SEO guru, Mike Grehan makes the distinction between the practice of ‘link baiting’ and ‘attracting links’ through creative thinking in his latest article, Stinking Linking Vs. Creative Thinking at Clickz.com.
‘Link baiting’ is the process of making an outrageous or controversial statement with the intention of stirring up debate and controversy - and as a result get lots of links from people saying how wrong you are. (For example, SEO is Dead).
‘Attracting links’ on the other hand is the creative process of coming up with content so good, or an idea so unusual that influencers in the online marketplace write about it. (For example see the Home Office From Hell contest).
Grehan goes on to say, “We throw around terms like 'viral marketing', 'buzz marketing' and 'word-of-mouth marketing' as if they were new concepts. Yet these tactical promotions have been around forever. Seeding trials, brand advocacy, buzz-worthy PR and other grass-roots promotions were standard tools of the trade for conventional marketers long before the World Wide Web and search engines”.
Such practices “adapt themselves beautifully to the Web, where it can all happen bigger, better, and faster”.
Of course, being controversial as a PR tactic has also been around for years but I couldn’t agree more with the thrust of Grehan’s article.
Time and effort invested in developing a creative idea can have huge payoffs in extensive publicity and a ton of high quality inbound links.
I am a website designer and
I am a website designer and have hosted a full flash website for years. More Recently I have added html page content and begun a link building campaign for purposes of driving search engine traffic to http://www.launchthatweb.com. My lingering concern is how relevant will global links be as search engines evolve and ultimately fine tune so that consumers get what they want most — more regionalized search results.