Note: This is the first ever guest blog post on things of sorts. If you would like to guest blog here, please drop me a line with your idea or you can also email me. Since this is an experiment (I’ve asked a couple of others to guest blog too), I would love to hear your comments. If you have a favorite topic you would like to see a post on, you can also ask!

Today we have Rand from 14^th Colony talking about content promotion. Apart from formatting the post and pasting it into WordPress, the whole thing is Rand’s.

It seems every SEO blog and forum says the key to getting backlinks and rankings is to "write great content". But even the best, most insightful, unique content won’t do anything for your site if nobody reads it. What is “great content” and how do you actually get the links you want after the content is published?

Great content is unique, informative and insightful information presented in a way your intended audience will be receptive to it.

What great content is not is regurgitated information that is already on a thousand other websites. Even if you are presenting information that is common knowledge just by putting your own personal stamp on it you may have something noteworthy. And noteworthy content is what picks up links.

Tips to make "average" content noteworthy

• Package the information to match your target market. An extreme example of this is websites that translate documents from one language to another. A less extreme example is repackaging a business article for working moms – the tone of the article will be completely different making the information more valuable.
• Fill in the blanks. Professional articles in every industry assume the viewer knows all the background needed to understand their point. This just isn’t true. This post is an example of filling in a blank: how to promote articles to get links.
• Be ahead of the curve. If you put together information before anyone else does your article will be cited as the source document for all other following. An example of that is my article on Social Bookmarking that came out when that phenomenon was still pretty new. Pierre included a link referencing it to explain his article on Social Bookmarking Code.
• Make it personal. If you can show that you have been in the situation the viewer is facing and made it through you develop a bond with them. Having clear examples and illustrations also help.

And it probably goes without saying but I just have to push this point: proof read, edit, spell check, edit, read it out loud, edit, edit, edit. Spelling and grammar errors can drop the viewer’s trust in a heartbeat. Fix them ahead of time.

Getting the word out

Once you post your carefully crafted, super edited, insightful, unique article it is time to promote it.

• Tell your friends and colleagues. Send out emails to people you know. Your personal relationships are easiest to connect with and they already have a vested interest in your success.
• Ask industry leaders. Be very polite and do not attach any expectations. Industry leaders are who they are because they are busy. Often asking for criticism is the way to go as it appeals to their ego or sense of "giving back".
• Announce the article in a forum. Be sure to comply with the rules and culture of the forum. You can also highlight the article in your signature file. I have had great success with this picking up links long after the initial "buzz" wore off.
• Reference the article on your blog. If you don’t have a blog, get one. They are great vehicles for promotion. This will also get the word out through your RSS feed.
• Reference your article in blog comments. These links don’t count for the search engines because of the nofollow issue but the traffic you pick up may lead to some strong links on other sites.
• Leverage Social Media. Many social bookmarking sites use nofollow but some don’t and the exposure your article gets – even if it doesn’t hit the home page – is often enough to get you some links along the way. Don’t submit everything you write, just your best stuff, and have a friend submit the articles for you (Diggers don’t like self-promotion).
• Write a press release. Getting your article mentioned by industry newsletters and websites can be a big boon.
• Submit to directories that offer deep links. Most directories only link to the home page but some will link to any page in your website that you choose. You can do a search for [keyword +submit] or [keyword +"add url"] to find sites like these.
• Exchange links. Reciprocal linking in limited doses is ok. Just don’t get carried away.
• Offer the article for translation. If you know people in your industry that speak a different language offer to let them translate your article in exchange for a link back.
• Write smaller articles on your topic for distribution sites. If your article is about "widgets" you can expand on some details and have a new article about "the history of widgets" or "the difference between red widgets and blue widgets" or… whatever. The point is you’ve already done the research so use it to generate some smaller articles that reference your main article.

One to two weeks of solid promotion should give your article the momentum it needs. If you do another round of link-building every 6 months you can have a solid position in the search engines and consistent stream of traffic for years.

Randall McCarley has more than 10 years experience in marketing and website development and promotion. He owns 14th Colony and Linker’s Union and is a moderator at SEO Refugee.

A press release just made public covering research by Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology. It’s a very succinct write-up, so I’ll just quote bits of it:

Researchers in the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) copied Google results pages from four different e-commerce queries, ascribing them to four different search engines — Google, MSN Live Search, Yahoo! and an in-house engine created for the study. Then the researchers showed the pages to 32 study participants who were asked to evaluate the engines’ performance in returning relevant results.

Despite the results pages being identical in content and presentation, participants indicated that Yahoo! and Google outperformed MSN Live Search and the in-house search engine.

Participants ranked results from Yahoo! more relevant across the four queries.

The whole premise of the press release is that this observation is the result of brand power for both Google and Yahoo!. It’s an interesting observation, and certainly makes sense, but I’m still not 100% convinced. The sample size is too small and as the researchers noted, "many of the participants said they used Google to search". The very next thing they need to try is to recruit MSN/Live users to do the experiment. If their hypothesis is true, the MSN/Live users would rate MSN’s results top.

Regardless, an interesting note that could explain a lot of the momentum behind the top SEs.

[tags]search engines, Google, Yahoo, MSN, Live, research[/tags]

I saw it on the Internet. It must be true.

So Michael tagged me with the latest meme going around: taking a nerd test to get a score (of course). And my score? Let me use the test’s words: "I am nerdier than 92% of all people.". That’s right folks, I know my periodic table inside out and can recognize photos of great scientists who passed away hundreds of years ago. I even get a badge:

Apparently, this beats the highest score Michael knows about. If you’ll excuse me, I need to go have a walk or something.

So now I get to choose some people to have a go at beating me. Let’s hear it for:

• Joe
• Sophie (wonder if switching to a mac has affected her)
• Kim

Sophie Wegat, the brains behind Think Prospect of Melbourne, Australia, just had an article of hers published in My Business, an Australian business magazine. The article is very easy to read and explains the basics of building a website on a budget is detail. Articles like these are great for beginners in SEO and web design, and also for the professionals who would like a prop to help them explain the process to their beginner clients.

Sophie just blogged about her article linking to a PDF download: Building a Website on a Budget. Well done Sophie!

In the past few weeks I saw the same question asked twice: how do I choose which social bookmarking sites to use on my blog or website? Here is my explanation of how different sites do it and my suggestion of ‘best practice’.

There are three approaches I’ve seen on the web:

• The ‘Link Series’ approach: a series of links, sometimes with images, dumped on the page. Honestly, I think this is a waste of space as the CTR of these links is minimal. This is what I had on eKstreme.com and what led me to create the Socializer in the first place. If you go down this route, keep an eye on what’s going. I suggest you hack the AJAX link tracker.
• The ‘Chosen Few’ approach which links to only a select few of the myriad of social sites out there. If you’re a shopping site, you can submit to social shopping sites. Science-type sites can use Conntea, which is a delicious-type service for academics. Techie sites go for digg and slashdot. You get the idea.
• The Socializer approach, which you know well. Some people use it on its own, and that could be the wrong way to do it. There are two really good ways to use the Socializer:
  • If you use just the Socializer, user a very descriptive anchor text. For example, on my Science Blog, I use the anchor text "Social bookmark post (digg, delicious, reddit, etc)". I also use the Socializer logo as I’ve noticed having the image increases CTR.
  • Another excellent variation I’ve seen is that you link to very few sites (say, delicious and reddit) and then use the Socializer as “the rest” link. I like this approach, as it gives easy access to the social sites your visitors use most often, but covers all bases.

For a website that doesn’t have an unusual layout (like a blog), I recommend the last variation. However, test, test, and then test some more!

The real question is how do you choose which services to list? For each site, test the various services. However, perhaps the strongest hint is your log files: which services refer hits to you the most? These are these are the services your visitors are already using. This data is even more interesting if your site does not already have social bookmarking links; in this case, the log files tell you the most popular services your visitors use without any bias from your help.

Finally, a comment about location. I think, although I haven’t tested this extensively, is that you should place your socializing links in a consistent manner throughout the site at the bottom of each page or blog post. I’ve also seen some very successful links placed at the top of the pages. Also, my experience is that using the services’ logos helps the CTR a lot, in addition to descriptive text if you can squeeze some in.

And there you have it. Questions or comments below

[tags]socializer, social, bookmarking[/tags]

Terrible ad placement: here.

A colleague tipped me on this: Google Scholar is now showing patent results. An example: Result 9 for [video compression].

I’m of two minds about this. Sure it’s not true to the ‘scholarly’ spirit of their "Stand on the shoulders of giants" search they developed, but it may be kind of useful to have both databases searchable in one interface (just don’t believe it’s scholarly). On the other hand, I see this as yet another attempt by G to force upon us a half-baked service that is very inferior to everything else out there. I already had my rant in this Cre8 thread, and I think it’s still fairly accurate.

To follow on: is this the web equivalent of ‘bundling’ that got Microsoft into so much trouble in the 1990′s? Any lawyers out there? Pinging Bill!

[tags]google, patent, scholar, search[/tags]

A very cool idea and shows that Reuters is keeping up with the times: The news giant’s April newsletter talked about their new service called You Witness News. Users can submit their photos and videos to be shared by Reuters and Yahoo.

Of course, the BBC has already had such a service for a long time now, but it’s good to see the Old Media evolve.

Interesting that they mention Yahoo explicitly.

[tags]Yahoo, Reuters, You Witness News, social[/tags]

Hot off the press: the Yahoo! Search Blog announced some upcoming Slurp changes. Effective immediately, we’ll start seeing Slurp accessing pages from crawl.yahoo.net. As they phase this in, they’re also promising bot authentication like Googlebot and msnbot. Finally!

Once Slurp joins the authenticated fold, all the cloackers’ dreams would have been fulfilled. Thank yooooooooooooooooooo!

[tags]yahoo, slurp, google, msn[/tags]

If you ever needed proof that Digg is being manipulated by SEOs, this would be it. Actually read the page and squirm with the pain of innacuracy.

[tags]digg[/tags]

The river in the village a priest lived in was about to burst its banks and drown everything. A car pulled up to the church and shouted to the priest, "Father, we can squeeze you in. Hop in!" The priest replied, "No, you go my children. Save someone else. God will save me!" The water level kept rising and some people in an inflatable boat rowed to the church and shouted to the priest, "Father! Hop in! You’re going to drown!" The priest replied, "No, go save someone else. God will save me!" Now the whole town was under water. The priest made it to the roof of the church where a helicopter hovered nearby and shouted to him, "Father, grab the rope!" to which the priest replied, "No, don’t worry about me. God will save me!"

Our poor friend the priest drowns and he goes to heaven. When he met God, he asked him, "I’ve been your humble servant all my life. I helped the poor and did good deeds. Why didn’t you save me?" And God replied, "Whatever do you mean? I sent you a car, and you said no; I sent you a boat, and you refused; and when I sent you a helicopter, you still said no."

….

….

A salesman built a website. When his visitors came with their money, he said, "No! Go my customers. Buy from somewhere else…."

Are you like the priest who forces visitors away? How many customers did you inadvertently turn away today? Still think your site doesn’t need to be accessible? Think your site is usable?

Your site is broken. Even if you think it’s perfect, it can be improved. Fix it and embrace more visitors.

[tags]accessibility, usability[/tags]

I’m doing a thorough analysis of the monetization strategies on eKstreme.com and I’ve come up with a lesson and an interesting observation.

The first lesson worth repeating a 100 times for everyone: diversify your income streams. A few months ago, eKstreme.com was only supported by Google’s AdSense, and so it rode the turbulent ups and downs of it. Actually, for most of 2006, the montly earnings were going down, a trend that started in April and continued till December. This led me to look at other sources of income. The current strategy is as follows:

• AdSense is still the main ad system used, but it’s ever decreasing in earnings and the slice of the earnings it brings in. Eventually, I think it will be relegated to a backup system.
• I have an old ValueClick account that I revived. It used to be the backfill for AdSense, but now it’s being rotated in on all pages too. Also, since it’s a CPM system, it’s used on this blog and anything that gets referred from digg.com or reddit.com. That is, it monetizes high drive through traffic pages.
• Finally, I started using Text Link Ads, and the results are amazing. Again, there are fluctuations, but the peaks more the offset the downturns, and so overall, a great earner. I use TLA only some targeted pages.

What’s the point? February was a record earnings month for me, with AdSense earning about a third of the total. If I didn’t have the other income streams, the site would have earned a pathetic amount. That’s why diversity is necessary. Even better, March is panning out to be another good month, but AdSense is acting up again.

And now a thought: For a while now I’ve had a deep feeling that Fridays are terrible days in AdSense. Why? It just never seems to earn as much as I do the rest of the week. So today I did an analysis for the past six months, and sure enough Friday was the worst of the working days. The difference between Saturdays and Sundays was minmal, so they’re equivalent. Surprisingly, Wednesday was the highest earning day of the week, followed by Thursday.

What does this mean? Firstly it’s interesting that different days have such wildly differing earnings. Secondly, this may be very hot data for optimizing AdSense impressions. Since Fridays are terrible, I can test new ad networks on Fridays or I can tweak the impressions to reduce AdSense impressions on some days while upping other networks. On Wednesdays, I may run an AdSense only strategy. I’ll be looking more into this, and I’ll run some tests.

One effect this will have is that the overall AdSense impressions might go down. This is tweaking the inventory at its heart, and who knows, Google’s algo might have impressions as a variable. Whatever happens, the only result I care about is higher earnings

[tags]text link ads, adsense, google, monetization[/tags]

An anonymous tipper just told me about this: Log into your Google account, make sure you have personalized search turned on and then search for [inurl:read.php? mysql] and click on the first result. You’ll get a redirector script message like the one below:

(click for full size)

How many people do you think click that link? No doubt sites are losing traffic this way.

Anyone else out there facing the same issue? Yes, many more. To find them, search for [forum inurl:read.php?]. The issue seems to be special characters (commas) in the URLs.

Check your sites folks.

Update: The referrs coming from the notice will be different from the ones if the direct search result was clicked and worked. So it will show up clearly in your log files.

I was very excited when a couple of days ago, Kim, one of the founders of Cre8asite Forums invited me to join the moderating team. I love Cre8 (a lot) and without a blink I blurted out “yesssss”. I’ll be moderating the PPC forums, the Google forums, and the Yahoo forums.

Now it’s official: the announcement thread and blog post. A big thank you to Kim and everyone for extending this invitation and for making Cre8 a great place to hang out and talk web stuff.

So come on – join in the fun!

Tomorrow, the 22nd of February, marks the first birthday of me officially announcing the Socializer for public use. For a few months before that, the Socializer was in use (and thus testing) on eKstreme.com.

To mark the occasion, the Socializer now has new design to bring it more in line with the Web 2.0 look. Please tell me what you think of the new layout either in the comments below or over at the site review thread at Cre8.

So what does the future hold? There are many, and I mean many, updates on the way. I don’t want to spoil the suprise, so I’ll keep mum for now, but webmasters will be very interested in what’s coming. I can’t promise a time line as I’m so busy, but hopefully within a month things will be launched into public testing.

This past year has been amazing for me. eKstreme.com’s traffic went up 10x. I met some great and wonderful people. Even a little community of sorts coalesced. All this was mostly due to the attention the Socializer garnered. Never did I think that it will become as popular as it did, and I want to thank everyone who blogged about, who suggested to friends, and to its users for making it what it is.

So thanks again to everyone, and if you have any feedback, recommendations, suggestions, anything, please just give me a shout.

[tags]Socializer[/tags]

A thread started today by Barry Welford of Strategic Marketing Montreal asked if Google tracks URL clicks in SERPs.

We always knew that Yahoo! sends clicks through a redirection script, and even asks that developers using its API actually use the redirection URL. Their API FAQ states this very nicely:

Q: While using the Yahoo! Search APIs, what’s the difference between a "click URL" and "display URL"?

Our services often provide two URLs for each result. The "display URL" leads directly to the site or resource in question. It’s suitable for display in an application. The "click URL" is longer and contains extra information that helps us to optimize our search services.

Please use the click URL when sending users to a site as the result of using our services. For example, <a href="$clickUrl">$displayUrl</a>

So what about Google?

We already know that GMail tracks URL clicks, and I pointed that out in my reply to Barry, so that’s one service. Digging around in the Google search results, I couldn’t find any evidence of tracking. I was using the LiveHTTPHeaders Firefox extension, and it was very clear that a click in the results was directly transfered to the target website. Javascript was turned on.

Then it occurred to me to turn on search personalization. Immediately, I found the tracking by searching for [google] and clicking on the Google Maps result. The status bar said the URL is http://maps.google.com/. The tracking headers look like this:

So that’s how it’s done: a 302 redirect using Javascript click capture. It makes sense to track clicks as a means of personalization, but that doesn’t mean personalization is all pure and holy as Google makes it out to be.

Please join the thread at Cre8asite forums.

[tags]Google, personalization[/tags]

Joe Dolson has a great article about Processing Forms with PHP, a Beginner’s Guide. Excellent read.

Thanks, Joe!

A thread at Cre8 asked a simple question: how do you monitor your brand on the web? To rephrase, how do you keep track of what is being said about a certain subject?

As you may know, eKstreme.com is home to a tool to do just that, called What the Buzz?. You enter a search term (your brand, your favorite topic, anything) and you’ll then get a large dataset: blog popularity chart, Google Trends, tagged blog posts, Topix.net search, blog posts containing your search (via Technorati and Google blog search), and social bookmarks tagged with your keyword. The Google blog search is a new feature uploaded just now.

So go really check your keyword popularity. Note that the URLs are bookmarkable so you can always come back to get the latest very quickly!

[tags]keyword popularity, brand monitoring, ekstreme.com[/tags]

What is the most popular social bookmarking site? There are many metrics to measure this, and one of them is submissions of links. This website is the home of the Socializer, a multi-social bookmarking service. Using data collected from visitor clicks using the Socializer, I ranked the popularity of the services it lists.

Methodology

Hundreds of sites use the Socializer for their social bookmarking needs. For each page, they create a submission link to the Socializer. When visitors arrive on the Socializer submission page, they are presented with 47 links, each being a specially formatted URL for submitting a link to one social bookmarking service. The 47 links include the most popular services like digg, del.icio.us, and reddit, and many niche and less popular services. The services are listed alphabetically in a rectangular grid, starting with Backflip on the top left corner. Here is an example.

When a visitor clicks on a submission link, the click is logged using the AJAX Link Tracker with the help of a server-side script. Because it is using AJAX, the visitor’s submission is not interrupted; i.e., the data collection does not interfere with the actual bookmarking activity. Since the Socializer page contains other links than just the submission links, clicks on those are also recorded. Example of non-submission links are navigation and links to external sites that host plugins for getting the Socializer to work with WordPress, MovableType, and others.

A few weeks ago, I reset the click logs and started counting from scratch. As of 11PM last night, I had collected 21835 clicks. Overall, these clicks represented 70% of all clicks on the Socializer’s page.

Results

Digg was the service most submitted to. Digg collected 1220 clicks (5.6%) during this time. This represents a very wide lead over Netscape, the second most popular service, which collected 1009 clicks. In third and fourth positions are Yahoo!’s two properties, MyWeb 2.0 with 981 clicks and del.icio.us with 942 clicks.

The rest of the data is presented in the table below and graphically.

(Click for full size version.)

Analysis

There are many points to make here:

• Digg is very popular indeed. It has a full 21% gap over the second place service, Netscape
• Speaking of Netscape, everyone yawned when they moved to their new Digg-like service. They seem to be doing quite well to me!
• The data agree with a recent post by Rand Fishkin. He talked about links gained from social sites, and Netscape is up there with Digg, del.icio.us, and reddit. That’s another metric of popularity of social sites, and it’s good to see some agreement.
• There is a very tight pack trailing Digg composed of Netscape and the two Yahoo! sites del.icio.us and MyWeb 2.0. The difference is minimal, but real as far as I can tell: For the past five days, I’ve been checking the data, and the rankings didn’t change, but they all gained clicks (as expected). It will be interesting to watch the top four in the future.
• But, but, but: although del.icio.us and MyWeb 2.0 are distinct services, together they tell of a very powerful Yahoo! in the social bookmarking market: Combined, they garnered 1923 clicks, which is 8.8% of the collected clicks. Yahoo! is the true leader here.
• Notice the green trend line I’ve plotted on the graph. It’s a best fit logarithmic trend, and the fit is really good. This harkens to the idea of a ‘long tail’ where we observe very few categories (in this case social bookmarking services) being the most popular followed by a long tail of categories of ever decreasing popularity. This is interesting and warrants further study.
• We have to stop and think about toolbars. The key service here is StumbleUpon which shows a very paltry performance. However, most SU submissions are probably done using their toolbar that users install, and so we expect to see very few people using their submission URLs.
• One service I’m surprised to see perform so well is PlugIM. I’ve mentioned it several times in previous blog posts as it’s relevant to internet marketing. I asked the creator of PlugIM to give me exact details, and he said that PlugIM officially launched September 1st of 2006, a mere five months ago. In this light, they’re doing really well!
• The performance of Backflip amazes me again. Last time I did this league table, Backflip also performed very well, but frankly, I don’t hear much about it on the web! One suggestion is that since it is the top left link, it is the first link visitors see and click it anyway. This is a bit like putting ads in the top left triangle area of a web page. I accept that this is a real possibility, but I’ll study it more before making judgement.
• We have to note again how the data was collected, namely, using Javascript. Although not all people have Javascript enabled, there is no reason to believe that those that do and those that don’t behave differently from each other. I’m very happy to accept that users browsing with Javascript enabled are a representative sample of the Socializer’s users in general.
• Finally, we have to look at the demographics of the Socializer’s users. The sites that use the Socializer are diverse and target very different markets. The markets include technical sites, adult sites, commercial sites, and charities. I have no reason to believe that the sites using the Socializer are not representative of websites in general. The largest category of sites is blogs, though, but I don’t know the exact percentage.

Future Work

Well, this is the second time I do this ranking, and the results are very interesting. In a few months time, I’ll quietly reset the counters again and do the experiment again.

Also, there is a new version of the Socializer in development. It will have many new features, some aimed at gaining better understanding of the how users use social bookmarking services. The data will be published like this routinely.

In the meantime, I’ve partnered with SEO Refugee Forums using a customized Socializer, and I’m looking for other partners too. No data has been collected, but it will be interesting to see if the global usage pattern holds for individual sites or not. Should be fun

Any questions or comments, please comment below or email me.

I can’t help but think this is a bad turning point for Digg. Today, the news is buzzing that Digg removed its top users list. Why? As Kevin Rose puts it:

Some of our top users – the people that have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours finding and digging the best stuff – are being blamed by some outlets as leading efforts to manipulate Digg.

Got that? After reading the full post, I can’t help but think that Digg is hiding the evidence of manipulation, not actually fixing the problem (if there is one to begin with). Removing the list and looking the other direction does nothing to stop spam. It just keeps it hidden.

In the meantime, Digg is yearning to be Google. Back in September, the official Digg blog posted a letter with this little gem:

I can say that a key update is coming soon. This algorithm update will look at the unique digging diversity of the individuals digging the story.

A spam-fighting algo change? Sounds awefully familiar. What are they saying now?

The factors and the algorithm are constantly being tweaked to reflect the diversity of the Digg audience as well as to guard against manipulative behavior.

They should have a tag line for companies that do this: "In the algos we trust". All others buy ads.

Back to Digg: basically, they’re saying "we have a spam problem so we removed the top diggers list but we don’t actually have a spam problem because our algos are great". At the same time they tell us it’s because of all the ‘bad publicity’ which makes me wonder: What are they doing? Where are they going with this?

Right on queue, here is an interview with Digg’s current Top Digger (as of removing the list) and his take on things. He asks a very probing question:

What keeps people voluntarily contributing even when the slightest bit of reward is taken away?

Exactly. Digg has set itself on a self-destruction course now, but it’s still easy to fix that. The least they can do is reinstate the Top Diggers list. The best they can do is recode their very trusty algos that rank the top diggers. Otherwise, this is the most pointless move by Digg.

[tags]digg[/tags]