Social Bookmarking: A Stumble upon Traffic

Building traffic is the ultimate goal with any SEO activity. Hands down- optimizing for a particular keyword is designed to gather as many visitors from as high up on the Results Page as possible.

The side-kick to SEO is gathering Links. Utilization of social bookmarking tools has been a safe and easily implemented source for User Generated Links. After a week long foray into the actual effectiveness of social bookmarking utilizing Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Stumbleupon, and Twitter on a very fresh blog with no branding, constant traffic or SEO, the results are interesting at the least.

Test Objective:
To determine the best source for traffic among the popular social bookmarking sites. Key metrics: # of visitors, Time spent, Page views per visitor.

Test Application:
With a different post each day- submit to all of the social bookmark sites utilizing a 50-50 schedule of "highly related keywords" and "broad keywords". An example for this would be- "humor, blog" vs. "travel, photo, graffiti, humor, blog, asia". In an interest to see the effect of keyword tagging, for this experiment article descriptions were ignored.

Don't ignore descriptions in your bookmarking. Please =)

After 1 week of 50-50 keyword testing on the above mentioned bookmarking sites, an interesting trend appeared.
The test had given evidence that every other day- there was a boost of traffic relative 10-13 times the other days. Since this test was on a dormant blog that was sitting, looming deletion- that is a notable jump!

To analyze the jump in data- I will clarify that the days that experienced 100+ visitors were in fact the same as the days which Higher relevancy keywords were used. The real ground breaker was this: None of the sites referred more than 2 clicks per day (including highly relevant keyword days), except for StumbleUpon.

With referral visitors coming from Digg, Delicious and Reddit amounting to just 1 visitor per day (each day), and Twitter with 5 per Tweet (~100 followers), the amount of raw traffic coming from StumbleUpon is amazing.

Is it relevant?

Maybe. If your goal is for numbers, then yes, this traffic is awesome. If you are looking to sell, gather prospects or get sign-ups, likely no. The average time on the page (each individual blog post) was at 0:31s. Hopefully this means that each post was read or skimmed- but with pageviews amounting to 1.87 per visitor, there was interest to jump around.

For this test, it shows that for pure traffic- StumbleUpon is the highest referrer, and looking back at the dynamics of these bookmarking networks the reason is clearly visible. The user doesn't see what is coming next. If they utilize the StumbleBar- they click, and can land on your site. Its that easy, the end user has no choice in the matter.

With Digg, Delicious, Reddit and many other sites that bookmark the latest stories and hot topics, to draw attention from the site is much more difficult, as the content you provide must be buzz worthy. When you apply social bookmarking to your site- you will likely have some awesome content to share with the world, and using proper tagging can help the world see it (especially for searching the social bookmarking sites). Using Digg and the big social bookmarking sites requires a big group of active 'friends' and 'fans' of your digging, just as much as StumbleUpon will give you higher Authority the more you Stumble.

If you are starting a blog, or looking to spread your word, for an initial kickstart- and help in possible bookmarkings elsewhere (for digg clicks if you already dugg), give it a Stumble.

-Derek Kean

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Content Management System Survey

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The YAML is Ruby's SEO Friend

Each formatting language has a distinctive characteristic that sets it apart from the rest, hence why designers prefer the visual stunning of Flash, and us SEO enthusiasts enjoy HTML/CSS for its inherent ability to control text.

Using Ruby to build pages has with it a few issues with setting a style sheet (.erb) and modifying individual pages' meta descriptions, keywords and title. Simplifying this into an easy solution requires only three steps, none of which should give you a headache.

First off, make sure that your .erb layout and style sheet is asking the individual pages whether or not they have custom meta's or titles. The coding should appear as such on your .erb file:

Once your .erb is established as containing "back-up" meta (also layout main page), and properly requesting data from pages, use your .yaml file to instruct your pages on which layout and customizations to load. This is a very simple set of instructions that will make later updates and modifications a breeze, not to mention how easily you can compile and modify this data offline (excel spreadsheet, etc.). The .yaml layout should take two steps; designating which .erb assetts to customize, and meta input. After these two steps, your .yaml should look something like this:

# Built-in
layout: "your-selected-layout"
# Custom
title: "My SEO Yaml Title"
meta_description: "Individual page description"
meta_keywords: "ruby, rails, seo, fun"

*One note: Make sure your '@page.example' is the same as your 'example: "page info"'

When your .yaml file is ready to roll, you can type away in your content file, knowing full well that your page has the proper meta-tags. Within the .yaml, you are able to specify any customizations, from banners to tabs, and anything that is dynamic. Be sure to test your local copy for web browser compatibility first, tweak your keywords, and enjoy Ruby to the fullest.

Please comment any other features you think should be added or if you have a special way you deal with Ruby.

-Derek Kean

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Instant Findability

Another development via Wordpress.com is their new usage of content to deliver "instant findability" once a new post is published.

From what I can gather this would work something like this-

1. Write your article
2. Use your content to relate to the topic/idea at hand
3. Publish article
4. User will search for a term contained in your article/title
5. Your result is on top- near top.

In the Wordpress blog they quote:

The instant you publish, searchers will see it at the top of the “most recent results”

This will usher in a new ability for Wordpress blogs to utilize the ever present SEO tactics in blogging to help drive more traffic through relevant social media, and hopefully this search engine within Wordpress will lead to others. The only downside to this is that it could potentially become another avenue within the blogosphere in WP to spam high value keywords for non-qualified traffic.

Original article: Instant Findability

-Derek Kean

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Wordpress' Matt Mullenweg at Web Wednesday Hong Kong

Last night at the new venue for WebWednesday HK, the diginerds in Hong Kong were graced with the presence of Matt Mullenweg (apologies for last night's tweet "Matt W"), founding developer of the Open Source blogging platform Wordpress. The night was hosted in Volar, giving what MC Napoleon Biggs says is "the only time you will be here unless you are a model or millionaire."

That aside, it was interesting to hear what Matt had opinions on- especially given the current trend in micro-blogging services like Twitter, etc. One of the trends of the answers Matt provided gave light on a few possible focal points of the Wordpress team.

"Bloggers usually write and they are done, where as Twitter and other micro-blogs you read and write. We want to provide a way to digest blogs so that you read and write on Wordpress instead of just one."- Matt Mullenweg

To cap off this quote, the discussion turned for a while focusing on how improving the ability to reach others with easier commenting and discussion (quality controlled, ie. spam protection) would lead to a much more interactive community that embraced sharing ideas as much as content and relationships.

The use of Wordpress as a social community which serves as a "hub" to aggregate content and share info was briefly touched on- leading to the inevitable discussion on how user interaction can make or break a blog, in this case "lolcats". Matt believes that utilizing the ability to share within Wordpress and syndicate information from other areas will lead to a greater sharing blogosphere, and reduce the amount of 'share this' tagging on every page.

The share this icons just start to look like NASCAR doors" - Matt Mullenweg

The most interesting point of the interview was related to the new project underway within Wordpress, which is BuddyPress; a social network in it's own right that is compared as "Facebook meets Ning and follows you around". The premise is that BuddyPress will aggregate your online experience much like facebook would, and put that into your own profile so that you, or others can come back and look at your "public history".

Overall, the night was a great time- and I believe everyone there had something to take away and ponder- for me, it was how can I write about this event and WordPress while using Blogger. I will migrate soon Matt, just working on a design.

-Derek Kean

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Baidu - Using your Content. Exactly as it is.

While analyzing a client's page for optimization, I noticed a large amount of traffic coming from China. Great news! Since this company is focusing on development in the Chinese market- traffic already coming in can't hurt. Or can it?

As a popular topic discussed frequently by SEO's around the world, optimization of keywords is highly important, but when does that optimization become a hindrance on creativity and enthusiasm?

Here is direct text from the 'About us' page. Using just one word - adult in nature and could be confused with mature content - Baidu's algorithm has picked that one word out of the on-page content and rendered the page available for search under mature content.

Now we know that the emphasis on individual words that are not tagged or bolded carry a (highly contested, but I believe) lower weight than those which are, but it goes to show how a simple word can place your site into a shady category of searches. In this instance, the keywords driving in results are not relevant to the desired niche: web design and application programming.

Many things can be determined from this information.
1. Baidu uses a content relevant search algorithm - weighted heavily on keywords in content.
2. On-page words can be mistakenly placed into shady search results given their results.
3. Google, Yahoo, Live and other engines use a much better algorithm than Baidu for relevance (given that one word on a page surrounded by programming jargon and personal bios gets this undesired result)
4. In the short-term, traffic numbers will drop with the deletion of this word.

The main moral of this post is to show that even the greatest enthusiasm towards describing your hobbies and demeanor to business can hurt you. Using the 'H' word can denote a heavy-user or an addict to tech, but a better choice in this situation would be to remove the adjective altogether - leaving just 'Linux Guru'.

Baidu in general has been a headache, because of their upfront attitude towards revenues- and that it is vital for Chinese search. Be cautious of your content when optimizing for Baidu, and for those of you new to SEO, do choose your content carefully. Just one outlier word can throw your traffic's mind into the gutter.

-Derek

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