Last night a PR manager from the New Yorker emailed me about the Terry Semel interview, so I watched it and put up a link to the actual video. I emailed a few SEO related bloggers about it and thought nothing more. (other than the interview being great insight into Yahoo).
While the bloggers I emailed did not mention the video, a few other sites did link to the blog post I put up about it including Digg.com (front page right now) and the Financial Times.
While I’ve had other things hit Digg and grow traffic as part of a SEO program, this was 100% natural. There was no suggested email to a large network of friends with digg accounts or anything like that. Not that I would ever do THAT.
It just speaks to the future of linking though catching on to something that’s even a little bit viral. Timing is important and can do amazing things from a link traffic and link popularity perspective.
Getting a little viral is what’s happened with a few of the blog marketing tools Thomas has made. The RSS Button tool alone has about 40,000 links to it according to Yahoo. Some SEOs call this stuff “link bait” but it’s always been about “viral marketing” to me. That’s the power of the link and that’s what our digital marketing firm is doing for more and more clients. In fact, by only taking on client projects that include search engine optimization with online public relations we’re able to do some very interesting things with creative link building that carry over into the offline world.
