What the heck is ‘link bait’?
Link bait is any type of content that sits on your web site which is likely to cause other sites to link to you. The content may just be an article (all the articles on this web site are essentially link bait), it may be photos or videos, or it may be a useful tool (think how many sites link to www.xe.com just because of their useful free currency conversion tool). The majority of the free search tools I listed (and linked to!) in my articles on search engine optimisation are ‘link bait’.
Write something interesting
Now not many of us are in a position to create unique pieces of software for our web sites, but we are all hopefully capable of writing an interesting article or two. The key to link bait is to be interesting, unique, controversial, useful etc to make sure that you get noticed.
Why not Write a guide to your town / area / region and put it on your web site? You could make it specific to a certain interest group to make the article unique and therefore useful (i.e. a guide to horse riding in Normandy, or a guide to activities for kids in Languedoc for example). Another great idea is to put photos of the region and of guests (with their permission) on your site each year, and then send the link to the guests after their visit. Not all will link to you, but some might, and that’s a great start.
Make it easy for people to link to you
Just putting the content on your site might be enough, but it also makes sense to ‘encourage’ people to link to you by making it easy for them. At the bottom of each post on this web site you’ll see a little ‘bookmarking’ button which helps people to link to my articles with just a single click (more on social bookmarking in my next article). Alternatively, it might make sense to actually have a ‘link to me’ page on your web site where you give people the code to cut and paste into their html to link to your site. That code should look something like this:
Obviously you’ll need to change the url in this code, and the ‘anchor text’ which is the “Gite Website Design” bit. Incidentally, the anchor text you suggest is the really important bit in SEO terms, as it’s given great importance by search engines when they’re deciding how to rank you for specific search terms. If I have lots of sites linking to me using the anchor text “Gite Website Design” it’s likely that I will rank highly for that search term.
Bearing in mind that you’re going to be optimising several pages on your web site for several different search ‘keywords’ (see this article on preparing your gite website for SEO for why), you may wish to change your ‘link to me’ anchor text and URL occasionally to a subpage of your main site. So for example, in a few months I might change MY recommended link text to:
<a href=”http://www.giteguru.com/gite-website-designer”>Gite Website Designer</a> to try to improve my ranking for the search term “gite website designer”.
Generating inbound links using link bait
In a previous article I covered the importance of links for improving your gite’s search engine ranking, and in a subsequent article I covered all the different strategies for generating inbound links to your gite website. In that piece, I promised to go into a bit of detail on each of the strategies, and this article covers the first strategy: link bait.
What the heck is ‘link bait’?
Link bait is any type of content that sits on your web site which is likely to cause other sites to link to you. The content may just be an article (all the articles on this web site are essentially link bait), it may be photos or videos, or it may be a useful tool (think how many sites link to www.xe.com just because of their useful free currency conversion tool). The majority of the free search tools I listed (and linked to!) in my articles on search engine optimisation are ‘link bait’.
Write something interesting
Now not many of us are in a position to create unique pieces of software for our web sites, but we are all hopefully capable of writing an interesting article or two. The key to link bait is to be interesting, unique, controversial, useful etc to make sure that you get noticed.
Why not Write a guide to your town / area / region and put it on your web site? You could make it specific to a certain interest group to make the article unique and therefore useful (i.e. a guide to horse riding in Normandy, or a guide to activities for kids in Languedoc for example). Another great idea is to put photos of the region and of guests (with their permission) on your site each year, and then send the link to the guests after their visit. Not all will link to you, but some might, and that’s a great start.
Make it easy for people to link to you
Just putting the content on your site might be enough, but it also makes sense to ‘encourage’ people to link to you by making it easy for them. At the bottom of each post on this web site you’ll see a little ‘bookmarking’ button which helps people to link to my articles with just a single click (more on social bookmarking in my next article). Alternatively, it might make sense to actually have a ‘link to me’ page on your web site where you give people the code to cut and paste into their html to link to your site. That code should look something like this:
<a href=”http://www.giteguru.com”>Gite Website Design</a>
Obviously you’ll need to change the url in this code, and the ‘anchor text’ which is the “Gite Website Design” bit. Incidentally, the anchor text you suggest is the really important bit in SEO terms, as it’s given great importance by search engines when they’re deciding how to rank you for specific search terms. If I have lots of sites linking to me using the anchor text “Gite Website Design” it’s likely that I will rank highly for that search term.
Bearing in mind that you’re going to be optimising several pages on your web site for several different search ‘keywords’ (see this article on preparing your gite website for SEO for why), you may wish to change your ‘link to me’ anchor text and URL occasionally to a subpage of your main site. So for example, in a few months I might change MY recommended link text to:
<a href=”http://www.giteguru.com/gite-website-designer”>Gite Website Designer</a> to try to improve my ranking for the search term “gite website designer”.
That’s it! Hope you found this useful, a bientot!
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