Worms, Peanut Butter, and Other Fish Food

Original Article from IntelliSites, the smart choice for web design (and SEO!)
So you know how important blogging can be to the success of your site.  By blogging about topics relevant to your company's area of expertise, your clients will get to know and like you better, and the search engines will like you better, too.

But in addition to adding more content that search engines will value, a blog can also help you out with another important area of SEO - establishing links to your site.

The search engines really like links.  Basically, if you can get the right links coming in to your website, your website will get better rankings.  And you can use your blog to entice other web users to link to your site.

That is, if your blog does something to lure them in.

And that, kiddos, is what we call link bait.  If you can come up with a blog post that other sites will be tempted to link to, your blog will take on a whole new role in your SEO.

So...what types of posts are considered link bait?  What are people out there itching to link to?

Link bait stands out. By being unusual, controversial, polarizing or extremely useful.

It could be a post with a point that you make that is really out in left field - something that other people aren't already saying.  But of course, you have to believe and support what you're saying, or you'll have people linking to a site with no brand equity.  Controversy gets people talking, but of course, you need to make sure they aren't talking about how out of your tree you are.

Writing extremely useful link bait might be a little safer.  Here, we'd look for a post that has really strong content that people can use as a reference.  We're talking about things like 50 Frequently Missed Tax Deductions or 101 Ways to Cook Chicken.  The types of posts people forward to friends or print out for future reference are the types of sites to which people will also link.

Writing link bait isn't really all that different from writing a regular post.  At the end of the day, you want the content in your blog to be stuff people want to read.  When a post qualifies as link bait, however, the author has gone the extra mile and made sure that the content will get people talking, and, of course, linking.