I'd like to thank everyone for their testing on the Social Suite with Digg Analytics and Automation. It was, well, interesting. I've done a lot of beta testing inside client sites but haven't really released a program into the wild since before the internet. (Remember FidoNet and shareware distribution? Yikes!)

At the end of the day we decided that it was usable enough to replace the old Digg Friend Finder. Which, given the number of daily users, was a pretty uncomfortable and tricky decision. However, the actual traffic on the free version of the Social Suite has gone up from the old Digg Friend Finder, so mission accomplished there.

Mainly, however, it was quite a learning experience for us in how people use automation software when it's not part of a larger corporate sponsored project.   We clearly recognized that individual or small company buyers had different price and function points, but the variable cost of time and overhead is so much less accounted for in smaller firms that a lot of our positioning was probably not necessary.  Fascinating. 

Social Suite Beta Test Pre-Natal Expectations

I was expecting a LOT of criticism for the UI. I quite like it and it has a lot of technical advantages from our standpoint, but it is not the typical UI.

Not one word.

I was also expecting people to balk at installing iMacros (especially since you have to install the previous version because of bugs in the new release) and running the Suite in its own Firefox window.

Not one word.

I thought there were too many columns of numbers in the Find Friends panel for people to really wade though them. It turns out people ignore the numbers they don't understand or think are unimportant. Fascinating.

We got a lot of good feedback about our documentation and how to help reduce the complexity of what the suite can do. Over the next week or so I'll be publishing some articles to help people use both the free and premium versions of the software.

Beta Test Post-Mortem

This is going to sound strange, but our take homes were:

1. Our target market uses paypal rather than Amex. We were startled.
2. People want videos rather than user manuals. I guess it's the YouTube phenom coming home to roost. I actually find it easier to write a manual. (Yes, I own a typewriter, why do you ask?)
3. We were right to go with value based pricing and to aim for "professional diggers."

Value Based Pricing

There are (broadly) two ways to price anything: cost or value. Walmart prices own-brand cornflakes a price+markup. Apple prices everything at value. The difference differentiates your market.

So when we decided to price the first version of the social suite we tried to balance off users, user time/value, revenue, support costs/expectations, server load, investment timeline, etc. We put a stopwatch on a lot of in-house testing, spoke to the alpha users extensively about the value proposition, and did some magnificent fiddling on a whiteboard.

And came up with a buck an hour.

If you value your time at more than a buck and hour and use digg to drive revenue, then you should be paying us to use the social suite. And our beta testers, as they converted to paying customers, confirmed this observation.

Why Not Charge More?

If you look around, there aren't that many SEO tools that successfully charge an admissions fee. So our goal was to establish a precedent and, as we add value and reduce time/cost we will raise our prices.

If You Missed the Beta

Look, if you were taking a nap under a lilly pad or something, just go to our contact us page and drop us a line and we'll help you out.

[Note -  don't put  slashes and plus signs in your  article title if you have SEO friendly  URL addresses that  mimic your title.  I'm just saying!]

Beta testing is a very strange thing to watch. Some people ask for access and do nada. Others use the software in ways that, frankly, are puzzling. Some people complain about everything ("I hate red" is my favorite). Others give you attached excel spreadsheets of bugs they want fixed and features they'd like to see. Stack ranked. Bless the OCD among us because they are the one true beta testers!

But what I really live for are emails like these:

I started using your Social Suite with the expectation that this was yet another silly Digg tool that would be "eh, clever" and not much more.

I was completely wrong. Once a week or so I usually comb through each of my four Digg users, in rotation, to look for people who are banned, or who have stopped using digg, or who have dropped me from their friend list so I'm shouting at an empty cubicle. It takes me, literally, all day to check the high points. So I spend 4 days/month grooming my network. I drive 100K+ hits/month onto my websites, so this is time well spent, though it is really boring.

I plugged my digg logins into your tool, hit "research," went to a soccer game, and when I came back the work was done.

So this thing saved me eight hours. The first day I used it. Plus I actually had a lot more information to make better decisions.

Then I noticed the "unfriend" button and realized that I could save another three or four hours a month.

I look forward to being a charter subscriber. Do I get a discount?

Wow. And no. :-)

I've been having a right proper geek fest with Excel, PivotTables, and the output from our Social Heartbeat Monitor of 2,000+ Social Networking and Social Bookmarking sites.

Actually, that was hard to type as my hands are kind of cramping up.

I'm still pondering what this all means, and it'll get a lot more interesting when we start having week-on-week data. But here are some interesting graphs....

PageRank and Live Count

As you may recall, we looked at over 2,000 sites and found the ones that were "live" - they loaded, they at least looked like they were having some social activity, etc.

So here is the total pagerank distribution - and it's interesting to me how many middle pagerank (if you can call a PR5 middle!) social sites there are.

But this is only interesting to the point where you can see what is live.   Remeber that not-live includes stuff that does not load, linkfarms, obviously dead sites, etc, etc.

So, fear not, fifteen seconds with my trusty Excel and you get:

Quite a spread - you are much more likely to have non-live sites towards the bottom, but can you imagine a PR9 site that is linkbait or a personal blog or something?

Actually, it was half.com, which used to (if you're old enough to remember) have all sorts of things not related to selling and buying. Thanks, Meg, for all the fish.

I Feel The Need for Speed

Quick explanation: pageload is the time it takes to load the home page of a site from our server in lovely cari.net. I rounded all the times to the nearest whole number so 1 second is really 0.5 through 1.49. It is a relative measure, so that should be fine.

And what we see is, well, it's all ove the board, but can you imagine a 7 second load on a PR10 website? That was the Annotea project at w3.org. A-freaking-mazing.

Sad Sad Man

Yes, I am, and it is because I love stuff like this.

What interesting stuff are you guys pulling out of this? We've had scores of downloads - many more than we thought for something so, so, so of interest to SEO type people. (And thanks for all the kind emails!)

It's always great to get a new tool like the Social Heartbeat Monitor ™ and I always appreciate an article explaining why someone built it.

But that is often all you get. I have to admit, I rarely read detailed instructions, so I'm a bit reluctant to, you know, write 'em.

How It Works

The Social Heartbeat Monitor ™ page has a a pretty traditional advanced search form built around a grid. And since most of the people here are going to be search professionals, I am very much going to continue to resist explaining how to use an advanced search form, but below I have covered the search, status, and filter options so that it is all a bit more clear.

Search Options

The search options are the normal and useful ones:

• Name
• URL
• Domain
• Description
• Page Title
• Meta Description
• Meta Keywords

The "domain" variable is the stripped down url, so "http://promote-my-site.com" becomes "promote-my-site.com" - which is handy for deduplicating our list against the one you use.

It is also useful for using "%.br" to find all the Brazillian domains. The url is what we were able to make load in our browser: "http://www.myfunkysite.com" loads but "http://myfunkysite.com" does not.

Status Options

These are pretty simple:

• Live - site is what you think it is - pligg or scuttle or myspace/facebook clone and you can login, post, etc
• Dead - does not resolve, throws error pages >5 days a month, etc
• TBD - have not had time to look at it yet
• Waiting - waiting on a response to test the site
• Zombie - site resolves to a link farm, or it loads but does not work reliably enough to be "live"

I'm sure someone from Gartner could come up with more expensive names, but those should be pretty clear.

Filter Options

And the filter options (equals, min, max) are:

• Page Rank (PR)
• Google Backlinks
• Yahoo Backlinks
• MSN Backlinks
• Pages Indexed by Google
• Pages Indexed by Yahoo
• Pages Indexed by MSN
• Name in Google
• Name in Yahoo
• Name in MSN
• Load time

I think the only things here that require explanation are:

• Name in Google/Yahoo/MSN - How many times does "VOIPigg" show up in each search engine. Think of this as a rough (very) strength indicator.
• Load time: how long to load the home page from our server. Yes, yes, I know that this isn't perfect, but it gives you a rough order of magnitude (ROM) for how fast/slow a site is. The range for live sites is from almost 10 seconds from Alexadigger to four tenths of a second (0.04) for eZine Writer.

All of the search and filter terms are available as columns in the grid. Obviously.

Downloads

Now, rather than swearing at google docs, you can download the whole list as a csv and filter away in Excel. Heck, if you're a glutton you could even put it back into your google docs and hum the Heintz Ketchup "anticipation" song if you want.

You do to register first to download. Why? So you can have the option to be notified when the list changes. Or when you next want to download the list you can get only the stuff that has changed. Handy, we think, and worth a quick and painless regsitration.

Feedback

Please do give us your feedback of the features and functionality. Things that seem obvious to us but not to our beta testers have pretty much been eradicated, but each time we release a new tool and thousands of people come bang on it we find they've done stuff we did not anticipate.

We already caught the problem when someone puts "-0.5" in the PR field, but what else will people come up with?

Enjoy!

And remember, since the Social Heartbeat Monitor ™ is fully ad supported freeware, you can count on it sticking around. We have around a hundred updates to the list but wanted to wait to get it into this new form before putting them in.

We're taking down the downloadable list of 2,162 social bookmarking and networking sites and replacing it with an interactive analytical tool that gives you a lot more information and display control. It will let you see the heartbeat for any social bookmarking or networking site. Thus, in a fit of imagination, we called this the Social Heartbeat Monitor ™.

(Plus it is much much cooler than a google doc and you can get the list directly as a "csv" file.)

Things you can find out

We've built some controls around a grid so that you can filter the list of 2,000 plus social bookmarking and social networking sites down into the sublist you're probably most interested in. By my watch it is between 30% to 70% faster than google docs. (Attention google: my technical staff is better than yours!)

We added the kinds of controls that will help you find something specific:

• You want PR5 or better Live Sites? No problem, there are 534 of them.
• Sites that are live but between PR2 and PR4 with >1,000 pages indexed in google? 403 of them.
• Insert your question here....

But most importantly, we introduced the idea of a heartbeat for each site.

Heartbeat?

It's great to have a big list, and it's even handy to have a "Live" indicator so that you know that sometime in the last two months I was able to use the site in an appropriate fashion (create user, login, post). But we're including what we call heartbeat information:

• Pages indexed in Yahoo/MSN and what-is-their-name, oh, yeah, Google
• Backlink count for Yahoo/MSN/Google
• Load time

We'll be keeping this information on a weekly basis for each site so that you can track a site over time. And, because we really believe in making this information widely useful, you'll be able to download the performance over time.

Made for Custom Analysis

For example, Mixx is getting huge buzz right now in the SEO community and has 133K pages indexed in google. Does anyone (outside Mixx) have any idea what that was last week? You'll know in a week if you come back.

To put it even more in perspective, Digg has 9.8M pages indexed and Dogster has 134K pages. Dogster? Yep, it's exactly what you think it is. But both Dogster and Mixx are PR6 sites with similar google love. Where should you be putting your funny dog stories? (Trick question, the answer is both digg and dogster, wtih mixx in third place if you have time!)

Do you find that your stories do better on PR4 sites or PR8 sites? Do you want traffic or links? Now you have to consider.....

Tribal Knowledge vs. Experimentation

Well, we know all about long tail search and long tail e-tailing and long tail PPC campaigns, etc, etc. And there are even a few of us talking about niche sites versus huge volume general sites (ex: Digg vs. VOIPigg) but you know, it's all been logic, supposition, and educated guesses.

At Promote-My-Site we've written about getting a diversified portfolio of social bookmarking and social networking sites. So we started thinking about analyzing sites - how many backlinks, what is their PageRank, what is the change over time, etc. It's all obvious stuff to want to know, but except for traffic share changes for the "big 10" you can't really get any of that. For free anyway. And you certainly won't get that easily downloadable.

No longer. Now you can experiment using our Social Heartbeat Monitor ™. Find sites that are in your specialty, look at smaller but still high value sites (there are a ton), re-post some of your greatest hits. Once you find a combination that works and gives you good ROI, find more sites like it using our filters.

Calling All New Sites

We spend an astounding number of hours pulling lists from the internet and came up with 2,000 to look at. Yesterday I got emails about three new ones. We'll be constantly adding things to the list and we'll give you a way to find "what's new." You can also easily suggest new sites right from the Social Heartbeat Monitor ™ page.

Time Will Tell

We believe that a social bookmark and network heartbeat will be a valuable tool for looking at the change over time of a social networking or social bookmarking site. We think you'll enjoy it and find it useful to build a portfolio of performing social network and bookmarking sites.

In my last article about Google possibly punishing Digg I contrasted Digg versus a niche pligg site, VOIPigg. And I noted that you might too casually dismiss VOIPigg:

Let's say you were in the Voice Over IP (VOIP) business and you were writing content around decision making, technology, standards, all that jazz. Which do you think would be better - digg or VOIPigg?

Then I said:

It takes the exact same amount of time to submit to both Digg and VOIPigg, so obviously Digg is a better use of your time.

I should have been clearer - it was meant sarcastically. You have to do both.

Traffic versus Readers

Look, because Digg gets an order of magnitude more traffic than VOIPigg doesn't mean you wouldn't be better off at the niche social networking site.

Of the 100 people showing up every day on VOIPigg approximately how many are there to read VOIP articles? Right, 100%.

Of the bazillion people at Digg how many are there to read VOIP? And how will they easily find your content?

Digg Friend Finder

Well, you could use our Digg Friend Finder and find the (currently) 158 people who have submitted on VOIP. And friend them. And then find the people voting on those stories and friend them too.

But, really, you should do both, if you want a diversified portfolio of readers and a diversified reputation.

In one of this week's hottest Sphinn stories, Google to punish pagerank for Digg stories, it is clear that people are really focused on the readers, links, and prestige of Digg and the other top-tier social networking and social bookmarking sties.

Which is fine but the level of upset makes it clear that a lot of people don't have any real diversified portfolio of links and readership. Nothing wrong with making buggy whips, but you gotta watch out for changes in consumer taste.

What Did Google Really Say?

Let's take a look at what Google (supposedly, it was taken down) said:

We are working on strategies to level the playing field, effectively bringing back natural search patterns enjoyed in the pre-social bookmarking days. For webmasters who use social media responsibly, this is nothing to worry about - we will be targeting mainly a small minority of prolific bookmarkers with a new algorithm that looks at linking patterns over time.

Webmasters who rely heavily on bookmarking their own sites to gain traffic will likely see a drop in pagerank before the end of 2008, and we will be working closely with two major social bookmarking sites to find a solution that will have no detrimental effect on the average internet user.

Let me translate from google-ish

• "level the playing field" means: Make more money over here and get our stock back up from 430 to $700+.
• "pre social bookmarking" means: We used to be able to control what was hot, not Digg
• "use social media responsibly" means: Guess what we mean else we'll make your website disappear
• "new algorithm" means: Anuj and Prakash are going to be busy in Bangalore
• "will likely see a drop in pagerank" means: Let the rending and wailing begin

What will be the most interesting to me will be to see if breaking cover and running to cover your tracks is better than just freezing until the predator flies over.

The Key Phrase Is....

Kind of buried at the end: "we will be working closely with two major social bookmarking sites." Two. Let me repeat: Two. We took all the lists that we could find on the internet and spent months combing through all 2,162 Social Networking and Social Bookmarking sites to see who was alive and who was dead. (And, yes, you can download the list at that link!) We currently have a sublist of over 400 sites where you can create a login, actually login, and post a bookmark or story.

Automation

Really, you're going to need to automate some of your manual habits if you branch out from the tippy top tier players. We've reviewed a lot of the social networking automation options out there for you. It's not really going to be fun - life is easier if you use one or two sites rather than a dozen or more. But if people were using multiple sites then there'd less hyperventilating about this vague but important threat from google.

And if your (natural) competitors are going to have a problem, then that is really signaling an opportunity for you, isn't it?

Bear Stearns Closes at 30

And sells the next day at 2. Bam! Billions of shareholder equity lost. A year ago this would have been unimaginable.

Let's have a though experiment.... Eccentric Saudi Prince buys Digg for $750M, bans all content not involving funny Kitty Pix, Digg'ers flee to Mixx, Prince shuts down site in a huff.

What if all your links were from Digg? Or if all your readers were from Digg? Or if all your reputation in the social media world were resident in Digg.

Oops.

Do Nothing

Two words: Buggy Whip.

If you just keep on using one or two sites and your competitors diversify, then you will lose in the SERPS, all other things being equal. They will have a more diversified and stable reputation base, get readers who never see your stuff, etc.

Find the Niche Sites

Let's say you were in the Voice Over IP (VOIP) business and you were writing content around decision making, technology, standards, all that jazz. Which do you think would be better - digg or Voipigg? Who? Voipigg. It's a niche pligg site with good content control. Low volume, like most niche sites, but the 100 or so people who show up regularly are all looking for VOIP related stories.

It takes the exact same amount of time to submit both sites, so obviously digg is a better use of your time.

Think Risk Aversity

Really? Think about what started this whole discussion - threat of wholesale stripping of pagerank for heavy Digg users.

I think the mindset of "only have time for one" is a false dichotomy and that in today's competitive environment you have to make the time to develop and implment a diversified social networking strategy.

It is a truism that "you have to have the right traffic" to convert.  Convert people to what? Well, it depends:

• RSS readers
• Subscibers
• Ad clicker-throughers
• eBook downloads
• And so on....

At the end of the day it is about converting people to a vaulable asset.

And I don't disagree with any of that because we have been experimenting with traffic a bit ourselves.

First You Need A Goal

When we started this division of company the goal was to build a good base of regular readers by offering targeted and high quality blog articles (*cough*) and unusually useful free tools.  We would then convert some percentage of this group to paid subscription members interested in advanced SEO tools.  We estimated that with 1,000 unique readers a month we could flip the switch on our subscription service and have the business go profitable due to natural conversion.

Getting Started

We did the obvious stuff - we identified where our target market (SEO'ers, e-commerce store owners, etc) congreated and started, politely, building a presence.  This was designed to complement our market research and help us trim and adjust our rollout schedule.  It has also helped us identify some additional places where we can deliver tools and automation.

And so a trickle of really high quality traffic starting coming in, with little increases here and there and no drops.  Reassuring!

Moving Stepwise

In the early days we got a few Stumbles and a bit of a Digg rush, but the base of our readers didn't really increase very much.  Duh, no tools and not much content.  So we decided to keep up our social authority efforts at the SEO watering holes and ignore traffic for a while.  This let us concentrate on building out the initial SEO tools and making modest announcements about our intentions.

For example, our Free Yahoo Store SEO Analyzer is an extremely poweful, Yahoo store specific SEO tool.  This brought in a lot of Yahoo merchants and got a lot of attention from the SEO community focused on that market.

And several thousand people have used our Digg Friend Finder to increase and improve their Digg friend network.  Presumably a fair portion of these folks are people using social media for SEO fashion.

Each of these tools bumped up our regular visitors, as we expected.  We suddenly had both content and tools, and people were responding to it.  I discussed how powerful this was in my post on SEO Tools vs. SEO Content.  Basically tools deliver a lot of repeat traffic and to the extent that they are unique they provide stickiness.

Time to Get Some Bulk Traffic?

People love lists, so we released lists in the last two weeks:

• 117 SEO RSS Feeds Worth Reading
• Downloadable List of 2,162 Social Bookmarking and Networking Sites

BAM! as Emeril would say (sold to Omnimedia for $45M, BAM indeed!), thousands of new people show up.  And keep showing up in a reducing curve over the next week.  Which is exactly what happened before, so we were curious to see if the outcome would be different.

What's New Pussycat?

Our RSS readers took a big jump.  And the number of people navigating to our site directly from bookmarks (that is so 2001!) jumped considerably too.  We're watching the waves of Digg and Stumble traffic subside, but unlike in the early days, we're seeing more readers washed up on shore: there is enough here to keep them coming back.

Google SERP Inflection Point

I know we all live in the google matrix and so we have to try to deduce causes from the visible effects, but there is no question that our google traffic started jumping as well for the keywords we're most interested in.  We notice that, right before we released the list that we'd gone from pariah to PR3 in three months.  And we had been seeing some additional google traffic so that change didn't totally surprise us, but it was really almost a week after the first list that we saw the dramatic increase in google search traffic.  So clearly there was some confluence of events going on in google-land and it was some aspect of the traffic/linkfest that tipped us over.  We'll probably do a few more Stumble/Digg things in the next month or so and see if the google traffic increases after that - after all, it might be a mighty coincidence.

Monetizing

We've reviewed other tools and criticized them for not having a clear monetization strategy, terms of service, or a privacy policy. We've had several people tell us that we could be doing a much better job of monetizing rather than using Adsense (horrible) and Amazon Affiliate links. They're completely right, and we're going to be experimenting with some other monetization strategies on our free and freemium tools. But we've been very clear that our real goal is to build up a community that will be receptive to paying for a subscription for our premium tools when we roll them out. We figure that if we offer free and freemium tools that are a cut above other free tools ( i.e. they actually work and produce actionable results) and we offer some things for free that other sites require payment for, when we launch our premium service people will see the dramatic increase in value and will sign up.

As Time Goes By

And obviously that sticky effect should continue to improve as we have more tools online and more content.  If we kept, say, half a percent of the Digg/Stumble traffic as regular readers in this wave, maybe we can get that up to one percent in a few months with some of the new tools we've got in test.  Since we're building SEO tools and not MySpace widgets I wouldn't expect that the upper end of capturing readers will ever be very high, but that is ok - if you're running a gossip site you need 40K readers/month, but our targeted sales community is much smaller and more cohesive.

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I ran across that Buck Converter circuit graphic quite some time ago while I was looking at table saws and I have been looking for an excuse to use it!

I was reading this really cool article on Chlorine Trifluoride, which apparently can basically burn through just about anything, including sand, asbestos tile, glass, and probably even leftover high school cafeteria pizza.  I completely love this description:

It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that's the least of the problem. It is hypergolic [ignites on contacts - ed with AP chemistry] with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively.

Speaking of Explosive

We have been spending a lot of time looking at SEO tools while deploying some of our own (Yahoo Store SEO Analyzier, Digg Friend Finder, Backlink Pinger) and while we've talked a lot about SEO Application Architecture we never did much writing about security.  I guess we thought that with all the, er, black hat stuff that can go on around this industry that people would be careful about how their SEO applications were architected.

Uh, No

Without naming names, though you'd recognize them as very big players, we found dozens of security holes in their applications, including but not limited to:

• Wide Open Ajax Services - Ajax is a wonderful thing. And FireFox protects the browser against cross site scripting. But if the service on the back end is willing to accept a call from anything and doesn't verify that it's the client that's actually calling, then someone else can write an application that does the same thing you do, but uses your server to do the work. For example, another server running PHP could use curl to load one of your pages and then make web service calls to your "public" service and you'd be hard pressed to tell. You'd think you were getting lots of traffic, but you'd just be providing the back end for someone else.
• Javascript Based Security - It's hard to believe, but we've seen plenty of applications that take a login in javascript, make an Ajax call to authenticate, and then enable a button or show content using javascript. If some hacker couldn't figure out how to rape and pillage those systems I think they'd get kicked out of their club.

About That Picture

That is a picture of a couple of pounds of Chlorine Trifluoride going off inside an asbestos berm test container. Or it is your website as some hacker takes control of your PR checker (for example) and hoses down google with it until they block your IP or penalize your site?

Ouch.

Perils of Outsourcing

Of the dozen or so tools we found with major security flaws the most common theme was not age of deployment, or country, or sophistication of the tool.  It was that the development was outsourced by a very non technical person.  Not non-technical as in "doesn't understand SEO" or "can't figure out how to tickle google" but as in: not much exposure to complex software engineering.

One thing you should know: we have some extremely technical people on staff.  (Not me, I just fetch the coffee.)  I think we could probably safely outsource applications built to a safe and sophisticated  architectural specification, but it'd be tricky.

We described our SEO architectural technical stack earlier, but here it is again:

Here is my rule of thumb: if you can't understand that picture, you can't export the work.  You need someone working for you who "gets" it.  I'm not bragging - we're not perfect and there are a lot of things (*cough* graphic design *cough*) that we don't do very well and have to get help with.

Conclusion

If you are going to outsource some development and you'd like to avoid a meltdown, well, you should probably get someone on staff or at least locally consulting with you to ensure that you have proper security. If you can't look at the code that your overseas outsourcing partner is giving you and make sense of it, then you probably shouldn't be trying to play that game.

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!