Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP: A Developer's Guide to SEO

Chapter 10. Link Bait

Link bait is any content or feature within a web site that is designed to bait viewers to place links to it from other web sites. Matt Cutts defines link bait as "something interesting enough to catch people's attention." Typically, users on bulletin boards, newsgroups, social bookmarking sites, or blogs will place a link to a web site in some copy that further entices a fellow member or visitor to click. It is an extremely powerful form of marketing because it is viral in nature, and links like these are exactly what a search engine algorithm wants to see — that is, votes for a particular web site.

Soliciting links via link-exchanging is less effective than it once was to the end of improving rankings, as discussed in Chapter 2. Link bait creation is one of the newer popularized concepts in link building. In the article at http://www.seomoz.org/blogdetail.php?ID=703, Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz states" ... I'd guess that if Matt (from Google) or Tim (from Yahoo!) had their druthers, this would be the type of tactic they'd prefer were used to achieve rankings." It is frequently, with a lot of luck and some skill, an economical and ethical way to get links to a web site; it is considered to be a white hat search engine optimization technique universally.

This chapter introduces the link bait concept, then shows an example of what we term "interactive link bait," which is an application that garners links naturally and virally.

As discussed in Chapter 2, building links ...