This guest post is by Ryan Shell of Fashables.
I won't even begin to act like I'm some sort of SEO ninja, because I'm not. What I do know is that a particular post on one of my sites has ranked in the top three spots on Google, with a majority of that time spent at number one and outranking a major clothing brand.
Tumblr played a huge part in making that happen, and I'd like to share my almost accidental findings.
The backstory
Break dancing (Image courtesy PhotosbyRy.com)
I'm a marketer by day, but one of my many side projects is running a men's and women's fashion blog called Fashables. I attended a Dockers event on April 7 for the launch of one of a new line of pants, the Alpha Khakis.
After the event, I went home, wrote a new post and scheduled it to be published the following day. The post was well optimized for the phrase "Dockers Alpha Khakis" and search engines have since sent my site a good amount of traffic for those keywords.
One of the reasons why I've received the traffic is because of keyword optimization, but another huge part of the SEO puzzle is what happened with Tumblr, and that's the real story here.
The accident
This could get confusing, so keep I mind that Dockers Alpha Khakis is the primary post in question.
A recurring feature on the site is a street style fashion post that is published twice a week. One of the photos previously published is the one you see to the right—it's of a young girl taking part in a break-dancing circle at Union Square in New York City.
One of Fashables readers evidently liked the photo enough to share it on Tumblr. Now, this is where the accident happened.
When they shared the photo on Tumblr they, for a reason unknown to me, linked the photo to the Dockers Alpha Khakis post on Fashables.
Once the photo hit Tumblr, it got reblogged and reblogged—maybe 40 or so times in total. Each reblog...
