Link Building & Link Baiting guide to SEO

This is my first one on SEO and there is no specific reason to start with the link building topic. Its old and over abused but it works. Google Webmasters reports this number and for all SEO professionals its a key metric they will never miss. Since the advent of the social web phenomena inbound linking has got a big weight in the Google algorithm and has the capacity to impact your SE rankings.
 

What is Link Building?
Link building means generating links from third party websites to the website which is being optimized. These links are also called back-links.
Why is it so important?
Search engines crawl these sites and follow the link back to the website being optimised, they also tend to associate the website with the keywords in the anchor text which makes the website rank higher for those set of keywords.

How do you do it?
Top Quality content- generate top quality content which will be loved by your target audience and discussed by the critics group (usually industry professionals, analysts) 

Website & Directory submissions: Submit your links to relevant websites & directories which carry good popularity on the subject of your article.

Things to remember:

• The original article should be on the website which has to be optimized (all back links should point to this website).
• Referral directories & Websites should be relevant to the published content should have anchor text to achieve high key word rankings

What is Link Baiting?
Link Baiting is to create a piece of content so beautiful that it will attract link organically without you having to actually ask people to link to your article.
A good example of this would be a viral video or a creative infographic or a well written article.

A good link bait is known to boost rankings by creating a lot of noise in the social media and generating a spike of organic traffic for a sustained period of time.

Here are a few tips you need to know when you are making your bait-
1. Topic- should be well chosen and suits the target market
2. Time- it such that it relates to a major event which people like discussing, sharing, more importantly participate in
3. Be Creative- be creative and make it visually pleasing
4. You have to promote baits- Even Link baits have to be promoted. There is a certain amount of push required initially to set the ball in motion. If it's a great piece of content and has been exposed & digested by a critical mass of your target group you will start seeing the results soon.
5. Easy Sharing- Provide easy social sharing options on your landing pages so it gets well percolated in every individuals network
6. Analytics- Test your analytics codes before launching, data from Link baiting will be extremely helpful in knowing Content & TG relevance, demand gen possibilities, SE ranking impact etc etc