What is Link Bait
Link baiting is a very popular way to give your search engine optimization efforts a boost. The process of creating an effective link baiting campaign is fairly complex but I'll try to break it down to the simplest level. Link baiting is a term used to cover a lot of different methods but the goal for each process is the same: get more incoming links to your website. A piece of link bait is a page or series of pages that are designed to attract those links.
With link bait you are not really trying to get people to use your desired anchor text on a landing page that you want to rank highly in the search engines. In fact, you shouldn't really care if these pages rank highly for any particular keywords at all (unless that would help you generate more links). The most important goal of link baiting is to simply build more authority or trust in your site by gaining quality of links from external domains (preferably from quality, trusted sites). Of course, it wouldn't hurt if you build up your reputation, gain traffic, increase your subscriber or follower counts, or sell some products with the process either.
Different webmasters have different views on link bait. The problem is that with so many different types of link bait out there it's easy to like one way of doing it and despise how other people do it. I'll go over link baiting techniques in a different article, but if you are creating quality content like lists, polls, breaking news, or in-depth research then you are making the web a better place and should be rewarded.
Other people out there spread false rumors, bash people without reason, or run bad contests. Those sites and webmasters I do have a problem with and would never reward them with any kind of a link, even if it's to tell everyone what a scam they are.
To summarize, link bait is simply a section on your site that you create to generate incoming links to in order to build your site's reputation. You don't worry about what anchor text is passed.