How to tell real facts from marketing pitches?
Every week several new tools for web promotion and SEO appear in the market. Most of them can be useless for the average Web Promoter, but a few can bring significant value. Which ones? Hard to tell.
Every new product comes out with an impressive amount of cleverly designed marketing mumbo-jumbo, mixed with technicalities and dubious favourable testimonials. Knowledgeable testing is rarely performed. Objective reviews are hard to find.
Selling software is an activity that quite obviously, needs to be done online. There are significant advantages of being able to do all these steps in a few minutes: find a useful software product, learn about it, download it, install it, test it, and reach for the credit card to buy it.
Paradoxically, many software programmers are unaware of the huge resources for selling software online, and do not even have a web site. Or they have a nice one, with plenty of Flash animations, and no elements for web ranking.
When we create internal pages in a web site we do not usually expect that visitors will be convinced to buy the product just by reading them. They are, after all, units in a large set of pages called a site. The whole site is in charge of delivering the message and convincing visitors. However, the search engines rank pages for its individual content as defined by a few keywords.
At the beginning of the Web Marketing science, the idea of having a page was nice and useful, usually being enough for a promotion. Later, people started having complete sites, in order to provide more complete info and improve the chances of being found in the search engines. A site could sit in a sub domain, sometimes in large domains providing cheap or free hosting.
Having its own domain, with a carefully chosen name, became the next logical step.
Currently, it is cool to have a blog, for frequent and easy updates. And the savvy clients order a cluster of domains, with related names, sitting on servers with different Ips.
I suddenly noted that the visits to a website of mine had multiplied 5 fold in a day. After feeling some satisfaction on the success of my promotion efforts, I noticed something unusual: the requested subjects had nothing to do with my main theme, but with foods and drinks. And when you visited one of those pages, you were redirected to a malware site.
I entered my sites by FTP and I found many offending pages that some bot had placed there. And when I say many, I mean about 5000 files in dozens of directories in several sites accross 3 servers… Many hours were needed to clean up.
Of course I had to clean my PC from malware, apparently coming from a mailing software that I had downloaded 2 weeks ago.
I want to be able to test every social network for its promoting power for my stories. Some of them are going to be more receptive than others, depending on its size, difficulty, subject and to the importance they give to old, reliable accounts.
Social networks give a value to each user, sometimes called ‘karma’, and that value is useful for promotion of stories, either the own user stories or stories from ‘friends’ and strangers.
I am sticking to 2 accounts per network because it is well known that they detect some features that could point to spam, namely IP. Of course, IP can be defeated by using a navigation proxy, but that needs information, expertise and a potentially self-destructive desire to spam the sites. The second account is used if the first one loses value, or to start polemic discussions that are often followed with more attention.
I read about a “snowball” effect while promoting stories in the Digg-like sites, started from a minor network, where it should be easier to get noticed, and bringing users/friends/voters to the other sites. It would be useful if the home of your stories included the links pointing to the other social networks where the visitor can vote you. For that, I included a couple of plugins in my WordPress blog.
Stories are improved by user feedback and testing as they pass thru networks.
I am starting to test the power of this promotion technique, not too fast because I need my accounts to be mature enough. An account is mature when it had some time and healthy activity in the networks. As in real life networks, you cannot arrive, post your story and expect everyone admire you.
It is also good if your stories refer to the same subject, and if you develop virtual ‘friends’ that show their trust in you. It is important to complete a profile and include a photo.
This is the partial list of the networks where I am now. If this story gets enough Diggs, Propellers, Reddits, and so on, I plan to add the age, votes and karma of all the accounts, to help value them. Continue reading
I have been studying the way to communicate my good bizz ideas across the Web, and maybe find a buyer, a partner, an investor or other kind of supporter.
I have some expertise in SEO, so I can rank my sites quite well in Google and Yahoo. However, there are social networks that are faster and probably more targeted.
So, I am experimenting with Digg, Meneame and many others.
It is not easy to get a news promoted by those sites, unless you have a lot of time to spend increasing your karma.
This is done by reading many news every day and voting the best ones.
The links that I obtain by publishing in those sites are very helpful for my medium-term efforts of ranking into Google. So, both strategies are concurrent.
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So far, it is not possible to compare multi-keyword positioning (ranking) results in google or yahoo. Positions are not additive, because every keyword has a different difficulty. Obviously, it is better to be 1st of 100 than 1st of 10.
However, is it better 1st of 100 or 2nd of 1000? How about any other non-obvious pair of rankings?
Moreover, things get complicated when there are more variables: in addition to position (rank) and total number of SERP (search engine result pages), the search engine and the specific keyword.
The ideal measure of search engine positioning should have these properties:
– easy to calculate
– additive
– representative of the difficutly and merit of the positioning
– correlate with commercial results for the ranked site
– reflect the habits of the search public
It is known that most people search Google or Yahoo for the first 5-6 results. However, to cover the whole population, we need an idea of the math explaining this behavior, like an asymmetic Poisson distribution curve.
When several SEO companies want to compete, they create a contest with a single keyword or keyphrase: ‘mangeur de cicogne’, ultramarine nigritude and other nonsensical, unique, rarely sought phrases. This method is cumbersome, takes time, and otherwise useless. And it is completely separated from real life situations.
It would be much better to have a method to compare existing positioning results.
Thus, I proposed the SEPI, Search Engine Positioning Index, as:
SEPI = Total SERP x Keyword Difficulty ^2 / Position ^2
Keyword Difficulty can be estimated by the PageRank of the tenth page for a Google search on the keyword.
You can use this online calculator
This index is useful for:
– comparing results of SEO software or SEO campaigns
– comparing SEO companies.
– charging customers by SEO results
– measuring the effectivity of tools and techniques, applied to the same or different web sites.
We need consensus from the SEO webmaster community, or suggestions to improve this index.
We are preparing different experiments with the current version of AlgoCracker. We first want to establish the value of different TLDs on Google ranking. If non-standard TLDs are not discriminated against, domains with keywords should be very valuable for ranking purposes.
The problem with TLDs from different countries is that we cannot establish the value of page quality. The .com pages tend to be of better quality, because they are more demanded and thus more expensive.
Which keyword should be analyzed? It should be a keyword of neutral value to the TLD.
To solve that, we will use the names of the capitals of countries.
More later.