On November 1, 2007 we launched Promote My Site and on November 8th we figured out that Google Hated Us and on February 29th 2008 we woke up to find our site was now a PR3.  How did we do that?

Tiger?

Well, ok, maybe a bear cub.  But it feels very tigerish to go from the sandbox to having almost every page on your site in google's primary index.   Like when you hit a really good 3 wood off the tee box and you feel like Tiger even though your ball is 60 yards back from where his would land.

What Kind of Difference Has It Made?

A lot in terms of search results driving traffic.  We still post daily, and we get a fair number of people who come to the main site just to read the daily post, but more and more of our traffic is coming from people searching for terms that we put up on the white board six months ago and said: we need this traffic organically.

How'd You Do It?

It was pretty straightforward:

• Fill out the google form for recosideration
• Write good content every day
• Spend 1 month laying a base of decent inbound links
• Reply to every post with an incomming link

I don't think any of that is rocket science, but ti does require daily application and attention.

Dense Content

Not as in stupid, but as in longer posts predominate.  We have an average time-on-site of over six minutes and three pages.  I think our average post is 400 words, so that is about right in terms of reading speed.

I think that adding images and diagrams to our stories has also helped our readers.  I love a good Victorian novel but I know that sometimes when I hit a blog post that is a giant field of text, I just think, "I will read that later."  As if.  So we've tried to balance quick loading times with some visual relief.  But we've also tried to make sure that the images relate to the post in a useful or humorous way.  One of my favorite SEO blogs has these great pictures all over it but they're essentially eye-candy and don't relate to the story.  Which kind of annoys me while it puzzles me - if you're going to take that long to dig up a photo, why not get one that applies to the story?

Tools

We have seen a LOT of people coming to our site to use the tools (Digg Friend Finder, Backlink Pinger, and Yahoo Store SEO Analyzer) and they tend to stay on the site even longer than the readers.  We also see a lot them come back several times a week.  This is especially true for the Yahoo Store SEO Analyzer - there is a great deal of SEO functionality goodness there, plus re-doing a store is an interactive/iterative process.

Linkbait

We haven't ever set out to write linkbait.  In fact, most of our posts are pretty boring to the general public - we are aiming for SEO business people and practioners  And while they will enjoy linkbait, and may even admire its creation, it doesn't speak to our need for legitimacy in our target marketplace.  So we don't do it. 

Having said that, we have put out some things that we knew would attract a lot of attention: a downloadable list of 2,162 social networking and bookmarking sites, reviews of some popular SEO software, etc.  But the goal of these posts was never linkbait, which I think is pretty obvious from how they were written.

Future Plans

Actually, while we will still be careful to target good inbound words for our customer base, we're not going to pay much more attention to page rank because it is only valuable to us for two reasons:

• Speaks to competency in our chosen field - would you buy SEO tools from a company that can't rank?
• Provides us the ability to target new keywords and get good organic search traffic from them to drive business

All in all, I have to say, the 29th was a good leap day for us!

[Ok, read this post, it's a doozy, but before you go download this list, you should check out our new Social Heartbeat Monitor . Look left. Yep, there it is. You might also want to read this article on why we built it to replace the file discussed here.]

About six months ago we started looking at social networks. Not just the top tier sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, etc, but the second and third tiers as well. There are a truly huge number of social network sites out there. Almost every niche has at least one if not many sites devoted to it.

For example, take Memeza. It's a Pligg site for Zambian news. You might think that's pretty small and insignificant, but if you've got a story that would be of interest to Zambians it only takes 2 votes to get to the top page.

It's PR 4. Think of how that might be useful.

A lot of Sites Out There

There seem to be lots of different lists of of social network sites. The lists usually have numbers of sites in double digits. We've scoured the web for everything we could find. Every time we found an article along the lines of "Here are 18 social networking sites you should know about" we added those sites to our list.

We've researched 2,162 social nework sites. Here's how they break down:

A Present For You

We've put the entire list up on Google Docs as the Promote My Site Social Network and Bookmark MegaList V18. Here's a snapshot of the first few rows to entice you to go download the document.

More than just a list of names of social network sites, we've also included the URL and Domain so you can dedupe it against your own lists, as well as a status as of last week and our comments. If we get enough interest we'll put together an application so that people can query the database.

We thought about making this premium content, but compared to the stuff we're working on for premium, a raw list of social networking sites just doesn't cut it. We hope you'll keep an eye on us for when we start releasing the premium tools.

[Remember, check out our new Social Heartbeat Monitor. and this article to explain why we built it.]

Yahoo Store SEO Analyzer

What if there was a free tool for your Yahoo Store that:

• Suggests better keywords you could be using in each page in your store?
• Shows your PageRank for every product in your store?
• Shows your backlink counts for every product in your store?
• Shows how well you're using meta tags for every product in your store?

Wouldn't you jump all over that?

Yahoo Stores are a powerful and relatively simple to use ecommerce solution but they certainly don't go out of their way to help merchants improve store and product Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  The only SEO tools that come with the store are the new Search Engines section and the new Keyword Finder. The search engines section allows you to turn on sitemaps and provides a link to Yahoo Site Explorer -- not exactly the pinnacle of SEO analysis for your store.

The Keyword Finder is interesting, but the limitation is that it only shows keywords that people used to come to your site. It can only show you the keywords that you've already been successful with. Wouldn't it be a lot more useful to find out the keywords that you should be using?

With Promote My Site's new Yahoo Store SEO Analyzer there is a solution to help you work through any page or product on your Yahoo Store. You can get an immediate feel for how well each of your pages are doing, and a deep insight into the keywords that are actually present on your page and perhaps some keywords that you could add in order to increase your traffic. At the same time you can see how your individual products are doing with backlink popularity.

In our next article we'll go into the operational details on how to use the Yahoo Store SEO Analyzer but let's start with a high-level first....

How Does it Work?

It all starts with telling the Yahoo Store SEO Analyzer where to find your exported page information (objinfo.xml). If you haven't make your objinfo.xml file public, go ahead and do that right now by going to the Search Engines link in your Yahoo Store manager and clicking "enabled" for objinfo.xml.

Unless, of course, you're trying to keep your store a secret from the search and shopping engines, in which case keep it unpublished. By the way, you really ought to have your sitemap.xml turned on too.

Depending upon the size of your store, it may takea while to load your store into our system. After it is loaded, you'll see your complete product catalog in a scrollable grid. You can sort the grid by clicking on the header fields, and there is a set of filters to allow you to focus on specific parts of your store.

Drill Down Process

For each product in your store, you'll be able to see this data:

• Pagerank
• Count of Yahoo backlinks
• Count Google backlinks
• AltaVista index status
• All The Web status
• Page Title
• Meta Description
• Meta Keywords

Just select the row with the product you're interested in and click "Get Data" and it will load the statistics for that record.

How do you know what pages to look at?

You Know Your Products And Competitors!

Well, of course you do.  You can scroll through your products and examine those which:

• Have strong or weak PR
• Have many or few backlinks
• Have strong titles, meta descriptions, and meta keywords

Yes, there are a million reasons to look at a page - you might want to play offence and go after a juicy niche or play defense and strengthen your core money maker. You could also spot product pages with strong PR that you might want to cross link to products with less PR.

Of course this is super-cool, but what can you do with it?

Review, Improve, Rinse, Repeat

Dive into a page and do some keyword work for any one, two, or three word phrase:

• Google traffic estimator
• Google SERP location
• Yahoo SERP location
• MSN SERP location

One of my favorite features is the ability to click through any keyword or keyphrase and go over to Wordtracker and find out alternative phrases to place on the page for more potential google love.

We had one beta tester notice that they had "rolex watch" (266 google searches max/day) well represented, but when they hit the free keyword search on Wordtracker the found out that "rolex watches" was even better, wtih 847 searches day/max.  That's a five minute change that could triple the traffic on a $5K item.

They also noticed that one of their best moneymaking pages was very effective for "rolex watch repair" (28 hits/day/max) but didn't have the keyphrase "repair rolex watch" (15 hits/day/max).  Again, that may not look like a big deal, but it was potentially 50% greater traffic on an important page for them.

Start With Baby Steps

Go on over to the Yahoo Store SEO Analyzer, plug in your URL, and give it a whirl.  Drill down into your highest traffic and most powerful pages.  Find one thing you can improve on each page and make the changes.  Observe the traffic.  See the effect on the bottom line.

You asked for it. And now it's here! The Digg Friend Finder bookmarklet is now available.

Just drag that link to your toolbar. Whenever you're on a page that has some interesting text and you'd like to see which Digg users have submitted similar content, just select the text then click the bookmark in your toolbar.

The Digg Friend Finder page will load, with your selected text already populated in the search field. Just click search and watch the magic.

This is a really interesting question.  The two primary places I go to learn tips and tricks in the SEO world are the guys over at SEOMoz (disclaimer: we subscribe) and Aaron Wall of SEOBook fame.  Ok, I have a bit of a crush on John Chow's business model and I think ShoeMoney, Dosh Dosh and a buncha others are awesome too.

Tools with Content the Key

But Rand and Aaron are also tool providers.  But they're pretty clearly tool providers who are monetizing other products - exclusive content, a book, whatever.  It's not that they don't have very nice tools, but from the outside it looks to me as if SEOMoz's tools and free content drives their subscription model.  I think Aaron is pretty much upfront that he sells his SEOBook.

Opposite Way Around

We have content to bring in tool users. We have "free" tools to sell, well, tools.  Let me show you why, using SEOMoz's recently published traffic stats:

Rand was using this chart to talk about the importance of long tail, but we look at this and think: the people looking for SEO tools are exactly our target market.  I think it's great he can monetize people typing in "what is SEO" and "seo" but we think that the orange boxed "tools" queries are more to our liking.  This doesn't put us at loggerheads with SEOmoz (what is Turkish for stupid?) because our tools are aimed at very specific vertical markets.

For example, SEOMoz's page strength tool is really quite cool.  So we'd not really try to reproduce that (what would be the point, really?) but we might create a page analyzer tool for, say, mobile focused websites.

Vertical Focus Drives Actionability

One of our annoying habits is that we look at ideas and say:

So, what can you DO with it?

Take the Digg Friend Finder as an example - it's blindingly obvious what you can do with that.  Ditto the Backlink PInger.  Who do we know?  Well, as i mentioned, only around 10% of the users have bothered to read the directions for Digg Friend Finder....  If I hadn't started our my career, back in the days of punch cards, as a technical writer I suspect I'd never document anything again.

Actionable Tasks Should Provide ROI

Great, so you can DO something with these tools - what does it buy you?  Again, by focusing on a specific niche we provide that ROI.  Could we have built a Friend Finder that worked for MySpace, Facebook, Mixx, etc, etc?  Probably.  But it was not clear to us that we could provide an architecturally compliant application that provided TOS compliant ROI.  So we didn't.  Simple is good sometimes.

Bias Toward Action

It may be all the startups under our belts (and all the worthless stock options in the file cabinet!) but we're most interesting in things that do stuff.   Content is great, and we produce a bit and consume a lot.  But you have to translate content into action, either manually (horrors!) or by finding a tool or automated service.

Tools are Always Downstream of Content

Would you know to ping your backlinks if a hundred SEO bloggers hadn't talked about how important it is?  Yes, I know we talked about how All Your Backlinks are Pingworthy, but I'm not under any illusion about who gets read first if Sebastain posts something about backlinks the same day I do.

Would you know the value of more digg friends if there hadn't been a LOT of discussion by social media mavens?  Yes, I gave you our take on Efficient Friending on Digg, but....

But once you read the content you can come to us for tools.  Over and over again, we hope.

When we launched Promote My Site we had a pretty narrowly defined target market in mind - people interested in SEO tools that produce actionable reports or measurable ROI.  And we knew that we wanted to spend some time blogging about business and SEO and VC -w e wanted to introduce ourselves first, as it were.  And we knew we wanted to review some non-competitive SEO tools so that future users could better understand what we used to evaluate our go/no-go decisions.

Planning Never Survives Launch

So we did all that, and after reviewing thousands of inbound traffic referrals, reading comments, answering emails, and noting the kind of comments people were leaving around the 'net about our blog, we thought we understood the market, at least a little bit.

Then we released  Digg Friend Finder and Backlink Pinger anticipating that the people who were visiting every day would find them useful and maybe make a few more visits. Perhaps even put the blog on their RSS Feed.

Wow, we did not really anticipate people coming back several times a day, bookmarking us, sending emails about us to friends, etc. (Yes, it is amazing what you can learn from site logs!)  And suddenly our overseas reader count really ramped up.

It's all Good

But very strange.  It looks like at least half the people using the tools are coming straight to them, which was expected.  But the other half are coming to read the daily post and then going over to use the tools.

We couldn't really understand that behavior, so we did a silly post on Saturday - no real change in tool use.  Then on Sunday we didn't do a post at all.  Tool use dropped around 50%.  Fascinating.

Wait, You Said Free is Bad?

No, we said (and will continue to say) that if someone doesn't have a way to monetize what they're doing then it's just a hobby.  So why would you depend on someone's hobby site to run your business? 

Monetizing the Tool Users

We think that there are three ways to make money out of tool users

• Ad revenue.  We're currently using google, but expect to implement different models in different parts of the site.
• Affiliate programs.  We only do this for stuff we respect: iMacro, WordTracker, SEOBook.
• Paid subscriptions.  Not currently available, but when they are they will offer a huge increase in features and functionality.

We can see that, based on the current traffic and click rates, that the "free" tools will shortly pay for the hosting resources consumed while bringing in paying customers.  Which is twofer, if you think about it.  So we have a lot of incentive to maintain the tools, ensure that the server has good performance, etc, etc.  In other words, this mixed model gives you something to count on.

Why Tools Are Cool

Recall what I said earlier - people are coming back several times a day without needing new content to drive them.  Hmm.  Leverage, wot? 

We've also seen, not viral, it's not that big, but a fair number of new users coming from emails and blog comments.  And, finally, we're getting all sorts of new organic SERP traffic from regular-old-google and from a half dozen new country specific google portals.  Are SEO folks from NZ more likely to click ads than our Canadian brothers?  Who knows, but if we have both then we'll find out and can make adjustments accordingly.

As we continue to roll out new tools (we'll have another one this week too) we expect that the virtuous cycle of increased traffic, revenue, and referrals to continue.  This should put us in good shape for paid subscriptions and a cash flow positive business you can count on.

Ok, not really, but a few days ago I noted that we'd learned a lot of things the first few days after we launched Digg Friend Finder, and that one of them was that there were a lot more mentions of hamsters than gerbils in digg.

So several hundred people have run the exact same experiment.

I have only one thing to say... Our paypal address is

paypal-payments@promote-my-site.com

I'm just saying.

(Actually, that would be a cool configuration for a home office!) 

Phone number portability has been a boon to consumers and the mobile industry, so why will OpenID be a total disaster for social networking and social bookmarking if anyone is stupid enough to use it?

This Woke Me Up

We got a LOT of hits on an article via this Russian scuttle-based bookmarking site. So I was poking around to see if there were any smart ideas we could use and I ran across their registration page.

Tell me, and nothing against the folks running this site, because I wouldn't know them from Adam's housecat, but if you thought about it for 10 seconds, would you use your OpenID there?

Controls

When you switch your phone number from Verizon to Sprint there are elaborate checks and balances. Plus you know that the call center person isn't writing down your phone number so they can call the Maldives or something.

And if you use OpenID to move between your MyYahoo and Gmail accounts, that is probably ok. Because those guys have lots of corporate controls in place.

You can read this excellent Wikipedia Article to understand the types of technology controls built into OpenID (geek warning!).

Trust

At the end of the day you can really only use a site if you trust it. On Amazon many of us have our credit cards stored and one-click buying turned on. I use Overstock a lot, but I don't keep a credit card on file there. When I buy stuff from some smaller retailers I go get a one-use credit card number from my bank.

And you can only use OpenID as a single signon across sites if you trust it.

Single Signon Works in Corporations

Yes, we have it in our office too. But that is a trusted environment. How many of the websites that you regularly use are ones you would really trust? I say that because....

Accidents and Theft Will Happen

What happens when one of the issuing authorities has an, er, well, minor problem?

Like losing the tax records for the UK last November:

Britain's Revenue and Customs department is scrambling to find two discs that contained data on 25 million people.

How about if someone in a trusted position just steals it all. Never happen? Let me remind you of a story from a few years ago:

An engineer working for America Online was arrested yesterday and charged with stealing 92 million e-mail addresses of AOL customers and selling them to spammers that were peddling penis enlargement pills and online gambling sites.

Let's all remember that AOL lost all that before you could buy an 8G memory stick for $40 at Office-Stuff-R-Us.

Phishing is Easy

I get those so-called MasterCard or eBay emails all the time. Sometimes, if they look really good, I go visit to see what I can see. I got one from Malaysia the other day and their site had more than 100 pages that looked EXACTLY like the ones at Citibank.

Wow.

They do, and if you google around a bit you'll find excellent articles like Radar's. And I think that the idea of putting lots of pieces of security (a picture you should see every time, etc) is good. It's like airport security - a hundred little barriers and places to make a mistake and get caught.

Some differences:

• You have to, as a user, be paying attention to see and use the security measures.
• The guy caught sneaking onto a plane with box cutters last week was risking physical detention. How you going to catch some guy living in his mom's basement stealing OpenID's via a phony soccer survey site?

What Would Your Momma Do?

Let's say your mom uses OpenId on LOLCats (it is embarassing but true!) and one day she clicks on a banner ad for some site importing French cheese. They ask her to login using her OpenId so she can fill out a "short" five minute survey and earn a free pound of brie. While there they ask her to "update" some of her OpenID details.

Did she notice and use the security features? Or did she just help someone order a dozen Garmin GPS units from Amazon using her one-click account?

Remember what I said above, OpenID's security only works if you're paying attention. And if nobody steals or loses the information at a trusted center.

I am obviously going to give this a "pass" and I think you should too. I don't share passwords across sites so that I'm insulated from just the kind of problems that are bound to occur with a system like OpenID.

I'm just wondering how long until the first big security breach happens.

Well, Digg Friend Finder has really made a lot of people happy and has taught us quite a bit about launching SEO/SEM Tools.

Of course it had to go into a top 10 list.....

1: People Don't Read Directions

The ratio of people using the tool to reading the directions is around 15:1. Or vice versa, I couldn't get that right in 5th grade either.

2: Free Products Need Support

Not surprising, but at least the questions are easy to answer.

3: Half the Traffic is SEO

At least judging by the queries. I'm not sure if I expected more or less.

4: Threads Are Confusing

Digg Friend Finder uses our distributed SEO architecture to run the queries against Yahoo and Digg in an Ajax app running in your browser. And because of technical limitations and API functionality we can't really know how many digg friend we can find until a bunch of threaded processes finish running against the digg api. So after you hit "find" it take 10 seconds or two minutes to have the friends come back.

People find this very confusing.

5: Everything is Black Hat

Sigh. No, man, this is about being efficient in your digg friending. It's not black hat - we're within the API, the TOS, and, I wouldn't be ashamed to have my mom find out.

6: NO MAN YOU ARE A #$**&^^%% SPAMMER!!!!!

Well, gee, all caps, I'll take that seriously.

7: Users Click on Ads Even When They're Clumsy

Frankly we did not prioritize ad layout (we stink at that anyway) because we decided that we had other priorities during launch. But a lot of people clicked ads. A lot.

8: People Like Working Tools

We got a fair number of emails saying, in effect, "Thanks for making something that works." Yeah, well, we have a very large list of SEO tools we've looked at and a fair number of them simply don't work reliably. Which is very frustrating.

9: You Can Watch The World Wake Up

If you set the sitemeter geographic display on a refreshing page on Mozilla then you watch people in India, Oz, China and other strange countries (ex: San Francisco!) wake up and bookmark over to your site. Pretty neat.

10: You Learn Something New Every Day

There are 384 posters in digg with HAMSTER and there are 213 with GERBIL. I'd have thought that hamsters were a lot more popular, but then I'd have never thought to look for either. Digg is a biiiiig community.

I do not normally just point at an article and say: read this article on How to Choose a Popular Niche for Your Blog. But not because it's well written (all his stuff is) and not because we need more bloggers (we don't!) but because it is a very well written example of how to do keyword research.

Hitting Homeruns With Keyword Chains

I'm not going to repeat what was in the article, just note that the process is a lot like the more formal brainstorming techniques (if that isn't an oxymoron!) where you take an idea and do the permutations and combinations.

And what results is called a etiological keychain. And now you know why he didn't use that term - I think I just heard 100 people groan and leave.

But what you have is a primary cause (keyword) and all the phrases and keywords associated with it and their probability (search frequency).

The value of this sort of graph is that you can determine which words you need to use around your content in order to get the right kind of SERP love.

Actionable

It all sounds very intellectual and theoretical, but it is very actionable information. If you have the phrase "driving technique" as a key phrase and the suggestion comes back that "snow driving" has 1K searches a day, well, you can do something about that to capture traffic.

Product Keywords

The only problem with the above examples is that you have to create content around them. Which is expensive and time consuming. But if you are selling products then this is a pretty quick exercise, even if you have a LOT of products.

And, of course, you can get a LOT of leverage from this quickly if you use google base to make sure your products are powerfully searched and displayed .

Unfortunately Manual

Here's the problem: you need to keep up with this stuff. And you need to refresh it regularly because search terms do change. And this is a manual process, which means that it is:

• Expensive to execute
• Tedious