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07.12.07
Getting A Million Links
 By
Steven Bradley
A journey of a thousand million miles backlinks begins with a single step link.
-Confucius (sort of)
I hope Confucius will forgive my changing his quote around, but if you haven't heard SEOmoz recently moved past the one million mark for links flowing into the site. Congratulations to Rand and the rest of the Mozzers on their well deserved achievement. Rand posted today on how SEOmoz gained those one million+ links, all in under three years no less, and since I've been answering a lot of questions the last week on how to get links I wanted to add a few thoughts of my own.
First let's put things in perspective. I just checked Yahoo Site Explorer for a link count on this site and I'm sitting at 15,183, of which a very large part are undoubtedly from forum posts and blog comments, so I've a long long way to go to even get to 100,000 links, let along a million links. On the other hand that probably means my links are more on the order of yours as I'm guessing you need a lot to get to a million links too.
In his post today Rand outlines the keys to how he got all those links and I take heart in the knowledge that my strategy for growing this site since day one is in line with much of what Rand discusses. I still need to get better at a few things, but it's confirmation I'm doing things right. Hopefully you are as well.
The keys according to Rand are Content, Community, and Timing.
Content
By now you know that content is important to your success. If you don't then here it is again. Content is important to your success. Reread that a few times until it really sinks in. Yes, there is more to generating traffic and success than content, but this is where it all starts. If you don't have something worth linking to why would you expect to gain links.
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What's worked for SEOmoz?
1. Don't be afraid to try something new
2. Be timely & topical
3. Make it usable & attractive
4. Present something different
5. Writing quality
I'll let you read Rand's post if you haven't already for the details on the above, but I would like to call your attention to the last item on the list, writing quality. There's a good reason why people like Brian Clarke and Chris Garrett are on my daily reading list. Both help improve the quality of your writing and over the months I've incorporated many of their ideas.
Not every post I write today is better than every post I wrote a year ago, but overall, by focusing on quality, this blog has improved. A better blog is more likely to build links into itself. Improve quality and you're more linkable.
The quality of your writing goes beyond knowing the rules of grammar and being able to put sentences together well. I think it's important to develop a writing voice. Your voice is everything about you coming out in your writing. It's your experience and your thoughts and your beliefs and so much more. By all means research what you're writing about and spend time learning what makes for good writing online, but develop a unique voice above all else. No one can replicate your unique voice.
Continue reading this article.
About the Author:
Steven Bradley is a web designer and search engine optimization
specialist. Known to many in the webmaster/seo community by the username
vangogh, he is the author of TheVanBlog, which focuses on how to build
and optimize websites and market them online.
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