For a Stumbler or Digger who doesn’t have a very big profile yet, submitting to both these social networks can be a good way to gain a bit of extra traffic, but which is better?

Digg can bring masses of traffic for anyone who can get their post to go popular, but without having spent a long time building up a profile it can be difficult to get your content in front of enough people to get dugg. As a result, the novice digger can end up submitting articles and receiving no visits to their site at all. Even if the articles are good informative pieces that should be useful to digg readers, they just don’t get seen.

Then there is Stumbleupon. Pretty much from the moment you sign up, if you submit to Stumbleupon you will get visitors to your site. From experience you may receive around a hundred extra visitors for each page you submit. If you analyse your stats though it doesn’t seem like the highest quality traffic. Page view times are usually down and bounce rates are way up.

So what’s best? In my opinion, even though Digg is harder work initially, I prefer the way it works. If you take Digg seriously it seems entirely possible to get some good traffic from it once you’ve built up a profile. With Digg, I think that the chances of getting traffic that are actually interested in your subject is much higher. Stumble upon traffic is like foot traffic passing a specialist shop on the street. For the most part only a small percentage of those people stumbling past your site are even remotely interested in what you are selling.

Of course the on-the-fence attitude would say you should build a profile on both sites and submit to them both but as for which is better, I’ll jump on the side of Digg.

Chicklets, bookmarklets, share this, Digg this buttons are everywhere. Inviting you to click and bookmark or share with the world. Sounds great. An easy way to build a list of articles you like and share them with everyone.

If you’re a blog owner, stick these buttons on your blog or site and it makes it look like your hip to the crowd, deep into the social networking thang! Your readers are gonna make everything you write go viral.

The problem is, of the 10 articles that I’ve clicked the “Digg this” button on this week, 9 of them have never been submitted to Digg yet. I click on one of these chicklets, expecting it to quickly come up and say that it’s been Dugg. But instead I get “Processing your submission”. Hang on, it’s not my submission. Oh wait a minute, they want me to choose a title, description and category for this article. It’s not even mine. Oh well, I’ll do the guy a favour and submit it for him. Here goes then:

Title: Stupid Haggis Wants Me To Digg His Stuff But Can’t Be Arsed To Digg It Himself
Description: Honestly, it’s a rubbish article. The guy can barely write, and he’s not funny. I don’t know why he’s even in my feed reader.
Category: Offbeat > Pets and Animals

Searching for duplicates…

Is it original?  (How should I know? A million people might have already written exactly the same crap, word for word) Yes, totally original I swear.

And so it goes. If I had the time to waste doing this, I would submit all these articles on other people’s behalf, making sure that the title was pure Digg gold and the description reeled people in by the thousand. Or maybe not.

Now, I better go check if I’ve submitted my own articles!

Lets face it, if you’re just running a standard e-commerce site and it does nothing but sell products that other people sell too then you don’t have much hope of ever getting anyone to link to you. Ever.

So how does a shop set about creating content that people will link to? It varies depending on what you are selling but in general you are looking to solve a problem for people, break news to people, or entertain people.

Most ecommerce stores aren’t setup with an easy publishing platform for adding information other than new products. That’s not a biggie, you can simply ask your web developer to add pages as and when you create the content. In my view it is preferable though if you can quickly add your content yourself (and edit it as required). Adding a blog is probably the best way of doing this. It allows easy publishing, editing, conversation with readers/customers and automatic RSS feeds so people can subscribe to your other updates after they have found you via your linkbait.

So once you’re all set up and ready to publish, what could you put on there that will act as linkbait? Here’s a few ideas.

• Video of someone using one of your products to solve a common problem
• Photos of your products being used in an unusual way
• Top (& Bottom) 10 articles (not talking about your own products, but the 10 best… helps create discussion)
• Innovative competition
• Post a strong opinion on something controversial related to your marketplace
• Break a piece of news before anyone else

Most of these ideas could relate to any website. Where you need to make it work for your ecommerce site is to subtly encourage visitors to the linkbait to move through your site and buy the products. If you are blatantly selling the related product right there on the linkbait page you’ll probably get a lot less links. If you don’t cross sell at all though then you risk visitors bouncing back where they came from without exploring your site.

In my opinion the best way to cross sell on a linkbait page is to utilise your site-wide nav bars and highlight products within them. You can also add a link at the end of the article or after the linkbait to a related item in your shop, but don’t make it completely “in your face”. I certainly wouldn’t advocate putting your products, or links to your products right there in the middle of the article.

Of course, once you’ve got the linkbait there on your site you’ve got to get the message out there to movers and shakers who will get the ball rolling for you. That’s a whole different discussion.

Then when it doesn’t work first time you need to go back and do it all over again, and again until you hit just the right formula.

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There’s a buzz around just now about new advice from Google suggesting you shouldn’t bother rewriting dynamic URL’s to look like static URL’s. Some SEO people are suggesting that having a people-friendly URL is more likely to get you a click from the serps than if people see a long dynamic URL. Also, some people link to you using your URL as the anchor text. Much prettier, and more likely to help boost rankings if you’ve got a real page name in there.

However, that’s not the thrust of this. Google state that they are best placed to work out how to remove unnecessary arguments in the URL such as the Session ID. They go on to suggest that if you do a bad URL rewrite that includes a session ID in a static URL-style format then you’re only setting yourself up for problems e.g. duplicate content penalties (not that they’d admit there is such a thing).

In the example they give they suggest that in a dynamic URL, Google will strip out things like session ID’s and search queries that have been included in the URL and display what’s left.

What’s to stop them stripping out other arguments that they deem irrelevant but are critical to the display, tracking or content shown on your website?

Can you trust them to get this right? Or maybe we’re all better off ensuring we mod_rewrite our dynamic URL’s.

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With all the press release writing, article writing, brand building and online profile building that a good SEO will undertake these days, are we in danger of becoming the new PR people?

SEO used to be a simple matter of optimising a site and submitting it to some directories and search engines. Stuff those keywords in and get to the top of Infoseek in no time.

Nowadays the SEO person often has to fulfill a larger role and often they are the only marketing contact that the client makes. We get asked for advice on advertising, SEO, content creation, site usability, building brand with press releases, viral campaigns, linkbaiting, social networking etc.

11 years ago I used to work in a rented corner of a PR office and I could hear the discussions they were having with clients. Much of them were the same, though the web was less prominent in those days for distributing the clients message. Now though the web is at the forefront of any brand building, and SEO is one of the core aspects of that, so I guess it makes sense that we’re now taking on a much more public relations orientated role.

Look at it this way, if you are working on building awareness of a site by commenting on blogs on your clients behalf, you’re putting a very public message out there that reflects on your client. Same goes for building a forum profile with your client’s link in the signature - everything you say has to be measured and weighed to ensure it is putting out the right message about your client.

So next time one of your relatives asks what SEO is, you can just answer “It’s just like public relations”.

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Given that the main thrust of most SEO strategies is to get people linking to your website, have you asked yourself what your site has that makes it worth linking to?

There are ways to get links to sites that are not worth linking to but to be honest, most of those are links that are not worth pursuing. They tend to come from pages with zero pagerank or have nofollow applied and are basically links that Google will not count. If your site doesn’t contain something worth linking to and you chuck money or energy at a link building campaign then you’ll be mostly wasting that money and time.

So what can you do to make your site linkable? It’s kind of like the question that a lot of business startups need to ask themselves. What is my unique selling point, what makes me different and what makes me stand out enough that customers will beat a path to my door? What can you give people on your site that no-one else can?

To answer this you need to know your niche pretty well and then get inventive. If there are a hundred other sites selling exactly the same product as you, you need to visit each of them and identify something that your customer needs that none of your competitors are doing. That might be something like producing videos of how to use that product, really in-depth reviews, buyers guides, repair videos, a gallery of the product being used in unusual ways… It’s not for me to make the suggestion, it’s up to you to find something that makes your site stand out amongst all the others. Once you’ve got that unique idea, and you’ve implemented it, then we’ve got something to promote.

The more useful, funny or different your unique your idea is, then the easier it is to get links to your site. With a few reviews of a product you might be able to get a few sites to link to yours. With an all-singing, all-dancing, fireworks loaded, cabaret spectaular that people can relate to, really use, or email to their mates because it’s just too funny then you’ve got what is needed to start promoting your site.

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