truly interesting or authoritative.
Optimizing a website is inextricably linked with the production of high quality content. You need to give the spiders a reason to visit you. If other quality sites are linking to your content, the search engines will deduce that your site is highly valuable and therefore deliver you to the web user as a more relevant resource.
Creating reasons to visit
There are a number of ways in which you can seduce other bloggers and webmasters to link to you.
1. Staying current: Where are you getting your information from? If you are compiling articles by sweeping the web for information, that’s fine as long as you put your own spin on it and don’t directly duplicate content. However, it won’t necessarily get you noticed.
In order to stay fresh and be able to create a piece that will resonate through the web, it is a good idea to spend some time in the online community; searching latest blogs participating in forums relevant to your field and so forth. By properly listening to what people are saying in these forums i.e. what they’d like to see more of, pet hates and current issues etc, you can get some good fodder for your next post. Being active in the social networks i.e. Digg can kick-start your popularity and lend you some visibility to start with.
2. Capitalizing on partnerships: Think about whether you could team up with an expert in your field. This will lend immediate credibility to you and your site. A joint venture or even securing a quote from said expert can work. You could do a feature on them and link to their site. If the article is good, you could get the expert linking back to you for self-promotion.
3. Being funny or unique: Comedy is arguably the primary reason for a web feature to go viral. For example, some of the most highly visited youtube videos have consisted of nothing more than a baby Panda’s sneezing (to its mum’s great surprise). Nothing groundbreaking there, but it did manage to tickle the global nation for a while.
If you can’t think of something funny, or it seems inappropriate to do so, it also pays to be unique. As mentioned above, monitoring blog subjects will help give you ideas, but you could have a personal view or opinion that might spa rk debate. Something that has neither been proved or disproved in the past stands a good chance of getting talked about in the present.
4. Link baiting: While all content designed to get links could be referred to as link baiting, it is more common that you associate the phrase with giving away free stuff. Providing one-stop solutions e.g. complete how to guides/top 10 lists etc, free tools such as BMI calculators, search tools and so on, is a great way to attract links. A website can make itself more useful by providing access to such tools to web users, but even more effective is if you can provide a tool that a blogger or webmaster would be interested in. This will provide an excellent source of links.
5. Avoiding overt commerciality: Websites that feature lots of ads or overtly sell within their content are generally avoided by bloggers or webmasters. A piece that appears purely informative is far more likely to attract genuine links of quality.
While this article only picks up on a few of the techniques that can be employed to generate interesting content, the overall message should be that generating less high quality pages is far more valuable to the virtual community, and your site, than having hundreds of irrelevant filler pages. The goal with online content is to become an authority or reference point for a subject in order to get linked to time and again.