In the five years that I have been doing internet marketing I often heard, and continue to hear, the phrase that "content is king" when it comes to successful search engine optimization and internet marketing. I certainly agree that good authoritative, content is vitally important when it comes to generating inbound traffic to your web assets. However,  I would contend that content isn't truly king.  It is more like the crown prince (or princess)..  The real holy grail is to get your website in front of steady, natural link growth.  Obviously, there are many paths to steady, natural link growth and continuous content generation is just one of these paths.  On one hand, I've seen sites create great, one of a kind, heavily trafficked content that generates zero back links.   On the other hand, I've seen three year old widgets, calculators, quizzes, discussion posts etc. generate steady streams of links across huge periods of time.   I think this idea of steady, natural link growth really transcends the idea of "link bait" - to me, link bait has always seemed more temporal, and fleeting.   With this philosophy, you're creating content that is meant to generate back links.  SEO gurus and webmasters spend time thinking about what might grab people's attention and compel them to link to your site.  Of course, this works well for the will it blendpeople and others but for a telecom or pharma player it might be a whole harder to create attractive link bait. Instead, I think one practical take away here is that those SEOs and webmasters trying to create authoritative, important websites spend the time and money to generate not only great, fresh authoritative content and link bait but also spend time creating the tools, ROI calculators, quizzes, etc.  that aren't easily duplicated and/or that require serious inputs of time and money to create.  The differentiator here is that this content has lasting value and is useful to your visitor and is much more likely to create that steady stream of back links needed to be competitive against major brands and major sites that often have hundreds of thousands of indexed pages and backlinks.