From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Link bait is any content or feature, within a website, designed specifically to gain attention or encourage others to link to the website. Matt Cutts defines link bait as anything "interesting enough to catch people's attention." Link bait can be an extremely powerful form of marketing as it is viral in nature.
Of all methods for doing solid search engine optimization, link bait is one of the most alluring (yet mysterious) methods. Good link bait will grab attention and gather links from various pages across the web, but bad link bait won’t grab much attention and will not have the SEO effects desired. Keep in mind that bad link bait and bad attention are two different things – bad attention is still attention, and for the goal of link baiting, this is still accomplishing the desired result.
Linkbait is essentially a piece of content placed on a web page - whether it's an article, blog post, picture, or any other section of cyberspace - that is designed for the specific intention of gathering links from as many different sources as possible.
The term “link baiting†(aka. linkbaiting) is used through the internet by website owners that might help you to automatically generate more incoming links to your website from other websites. This is “just another†way to develop quality link network around your website.
A really weird video or image exclusively on your site can also act as linkbait. Or a good comparative review of different sites in a targeted niche, may lead to the other sites each linking to your review page.
I defined link bait as getting links unknowingly...my blog gets thousands of backlinks by link bait alone. That was also the reason why some people says just write good articles and the link will follow automatically