Link baiting has been talked about on many SEO & link building websites. Link baiting essentially employs writing a good quality post relating to the niche that you compete in. Because the post answers common questions or concern held in the industry, in theory, it is assumed that a lot of people will link to the post which will help your SEO efforts.

I personally believe that people who promote link baiting as the main way of getting links do not really know what they are talking about. Normally, authors tell you to write some good "How to" or "5 Tips to" kind of posts, which will force a lot of readership and people linking back to you. In this way, they argue, that you will get many links.

Here is the problem. I have tried many times to get link baiting to work. To my utter disappointment, I have never had more than 10 incoming links to my link bait pages, no matter how "interesting" the content was. Now I understand that this website is a still quite new, but the fact remains that even though you are an authority in a niche, I just do not see thousands of people linking to one blog post, no matter how good it is.

I think that the theory behind this technique makes sense, but in reality, this method only provides minimal benefits. Why?

Because you are spending your quality time to research, write good quality information. And as everyone would know, time is money. But unless your website is already dominating its market and getting thousands of pageviews, there will never be hundreds of people who will link to your article or post.

Plus, even if hundreds of people did link to your link bait page, that is not the page you want to rank high for, right? Think about it. Apart from that, even if for some reason you would actually want the link bait page itself to rank, you can never optimize your effort fully, because natural links coming your way will never care about the anchor text that you would want to use.

In my opinion, using link-baiting (in most cases) is like giving someone $100 just so he can give you $10 back.

Maybe this technique would help you in micro-niches, where it would be very easy to portray yourself as an expert on your subject, but for bigger niches I do not think this technique warrants itself to be used.

---

Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites