Link Baiting
Link Baiting is the technique of attracting plenty of links from all over the web to help promote your site, improve search engine rankings and also ensure short boosts of traffic. There is nothing specific that you can do besides creating some excellent content to help attract these links. The content no doubt needs to be of high quality and designed to attract popular bloggers and other content creators.
You will need a fair understanding of the kind of content that will bait links. You need to pin down the subjects, features and content that will pull in the best bloggers around. It is quite subjective as to what is the right content but is the most vital piece in linkbait creation.
A few sites that may help you decide about your content would be del.icio.us or digg.com. These sites will help you ascertain what is in, and the most talked about and sought-after content subjects. Popular blogs like, Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Threadwatch and others are also helpful in pointing towards the latest trends and popular topics. The two most popular subjects could easily be web 2.0 applications and trend announcing articles or posts. These subjects are most sought after by bloggers, and they will happily link to your content.
One excellent link baiting technique would be to have well-respected and well-known industry professionals to help you with content like best practices or even just give opinions on issues/trends/factors that are currently affecting industry. This is a great way to attract topical links to your site.
If you have a new site which is not already popular with net users, you could reach out to other popular and well-known bloggers. What you should not do is ask for links, and what you should do is ask for their advice. You can send them an email asking for their opinion about the content of your site and any changes that can be made to it to make it better.
More often than not the blogger will reply with their advice, and if you were to implement the changes recommended and let them know that you have done so, they would refer to it on their blogs and voila you have a valuable link.