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Nov 04

2008

Digg Analytics and the PageRank of Powerful Profiles

Posted by Don in SEO, Digg

We've talked about finding profiles on Digg that have Toolbar PageRank to pass. It's one of the criteria for finding an Interesting Digger. But how many Digg profiles are out there that have positive Toolbar Page Rank?

The answer is quite a few, even after you get past the Top 1000 Diggers:

Page Rank	Count
6	36
5	26
4	361
3	906
2	1,501
1	1,546
Total	4,376

This is based on an analysis of around 100K Digg profiles. Here are some key take aways from this analysis:

4.3% of Digg Profiles Have Rank - That's a pretty significant number when you factor in how very few users are really active. It's been my experience that with a few months of active digging and attracting strong profiles to make you a mutual friend you can build a profile with positive link juice. Guess what? You can add links in your profile directly to the URL of your choice, and they're do follow. Consider that a bonus in additional to everything else you get from Digg.
You Don't Have to be in the Top to Get Value - The Top 1000 are only about 25% of the profiles with positive link juice to spend. There are a lot of strong profiles that never get a submission to go popular. You can fly under the radar on Digg and still get a lot of benefit.
Having Positive Page Rank Will Get You More Friends - It's a self feeding cycle. As your profile becomes more powerful, more people want to be your friend, making your profile even more powerful.

What level of activity does it take to get a Digg profile with positive page rank? Check out these stats:

Activity	All	PR 6	PR 5	PR 4	PR 3	PR 2	PR 1
Average Diggs	4,298	17,779	27,520	10,040	4,276	2,674	1,465
Average Comments	314	304	906	590	406	252	171
Average Submissions	154	743	828	380	218	76	35
Average Friends	156	158	294	346	281	117	36
Average Mutuals	84	134	244	233	147	46	14
Average Fans	314	3,126	2,515	986	304	86	26

As you can see, the average amount of activity for a user with positive pagerank is pretty low. 4,298 Diggs is only 200 Diggs per day for 21 days. 10 comments/day for 31 days will get you into the average number of comments. 5 submissions a day during that first month will get you into the average number of submissions. The numbers of friends, mutuals, and fans is not that high. That's not to say that if you do just those things you'll get a Digg profile with positive pagerank -- you still have to garner the appropriate internal links on the site into your profile. In other words, you've got to get the right friends in order to build up the profile. But it clearly does not take an extraordinary amount of activity to make it happen.

It's even more interesting to look at the numbers it takes to reach the various levels of pagerank. There is actually a trail off in the amount of activity between 6 and 5, except for the number of fans. Which makes sense -- fans are a one way link into your profile, so having more of them will bring more internal juice.

Take a close look at the PR 1 column. It really does not take a lot of activity or numbers of friends/mutuals/fans in order to get to that first level. You could easily build a user with those characteristics within a month.

Remember when we suggested that you Cross Pollinate Your Social Media Profiles? This makes even more sense in light of these statistics. A few inbound links from other social networks can dramatically improve your link juice. If you look at some of the PR 6 profiles, they've got incoming links from blogs because people talk about them. Supporting your social media profiles with incoming link juice from your other web assets can be very helpful. As your profile becomes more "high profile," you'll add friends and juice.

Now, if only there was a way to buy a book and some software that would show you exactly how to build a powerful Digg profile and make the process easy. Oh wait, there is a book on how to Dominate Digg! And it includes free software!

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Apr 10

2008

SEO Puts $31,752 Additional Profit in Man's Pocket

Posted by admin admin in service, SEOMoz, SEO, Sales, project management, mistakes, customer, capability

Additional Profit from SEO At least. Which is a pretty good piece of pocket money. I suspect even Warren Buffet would slow down to pick that up.

I attribute this to SEO because even thought it was a change in business process coupled with good SEO that made it happen it could not have happened without SEO.

Fair warning to people looking for "advanced" techniques - they ain't here. But what I'm going to talk about is a LOT more valuable than a trick that may or may not work with Google next week or next year.

Best Ever YouMoz Article

Let's look at the real money quote that J Kelly Garrett put in his amazingly excellent SEO article at YouMoz. This piece of advice will serve you while you climb up the value chain from a specialist to a trusted business advisor:

I took the pile [of papers, documentation, etc], pushed it aside, and asked him [the business owner] to tell me about himself. This is a common technique of mine, whether it is a small business owner, or the Chairman of the Board for Burlington Northern Railroad.

He wasn't asking to hear about the guy's soccer team, he wanted to get the gestalt around the company. What is important about the environment, goals, challenges, employees, culture, customers, etc, etc, etc.

SEO Is Never Rocket Science It's Not About the Technology

Really, it's not. Not even in SEO. I wasn't about the technology in OO programming. It wasn't about the technology in robotics. It wasn't about the technology during the dang moon shots either.

It's about how the technology serves the business and makes it more successful. Sometimes 'success' means one or more of:

Improved profit
Increased revenue
Decreased risk
Stronger resilience
Faster new product introduction
and on and on...

But if the technology isn't in service to the goals of the business then it will eventually fail.

The $2M Piece of Advice

I know exactly when I finally understood this. No kidding.

I left one job as a consultant making $55/hour doing NeXTStep programming (hey, that was LOT of money back then) and got another one making $75/hour. The had two slots to fill - lead programmer ($50/hour) and technology business advocate ($75/hour).

For some reason, don't know why, during the interview I was homing in on the business objectives of the billing audit system they were building. I kept asking about change management (people, not source!), about deployment, about disruption, etc, etc.

Next thing I knew I was walking about into the freezing flipping cold in Chicago holding onto a 50% raise. Bubba, you don't get too many of those.

If you work that out - 48 weeks a year, 40 hours a week, 40 work years in a lifetime - you find out that that change in focus gets you a $1,920,000 raise.

Actually, it's even more than that because you keep the advantage while you march up the food chain.

Back to The SEO Example

What really struck me about Garrett's example was that the business took the fairly traditional and predictable approach of getting some SEO guys to graft web and SEO onto a traditional "ring and pitch" business.

The SEO guys put together a campaign that generates 2,500 leads and it kills the guy because:

ROI goes from "signup" to 2 years.

"He is looking at ROIs that should apply to heavy machinery and commercial aircraft."

Growth rate drops from 19% to 3% because of process issues:

"growth rate has plummeted from 19% per year to 3% per year because he is in the office answering the phone all the time with close rates of 12% [down from 97%]"

Actually, there were a lot of issues, but those are the two killers. Look at what happened - his profits got pushed out a year from acquisition AND instead of looking at an yearly "takehome" increase of $67,032 he was seeing an increase of $10,584. That is an opportunity cost of over $55K!

You can go broke quickly making money that way.

Do The SEO Math Do the math

I'm just going to quote Garrett's point in toto because it sums up the whole problem so neatly:

SEO Firm Declares “Success.” The PPC campaign is bringing in over 2500 hits per month. Closing the sales is not really their job. They just need to work with the business owner to further tweak everything to bring in more hits. “Obviously” the copywriting needs work to further capture the ones that do get there, or there is something wrong with the business, or whatever...but we are getting people to the site. Just wait till the site starts to rank higher with the search engines!

Remember, the owner is now going broke pretty quickly, has sunk a fair bit of capital into the new venture AND is probably pretty much apoplectic. In fact, if he's like any dial-and-smile salesguy I know, physical and financial threats are probably in the offing.

What's the Solution?

I won't repeat the meat of the article but basically Garrett becomes and advisor and helps the owner re-engineer his business so that he goes back to ROI on close. But most importantly the business growth goes back up to the previous 19% and then all the way up to 28%.

So, back to the math - previous to the first campaign the owner was looking at a yearly "raise" of $67K based on growth. The slap-on-SEO campaign took him down to a $10K raise. The SEO+BPR campaign took him to a $98K yearly raise. Thus the title of this post because the SEO catalyzed a $31,752 additional raise.

I'd like to read a lot more articles like this, and I hope he keeps writing.

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Mar 11

2008

SEO Has Arrived

Posted by admin admin in SEO

Torchwood SEO I was watching one of my favorite shows, Torchwood, and at a very important point in this weeks space opera episode they have to try to find out the nature of an inter-dimensional creature given just a few words it mutters in their presence.

So they google it.

And I've been doing this long enough to think, wait, these guys are in Wales, which google did they use?

I miss several lines of dialog and have to Tivo backwards.

Once again I have settled down to enjoying the show again when Death gives quite a speech

I am the Hunger that knows no end. I will feast until eternity and still desire to consume.

At which point the boss-man, Captain Jack (I am not making this up), calls Yanto, the guy back at their HQ, and tells him to find out if there are any historical references.

So he brings up google again, types it in, and says:

I found a lot of references but they all redirect me to Weight Watchers

People, SEO has arrived.

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Mar 05

2008

Ramblings

Posted by admin admin in SEO

I sometimes come across things that really really amuse me but aren't, in themselves, post-worthy. So I do what we all do, have a chuckle and forget about it. Today I thought I would try to capture some of them and hand them off to you. A mini-roundup as it were:

I was reading an excellent article about how captchya's are being broken left and right and someone suggested that we switch from text to a HotCaptchya. Go on over and see if you can pass the test 'for the other team.'

We recently did a longish post on Outsourcing to India and while responding to comments found a great article from Lazy Owner on Outsourcing. I think I like his article better than ours. Dang.

Back in January we wrote about using Bugzilla to control projects. We're in the midst of a pretty big project, with hundreds of items to complete, test, and integrate. And we have people working on the project in three different locations on two different shifts. I was just able to go through fifteen or so tasks and dispatch them back to where they needed to go with only a few minutes coordination overhead. All thanks to the lovely and free Bugzilla. If you do big projects you owe it to yourself to get off the spreadsheet and onto the 'zilla.

Would you believe someone has sold 15 Social Site Submissions for $10 on eBay? With 200 happy customers? Amazing.

I just read a really good article about letting Page Rank flow into your Contact page. I'd never thought about it, but, duh, of course your "Contact Me" page should rank above other people with the same name. We don't over-tweak our robots.txt file because we decided a long time ago that we'd rather spend an hour writing content than trying to over-optimize search engine behavior.
- Maybe we're just strange because we rarely no-follow links, except maybe to Wikipedia. <lol>

It's rare for me to find a new SEO/SEM blog and immediately find two great posts, but that's why I was so delighted to find Marios at All Things SEM:
- Sphinn: Many Voices. I like analysis based on numbers. And I really enjoy sphinn, so when you put the two together, well you had me at standard deviation.
- Scaling SEO Services. We're all about SEO tools here at Promote-My-Site, so when someone says they're important, well, we love it.

Why pick famous people for their Digg names? It's not really iikely that Kevin Federline is really my friend on Digg, is it? is it supposed to make me react to the shout more?

Speaking of crazy stuff, we were on a conference call today with a customer discussing, for at least 15 minutes, how to make sure that they had the right licensing paperwork for their servers and laptops when the project is complete. Ok, reasonable enough, but if you figure that the maximum possible cost for the licenses was under a grand and their cost for my team on the call was about $4K/hour, then that was pretty much a wash. Plus, of course, the answer is that the XP/Vista licenses are glued to the side of the computers and everyone on the call should have known that.

I got an email from a client complaining that he was going nuts looking for a simple semi-WYSWYG HTML editor. I love an opportunity to "give" stuff out. So I sent him over to the FCKeditor site. It's an open source PHP based editor, so you can easily install it anywhere on your intranet. But better yet, they have a "demo" version running on their website, so I can use that when I'm on the road and don't feel like logging into the VPN. Very very supercool - it has all the basic features and toggles between raw-HTML and WYSWIG.

That's all my scratchings for today! Have a great day.

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Mar 05

2008

117 SEO RSS Feeds Worth Reading

Posted by admin admin in SEO

Speed Read Your RSS Feed I recently did a quickie post on seoMoz about getting your RSS feed right and, in passing, mentioned that I had tested my theory on a LOT of SEO RSS feeds. Funny what people will pick up on - I got a number of requests for my feed list. So here it is:

Did I miss something? Drop us an email.

Self Promotion Warning

Most importantly is, well, us: Promote My Site Click here to subscribe to our feed.

You can also find the actual file on google docs right here.

What's the Point Jim?

With all that reading, you'd think I'd be smarter by now! Actually, like most people who have large RSS feeds, I don't read as much as I skim the headlines and pick and choose. However, my main justification for the time consumed is that I also use articles as "gifts" to clients - people always appreciate targeted suggestions. Unlike a lot of so-called networking opportunities, sending a potential/customer an article that is NOT self promoting your business and that has value is a powerful behavior.

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Digg Analytics and the PageRank of Powerful Profiles

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