This is a big weekend here at Promote My Site because we're moving servers, shuffling software around, changing DNS, upgrading this and that. Oh, and putting two free SEO Tools out. Phew. I'd be nervous but the technical guys threw me out at 5pm and locked the door behind me. All they'd say was: Don't Panic.

Free SEO Tools?

Well, not really free because they are on pages containing ads and, based on past experience, we figure the clicks will pay for the service.

But also not free because these SEO Tools (and the upcoming ones) are designed to get people used to our name, our architectural solutions, and our services. At which point they'll be more likely to buy our to-be-announced SEO tools.

So not really free, just an investment in ya'll.

What Tools?

We'll announce them early next week. Stay tuned.

Why new Servers?

Yeah, well, I have a list of 100+ SEO Tools from various people and I would say that at least 20% of them are not working properly at any given time. There are a lot of reasons for this, but a major contributor is that they produce server centric solutions and put too much stuff on one server. Our solution is to create web based client-server applications and host the server bit on a biiiiig hosted box at the end of a wide pipe.

So upgrading servers before go-live is experience talking. It is also the advantage of having a professional development and deployment organization - we tend to avoid a lot of mistakes or at least only make them once.

Best Under Construction Page on the Internet

I tried to get the guys to put up my favorite ever Under Construction page but they refused.

Check it out here and please to notice the page rank. This page is at least 7 years old, unchanged, and still funny as can be.

Don’t they? Good golly, are you telling me you don’t click ads? I click ALL sorts of ads on SEO sites. So maybe I should just say: SEO type folks click ads on SEO sites.

Honestly, that is what I thought this article about 6% of Users Click 50% of Ads was all about. Actually, it turn out that fifty rednecks in TN clicked 2.45M ads last month.

Do YOU Click Ads?

Do you? I was not kidding that I do. When I hit an SEO site (calm down, John Chow!) they have usually done a great job with ad placement and have brought stuff to a place where my eye can actually see it. And so I think: Yes, actually, I am interested in looking at a shared Windows server for that project, hmm, click.

$2.25 right into someone’s pocket.

I can’t help it, the placement is awesome, the focus is good – practically perfect. Ads to the left of me, ads to the right. Even peel-away-ads:

Gadzooks. How awesome is that?

A Lesson Learned

But there is a lesson in there, because I am the most blind guy on the internet. I cannot remember the last time I clicked an ad of ANY type on a non-SEO site. I am talking three or four years back I cannot recall clicking an ad. Buying: fuggidaboudit.

But I do have to wonder: do an of us BUY anything after click-through? I haven’t gotten any windows hosting, thought I have bookmarked some good sites. So am I just transferring money from the advertiser to Joe SEO?

Conversion Rate Explained?

And is that why click-through-to-conversion rates are so strangely low? To me, anyway. There is no way that 6% of internet users are driving so many bazillion dollars of spending. So are these few (and very active!) Lookie Loo’s masking the other ready-to-buy people?

Final thought: what the heck is Google charging us all this money for is most of our traffic is people who will never ever buy anything. Look at us, optimizing landing pages for poorly orthodonted backwoods dialup users and ignoring the soccer mom with a Plum card.

It’s enough to make you nostalgic for banner ads!

I was on the plane coming home and the cat next to me in first got to talking. It seems his son (11th grade) had put up a website extolling the virtues of his plumbing business and they'd actually gotten a customer from a google search the day before.

Needless to say, he thought this was pretty trick. Over the last 20 years he'd spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on yellow pages, bus signs, bench-backs, high-school yearbooks, little-league teams, etc, etc. He said that he reckoned that the average customer cost around $100 to acquire, the average bill was around $115, and costs were around $75. So each customer basically lost $25.

But return business was 60% and around 30% of customers stayed around, basically, forever. And their kids, when they stayed in the area, used his company too.

But he was really excited by the idea of getting a customer for FREE from the internet.

So we discussed the cost of professional website, getting someone to do the needful with directories, google local search, ranking on organic SERPS, buying keywords, etc. He was ready to whip out his checkbook and hire us, except for the minor problem that we don't do that sort of work, but I was able to give him some names.

It's pretty amazing to think about how many other small business people are ready to drop $20K on the table to the first person who gets to them to help them get "free" customers from google search.

Imagine what the Yahoo Store or eBay Store owner would pay - especially since they already write a check for online presence.  And they already know what google search means, but just can't get the pieces worked our or have other things to do.

Amazing - there is a LOT of running room out there. 

Digg is a sweet target for automated SEO tools because they have a powerful API, plenty of horsepower, and you can get a lot of ROI from even a little advantage. But you have to build it right or you’ll consume all your own bandwidth/CPU and produce a tool that is down a lot. And no matter how free something is, it’s not very useful if it doesn’t stay up and produce results.

The Obvious Way

Well, it’s usually wrong, or at the very best it’s what everyone else is doing, so there is no advantage gained. So if you were building a tool to mine digg for information you’d:

Easily Banned

We would never do anything black hat (we just look like the jelly beans nobody wants when we dress as Men In Black) but it’s pretty easy to imagine that with a server based architecture Digg would choose to ban our service or choke our bandwidth rather than change their TOS so we’d stop:

How To Build it Unstoppable

Once again, you download a small AJAX application which hits the Digg API from your local machine.

This conserves our bandwidth, CPU, and (most importantly) makes the overall application run faster and be unbannable.

What if Digg Hits Me Like You Worry They’ll Hit You?

Reasonable enough. But let’s take a look at why they’d hit us….

If five hundred people show up and each of them causes a thousand queries to the Digg API, well, you don’t even have to do the math to figure out that 500K hits on the API from one IP address, well, that is going to attract attention.

But everything we’re going to do is within the TOS of Digg, uses their API in a reasonable way, and can be used in a white-hat manner. So if the service runs from your computer then what Digg sees is five hundred new people using the API in an appropriate fashion. Their response to this sort of use is much more likely to be throwing some more hardware at the gateway.

Also, worst case, if you trip some sort of capacity limit and they slow you down, well, you're on a dynamic IP and our server ain't....

What Happens if Digg Changes their TOS

We’d change the service to stay inside the rules. If that were not possible, we’d pull it down. We’re a business and we have to co-exist within a framework of contracts and rules.

You HATE Free Stuff – Why Are You Doing This?

Well, we actually love “free” stuff that works, it’s the undependable and almost not-working free stuff that drives us nuts. But this is not a free service, we get several items of value:

• Advertising on the ‘free’ pages
• Name recognition for future, fee based services

How much does it cost to capture a customer? It can cost a lot and we do this sort of utility because we believe that this is the most cost efficient way to get paying customers. By paying we mean that people are either clicking ads or they are migrating to paid services.

What if People Abuse It?

Jeeze, you don’t even know what it does yet and you’re worried about abuse?Well, you’re in good company, we worry too. But we are assuming that people using the site are adults, with good judgment and respect for their internet environment. If that is a bad assumption then we’ll regroup and start putting controls in place.

Coming soon……

We’re pretty excited about this tool and we think you will be too.

I recently went on a bit of an SEO testing and shopping spree - you've probably read some of the reviews here. And one of the comments I kept making was that nobody would return my emails.

Customer Service Matters

Look, I've been hanging onto that hilarious customer service certificate for a year, knowing that I would use it someday. Because, while it is funny that someone is proud of being 1st runner up in the Greater Atlanta Metro area, they did get the point that customer service is important to, well, customers.

Customer Service in the SEO Industry

What does it mean when people put "free" SEO tools out and they break? Promise rankings. Sell spammy link pages. Engage customers without contracts or SLA's?

I'm not saying that SEO is different from, say, CRM or ERP implementations. Anyone who has been on the receiving end of a SAP implementation knows what I mean.

I have to say, if I were some Yahoo Store owner wandering through our little universe I'd probably turn right around and leave.

High Points

Look, there are some really great places our hypothetical new customer could land - SeoMoz, ShoeMoney, Aim, Joost, etc, etc. Lots of helpful advice and some reasonable services for sale at an affordable price. And there are tools, like Hubspot , where you get real customer service.

How is Customer Service Different in SEO-Land?

Is it? I think it is. When a customer buys a dozen seats at SalesForce.com for his freon sales weasels, he may not understand all the bells and whistles and features, but he knows he'll get a good pipeline view and synchronized customer contacts.

If the same guy buys "SEO" to get google traffic and then to improve his landing page, well, he might as well be a Cargo Cultist. He might even enjoy and appreciate the results, but they'll be amazing.

Maybe It's The Enthusiasm

Why is it all so mysterious? I think it is down to several things:

• It's all new, so it's exciting and moving fast
• We all play in Google's Matrix, and it is d*mn mysterious
• The industry is clearly pre-consolidation so there are no big players to set standards. Yet.

What Can We Do?

I think we have to wait it out and let it all grow and mature.

How boring is that? But I've been through several technical 'revolutions' and you get so you can see a pattern. In three to five years it's very likely that the players around today won't be around, that the industry will look a lot different. Different price points, the google matrix will feel different, and customers will know what to expect.

And customer service will suddenly look very important. Even though it always has been.

One of the first things that might warn you that Novasoft's SutumbleBot is a social network spamming tool is their blatant ripoff of StumbleUpon's logo.

LogoLicious Infringement

StumbleBot's logo:

StumbleUpon's logo:

Oh, wait, never mind, completely different - one has a blue background and the identical blue/green graphic is 15 degrees out. My bad.

Danger Will Robinson, Stumble Spambulator Coming Our Way

I think the other 'look out' moment is when the sales pitch is all about how to do something without getting caught:

Stumblebot is an easy to use application that lets you create thousands of Stumbleupon accounts, stumble your websites with those accounts and generate thousands of unique visitors from Stumbleupon in no time.

Stumblebot also allows you the option to post randomized relevant tags and reviews for these stumbles. It also includes a username checker and uses rotating proxies and user configurable delays between posts.

I am not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that if you're not violating the TOS doing all that, well, then, they must not have much of a TOS.

Novasoft - Sounds Familiar

Yes, we reviewed their Tag Automater and were not impressed - it costs almost $300 to purchase and then there is a $67/month "service" fee. It seemed like a lot of money for a tool that didn't do much.

Tool Overview

This tool is more reasonably priced at around $150, and even has a $1/2-day demo version. I was about set to pay the buck and give it a try, then I thought to look around to figure out how to terminate the demo period. Nothing. I looked on the support ticket area - this product wasn't even listed. So I decided to NOT get involved in a pay pal hassle.

I sent them an email, but as they did not respond to my previous emails, I don't really expect a response again.

I will say that, given Stumble's architecture, that it would be very possible to patch together a tool that would let you 'fake stumble' your posts with a low likelihood of getting caught.

How Worthwhile is Fake Stumble Traffic?

I had a friend who owned an okay-ish Italian place some years ago. He'd let me eat dinner for half price if I'd sit in the window seat and give the thumbs up to people who stopped to read the menu. But the food was only OK, so the people never would come back. I have to believe that if you're counting on people from stumble coming back after falling for this false-trail system then you've not quite understood what makes stumble traffic work.

Conclusion

I think self-stumbling your content is fine, and if you write good content then you'll get an appropriate level of traffic. I'd avoid this social spamming tool - not only are you violating Stumble's TOS but you're also putting your focus and emphasis in the wrong place.

In order to build an efficient SEO automation framework you must carefully seperate value added manual tasks from reptitious automatable steps. For example, writing content on Social Networking is value added, but posting it to 23 different pligg sites and bookmarking the article at 50+ sites is not.

Manual or Automation

But determining which categories it goes into on the 23 pligg sites is an appropriate manual task. So it's not like you are just going to offshore someone to pickup the phone and say: "Dr. Newharts office, hold please."

Let's posit, for the sake of argument, that you've built a framework of CMS, user administration, content creation, database driven workflow, and iMacro automation of specific tasks. Not a small task, but you can get there stepwise, so bear with me.

What we do here is to flowchart (remember that?) our process and mark boxes as M/A - where:

• M = Manual
• A = Automatic

The trick is to NOT mark something as "M" just because you don't know how to automate it. If you can concieve of something as non-manual, odds are that a bit of sweat equity will allow you to build a tool to automate the process.

Real World Automation Example

We recently had to create a BUNCH of customer records for a system migration, fix address fields, verify zip codes, etc, etc. And by BUNCH I mean it was 200K+ items. We had done this type of work before using Mark V1.0 Humans so we had an idea of times and costs. This time we did a bit of flowcharting and what-if'ing and decided that rather than spend 3 months doing the needful with copy/paste/excel and 40 people we would build an iMacro based toolset.

The tool creation took two weeks, we temp'd a dozen folks to manage exceptions, and were done in 2 months. For half the cost and at a measured 95% accuracy rate.

That is SO NOT SEO

Well, yeah, but did you think we'd tell you our internal SEO tricks? Uh, no.

But use your imagination. Say you have 50 keywords/phrases you buy on Google. Who else buys them? How do they rank in the SERPS? How are their websites organized? What else do they own?

You can certainly figure out all that stuff manually. Or you could write an iMacro to query google, capture the ads, present them to people to decode, send iMacro to run reports on their sites, look up their IP's, etc, etc.

If you Do It More Than Once

You might consider automating. Me, personally, it's only worth getting the geeks involved if I have to do it more than twice/week. Otherwise, in my experience, it may take me more time to specify than to do.

Summary: Automate

I think if I were smarter I'd move my 'automate' bar down to the things I do once/week for more than six months. But, then, I have a fair bit of technical support. If you are a roll-your-own person, your barrier to entry might be even lower than mine.

When in doubt, automate with iMacro and capture your data in a relational database.

Not for very long anyway.

I reviewed several manualized social network automators (OnlyWire, Social Poster, Social Marker , EkStreme, Post Toaster, etc) and then summarized the 114 sites they supported. And one of my criticisms was that they either had (a) no monetization or (b) weak but clear. And what fruit does that bear?

Uptime Status for Social Network Automation

Well, of the 114 total sites supported, there were the following errors:

• Excites - 7 minutes to load the home page, etc -> zombie
• Feed Me Links - No registrations allowed
• Feedmarker - No regsistrations allowed
• igool - NSFW Porn
• Linkatopia - No signup allowed
• Musigg - Would not load
• MillionsOfGames - Would not load
• Scuttle - Open source page (duh)
• Shadows - Dead
• Unalog - Dead
• Xilinus - Dead
• Yample - Dead

That is 12 sites, or more than 10% of the list.

I dunno about you, but I can't have a 10% error rate in my business.

List Rot 

Look, we all know there is rot in the list of secondary and tertiary social bookmarking and networking. So you have to check that pages load, that google is still indexing in the primary index (or whatever they're calling it this month), that logins process and links post.

We have a fairly large list of this sort of thing and it really costs a bit in maintenance to keep it up to date. But it's part of our business overhead.

Because "free" isn't "free" when it's broken too often.

Ernst-Jan Pfauth, at The Next Web, does some back-of-the-envelope calculation and figures out that Facebook may be making $15M/year in selling "virtual gifts." And she smartly urges other social networking websites to jump on that bandwagon.

Anyone remember a slightly less scary looking Whoopi Goldberg hawking Flooze in the last bubble?

How long until our customers want to pay us in virtual credits we can use in Second Life to buy private education for our virtual children?

We put up a post yesterday with a cool table of information about social websites and, because I hate having to scrape stuff off the web, we used google docs to store the information. But that is all we'll use google doc's for - because it has kreppy features and google has, or so it seems, reserved the right to use your "private" documents for whatever they please.

Horrible Lack of Functionality

First the functionality. Let's just say if my options were between Google's spreadsheet and a copy of Lotus-1-2-3 running on an Adds Viewpoint under CPM, I'd probably take Lotus. Yes, their stuff has that little functionality.

For example, some maroon at Google (who I am sure is worth 250x what I am, but never mind that) has breathlessly announced that you can build a web form that saves data in a spreadsheet. No, really. Big News at Google.

Leaving aside that people have been saving web form information to disk for, oh, 10 years ... Excel has been able to create forms since version 0. In 1990.

And don't even get me started on formatting, calculation features.

And a TOS to Bind Them All

But, most importantly, scope this quote from Google Doc's TOS :

You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Service. By submitting, posting or displaying the Content you give Google a worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through the Service for the sole purpose of enabling Google to provide you with the Service in accordance with its Privacy Policy.

I can't tell you what our legal consultant said about that because they might think I was giving legal advice and, frankly, I hate it when they come in my office and slap me around. And then send me a bill.

But I will say that we immediately pulled our important documents off google and started up a wiki behind the firewall. Because while I am sure that some lawyer made them put that in there, it sure reads like they can do what they darn well please ... but not with my document full of account numbers and passwords!