How SEOmoz Built One Million Links in Thirty-Three Months

Just look at it. The beauty – so magical, so inspiring. I feel like Gatsby finding Daisy again after all those years. It’s enough to bring a tear of joy to this bearded SEO’s eye:
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Of course, coming back down to Earth for a minute, I have to realize a few things:

1. It’s almost certainly not accurate (Yahoo’s making an estimate)
2. There’s no reward (although maybe there should be – one million links medal awarder opportunity awaits!)
3. We still get less than 30% of our traffic from search
4. Indextools tells me that fewer than 300,000 of those links have ever sent any traffic
5. Google Webmaster Central thinks the number is only 250,000 (although they themselves admit to not reporting fully)
6. Oh yeah – and we fell from ranking #7 for SEO at Google, to ranking #15 (losing our spot to a site that looks like it was designed in 1998, has only 3,300 links and links out to “sexy lingerie” in the footer)

So, the news isn’t all good, but it still feels like a milestone, and one worthy of sharing. Certainly, in the sphere of search marketing focused sites, SEOmoz has had great success appealing to the linkerati and growing links virally, with virtually no manual, manipulative or paid link building.

The important question, the one that’s valuable to you as readers is, how did we do it?

Actually, there were three keys to our linking success – Content, Community and Timing.

Content
The links we’ve generated spawned from other website owners in the field of Internet marketing (and related disciplines) and primarily references the source material we’ve built up here on the site. Our blog, articles, tools & antics follow less of a link “bait” formula and more one of link “appeal.” The content we put out isn’t just designed for a link – it’s really designed to make our readers into raving fans. Every blog entry I write, each tool we design and every article that’s authored has both a value proposition – primarily that it will make you a better marketer – and an emotional appeal – hopefully, you’ll get a sense of the personality, voice and style behind the words and grow to enjoy the rapport.

Many of our content pieces have generated remarkable numbers of links individually:

However, you can see from the above that only 15-20% of our links flow to those main pages, while another 5% point to the homepage. As with all things SEO, it’s about the long tail of 5-10 links that point to each individual blog post, a few hundred to an article here or there, rare links to our profile pages or services pages, etc. It’s a “natural” looking backlink profile primarily because it was built 100% naturally (OK, maybe 99%).

The takeaway lesson here isn’t about SEOmoz’s own content, though. It’s about applying the same principles to your own projects or clients. Here’s my top five list of suggestions for following the tactics that have worked for us:

1. Don’t be afraid to try something new – We experimented with quizzes (which are apparently down… need to look into why that is), tried expert-sourcing, built a recommended list with no kickbacks & gave premium content a shot. Some of these were great successes, others only mediocre, but experimentation proved key.
2. Be timely & topical – When Web 2.0 was a hot buzz word and everything with the term in its title got Dugg, we built the Web 2.0 awards. When people started wondering on the forums what the ranking factors were, we asked the experts. When Dan Thies (KW Guru extraordinaire) complained back in 2004 that there was no way to automatically measure keyword difficulty, we built the first version of the tool.
3. Make it usable & attractive – Other folks have replicated (or even preceded) much of the work that we’ve done, but I think our user interface and design prowess (primarily Matt’s doing) are responsible for a lot of the visibility we’ve had over other alternatives.
4. Present something different – The SEO world is particularly filled with the same coverage of news, events & search matters. SEOmoz has always tried to stand out by NOT covering the mainstream, but instead, providing our own take on topics that are often ignored by others. By creating news & providing unique information, our content doesn’t have to compete with Danny’s or Barry’s or Andy’s.
5. Writing quality – These poll numbers from Vizu’s blog research PDF tell the story far better than I can:

Community
Next on my list of big factors that have contributed to SEOmoz’s link-earning success is community, by which I mean, primarily, community participation and engagement by mozzers in the wide world of the web and the even wider offline world (yes, the ratio is still Internet < Real World).

I’ve personally met and interacted with between 2-4 thousand people over the last 3 years – shaken hands, shared meals and drinks, held conversations and exchanged business cards. As much as the online world connects us, the real world ties the knots in those binds. Once an in-person connection has been made, a true relationship exists and it’s those relationships that have built up much of the goodwill and branding that carries over into readership and links on the web. I’d urge anyone who’s involved with building a brand on the web not to ignore the power of direct relationships. You don’t have to be in the world of webdev or marketing, either, just look at how Allan Dick of Vintage has done it.

My top 5 tips for making your community connections valuable:

1. Don’t pretend to care, actually care – I think this lesson took me a few years to learn, but it’s been invaluable. While it might seem like a good idea to feign an interest in a person you meet, it’s far better to actually be interested in them. There’s a difference, and almost everyone can tell. Personally, I probe until I find something fascinating, and trust me, there’s almost always something you can connect on when it comes to people you meet during professional networking events – a school, a mutual friend, an industry event, a news item, a hobby, etc. Whatever that common ground is, find it – your reward will be a positive connection that both parties remember.
2. Follow up by email – Inevitably, you’ll get lots of business cards. When you do, read them, visit those sites and send the giver an email. Granted, due to the high volume of cards I exchange (usually more than 50 cards per conference day) now, I no longer have time to do this, but when I did, it was incredibly rewarding. I’d visit their site, shoot them an email with some kind words and maybe some suggestions and naturally, they’d remember me, remember SEOmoz and, equally important, I’d remember them (or at leas their site).
3. Stay out of gossip – I admit that I sometimes have a hard time following this one; it’s an incredibly compelling subject, particularly after a few beers. However, particularly when it comes to personal gossip, you’re actually building more risk than you are reward. Joking about an inept speaker or sharing an anecdote is fine, but stay away from relationships and company/organizational politics as much as you can – I’ve been burned a few times by this one.
4. Use some personal branding – Yeah, I know the yellow shoes are getting a bit old & dingy (and my new pair was stolen), but they’ve had a great impact on building a recognizable brand. I’m not suggesting that’s for everyone, but if you can have something remarkable about your personal appearance, background, storyline or style, it makes you memorable and that’s a very good thing at events where people are meeting dozens of new faces for the first time.
5. Strategic name recall – I’m awful with names. But, I make a big point of trying to remember. I use all the normal techniques (call them by their name a couple times in conversation the first time you meet them, associate it with something they’re wearing or where they’re from or something you talked about, etc.) but I also get a bit sneaky. You can always go for the “what’s your email address” question, look for a badge, ask for another business card, or quickly introduce them to a colleague – hey, I’d like you to meet Rebecca (then they say their name and now you know it!).
6. BONUS – Involve your connections – If you’ve just met someone you think is an important resource for the future, or simply someone you’d like to spend more time with, get them involved in something together on the web after the event ends. Interview them for your blog. Ask them if they’d comment on something you’ve written or get their opinion on something that relates to both your fields. Those shared experiences through email will make the bond stronger for the next time you see each other and give you something else to discuss and relate to.

Timing
I’ve said a few times that I feel that starting a new blog about SEO in 2007 is a huge challenge, while blogging about a new niche (where’s the unofficial iPhone blog? the 2008 campaign in the search engines blog? the social networking wars blog?) that’s on the verge of becoming popular is a much better choice. When SEOmoz started writing about search marketing (way back in 2003, though we didn’t start the blog until October of 2004), there was relatively little competition. SearchEngineWatch didn’t start their daily blog (in a blog format) until August of 2004 and with the exception of the major forums and fewer than a dozen other popular sites in the niche, we were ahead of the curve.

SEOmoz also began at a time when search and search marketing achieved broader popularity. Our article in Newsweek was one of the first in a national, non-tech magazine to specifically cover the art of organic search marketing and the Web 2.0 movement that spawned in that same time period placed new emphasis on startups and stalwarts in the web world generating traffic from the engines. Google went public, they started dominating market share and they rose to become one of the world’s biggest brands during our first couple years on the web, all of which boded particularly well for SEOmoz, too. We couldn’t help but be caught in the rising tide of an exciting time.

Timing is also about playing it smart, though. Our blogging and articles and tools have changed over time to reflect where we believe search marketers’ interests lie. We’ve moved from heavy coverage of IR theory & algorithm analysis to coverage of news & events to forum discussion and into a primarily educational role (with lots of entertainment and industry insider tidbits to boot). Now, we’re actually diving back into testing and experimentation of all kinds (I’ll have another post in the next few weeks with “what to expect from SEOmoz in the next 6 months”), back into PPC and back into broader marketing beyond search. If you can recognize trends as they happen (or, better yet, before), you’re going to have a lot of success in attracting links and attention.

Alright, folks, that about does it for it tonight. I hope that my post has inspired you and informed you about some of the things we’ve done right (and wrong) and how it’s helped us achieve what I would have considered 3 years ago to be nearly impossible. I’ll wrap up with a quick look at some data for other sites in the search marketing field, to give you an idea of relative link popularity.

Note – all numbers are from Yahoo!, which tends to fluctuate 10-20% daily. My counts are taken on July 2nd at 12:45am (yeah, I’m always up late).

p.s. Yes, I’m taking a subtle stab at the fact that Yahoo! linkcounts aren’t terrific data points, and yes, I realize that this blog post is, thus, infused with irony.