What is Link-Baiting?
Jackie Binion | 18 April 2006 |
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You may have heard the term “link–baiting” thrown out there in the online community – even in this newsletter. If you think about the term long enough, it sounds like it may be deceitful or corrupt. However, link-baiting is simply a link building technique that will hopefully result in building inbound links to your travel website.
Link baiting has been around basically since the invention of the internet. As you have probably learned over time, the amount of links, especially relevant ones, that point to a website is an indication of the site’s importance. Google’s own page rank algorithm uses these links to determine your “popularity”, and even Yahoo and MSN use links to differing degrees to quantify the importance of a site.
Bloggers use link baiting to gain links to their blog by the quality of information they put out there. Other sites use link baiting for the same reason, to gain quality links to their site. Basically, you put the content out there in hopes that others find it interesting and link to it. It’s been referred to as fishing for links - put the bait out there in hopes that someone will “bite”, and link to your site.
Good link baiting includes things such as: providing unique news, creating a new concept, providing a free useful tool, offering something valuable for free, creating original ideas or methodology, and much more. While link-baiting often is beneficial, there are a lot of schemes out there designed to entice you to link to a site that, in the end, may turn out to be a poor choice. Make sure that you verify a source before you decide to link your toursim website to it; you wouldn’t want to be penalized for linking to a bad site.
Jackie Binion - Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.
