Traffic

Which is better, del.icio.us bookmark traffic or the stampede that comes with a big Digg?

Well, I was fortunate enough to have a post make both the top of the de.licio.us popular page and the front page of Digg yesterday with my (formerly) private collection of link baiting resources entitled How to Attract Links and Increase Web Traffic – The Ultimate Guide. Of course both events were awesome, especially since they tend to reinforce one another, as well as lead to links from other bloggers.

But if you had to choose one over the other, I think there’s no real question.

Bookmarks beat Diggs. Here are 3 reasons why:

1. Bookmarks are Enduring.

While it’s true that sometimes someone will bookmark a page simply to come back when they have more time, more often than not the Delicious user views your page as a resource that they might return to again and again. A Digg is simply a one-time vote that may or may not result in big one-time traffic. A Digg is short-term event, while a bookmark endures.

2. Bookmarks Show Commitment.

Related to the idea above, a Delicious user has made a commitment to your resource by adding it to their collection of links, most likely because it provides a benefit to them. Other Delicious users notice that commitment, and therefore your resource gains in credibility thanks to that bit of social proof, which often leads to more bookmarks. I believe this is one of the key reasons why a big day on Delicious translates into subscribers and return readers, while the same exposure on Digg often doesn’t.

3. Each Bookmark is a Targeted Link.

Here’s the real power of social bookmarks. Each bookmark you receive is a separate link on a separate web page. Moreover, those links are classified by tags which define their overall relevance, much like normal link anchor text does. Not only does this help you in the search engines, it makes Delicious itself a search engine. Tagging will no doubt play a big role in the evolution of web search, and Digg’s model misses the boat here.

Ignore Digg? Nope.

Overall, you should continue to strive for both bookmarks and Diggs, since they do have a bit of synergy between them. If your resource is compelling, Diggers will bookmark you too.

But it’s important to realize that flash in the pan web traffic means very little other than high server load if they never come back. Diggers aren’t much for clicking ads, and they often don’t stick around long enough to decide to subscribe.

Creating content with the bookmark in mind tends to make you concentrate more on delivering truly useful resources, rather than just pulling stunts to pull traffic. Getting the right type of traffic (rather than just tons of traffic) is one of the main keys to a successful blog.

So, aim for getting a bookmark, and you just might get Dugg too.

I am pretty sure the guys at Google must be sneakily reading my blog. Remember this? Google has rolled out a special version of Google Maps for your mobile phone (via Google Blog). Well, well, well…

So is it really true, then? Is Google silently creating a presence in all possible verticals? How long will it be before they integrate all things under one roof?

I am still wondering…

Technorati Tags: google, feature, promotion

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A very interesting new and fresh approach in analyzing inbound search engine traffic only (!) is coming from 103bees.com. Not the normal traffic will be analyzed but only the referrers coming from search engines. You put the typical small Javascript call into your template and then you will get in-depth information about SE traffic. The registration (at the moment) is free.

A nice explanation for the name:

Bees are very likeable and hardworking insects relentlessly gathering millions of pollen every day. Just like our ‘bees’: they collect search terms so you will be able to analyze them and get more search engine traffic and revenues – the ‘sweet stuff’ everybody is so fond of!

That’s a very nice philosophy for analysis tools in general. The user loves the honey but doesn’t want to do the hard work 🙂

Check out the features …

Most interesting output of the SE analyzis provided by 103bees.com

• Top landing pages – Which search phrases targeted which landing pages.
• Top keywords – Single (!) keywords which gives a follow-up in form of a list of the phrases where that single keyword showed up
• Multiple domain analysis – called projects.

103bees features available at the moment

The main menu is “Analyze projects” which will give you the following items after choosing the individual domain to look at:

1. Latest search terms – This will show the latest search phrase and the follow-up analysis for the landing page and the search engines which triggered that landing page. Links for every single search phrase are ‘Pages’ and ‘Engines.
2. Top landing pages – This will show the landing pages with the most search engine traffic in the chosen time-frame (7 or 30 days). Follow-Up analysis shows an individual traffic graph for that landing page and (!) which search engine phases lead to that landing page (very, very interesting). Links for every landing page are ‘Traffic’ and ‘Phrases’.
3. Top search terms – Search terms ordered by most traffic. The rest is like ‘Latest search terms’.
4. Top keywords – Single (!) keywords ordered by generated traffic. The keywords are presented as list or cloud. Both presentations show the most used keywords which generated traffic for that individual project (domain) for the given time-frame (7 or 30 days) or a maximum of 5.000 search hits. The follow-up analysis in the list view allows to check for related keywords and to get a list of the phrases where that single keyword showed up (very, very interesting). Here you can define stop-words which will not show up in that list anymore.
5. Search engines – The typical list of search engines but you can see absolute numbers and percentage.

The standard time frame is seven days. At the moment you can upgrade for free to 30 days of traffic history. The explanation is transparent (and a possible reason for a later monetization).

Please notice: 30 days of traffic and search terms history consume an enormous amount of disk space and server performance. You can upgrade your account for free to 30 days of traffic history. However, you will be asked to confirm the upgrade every two months.

I have added the code yesterday and the service responds very fast. The numbers seem to be shown in real time. As the interested crowd using the service from 103bees.com will grow we will have to wait and see how the service will respond and react in the future.

Negative

A little disadvantage of the whole service is that you have to perform many clicks to get to the individual in-depth information. Many double linked presentations could be combined easily to show on one page.

Resume

A recommended very, very interesting fresh approach in analyzing inbound search engine traffic. Really worth to combine with PMetrics!

Keywords / Categories / Technorati Tags: Markus Merz, 2006, 103bees, SEO, search engines, analysis, tool, traffic, statistics

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In case you miss it, there is a terrific discussion on low traffic blogs and how to monetize them going on in the Performancing Forums. The upshot is that Adsense is a poor choice at this stage, but that doesnt mean it can’t be done, and if you’re looking for advice on what to do with low traffic blogs then head on over and join the discussion…

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Mary Nicklin brought up the thread about Basics on building traffic. I wrote two extensive answers which gave me the idea of writing a summary with the focus on side kicks.

What are side kicks? Side kicks are all aspects of generating traffic through external links, social bookmarking, article tagging, creating external services and using old school emails to inform about your services opposed to the work you invest on your Blogs main content.

Side kicks are an important aspect in your daily schedule decision compared to the effort for ‘just’ writing another article. I’ll try to motivate you to invest some time in side kicks because of their great impact on traffic in the short and in the long run!

Right now there are numbers around that every day 70,000 new blogs are created. How can somebody develop a strategy to build up traffic or improve the traffic stream coming to his website? “Produce a lot of fresh content” is one of the standard answers. It is true! But don’t believe that writing 15 articles a day gains incredible more inbound traffic than just one or two. And the Blogger Burnout will be coming to you pretty soon!

Side notes: some recommended number crunching from Dave Sifry (Technorati):
State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth
State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 2: Beyond Search

For a better overview I will not list the classical Search Engine Optimization (SEO) approaches for websites like page title, page name,
meta description, keyword optimization, directory entries, … there
are so many nice articles on performancing.com or on the Internet about
basic website SEO which you should use.

“My cooking recipe for fast SEO results“. The approach is that you can use the support of modern blogging technology as a side kick to gain inbound traffic and fast search engine attention:

1. Claim your blog at services like Technorati. Fill in all keywords for every single blog!
2. Use Ping services like PinGoat (important changes announced!) or Ping-O-Matic. These two and more are optional services are integrated in the publishing workflow of Performancing for Firefox (PFF).
3. Use FeedBurner for your RSS publishing. They offer nice optimization, publishing and statistical features.
4. Bookmark every article at del.icio.us (and other appropriate bookmarking services). That service is also integrated in the publishing workflow of Performancing for Firefox (PFF). As PFF is not giving the option to fill out the del.icio.us ‘notes’
   field it is a good idea to edit that bookmark manually and add some
   excerpt to it! The question came up if linking every article to del.icio.us would be
   aggressive? Remember that you post your article link to your personal
   del.icio.us profile. What can be wrong about that?
5. Use extensive tagging and keywording inside your articles and on services like del.icio.us. Del.icio.us bookmarking and Technorati tagging is also integrated in the publishing workflow of Performancing for Firefox (PFF). I get pretty much of my traffic through people who are subscribing or
   clicking on certain tags and also some traffic from certain tags in my
   personal profile.
6. If blogging about another blog or linking to other blogs try to send them a trackback. The trackback URI is normally published in public somewhere on blogs which support it. That service is also integrated in the publishing workflow of Performancing for Firefox (PFF).
7. Use Flickr for your public photos. Link to the articles in your Flickr descriptions. Again: use extensive tagging and publish to groups and picture competitions!
8. If using a photo from somebody else (from Flickr or other sources) for one of your articles always ask for permission and after publishing the picture add a comment with a link to your article. It is polite to add the photographer as contact and to make the used picture a personal ‘favorite’.
9. If linking to somebody always send them an email about your new link and how to find the link. If it fits your niche always ask them to actively inform you by mail if they have something interesting for you to blog about. That way you will build up your network.
10. Whenever possible you should add a link to a keyword in Wikipedia in every appropriate language.

A more advanced and time consuming practice is to create some secondary blogs and recycle your content there with
links to the original page. This is sometimes very useful because some
hosting services are accepted differently by different search engines.
Especially if you want to reach foreign markets it is good to find a
free blog solution which is hosted in that target area. This paragraph is not on the list above because many of the mentioned methods ARE already secondary blogs even if they don’t look like!

If you have money to spend and you want quick success you might even think about buying traffic for certain keywords and phrases through the Googels AdWords program. This paragraph is not on the list above because in my opinion it needs a lot of experience to get real value for the money.

All this promotion gives you a realistic chance to be picked up early by the SEs and that your blog starts with a nice range of links. On my new ‘local newspaper’ project I made the experience that Google kicked in almost immediately without any sandbox delay.

As a resume of all this writing I draw the conclusion that it is my recommendation is to NOT post articles in a high frequency. Instead invest that time in creating appropriate side kicks!

A last word about productivity with side kicks: Create a checklist for your specific side kick workflow! Every time you are planning to publish an article
open or print that checklist and do it step by step. By developing a routine for all these points the process will accelerate and the results will get better.

Copyright © Markus Merz 2006 – All rights reserved

Keywords / Categories / Technorati Tags: Markus Merz, 2006, website, Blog, blogging, promotion, sidekick, traffic, SEO, del.icio.us, flickr, technorati, workflow, performancing feedburner, pingoat, ping-o-matic

If you find you are not well suited to linkbait tactics then you are going to need to use alternative tactics. Here is a viral approach that is working for me right now, it might be an option for you too.

As bloggers what do we want? Attention? Revenue? Either way that translates into visitors, post views and links. The links bring in the visitors and also the google-juice that brings in more visitors by way of search engines. Then there is the “other PR”, the traditional PR of just getting your name out there, hopefully in a favourable light. Which could be described as “branding” too.

Link bait often takes the form of generating a buzz, debate, interest that draws links and comments from other bloggers. The focus is on your blog, focus being an appropriate word as the attention is focussed on your blog post.

The technique I am using is more distributed and viral. Your success depends on curiosity, peoples natural inclination and habits, but also unfortunately good photography. That last one might at first make it appear to rule a lot of people out from using it but hear me out!

It all started when I was contacted by another photography blog about a 30 day challenge. Their idea was to take a photograph a day and post it to their blog. They were going to use technorati tags to follow participation. I thought it was a great idea, still with my photographer head on.

Once I got into blogging mode though I realised there was potential to get a bit of publicity to my blog too. I added the promise of a prize, which required a voting mechanic (I will write a Drupal module to work with Flickr RSS for that) and an additional rule that participants need to use a Flickr tag which funnily enough contains the name of my blog, DSLRBlog-PAD.

So how does this bring traffic?

Photographers love taking photographs, and they like to be challenged. This challenge is hard but fun. Some great photographs are coming out of the challenge. Due to the way Flickr works, great photographs get a lot of attention and are shared in Flickrs groups. Each time these pictures are viewed the Flickr user will read the description “Here is my attempt for day 5 of the picture a day challenge” and follow a link, or at the very least will see the tags and be curious about the strange tagging that is going on.

This is when the viral nature comes in. If it looks like fun they will want to join in. When they see there is a competition attached there will be an additional incentive. If they are using Flickr to the maximum they will have contacts who view their photo stream or submit to Flickr groups the cycle will continue.

If the photographer is really good they will create a lot of traffic to their pictures and attract lots of Flickr contacts. A percentage of these will be drawn to your blog. Each photograph is like an advert for your challenge.

There is also a tendancy for online photographers to have their own blogs, going back to the original idea the participants had to post to their blog with a technorati tag. While the majority are linking to the original blog who started this challenge some are mentioning my prize. If you do this of course you will get all the link benefits!

So it all sounds good apart from the part about requiring good photography? The trick is you do not need to be a good photographer, you just need to get good photographers on board! You are running the competition or challenge, it is the photographers who spread the word and generate interest through their pictures.

We are just a week in and I am beginning to see the affects start to ripple in. Just one of my blog members had 379 views of one of his pictures so far, which brought him 20 new contacts. That’s one member and one picture, there is 20-some days left of the challenge. At the very least it is content for our blogs, thirty days worth of content.

Don’t get me wrong, my primary motivation for my blog and the challenge is a love of photography. The challenge itself was something I myself wanted to do. It’s an important factor that the thing has to be fun and appropriate or it will just not work.

If you are not into photography just think about this scheme and how you can apply it to your world and the niche your blog lives in. Is it possible to do something similar in online games, social networking sites (memes?) and video sharing sites like YouTube?

Have you got any ideas like this or done anything similar? Let us know in the comments …

Do you know why some entry pages are so successful? How much time do you spend to find a good title for a blog article? Are your headlines and static archive filenames containing your blogs ‘keyword cloud’?

If I check the statistics for my entry pages I see that there are always pages which are more successful than others. Two important points beside the body keyword density and the tagging are the article title and the filename of the archived static page!

Many blog authors tend to be very focused on the body part of their content. But beside the main content it is very important to attract readers and search engines with a brilliant title. Just pushing the ‘Publish …’ button after writing that awesome article means to give away a good chance to optimize your blog article for reader attraction. The same is true for SEO … titles and file names are highly relevant to search engines!

• Readers following many feeds are just skimming the headlines in their feed readers to find relevant articles. If you don’t have an attractive headline they are not going to click!
• Article titles and archive pages containing your main ‘keyword cloud’ means a better listing in search results!

Continuously checking your search results and the adword possibilities with a following concentration or widening of your key density is a very successful and not very time-consuming way to optimize the success of your blog articles and titles.

Last but not least your title and your archive page name and path are showing up everywhere where somebody is linking to your article. This is the easiest way to gain keyword competence and relevant links.

Lovely trap number one: Don’t change the publishing date of your article because most blog systems will then change the path of your archive page.

Lovely trap number two: Blogger creates a new name for your edited archive page if you change the title of your article. (But they also keep the old version … hmmm) So better take the first chance to generate a good page name!

Both traps may result in broken external links! I have just tested it again on Blogger and now have to update the appropriate del.icio.us links manually. If you lose all incoming links and trackbacks to an article because of these little traps … well I would be angry … and nobody to blame except myself.

It’s just another version of “The fish has to like the taste of the worm … not the angler”. As a result you will get more inbound traffic and higher listings in search results.

Technorati Tags: blogging, article, content, title, writing, SEO

I was due to speak at SES Chicago this week, but due to some unexpected passport problems, a bunch of missed flights and other minor disasters missed my slot by about half an hour. All is not entirely lost though, i’d planned to give this PDF out after my talk, and although some of you may find parts of it very basic (the audience is quite different to the Performancing readers), I think many may get some value out of it. You can download Tagging for Links and Traffic in PDF, and you’re welcome to comment or ask questions in this post.

• Tagging for Links and Traffic

SES ended up being a pretty valuable trip regardless of the bungled passport and speaking. I met a whole bunch of cool people and got a ton of work done on Performancing. I’ll catch you guys up on a little of that this week, for now though, im kinda knackered, and will likely be putting email and posting off untill tomorrow – it’s a long way from Chicago to Denmark heh…

Hope some of you get some value out of that PDF, do feel free to share, use under the general CC license the rest of the posts at Performaning come under and of course add to it in the comments here.