There’s a lot of noise made nowadays about “link baiting”, but to those of us who focus on the whole SEO process rather than just linking practices, it can seem a bit of a mystery. My understanding is this: it is an extension of the old mantra “content is king”, but with a slightly more cynical, deliberate edge. Whilst I wouldn’t disagree that good, regularly refreshed content has to be the cornerstone of any site wishing users and search engine “bots” to visit and contine to do so, it’s always seemed a little niave to me to assume that “if you write it, they will come”. At least, I’ve never noticed that to be true - while you might have just written the best ever piece of literature on your site’s theme, it is unlikely that it will ever be noticed unless the site in question is already regularly visited by a high number of users looking for useful information. This simply isn’t true of most commercial sites (the type that SEOs most often find themselves working with) - their content is sales focussed through and through, and most users do not expect anything more.

But this throws up a problem - people do not link to sales chatter. It’s promotional, and sounds good to someone who has found your website looking to buy, but to anyone looking for reliable information its lack of objectivity renders it automatically useless as a reference, and therefore not worth linking to. To naturally attract links to a site like this, we have to be a little more imaginative in what we’re placing on the site than simply suggesting “good content”. There must be something available from your site that deviates from the overall content to provide something sufficiently fun, informative or interesting so that others will link to it (and therefore your site) where they might not have before - this is what I have come to understand as “link bait”.

Now, I might be failing in the imagination department here, but I’ve struggled so far to come up with such ideas. So, I’ve had a look around. Good old Google. But, surprise on surprise, a lot of the SEOs who’ve hit upon a winning formula in attracting links to seemingly un-linkable sites are keeping schtum about how they did it, exactly. There’s a lot of articles out there, such as How To Win Links and Influence People by Jennifer Laycock, advising us on what not to do (”don’t make a link request all about you”, “don’t send your request to generic info@ or webmaster@ type addresses”), which is all good advice, but there’s very few ideas out there for what you should put on your site to attract links (apart from the old “good content” chestnut).

There are, however, some more generic tips out there to help you on your way. They aren’t fully fledged ideas, and will require considerable imagination on your part if they are to be applied to your site, but they are tried and tested methods of generating interest. The list below was found at Jim Westergren’s blog, and is about as concise and useful as I’ve found.

• Make a valuable resource (lists, special reports, history of, how to, etc.)
• Interview (e-mail/phone) prominent people and publish it.
• Build a useful tool
• Write an interesting article
• Run a newsworthy ‘event’ such as a contest
• Test something new that has not been done before
• Be the first in doing something on the internet
• Write something controversial
• Be the first to write the latest news in your niche
• Be the first to expose a scammer
• Disagree with an authority
• Write some funny humor
• Make an interesting picture
• Be the first to research and document something
• Make a theme, plugin or piece of software
• Make a tool that others can put on their sites but that links to you
• Make a joke about a known person
• Make a resource that is just in time for a major event
• Write an outrageous theory and back it up with logics
• Write useful comments on something that is happening
• Give something valuable for free
• Coin a new acronym in your niche and get people to talk about it
• Become an expert in your niche and write valuable information

Of course, I now have to decide which of these tips could apply to my sites, and decide on an appropriate and .effective way of implementing them without interfering with their look or feel.

That’ll be the hard part then.