What is Link Bait and How Do You Create it?

The term ‘link bait’ sounds like a very spammy practice. However, if you look beyond your first impression and understand what it means, you will discover that it is a unique SEO strategy for generating search traffic.

Link bait is content that is so engaging and valuable that other websites want to link to it. Link baiting produces such high-quality posts that people who read them are persuaded to share and even link to them. Basically, ‘baiting’ your readers, but not in a malicious way.

Like regular link building, link baiting aims to increase the number of backlinks to your website, which can help improve your search engine ranking and drive traffic to your website.

In this article, we’ll explore the different types of link baiting, best practices for creating appropriate link baits, and how to use your link bait to get the most out of your SEO efforts.

Types of Link Baits

There are several types of link baiting that you can use to generate backlinks to your website. Here are some of the most popular types:

• Controversial content: perhaps the most popular type of link bait is content likely to generate strong opinions or emotions. While this can be an effective way to generate backlinks, you should use this method sparingly and with deep thoughtfulness because the riskiness of controversial content can easily backfire on your website or business.
• How-to Guides: People are looking to learn about stuff all over the internet. How to cook; how to bake; how to fix smartphone problems; how to post videos on TikTok; how to ride a bicycle. The list is endless. Comprehensive how-to guides provide immense value to your readers and are effective link baits. Using the Eye10 Keyword Planner, you can get key longtail keywords for your how-to guides.

• Listicles: as much as people want to learn things online, most people do not always have the time for comprehensive content. This is where listicles come in. Compressing all you want to say about a topic into a list of a few items will attract several readers.
• Evergreen content: this is a piece of content that is designed to be relevant and beneficial over a long time. It is different from blog posts that are written to address current issues. One piece of evergreen content can continue to generate backlinks and traffic for you five or even ten years after it’s published.
• Content with Media: visual media is a way to keep readers engaged with your content. However, this does not mean just slapping images and videos on your webpage. For one, the media content has to be relevant to the main body of the webpage. Secondly, try and be creative. So, instead of a regular image, create an infographic that distills complex information into a simple format. However, always ensure you use the right alt tags when you use images. You can easily check for this through the Eye10 On-Page SEO tool.

• Original Statistics: conducting original research in-house and presenting your findings to the public is one of the surest ways to generate traffic through link baiting. Your post will remain relevant if other websites keep quoting your statistics in their writing. Of course, generating such statistics must be of the best standards.

Best Practices for Creating Effective Link Baits

To get the most out of your link-baiting efforts, it’s important to follow some best practices. Here are some tips to help you create effective link bait:

1. The most important tip for creating effective link baits is to ensure that your content provides value to your audience. It should be practical and actionable, and readers should be able to derive useful lessons from it.
2. Opinionated content is more likely to generate strong opinions and emotions, and this can help your content stand out. So, in your article, take a clear stand and defend that stand. However, know when to draw the line at being controversial.
3. Find avenues to evoke the emotion of your readers. Being controversial is not the only means of generating strong reactions. You can also write your content in a way that creates a sense of urgency, elicits curiosity, develops intrigue, and so on.
4. Because visual content is more engaging than text-based content, even if your content is primarily written, you’ll do well to include images, videos, and other visual elements that elicit interaction.
5. Make your link bait newsworthy by talking about the most current affairs. This does not mean that you should turn your blog into a newspaper. If your post is timely enough, it will generate more links than written weeks or months later.
6. Look for content generating many backlinks and then try to improve it in various ways. This could mean including more updated information in yours, adding statistics, using more links, using more current keywords, and so on.
7. Tell a story. The power of storytelling is incredible, and many people are looking for stories to which they can relate their experiences. If you want to learn how your competitors use stories to elevate their content, use the Eye10 Industry Checker to determine the leaders in your niche and try to mimic them.

Conclusion

Link baiting can be a powerful tool for improving your search engine ranking and driving more traffic to your website. By creating interesting, valuable, and engaging content, you can attract backlinks from other websites and improve your SEO efforts.

Using proper link baits makes your link-building strategy easier. This gets even easier when you use Eye10 SEO tools to generate real-time SEO data, export reports, and gain actionable insights for your SEO strategy, all with a single affordable subscription. Sign up for Eye10 now and start enjoying these benefits.