Go Fish - Link Baiting vs. Link Building May 1, 2009
The Difference Between Link Baiting and Link Building
One of the best ways to increase traffic to your website and to gain credibility for the site is to get incoming links from other sites. There are a few different ways to do this. Two of the most popular methods of gaining incoming links are link baiting and link building campaigns. Many people get these two confused which is a problem because they are quite different in both their approach and their results. Understanding the difference between them allows you to tackle both methods and to potentially double the results of your attempts to increase traffic.
Link baiting is a term that is used to describe the creation of web content that is intended to gain links from the rest of the web. The point here is that you are focused on creating high quality content which will be attractive to other sites. Link bait content may include cutting-edge news, a unique slant on a hot topic, video-rich articles, how-to guides (and other useful information) and anything shocking (such as inflammatory topics designed to incite people’s wrath on the web). With any of these types of articles, the goal is to write something so interesting that people throughout the web will want to point others to it by linking to you.
In contrast, link building is a specific strategy for obtaining links rather than a single type of content. Link building campaigns may include the development of link bait for the site. However, they also include many other facets such as social bookmarking and social networking, promotion and marketing of the site, requesting links from others, guest posting on blogs to get links and including your website in online directories. Link building, then, is a set of tactics for building links in a variety of different ways whereas link baiting is solely about creating content that will gain links on its own.
The goal for any good website should be to create a full link building strategy that incorporates link baiting as one aspect of the approach. Link baiting is great because it gains links on its own while adding high-quality content to your site. The better the quality of your site’s content, the more likely it is that your other link building efforts will be successful. Likewise, the more successful your link building is the more attention that you’ll get to the sites designed to gain new links. These approaches work back and forth to continually increase your web traffic and enhance the productivity of your site. Contact a qualified SEO company for advice on link building for your site
