All About Linkbait
Linkbaiting SEO Technique
The term Linkbait is self-explanatory as it is a piece of web content that is principally designed to generate incoming links to a website or blogpost from as many different sites as possible. With the ever-increasing popularity of blogosphere, meritocracy and other social bookmarking sites, once there is something interesting on a site and few people begin to share the link, the site rapidly gathers a large number of links across a wide variety of sites.
Conflicting Views on the Ethics of Linkbaiting
There is a controversy raging among webmasters and bloggers whether linkbaiting is ethical or not. Lately a few SEO companies have seriously begun to offer link baiting services while others are opposed to this concept. The dissenters claim that link baiting is not required and the benefits of linkbaiting can still be obtained if good web practices are followed.
Some argue that many linkbaiting strategies come close to spamming and the word ‘baiting’ itself indicates something sinister and conveys a sense of trying to cleverly trap and lead an unsuspecting visitor to a site they do not really want to visit. There is perhaps much truth in both the conflicting views. There will be people who may use linkbaiting strategies for positive purposes and still others for dubious and mischievous ends.
It is a fact there are sneaky marketing campaigns that try to exploit this sort of baitlinking - sites cunningly crafted to regale the visitor first and promote the brand thereafter. So is linkbaiting an acceptable technique or a beneficial fall-out of good content writing or merely an intelligent ploy to generate incoming links? At the end of the day, if a site carries interesting content, then there are several ways to garner links.
Linkbait - a technique
Some describe Linkbait as a technique while others define it as a natural outcome of producing quality content. Experienced professionals say that all along people have been doing all sorts of things to obtain links and ‘linkbaiting’ is only a lately coined term for something that webmasters have been indulging in for many years.
The term linkbaiting is of recent origin and it is used by webmasters to refer to a variety of practices which aim to generate incoming links to a website or blog from other sites. Linkbait is indeed a wide-ranging term as it covers a lot of different practices from conducting awards or competitions to writing provocative, sensational or controversial posts with the intention of generating back links.
Researching a current topic that is grabbing attention is another effective way to generate incoming links. People might not have forgotten that a couple of years back Oprah created a huge furore when every member of the audience was promised a car. While offering every visitor an extravagant gift can be ruled out, but a cleverly designed gift scheme can positively create widespread excitement.
The term ‘linkbait’ does sound somewhat unpalatable because it conveys the impression that the term was coined to describe deliberate content creation to garner links. If web designers are imaginative enough to design something extraordinary, the site will automatically excel in terms of incoming links.
This is certainly the best long-term strategy, because it is less about getting links and more about expanding the audience base.
Linkbaiting SEO Technique
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