If you’ve been doing SEO for a while, you know about the concept of linkbait. This is content that is so cool or useful or entertaining that people can’t resist linking to it, thus improving your page rank and your position in the search engine results pages. But how do you get the word out about your linkbait?
At base, the Internet is one big network – the largest in the world, granted, but still one big network. If you want your linkbait to attract visitors to your web site, you’re going to have to use the network to put it where they can see it. Quite literally, you’re going to have to network.
You don’t necessarily have to put all of your linkbait in places where it can be seen. You can set lures to your linkbait, in a manner of speaking. For instance, you may have engaged in pay-per-click campaigns. Have you considered starting one to promote your linkbait? To take a very basic example, if you put the term “mortgage calculator” into Google you get more than five million hits; you also get eight sponsored results on the right, including one with the words “Mortgage Calculator” as the active link.
I don’t often click on sponsored listings, but if I was thinking about how much home I could afford I wouldn’t have any qualms about clicking on those links. It’s obvious that they’re highly relevant to my search. If you can lure relevant traffic to your web site, there’s every chance that they’ll bookmark your linkbait, pass the link on to friends (after all, most of us have friends with similar interests), and maybe even link to it themselves.
In short, however you get visitors to your site, from whatever source or in whatever venue, once they’re at your site, they’re likely to link to it if you give them what they’re looking for. With a pay per click campaign, you may not have a lot of room in the ad itself, but you can focus it tightly to your linkbait. In this way, searchers will know you’re giving them what they expected.
There are lots of other ways to help the network work for you. It’s just a matter of knowing how it works. Some of the other tips I’m about to share with you are old techniques, while others are newer and have become important with the advent of web 2.0, social search, and user-generated content. As always, your mileage may vary, so try them out and monitor your results to see what works best for you.
Link Trading 
