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Ok, so I’m not actually a mad scientist bent on ruling the world, but the title of the article intrigued you enough to read this far, right? Well, that was the whole point of the title. If you follow the cool kids in the SEO game then you already know that one of the best ways to increase your rank in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) is by getting as many offsite links pointing to your website as possible. That increases your perceived popularity which is a major determining factor in your rankings. Those SEO cool kids use linkbait to draw in as many inbound links as possible, but very few of them will tell you exactly what linkbait is and why it is so important to their website’s success. Most likely they don’t want anymore competition than they already have.
Quite simply, linkbait is content placed on a website that will offers something worth linking to. A few excellent examples of linkbaits are super-nifty flash games like Radioactive Teddy Bear Zombies, something controversial like KFC Sells “Cancer-Linked Food” to Fight Breast Cancer or something inane and humorous like Britney Spears’ Father Mandates Bra on Public Outings…and you thought my title was a bit overboard? Ok, but each example linkbait web page was built to draw in those precious links, and look at that it worked because I linked to them in this article just now.
But how many of you actually read the full article or played the flash game on the websites in question? Here’s the thing, it doesn’t really matter. Those websites could get linked to by their titles alone. Content may be king, but titles draw links, which lead to more traffic pointing to that indexed content; and as I pointed out, they don’t have to be great titles at all just titillating.
What I’m trying to get at here is that titles are an important form of linkbait because they can bring in links and thereby increase your website’s search engine rankings. For more information on title creation check out Jeremy LaDuque’s 5 Tips for Effective Titles.
Tags: linkbait, SEO, SERPS, websites
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