Link Bait

Anything on a webpage that captures people's attention and results in people creating an inbound link to that page is considered Link bait. This could be text or other content, online tools, downloads, YouTube videos, music, or other features. So why do people work so hard at making good link bait? Getting a lot of websites to link to your site is one way to increase traffic to your website. And that's on everybody's mind.

Inbound links (links coming from other websites that point to your website) are really good for increasing your PageRank. Link bait is a form of link building. Search engines like Google create and display search results based on several factors, and one of these is Link popularity. The more inbound links you have, and the better ranked the websites are who are pointing to your site, the higher your Link popularity. And the higher up on the page your website will appear in search engine results.

Link bait may entice people because it's funny, entertaining, inflammatory, ridiculous, or provides useful information.  Link bait and link building are used in SEO and online marketing because they can bring in website traffic without relying on keywords or other traditional search engine optimization methods.