SEO Blog - Internet Marketing News

I’ve been building quite a lot of sites recently, both personally and client related. In this time I’ve observed quite a few strategies that are key to helping a site grow from scratch. Traffic is usually what the success of a website lies on, so you need to know how to build traffic as effectively as possible. Luckily, over the last 2 months I’ve helped launch over 10 sites and quickly drive them to large amounts of relevant traffic and lots of feed subscribers. With this in mind, I wanted to put together a selection of what I’ve learned; this isn’t going to be ground-breaking and you might know some of it, but putting them all in one place should make for this useful resource.

5 Tactics to Use

1. Utilise MyBlogLog

If you’ve never heard of MyBlogLog (where have you been?) then I’ll give you a quick run down. Basically, MyBlogLog is a Yahoo owned community based around your blog and its readers. When you sign-up you get to fill out your profile¹ and even register your community² which is for readers of your blog to show support. You’ll notice that any fans of your blog who are already on MBL are likely to register as part of your community. MBL also offer blog statistics, I used to use them a while ago but because of a few issues in the service i.e. some people could appear as Shoemoney when visiting sites, so I lost a bit of trust in them. My favourite part of MyBlogLog is that whenever you visit a site with their ‘visitors’ widget’, your profile is going to be shown³. Therefore, it is important to pick a relevant username and a memorable avatar. This is excellent for branding and you’ll also notice a few people checking out your profile on the site.

2. Register on Twitter

About one year ago I wouldn’t have recommended this, even though the service was around. This is mostly due to the fact that Twitter had quite a varied audience and people didn’t really think to use it to promote a website. These days however, Twitter is an excellent way to drive traffic to a site and build your name in a niche, especially with their now huge userbase. After you’ve registered on Twitter¹ make sure you fill out your profile² and use the same avatar as MyBlogLog. This is important for branding purposes and it’s also going to set you out from most users of the site. Note that people are more likely to notice your tweets (status updates) via your picture rather than your username. Once you’re all set-up you need to start adding people to follow³ and interact with from the niche of your site. If you are passionate about your niche then the discussions these people are having should interest you. There are multiple ways to find a relevant audience:

1. Look for links to twitter profiles on your favourite blogs
2. Perform the Google search ’site:twitter.com “niche”‘
3. Import your email contacts when you sign-up
4. Try a service like TwitterTroll, a twitter search engine and look for your main keywords

If you want more people to follow you, make sure you put a link to your profile on your blog.

3. Sign-Up to Gravatar

This one is relatively simple but it is definitely effective for branding and comment traffic. Gravatars are the avatars that show up next to comments on many blogs (this is increasing all the time) and is built by the same team that builds Wordpress. Gravatar works by assigning your email address to a picture, so whenever you post a comment with a certain email, your picture will appear next to it. I’m very big on branding so I keep this the same as the avatar on Twitter and MyBlogLog.

4. Register on StumbleUpon

Once again with StumbleUpon, I like to keep the branding and avatar theme running so whenever I sign-up or recommend others, I tell them to use either a personal name or site name for their username. Secondly, use the same image that has been used elsewhere as your avatar. Now then, there are 2 things you want to do with your StumbleUpon account: 1. Set-up your interests so you can find a lot of relevant content and 2. Stumble the blog posts of fellow niche bloggers and let them know about it in their commentsFor all the bloggers in your niche you find on the site, make sure you add them as a friend. You’ll typically find they link to their profile on their own blog, or they are always reviewing pages from their own website. When you add them make sure that you send a personal message which includes their name and ask them to add you as a friend. This can be time consuming if there are a lot of SU users in this niche but it is definitely worth the effort. Once you have started to build up your network you can help spread the traffic to others in your niche and even make use of the ‘Send-to’ function whenever you write a post of your own. One more thing I do on StumbleUpon is message all the people that thumb-up one of my personal posts. I thank them for taking the time to check out the site and also ask them to do a friend exchange. Once again, this is time consuming but it is a nice personal touch and anything to help increase traffic to your new website is a bonus.

5. Start Leaving Comments

Last but definitely not least in the list is to start leaving comments on other blogs. The follow-up to this post is going to look at all the various ways to find the top sites in a niche, there are more than you would expect. I’ve watched bloggers like Sean, Avani, Alex and Evelyn seriously increase traffic and activity on their sites by being very active on the blogs of others. I recommend commenting on other blogs for a number of reasons:

• Small amount of traffic from the site you comment on
• Increase branding & niche exposure (think: gravatar)
• Site authors are much more likely to link to your posts
• It helps establish a relationship with an author, this can definitely be helpful if you need their assistance in the future

As they always say, you can have the greatest content in the world but if you aren’t active online or promoting your articles in some way then nobody is going to see them. These steps are very simple but can also be very effective to get your brand out there and start promoting your new website.

Effective?

I did say these tactics were going to be effective and I keep to my word, think about how all of this interlinks. Whenever you visit a site to leave a comment, you are instantly shown as a visitor on their MyBlogLog widget, just for visiting. Now whenever you leave a comment, besides the traffic you get your avatar is showing next to it if they had gravatars enabled. All your comments and Stumbles are going to be a great way to build up relationships with others which you can leverage for links or promotion help whenever you write a worthy post. When that worthy post is ready, don’t forget to tweet it ;).

Business blogging is not always easy.

A business blog is subjective but unlike a private blog you still are writing for people interested in your trade, products and services and not necessarily you as a person watching movies and eating out.

You can’t annoy people too much, you can’t be too

• personal
• funny
• outspoken

So you need ideas that are creative while not being too creative as to scare away your business audience.

To assist you I collected a list of 50 blog post ideas for business blogging for any industry. You can apply it in most niches I think. Some of these ideas are the bomb and will bring you publicity and popularity while others focus on highlighting your expertise or are part of a social networking strategy. Some of the post ideas are all of these at once.

1. Envision the future of your industry by extrapolating the current developments
2. Explain why everybody should care for your trade and not only specialists
3. Make a list of famous people who deal or dealt with issues related to your business
4. List 30 or more online resources for business people in your industry
5. Review a publication dealing with your industry
6. Make a list of the top myths in your industry and debunk them
7. Disagree with a high level personality in your business, prove her or him wrong
8. Make a list of the top 10 blogs in your niche
9. Report from a trade fair
10. Compare the your national market to markets abroad
11. Collect the best blog postings in your niche and compile a best of-list
12. Expand your focus to a similar area of expertise by comparing
13. Write down a code of ethics for your blog and your business as a whole
14. Explore and depict a niche social media platform for your trade, if there is none use a forum to do that
15. Add a forum to your blog or site if your site has a big enough community to sustain it
16. Break the rules of your trade by remodeling them and adapting to current situation, write about it
17. Go off topic and link a topic from everyday life back to your business “10 Ways SEO is like Base-Jumping”
18. Make a list of WordPress plugins that are most useful for your industry “The 10 Best WordPress plugins for Graphic Designers”
19. Reach out to your clients and fans: “What would you like to change in [insert your product or service here]?”
20. Display attractive images of your products, several of them, in the best case your own products
21. Analyze the current climate in your industry and explain the ramifications
22. Identify leaders in your area and ask them to guest post on your blog or write for their blog instead
23. Show what went wrong in your company, why and how you dealt with it, learning from mistakes is very helpful for others
24. Compare the new vs the old ways of doing your buisness
25. Highlight top female bloggers or experts in your trade
26. Create fictional and visionary product description
27. Satirize a very well known personality, be it of your trade or outside of it
28. Write an allegory about your idol doing your business like “The Bruce Lee Method of Business Blogging”
29. Thank your 10 favorite readers and/or commenters
30. Expose a scam in your industry (make sure to consult a lawyer in advance)
31. Take a big brand (or several) and use it as an example for best practices vs mistakes
32. Use humor to lighten up a boring topic “I Can Haz Pay Per Cat? The Lolcats Way of PPC”
33. Explain the local advantages of your company, do not hide behind modesty: “Oxford: SEO since 1542″
34. Review a book dealing with your topic that really displays thinking outside the box
35. Combine your topic with another one, usually but wrongfully not combined with yours, like SEO and graphic design
36. Express your own personal view an a highly debatable issue and do not just repeat common ground opinions
37. Make a short movie to show on your blog, this can be something funny or just simply you speaking
38. Create a list of indispensable software or web tools for your job
39. Take a common issue many people care about and explain how it relates to your business
40. Introduce a new business model in your trade or better, several of them
41. Be the first to break news, for instance reveal your new product via the blog
42. Check your search engine referers and write postings for those queries that had no matches until now
43. Check in your stats which post is the most popular one and write a follow up
44. Join a trade organization and explain why you did it
45. Make a donation to a good cause and blog about it
46. Introduce the 10 most promising bloggers in your industry
47. Check Digg, StumbleUpon or Technorati to find out what’s most popular right now and find a new angle to it
48. Engage in a discussion on a forum and reprint on your blog
49. Ask people on Twitter a question and blog the best replies
50. Make a list of blogging ideas specifically for your industry

Remember that business blogging is about value. That’s indeed the most crucial difference between private and business blogs. In private blogs people want to express themselves, business bloggers want to create value for others. So while writing a post for a business blog always consider this question: Of what use can this article be to potential clients, people in my industry and the general public?”

Sadly the future of SEO is mostly a topic for people outside the industry who grab attention by reinforcing prejudice. On the other hand we’re in the middle of huge changes taking place in the SEO industry or should I say… yes, what.

Already at present we rarely speak about SEO anymore. It’s always part of a composite term or a larger concept like search marketing. Here are the 5 most common SEO futures already visible right now:

1. findability
2. advanced SEO
3. SEO 2.0
4. web design for ROI
5. search marketing

Findability
Findability is a concept stemming rather from the web development community and usability experts. It’s almost all encompassing and covers not only SEO aspects of web design. It also reflects off site factors and new developments like social media. It’s been revived recently but it didn’t catch on as much as I’d expect yet. Findability is a great term for all those who struggle to explain SEO again and again. Findability is kind of self-explanatory due to the non-acronym nature of the term.

Advanced SEO
Advanced SEO has been highly debated recently and then it seemingly disappeared from the daily buzz. Is advanced the new better SEO or just a part of it like basic SEO? I don’t know, the pundits do not even agree on what advanced SEO really is. It certainly has something to do with programming and web analytics, examples like “ip delivery” and “ROI analysis” get mentioned in this context. Some bloggers dispute that advanced SEO is another term for “black hat SEO” but there has been no final agreement reached on this.

SEO 2.0
SEO 2.0 has almost gone main stream when Lee Odden coined it’s most popular definition of “digital asset optimization” in 2007. Others have come up with numerous other definitions. Then the talk of the town kind of subsided partly due to the growing wariness of everything “2.0″ and corresponding buzzwords. It seems that SEO 2.0 is not only SEO for Web 2.0 but a holistic new approach highlighting social media engagement and techniques like link baiting, reputation management as well as viral marketing. It hasn’t really gone main stream yet though in spite of many SEO specialists already adopting it.

Web Design for ROI
Web Design for ROI is a highly influential book that basically, like the findability concept, re-contextualizes SEO along the lines of larger business objectives. These get translated via web design and information architecture in order to realign them in favor of higher returns instead of “good looks”. While it’s not a term that realy caught on it really describes what SEO nowadays is about. PageRank, rankings and traffic are not enough as return on investment is key. The concept is already widely accepted and I’d love people to use a short version of the term like ROI design or something. They do not yet though.

Search Marketing
SEO and SEM are intertwined for a few years. some people even define SEO as a sub-discipline of SEM. While I prefer SEM to refer to paid search (PPC etc.) the term has morphed to search marketing recently. You rarely say “SEM” by now. Not only the term gained traction, the approach did too. Search marketing dropped the “engine” as it’s about reaching out to people who search, be it on search engines, static websites (Adsense!) or social media. You don’t need strictly an engine to search. You need a search marketer to help you perform on the various media and platforms though. This term ist the most popular right now as describing the whole industry.

These are possible ways that you can take. SEO in a way branches out in many directions. You can choose which one you’ll take. Also the 5 new SEO paradigms overlap and are used sometimes as synonyms. Which way do you go? Quo vadis SEO?

Twitter have today removed all link juice from profile bio links and it’s fair to say this hasn’t gone down too well in the SEO industry.

The move follows Dave Naylor’s backlink tip which caused Matt Cutts to notify Twitter founder Evan Williams, appearing to recommend that hyperlinks are removed from profile bio pages.

As I wrote earlier in the week Twitter has become a very important tool in the search industry, and this began to cause controversy because many active users feel that the time and effort they have spent in building up their Twitter profiles should be rewarded with a backlink to promote their own websites.

This tweet from Sugarrae helps to show the general feeling people have about why bio links should be valued by Google:

With a good point made by Graywolf:

And another valid opinion from Rishil:

I would agree with all of the above statements and in my opinion Twitter could learn a great deal from the way Sphinn and SEOmoz reward the active members in the community. Sphinn nofollow all submission links until they hit the homepage and SEOmoz nofollow profile links until you reach 100+ user points.

What do you think, is this wrongly punishing legitimate Twitter users or is this necessary to stop spammers? And, if Google have contributed with advice about how these links are valued, should they be recommending this?

How to measure website success when rankings, Google PageRank and sheer traffic have gone the way of “hits”: All these older metrics become more and more meaningless in the current web environment.

• Why measure rankings when they differ from location to location and from computer to computer due to localization and personalization efforts by Google and other search engines?
• Why look at a site’s PageRank when Google itself admits that it’s only one of 200 signals that determine the assessment of a site’s authority in Google and sites with PR 3 outrank PR 7 sites?
• Why brag about traffic when you can get hundreds of thousands of people visit you via Digg and the likes just to make’em run away in an instant?

The good old days of primitive measurement of website success are finally over. Business people demand more than just traffic and rankings, marketing professionals get more web-savvy than 12 year old kids who almost were born on the Web and new web analytics tools finally make it possible to consider far more and specific metrics than ever before. So check out these 33 website success metrics instead of rankings, Google PageRank and traffic:

Business Metrics

People doing business online, be it with eCommerce sites like Shops, publishing companies, consulting firms etc. do want to see results in Dollars, which in most cases makes sense although blogs for instance do offer ROI which is not easily measurable though. Often it’s more brand recognition, reputation building etc. For most commercial websites measuring revenue is the best possible was of determining success.

ROI
ROI means Return on Investment. If you spend 1000$ on your website and earn 2000$ your ROI is 200%. So calculate the cost and the financial benefits and compare both. There are whole books about that.

sales
ROI sometimes gets difficult to define. What is the investment exactly, is the time spent on social media e.g. an investment or only the work on the site? Thus measuring sales, especially for shops, is much easier. Higher sales = good website optimization of course.

leads
You do not sell directly on your website? You do want users to contact you via your site insetad? Measure leads. A SEO campaign that brought 100 leads is better than one which brought a million page views but no new potential clients.

conversions
OK, you do not sell anything directly and you do not sell services either, but you want people to join, participate in a survey, recommend your site or simply subscribe to your email newsletter? Measure conversions. You should do it for sales and leads too but even without these conversions make a very reliable website or marketing campaign success metric.

subscribers
While subscribers can be referred to as conversions you can count the sheer number every site should by now offer RSS and track RSS as well as email subscriptions like blogs do. Your subscribers are the most important users of your website, even if they do not buy anything. So if you don’t have an RSS/Atom or whatever kind of feed get one now.

Usability metrics

While not every site’s success can be measured in revenue, sales or leads you always can and should measure the sheer usability of your site. Many sites today still concentrate on being pretty, “having a bigger logo” and some special effects like Flash or AJAX, sound or video. While this might look good in most cases it’s not the most important factor that decides whether your site is going to fail or to succeed, usability is.

returning visitors
This is obvious, only returning visitors really like your site. So the more come back the better, the more successful you are. One time search visitors and casual social media visitors are not the backbone of your site. The subscribers and returning visitors (often the same people) are.

pageviews per visit
While measuring pageviews is sometimes futile as bad websites where you have to click more can have higher numbers of pageviews the number of pageviews per visit often will tell you a whole lot about how much your visitors like your website. A 1 to 1 ratio is bad unless they all click the buy button instantly.

time on page
The time spent on a page can be read in manifold ways but you can deduct from it whether people just skim your content or read your whole article among others.

time on site
It’s not always the longer the better but 5 minutes is in most cases better than 30 seconds, especially for a publishing site or simply a blog.

bounce rate
The bounce rate is one of the most important usability metrics and thanks to Google Analytics or Woopra easy to follow nowadays. 100k visitors from Digg with an bounce rate of 95% means that in fact only 5.000 actually visited your site. So a site with a much lower visitor number AND bounce rate can be much more successful than a “stupid traffic” site with huge traffic numbers. Targeted quality traffic is key for a successful site.

form/shopping cart abandonment rate
Forms are the most important parts of most websites in business terms, be it the contact form, or the shopping cart which technically in most cases is a form. Now imagine a super market where half or more of the customers abandon their cart in the middle of the checkout process or while perusing the market. Count these people and try to make them stay. The simplest way of checking the shopping cart abandonment rate is by sending a message to customer support each time a cart or other form gets abandoned. Sometimes you might be able to get back to the potential client with the incomplete data he entered.

next pages
To make people visit more than one page on a site we use internal links. Some of the links are links that we really want the people to follow. Checking the “next pages” from a particular landing page we can determine whether the readers followed our advice or wanted to see more of it. When on your home page the next page is in most cases the search or the sitemap page you’ve got a problem.

links clicked (heat maps)
Modern “Web 2.0″ web analytics solutions sometimes offer heat maps views or at least a site overlay way of checking clicks. This way you can determine where your visitors click or try to click (to no avail sometimes in cases of not linked logos or underlines words which are not links). Do people click where you want them to click or not?

eyetracking
Even better than heat maps of click behavior are heat maps of actual eye movements. You need more than a web analytics package to check that you need real people to take part in a study but if you are large company depending on your website you should check this for sure. Do people look at your main message at all? Do they actually see the “buy now” button?

internal searches
Are most of your visitors clueless or targeted? You’ll find out via the analyzing the internal searches. There is even a widget to do just that. Google Analytics also allows that.

SEO metrics

SEO experts love to measure. They loved measuring PageRank, rankings and traffic and they still need something to follow this urge. Well, there still is a lot to measure beyond strict business or usability metrics. Old school SEO still makes sense in lots of cases, especially with backlinks which still determine above all your success in Google search. I’d concentrate here on Google, but on the US market it still also make sense to check these with Yahoo and others. Also, checking backlinks with Google is not fun (only a fraction of data is released by Google unless you check your own site in Google Webmaster Tools) so you’re advised to measure them with Yahoo tools are tools that measure it using Yahoo data.

number of backlinks
You still need to know how many people or rather pages link to you. especially if this week more or less do it. The sheer number may be meaningless if you have 10.000 links from one site though. So focus also on domain popularity (links from one domain counted as one).

quality of backlinks
Getting a ton of links may mean nothing in comparison to one link from the NYT. So determine the quality of links: Has the linking page many other outgoing links? Has it PageRank? It it an old authority domain etc.?

Google cache date
Many SEO specialists resort to checking the cache date in Google (Google saves most pages in a “cache”) for determining the quality and success of a website in Google. If the cache date is older than one month the site is either dead (no fresh content) or has a very low authority with Google. Of course you always should check whether a site has a cache at all. Not cached sites probably get de-indexed (penalized) by Google.

Google bot visit frequency
Your cache might be one week old, but if Google bot visits daily it’s OK in most cases. You can check with most server side web analytics solutions, those relying on server logs or PHP.

Last time Google bot visited
This is almost the same as above but only almost. If you have a new content page and the bot visited yesterday and you’re still not in the Google index something might be wrong (like duplicate content problems)

Pages indexed
It’s seldom as simple as “the more pages indexed the better” but for small sites it often is. If you have 50 pages online but only 20 indexed your site is not successfully spidered by Google. A site:yoursite.com search in Google is enough to find out.

PageRank “pass rate”
While I argue that looking at the actual toolbar PageRank does not make much sense nowadays anymore you certainly want to take a look at the pass rate of PageRank. Google PageRank is passed via the links on your site. A home page with PR 5 should have subpages with PR 4 or at least 3, otherwise you have too many links or your internal link structure is broken.

Alexa Rank
While Alexa is not really reliable or never was many advertisers use it to check your traffic numbers. Also the Alexa traffic estimates can be compared to other sites, other time periods (more or les trafic this year than last?) and to other traffic estimation tools.

Compete Rank
While Compete is said to be more reliable than Alexa it only is for US traffic. This is both good and bad news but at the same time allows, e.g. compared with Alexa, to see where you’re heading. If you server the US market, take a close look at Compete.

Social Media metrics

In the age of social media, user generated content you can’t rely solely on bots and other automatically gathered numbers to collect data on your website success. You have to find out what your users like and what they actually say about you, or at least how often. There ale plenty of ways to find out, these are the most obvious:

bookmarks on delicious
A site or page with a few hundred or thousand of bookmarks on Delicious can’t be that bad, can it? On the other hand a site that has none can’t be that successful can it?

bookmarks elsewhere
While it is not that hard to pay some “SEO India” service to submit you to Delicious etc. It’s still far more likely that a site is a good one if it’s only popular on Delicious but also has bookmarks elsewhere. I’m sometimes surprised how many people bookmark my articles on sites do not even know of.

social news submissions
Do really thinks getting tens of thousands people visit your site is the ultimate proof of being popular? Well, it isn’t, it just proves you’re main stream, political correct and have the best girls on your site while using Apple. Everything else gets buried. If Digg front page popularity reflects real popularity then why is McCain the republican candidate and not Ron Paul? In contrast the number of submissions tend to allow a better assessment unless of course the “SEO India” service is at work. When not, you can see that popular pages get submitted all over the place. Every SEO knows that. You can submit the best SEO relates resource and it won’t get on Digg frontpage due to the “bury brigade” there, the it will get submitted to Digg, Reddit, Propeller, Mixx. My own SEO blog has been submitted to Mixx over 70 times in 10 months and I did it only a few times myself.

tweets (Twitter mentions)
Being mentioned or recommended on Twitter is truly a success because here people communicate with their peers and fans and only links pages their truly recommend. Being linked more then 2 or 3 times means you are huge. It means 2 or 3 people telling 200 or maybe 200 other people that you rock. TweetBeep will send you email each time.

niche social site sites votes
In marketing circles and for SEO blogs it is a widely known fact that the search marketing social news site Sphinn is the destination to submit your work. Being successful here means recognition by experts and a few hundred highly targeted visitors. Each niche has by now it’s own niche social news site, be it Hugg for “green” news, YCombinator for startups and tech, Design Float and Design Bump for, you guessed it design or DZone for web development and programming. Here you get visitors and readers who really care and their opinion really counts.

number of “thumbs up” on StumbleUpon
Other than the almost US only elitist crowds at Digg or Reddit social browsing sites like StumbleUpon are populated by the general public from all over the world. People voting for you on StumbleUpon “like you” if you can offer something for the John Does out there. Other than that you only get a limited number of votes. Whether you have “mass appeal” in the positive sense of it you will find out here, not on Digg.

StumbleUpon reviews feedback
People who review you StumbleUpon really care for you, the StumbleUpon community or the subject. So listen closely. getting 10 or more “awesome” reviews on StumbleUpon means a lot if you want to determine the overall popularity of your website or particular page.

Technorati Blog mentions
A page often mentioned on Technorati is truly popular in the blogosphere. You are part of the conversation if you get linked often by other blogs. The Technorati authority is not reliable though as a metric. It’s based largely on Technorati bookmarks which bloggers can game easily.

Google BlogSearch Links
While the main Google search doe not show you many links the Google blog search is good at it. It’ll show you the legit links by other blogs, not the scraper blogs. Watch out for these, the simplest way to monitor them is by using AideRSS.

Some of you might assume now that all this is far too complex for them but it isn’t. Freely available tools like Google Analytics allow every webmaster to find out much more about a website than just a few years ago where we were the obvious numbers of PageRank, rankings and traffic had to suffice. The real web metrics experts will laugh this list off probably as advanced SEO and web analytics starts in most cases beyond the ways mentioned here.

You are certainly much better off checking these 33 web metrics instead of Google rankings, PageRank and sheer website traffic.

New web tools appear daily. Often I don’t even manage to bookmark them all, let alone try them. Nonetheless I try as many Internet tools as I can, I’m just a serial early adopter. I can’t stop it. These are mostly 30+ free tools which are either web tools or tools for the web I discovered just recently in 2008.

I tested most of these tools and I use some of them regularly as a web professional. Most of these social media, web design & development, search, SEO and analytics, e-commerce, blogging and Internet tools are not yet widely known main stream tools. The average webmaster will hopefully find them useful. I selected the 30 most useful tools from the hundreds available out there.

Social Media

• Social Median is a unique combination of a Mixx-like social news site and Ning-like community functionality
• Browzmi is a real time social browsing and chatting tool, it’s like a more social StumbleUpon
• Social Browse is very similar to Browzmi according to NetHackz, invitation only as of now
• Hooeey is half social browsing if you want it to, half a web based browser history that renders bookmarking obsolete according to the site
• Second Brain is often mistakenly referred to as a lifestreaming tool like the popular FriendFeed, but its focus is to collect and organize “all your content” available online
• Muxtape is a very simple kind of music community which allows to listen to predefined user “generated” playlists
• Twitbuzz is a Digg-like interface showing the most popular links on Twitter

Web Design & Development

• Cushy CMS makes any static site a CMS site, it’s so easy I’ll recommend it to my mother who already uses Jimdo
• Pokform is a Jimdo-like Flash online CMS that allows you to create smooth websites with ease, currently it’s a nono for SEO though so you should only use it for an artists or photographers page
• Pingdom allows you to test whether your site is up and how fast it is
• Splashup is the real web based Photoshop, the Adobe online app can’t match
• BricaBox allows you to create your own social site, be it a map mashup site, a wiki, or a voting site. They compare it to Wordpress and Ning to underline the ease of use of creation of a site but it appears to be even easier than WordPress

Search

• Cuil is a new search engine which claims to have more pages indexed than any other, for me its results are as good as Google’s
• Grooveshark Lite is a music search engine that lets you listen to what you find
• Muxtape Stumbler is a music search engine for the Muxtape community
• Picitup is a very advanced visual search engine for images which also allows you to find Creative Commons licensed images you can use for free
• Google GEO Search Tool allows you to see Google results from other locations as Google localizes your results based on your IP usually

SEO and Analytics

• Trifecta by SEOMoz is an updated blog/website worth measuring tool
• Rank Checker by SEOBook, been around for several months now but after more traditional ranking checker software has been crippled recently by Google a very good alternative
• Ranksense is a an advanced SEO software by Hamlet Batista for all those who do go beyond ranking checking, it’s out of beta for a few months now
• Raven SEO Tools, this a a whole web based SEO tool suite which will also track your rankings over time among others
• Woopra is an advanced web analytics suite which can compete with Google Analytics and in some cases offers better and more timely data
• Google Insights for Search is THE new keyword research tool for every webmaster or website owner, it’s Google Trends “on steroids”

E-Commerce

• Shopify is a very simple online shop application virtually anybody can set up a shop now, it’s been around since 2005 and nobody told me!
• PPCalc is a “PayPal fee calculator”. As you know PayPal is very widely used but rather expensive and also not the most reliable solution. I’d recommend Moneybookers as alternative
• ChipIn is a PayPal connected tool that facilitates so called crowdfunding. It’s like crowdsourcing but with money. You ask many people to fund your project

Blogging & Internet

• Feed Compare lets you view and compare the subscriber numbers of blogs using Feedburner for their RSS feeds over time
• BuySellAds does exactly that buy and sell banner ads taking 25% commission, it’s easy to use ideal for bloggers and worked fine for me
• Proxify “is a web-based anonymous proxy service which allows anyone to surf the Web privately and securely.”
• xrl.us by Metamark is the better TinyURL, I use it daily
• issuu is a YouTube like website for magazines and other print publications, you can upload them and allow people to read them only suing a sleek Flash interface

Bonus

• MagMyPic - You always wanted to get famous and end up on the cover of a magazine? Now you can!

You might know some of these web tools, especially if you’re a SEO expert you probably will know the SEO tools. I made sure that the list contains both the best tools currently available and those which not everybody outside a certain industry knows yet. Also these 30 tools can be used by anybody. You don’t need to be a full fledged web professional for most of these.

As spotted by Ciaran Norris, British tennis player Andy Murray is now using Twitter to provide regular updates to his fans and followers during the Olympic Games.

Described by many, including the normally very polite Tim Henman, as a “miserable git” this could be a very clever idea to help win over some new fans by helping to portray himself a more cheerful image of what happens behind the scenes, rather than the serious/grumpy Andy Murray we see on-court and in post-match interviews!

Many celebrities already have their own Facebook or Myspace profiles (most of which are fake) but the successful ones are those where people clearly take the time to provide information and communicate with their fans. Andy Murray obviously has a few people to convince but by cleaning up his online reputation I’m sure he can at least start to change a few opinions and help to get the crowd behind him even more in the future.

Yesterday the very popular social media bookmarking website Del.icio.us relaunched and moved to use delicious.com.

This was well covered across the blogosphere, with reviews looking at its improved design and enhanced speed, but in addition to this the move is also likely to boost the website’s search rankings.

Delicious.com SEO Strengths

• del.icio.us was already a very strong domain due to the website’s popularity, 301 redirecting a huge 524,803,978 backlinks will help to maintain existing rankings during the site migration.
• Delicious.com is an established domain with its own history, originally registered back in 1995.
• Delicious.com has a PageRank 9! I would assume this is largely because of the redirect from del.icio.us, however the old page is still indexed in Google so this would have been transferred across unusually quickly. The additional direct backlinks to delicious.com will add further weight to strengthening the overall website. Many SEO’s will argue about the importance of Google PageRank, however few will disagree that having a PR9 domain will significantly impact rankings.
• Possibly the most important change, from an SEO perspective, is that the site may now benefit from improved international traffic with Google UK, Australia, Germany etc more likely to favour a .com as opposed to a .us domain. I frequently see Digg.com URL’s appear in the Google UK SERPs but it’s very rare that I’ve seen del.icio.us appear.

Large social media website’s generally don’t rely too heavily on search engine traffic, however the content covered is often news based and will generate a high amount of search interest within a short space of time. So ranking highly for these terms could make the search engines become a major source of traffic and certainly help to promote the website more heavily outside of the US where it’s popularity isn’t quite so strong.

To succeed with or on social media like del.icio.us, StumbleUpon or Mixx (I leave out social news sites Digg and Reddit as these sites boycott any SEO related topics) so called killer content is needed. It does not suffice but it’s a prerequisite to get to the front-page. Bloggers often call such outstanding content “pillar content” as it’s one of the pillars of a blog. As most blogs do not break news unlike Techrunch e.g. this killer content in most cases will be a huge list of resources:

• 101 ways to…
• The ultimate list of * tools
• 50 great * web designs

Such posts are really popular and get bookmarked and linked as well for later. The biggest drawback of them for the blogger or writer: It takes days or weeks to write such a resource list in many cases.

In recent weeks I noticed a different pattern while blogging: My most popular posts took me in between one and one and a half hours. In contrast I usually need at least 2 hours for a good post.

One of these posts got popular 3 times on StumbleUpon during one month, bringing more visitors each time. Another post got 300+ bookmarks on del.icio.us and others became popular on Mixx, my favourite social news site, four times in a row in the last two weeks.

There are 3 main ingredients of such low workload popular posts. They do not have to contain all of them but each helps tremendously:

Humor
Present serious information in a humorous way, make people laugh in unexpected contexts.
Broad audience
Write about something everybody knows of or better deals with, like the Internet, Google, Windows, Firefox etc…
Quick overview
Enable your audience to quickly digest much information, which they otherwise would need hours or days to research.

Just consider this headline example:

10 web tools “computer illiterate” John McCain needs to beat Obama

It has all three aspects.

These 10 tools might be the 10 must have tools for new Internet users who want to become pros quickly, something like:

1. Firefox (Browser)
2. Gmail (Webmail)
3. Skype (Phone)
4. Zoho (Web office tools)
5. Pidgin (IM client)
6. Twitter (Microblogging)
7. PayPal (Online Payment)
8. Flickr (Image sharing)
9. YouTube (Video sharing)
10. del.icio.us (Social bookmarking)

Usually people would yawn when encountering such a list, but with this twist these tools for web noobs list might succeed big time. Now you might add some humorous descriptions like “Gmail, a widely used electronic mail service by ‘the Google’. For electronic mail you don’t need pencil or paper!”

You see, it’s easy. Now the time is up.

This Tuesday I spoke at the social media panel of SES Hamburg. While I enjoyed the great session for some people in the audience social media and blogs are not as enjoyable. The contrary seems to be the case. The last question asked at the end of the panel was the most striking. A man in a suit asked:

Can I outsource all that social media marketing crap to affiliates?

He really said “crap” and he was not really fond of the idea of having to deal with social media. While I see these websites and ways of publishing as new opportunities obviously others don’t. So let’s take a look at the outsourcing issue. We, all three of the speakers, were quick to warn of the dangers of outsourcing social media marketing to affiliates. Why?

• Affiliates do not care for your reputation, they aim at quick profits
• Affiliates often already fail in ethical SEO, in social media the standards of ethics are even higher
• Affiliates might break local laws in your name and at least in Germany you can be sued for that as well

So the idea of making affiliates your representatives on social media is inherently a bad one. The outsourcing idea by itself is not though! Indeed many people outsource their social media activities to marketing companies specialized in

• dealing with social media in a responsible manner
• creating outstanding content for social media, sometimes referred to as link bait
• offering business blogging consulting

One of my examples on the panel was in fact a blog I manage and write for in the name of a big German client, a shopping search engine. While some other shopping search engines have their blog-like news sites that even get tolerated on social media, my client’s blog really got accepted as a real genuine blog and even got linked by “real bloggers” in their blogrolls. This blog managed several times to get to the front page of the German Digg equivalent so it’s more than accepted, it’s a real blog itself by now.

So can you successfully outsource your social media marketing activities?

Yes you can! If you think it’s crap, I’ll advise you to change your mindset first though.

What are the most important benefits of serious social media engagement?

• Joining the conversation, you talk with the people instead of people just talking about you
• Reputation management and building, people get to know you and your brand, they remember you in a positive light
• Link building, if you offer value people will naturally link to you

Stop ignoring social media and blogging. If you can’t manage it yourself find a pro. You’ll find plenty of them in social media or via their own blogs.