In SEO, One of the most challenging issues is effective link building! Here effective mean both in terms of performance rankings as well as long term benefit. You can blow up the hell out of your website with blog comments, social bookmarks, directory submissions and you may see the benefit in rankings, but it is only a matter of time before your website gets into Google’s radar and gets penalized by Google Penguin.

What you need to achieve as a Marketing & Performance Expert is a long term benefit. Your website’s backlink profile is under constant & strict monitoring.  That what the algorithm check is whether your website’s link profile is compliant with Google’s guidelines.

They say that link baiting is more of an art than work. Indeed. You should have the knowledge & talent to make it work. Now, we are going to take a look at the most popular link baiting tactics that still work in 2015.

Lists

People are busy. Give them what they want and construct a “easy-to-jump-through”, “quick-to-read” piece of content. Build a list. You will be amazed how easily they still go viral.

Infographics

An image is worth a thousand words. As we said, people are busy and infographics allow users to easily understand any content– and make it viral.

Crowdsourcing

Makes sense when applied to blogs. What you need to do is ask people for contributions to a blog post. You actually need to invest a lot of time in research and PR, contribute the more likes, shares, tweets and backlinks.  Extra pro tip: Speak about a controversial topic and even better include your competitors in it.

Freebies

It is almost niche-independent. The only restriction is that you need to find bloggers and websites talking about your niche. You just need to send them some free stuff in a beautiful package along with an intriguing message and do not forget your contact details & URL then receivers will send some “link love” to you.

Contests

Selected bloggers/websites, the participation is open and you launch a contest with one big prize. The best way to combine SEO benefits with this tactic is to launch a bloggers contest: “write about our product/service including a reference link” and win the big prize.

All these tactics require a lot of brainstorming, effort, project management skills and time. Although linkbait is the single technique that can both be characterized as a white-hat, it is penalty-safe and can be effective in terms of performance if you are devoted to it.