SEO TIPS: LinkBait 101

What do you know about tactics designed to make people react with your content in such a way that they can’t help but share your link around? The odds are, you know of the concept, but you don’t really know how to make this happen on a consistent basis. What we are talking about is linkbaiting, and when it is done correctly it is an incredible way to get a large number of organic backlinks very quickly. The trick is, it’s not easy.

The art of linkbaiting is all about highly relevant attention grabbing content. The keywords you need to keep in mind here are relevant and quality. You don’t want a link spread all over the web that makes you look bad after all. You need more than a worm or a cricket – you need something special to use as bait and reel in the people you want attention from.

The goal is to attract the right people to your content who will then spread it. You are mostly interested in important bloggers, journalists, or even your competitors sitting up and taking notice. Don’t underestimate getting power users on Twitter to take notice who can spread your message to over 100,000 streams with one click. To get your message out fast, linkbaiting is the way to go.

What do you need to know about the linkbait itself? Linkbait should be controversial, fun, insightful, entertaining, informational or even just ridiculous. The key is to make people take notice. Whatever your hooks are, you need to research and slant the material in such a way that it becomes an angle for approaching link acquisition targets for your business. Never lose sight of this fact – it is about getting traffic.

There is really no limit to what you can use as linkbait – creativity is the key to making it work. There are many different types of hooks. You can use news, incentives, appeals to ego or sense of humor, contrary views or attacks, or simply resources that people are attracted to because they fill a need. Even something created merely for fun can end up going viral. Anything that hits the right audience at the right time can take off.

How do you give yourself the best odds of it working? The first thing is that you will need a strong, attention grabbing title with good SEO value. Take some time to study direct marketing headlines and sales letters as well as popular blogs and viral posts on social networking and bookmarking sites. These will help give you an idea of the types of titles that spread fast.

Something else you need to keep in mind is making sure that you use high quality keywords in your anchor text since the title will be used as the link in many cases if you do manage to get your linkbait to go viral.  You should know what will appeal to your niche audience and concentrate in that area. Yes, people often go viral by dumb luck, but we are talking about a formula to make going a viral something that happens a few times a year – not once in a lifetime.