Last night, during Digg’s annual SXSW party, Digg’s CEO Jay Adelson announced a set of significant changes to Digg. Among the changes Adelson announced are a streamlined submission process, a personalized homepage, an unlimited amount of topic pages, a new commenting system and better curation tools. Earlier this morning, we got a chance to sit down with Adelson to discuss these changes in greater detail. Some of these changes will surely be extremely controversial in the Digg community and might also make some publishers who rely on Digg’s traffic a bit nervous.

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It’s hard to underestimate the influence these changes will have on the Digg community. Not only did the Digg team create a completely new backend architecture, but Digg is also making a lot of changes to how the site will work from a user’s perspective – some of which will surely be controversial among Digg’s most active users.

Digg will launch the new site in alpha in a few weeks. You can sign up for an account here. It’s important to note that Digg plans to work directly with its users and is looking for feedback from its alpha users. The alpha site, for example, will feature a large feedback bar at the bottom of every page.

Personalized Homepages as Default

On the new Digg, every user will get a personalized homepage which will be populated with stories that are popular among this user’s friends and relate to topics this user has expressed interest in. This personalized homepage will become the default Digg frontpage for all users who have signed in to Digg. Users who are not signed in will still see the old Digg homepage. With this, the Digg team is clearly looking to get more users to sign up for the service. Digg will also update its users’ profile pages.

Submitters Lose Power

Another major change to Digg – and one that will surely create some controversy among the most active users of the service – is that the new Digg will de-emphasize the power of submitters and put an even stronger emphasis on who votes for stories, as well as on outside signals from third-party services like Twitter and Facebook. Indeed, the new Digg will now allow publishers to auto-submit their stories through RSS feeds and a number of other mechanisms that the company plans to unveil in the next few weeks. Until now, while Digg didn’t forbid publishers to submit their own content, this behavior was generally discouraged by the Digg community.

As Adelson told us, on the new Digg, submitting a story will basically mean that you are the first voter. Currently, a relatively small group of submitters has a lot of power over which stories will appear on the Digg frontpage.

Signals from Twitter, Facebook and Co.

While there will still be a role for those users who regularly discover new and interesting content, the new Digg will put a strong emphasis on votes and signals from your friends on third-party sites like Twitter and Facebook. Indeed, Digg will create a social graph for you that will take all of this information into account when it create your personalized homepage. On the homepage, Digg will also expose why a story appeared in your feed.

While Adelson couldn’t go into details, it seems like Digg has established a very good relationship with Twitter and has had access to Twitter’s firehose feed to almost a year.

Once the new digg comes out of beta, anonymous users will also be able to vote on stories. While the team is still working out the details, it is clear that Digg is looking to get as many signals as possible to augment the current voting process. It will be interesting to see how Digg will weigh all this information in the creation of personalized pages and the new topic pages.

The submission process for stories that haven’t been submitted to Digg already will now be a one-click process.

Digg will also soon use third-party sign-on systems, including Google, Twitter Connect and Yahoo to allow its users to sign in.

Working With Publishers: What Will Happen to the Digg Effect?

Obviously, quite a few publishers will worry that the old Digg effect – which would often take sites down because of the huge amount of traffic a story on Digg’s frontpage can create – will now disappear. Adelson, however, who also noted that Digg “wants to be a good source for traffic for publishers,” thinks that this new system will create a more regular stream of traffic to publishers.

In the long run, Adelson noted, Digg also plans to open up its advertising platform to share revenue with publishers. This project is still in its early stages, but according to Adelson, this could involve using a widget on the publisher’s site or by using Digg’s salesforce to sell ad inventory on these sites directly.

To make all of this work, Digg completely stripped out the old infrastructure and started over by building a completely new platform. This, said Adelson, will allow Digg to easily make changes to the frontend and react to user feedback during the alpha and beta phase. At some point in the future, Digg might also open this platform up to third parties.

A Completely New Platform

Digg is clearly taking this new version extremely serious. The company plans to hire 50 engineers this year to help with scaling the architecture. Adelson was clearly proud of the work his team has done on the backend architecture. The new site will be “wicked fast,” thanks to a complete retooling of every aspect of the site, up to the point where the bottlenecks for Digg are now network speed and latency. This is quite a feat, given that Digg now offers an almost unlimited amount of topic pages and a personalized homepage for every user – all of which will have to be recalculated constantly.

How Will Users React?

It will be very interesting to see how users will react to all of these changes. Adelson and the rest of the Digg team are very aware that this will create some controversy, but Adelson clearly thinks that this is the right way to go for Digg. The topic pages will allow Digg to cater to users who care about every type of news, be it the Boston Red Socks or the latest gadget news.

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If you were under the impression that the controversy surrounding Google Buzz was starting to die down, think again. So far, we’ve mostly heard about privacy issues, which Google has publicly addressed. They’ve also made changes based on user feedback. Now, we’re hearing about possible copyright issues. Google appears to be republishing full articles without permission, and stripping out any ads that may be in those articles.

One can easily see why any blogger or publisher wouldn’t be very pleased with this scenario. Not only are they serving up full articles that others have written without sending authors the traffic or even ad clicks, but if a user reads the article through Buzz within their Gmail account, they will likely see the ads Google itself serves.

Blogger Jesse Stay of Stay N’ Alive brings the subject up in a post, claiming that this is exactly what is happening to his content. However, Google did respond to him, saying they would "have the ad scraping issue fixed by next week." That would solve one problem, but presumably, this doesn’t change the fact that they are showing full article text, which is an interesting choice on Google’s part, considering the controversy surrounding how Google News aggregates publishers’ content.

That is a different situation entirely, because Google News does not publish full articles (unless they come from one of their partners). They simply provide a title, small snippet, and link to the original source, hence driving traffic to that source. Based on Stay’s story, Google will not likely be driving much traffic by showing full articles in Buzz. We’ve contacted Google for comment on this (we’ll post when we receive it).

One might compare reading an article through Buzz to reading one through a feed reader, like Google Reader. Sometimes you can read a feed in its full text, but the author has the ability to prevent this. With Buzz, the full-text articles appear to be coming simply from people sharing the articles, which is out of the author’s control (we asked Google if their is a way authors can prevent this…again, we’ll post a response when we receive it). 

Today, email is nearly as ubiquitous as the computer itself. It offers a simple process that “just works” for most users and it has become a defacto communication process for enterprises and individuals alike.

YouSendIt found its place in the evolution of email by providing existing email users a solution to a common problem – sending large files. Along the way, the company has leveraged its position in cloud based solution to offer additional benefits to its users.

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What do we Know about Email

A few things about using email that define it as a communications tool.

• Each message can be targeted to a person, a list of people, or an entire group of people.
• Individuals can respond to the message, ignore it, or mark it as Spam.
• It’s security and privacy model that starts as opt-out, rather than op-in. Meaning that if you get an account *anyone* can send you a message.
• Spammers are the single largest sender of email traffic.
• Email messages can include file attachments that offer a way to send a file from one computer to the user on another one.

Improving the flow of attachments is part of email is that YouSendIt specializes in.

Large Files Needed a Home

For both user experience, technical infrastructure, and cost reasons many email systems cap the size of attachments they allow to pass through the gateway. Large files are routinely blocked, causing email users the challenge of figuring out another way to get them across the network.

One way to think about it, is that large file attachments “real” home is not the inbox, but more rightfully the filesystem (aka My Documents). And, increasingly these files are being stored in the cloud rather than the filesystem.

A diagram describing how it works shows how it creates a new channel for connecting the user to their file, while continuing to use email “as-is”.

Collaboration Happens: Did You Get my Email?

By offering a cloud solution to deliver the files, YouSendIt was also able to track whether the recipient downloaded the file. The company currently has has about 5 million “file batches” sent per month with over 10 million downloads. On average, each file is being read by two persons on the other side and the sender is able to see which ones.

This audibility provides YouSendIt users a way to close the loop and gain a deeper insight to the status of their communications.

Imagine the sales person, who sends a brochure to the prospects, getting a report back for who opened it and who didn’t. It automatically separates out the interested from the others and gives an opportunity to target the next message.

Email is a social application that has it’s own rules and nuances – Google reminded the world recently with the launch of Buzz that connecting email and social networks is harder than it looks.

YouSendIt might be onto something. Instead of reinventing the entire social context of email, the company is focused on enhancing the existing email system as it works today.

YouSendIt Adopts the Enterprise

Microsoft Exchange has become the dominant email system in the enterprise. YouSendIt spent a lot of time working closely with Exchange and it’s client counterpart Outlook to bring its cloud-based attachments solution to the platform. This solution offers an approach to a gradual transition to cloud computing – one message at a time.

Change is in-the-air around collaboration and email. We wonder if the next generation of email going to evolve into the killer app for bringing social networking it into the enterprise.

What do you think, will email ever fade away?

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It’s not every day you get to watch the birth of an Internet meme, but yesterday, I was there at the moment of conception. I didn’t give birth to it but I certainly played a completely inadvertent and circumstantial part.

Facebook and AOL had announced their partnership and I decided the news merited more than the two paragraph treatment I saw everywhere else. So I embarked on a diatribe about how Facebook was trying to be our “One True Login”- and unknowingly set in motion what has become the most epic comment thread ReadWriteWeb has ever seen. But how did this happen and why?

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Within a half an hour of posting, the number of visitors had skyrocketed. It looked like a real winner. An hour later, it had reached the number of visitors an average post might see in an entire day. I figured I’d hit a home run.

But then the comments started rolling in.

“When can we log in?” asked one commenter.

“I WANT THE OLD FAFEBOOK BACK THIS SHIT IS WACK!!!!!” complained the next.

At first we wondered if it could be a giant, orchestrated prank. We weren’t sure who we might have offended, but obviously it was a premeditated assault. When we looked at our traffic, however, we didn’t see any of the usual suspects, just two little words on a very big website: “Facebook login” and Google. The post had become the number two search result.

By the end of the day, the post had several hundred comments and our back-channel chat room was still debating whether or not it could all be real.

It was like we had unearthed a long-lost city, the Atlantis of the Internet. But instead of treasures and gold we’d found a steady deluge of confused and frustrated users who had tried everything they knew to do and just wanted to log in to Facebook, damnit. But how had this happened? It certainly wasn’t that thousands and thousands of people had just started searching for “facebook login” yesterday. This stream of people has been there all along and something is broken.

Google had completely failed its users. It put us, with a post about how an AOL partnership foreshadowed Facebook becoming the de facto user database, above the most logical search result possible – Facebook’s login page.

While for us this was completely random, other search results show that this is actually a space that is otherwise intentionally occupied by sites trying to siphon off this traffic and profit from it. I don’t think the first search result for “Facebook login” was actually English, and the one that followed wasn’t either, but those two key words are used over and over.

By the next morning, the scale had tipped. News of the epic thread had started making its way around the social web, being retweeted across the Twitterverse, posted by early adopters on Buzz and submitted to sites like Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, HackerNews and Fark.

“No, really,” everyone seemed to be saying, “You GOTTA see this one.”

Suddenly, the two worlds collided. The tech savvy ran head-on into the tech illiterate and mockery and disbelief started to overtake confusion as the general tone in the comment thread. As the post made its way around the web, other comment threads, like those on Reddit and MetaFilter, began mimicking the now infamous comments. I suddenly realized that we might be standing at that flash point, that moment where it begins – the immaculate conception of an Internet meme. I’ve always wanted to be there at that moment. I’ve always wondered about the first person that saw a lobster and said, “You know what? I’m going to eat that.”

“I LIKE THE NEW ALL-BLUE FACEBOOK BUT CAN I JUST LOG IN NOW PLEEEEEZE?????!!!11″ reads one comment on MetaFilter.

Another comment on Reddit reads, “IS THIS THE ARTICLE!!? ALL I SEE IS COMMENTS!!!!! HOW COME WHEN I TRY TO LOG IN I PEE ON MYSELF AND PASS OUT?!?? I LIKED REDDIT BEFORE THE PEE!!!”

One person has even written a sonnet, detailing the plight of the lost Facebook users.

While we mock those users, the simple fact is they haven’t necessarily failed, something failed them. With all of our talk about the semantic Web and search engine optimization and tailoring search results to the individual user, there are thousands upon thousands of users performing the same simple search and following the same wrong road. If this were a standard traffic sign misdirecting this many people, it would have been pulled down long ago. There would have been outraged citizens at town meetings and special reports on the five o’ clock news.

So, when five years down the road someone, somewhere, in a completely unrelated comment thread says “i need the old facebook this new one is very bad bbbbbbbbbbuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!” I will be happy to say that I was there – I was around for the birth of that Internet meme. But I also hope that, by then, we’ve addressed the problem at the core. This is the Internet and these are its users.

If this many of them can’t login to Facebook by typing that into Google and clicking on the first thing they see, it’s probably not them that are wrong, it’s Google.

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Google has introduced a couple of new alert options for AdWords advertisers. Users can of course use account alerts, and can also use custom alerts. Now Google has added new alerts for keyword and budget ideas, which are personalized tips to help users improve their campaigns’ effectiveness. These are in the "opportunities" tab.

"New ideas are usually generated for campaigns and ad groups every few weeks, but you may miss ideas that can expand your coverage and boost your traffic if you don’t check the Opportunities tab regularly," explains Google’s Dan Friedman. "Now, when there are new ideas available for your review, you’ll see them highlighted along with the rest of your campaign alerts."

Google has also added the ability to create custom alerts for changes in conversion volume, conversion rate, and cost per conversion for users using AdWords conversion tracking.

"By setting alerts for your conversion data, you can make sure that you’re quickly notified about fluctuations in your key metrics," says Friedman.

Google says it is still working on bringing custom alerts to all linked accounts for My Client Center (MCC) users, but until then, you can just set custom alerts for individual accounts if you can log into them directly.

Related Articles:

> Google Gives AdWords Advertisers New Comparison Option

> Google Launches Latest Version of AdWords API

> More "Ads by Google" Across the Web

Data portability is an important issue for users and businesses alike. In this age of cloud computing, where so many web users have valuable data hosted by web services, we can sometimes find ourselves vulnerable to the will and occurrences of these services. Let’s say for example, Twitter is one of the key components to your marketing strategy, and one of your main sources of traffic. When Twitter goes down, as it frequently does, this can present quite a problem. Ever wished you could access your tweets when Twitter was down? Comment here.

On the subject of Twitter, the company announced some changes to its terms of service late last week. They tried to emphasize that users "own their tweets." But do users really own them if they cannot access them because Twitter is not working? What if you could export your Tweets into Facebook, or into MySpace? It’s not that one service is better than the other. It’s about simply having the freedom to take your data wherever you want.

Google realizes the importance of this concept, which is why some members of the company’s team have gotten together and formed the Data Liberation Front, a group that is dedicated to making Google’s products easier to get data in and out of. The group has also launched a website at DataLiberation.org, where users of Google products can find information about how to import and export data.

"Many web services make it difficult to leave their services – you have to pay them for exporting your data, or jump through all sorts of technical hoops — for example, exporting your photos one by one, versus all at once," says Brian Fitzpatrick, Data Liberation engineering manager. "We believe that users – not products – own their data, and should be able to quickly and easily take that data out of any product without a hassle. We’d rather have loyal users who use Google products because they’re innovative – not because they lock users in."

The group’s mission statement goes:

Users own the data they store in any of Google’s products. Our team’s goal is to give users greater control by making it easier for them to move data in and out.

"This principle not only applies to individual users, but also to businesses, schools and other organizations that choose Google Apps to provide better tools at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions," says Fitzpatrick. "It should be easy to bring legacy data into the cloud, share data between Google Apps and other IT infrastructure, and get data out of the cloud if it ever makes sense to stop using our service."

At DataLiberation.org, users can simply browse through Google’s list of products and see detailed instructions for each one about how to "escape" to or from any of them. This list includes: AdWords, Alerts, Analytics, App Engine, Apps for Businesses, Blogger, Bookmarks, Calendar, Chrome Boomarks, Contacts, Docs, Finance, Gmail, Health, iGoogle, Maps, Notebook, Orkut, Picasa, Reader, Voice, Web History, and YouTube.

The company says it will be working on adding import/export features to more of its products like Google Sites, and Google Docs (batch-export) in the coming months.

"We think open is better than closed — not because closed is inherently bad, but because when it’s easy for users to leave your product, there’s a sense of urgency to improve and innovate in order to keep your users," says Fitzpatrick. "When your users are locked in, there’s a strong temptation to be complacent and focus less on making your product better."

Google’s certainly not the only company to offer data portability options, but it’s a very large one that has a huge impact on a lot of users and businesses. That’s why Google’s work in this area is so important. The company’s broad range of products that are used heavily on a daily basis emphasizes the importance of the issue on the web in general. Tired of Gmail going down? You can take your info elsewhere if you wish.

Have you ever wished you could get your data out of some product on the web and transfer it to another, only to find that you could not do so? Tell us about your experience.

YouTube has launched a feature that lets video uploaders share information they collect with YouTube Insight. The shared info is able to be viewed by anyone watching the user’s videos.

"Now when you watch a video, you can learn even more about it and its audience: on the watch page, under the ‘Statistics & Data’ section, users will be able to see more information about a video’s views over time, its popularity in different parts of the world, the top drivers of traffic, and the video’s top three audience demographics," explains YouTube Software Engineer Jonas Yngvesson.

Things that can be shared are:

- total views
- number of ratings
- where the video is most popular (geographically)
- popularity by demographic
- referrals

Yngvesson says that partners can attract more advertisers by allowing this information to be viewed. Advertisers are looking for brands with lots of views and audiences who are engaged. Those who fit the bill can basically show this off by sharing the data.

"We’ve seen popular users like Paul Telner and Chris Bosh leverage YouTube Insight to sign business deals and sponsorships," says Yngvesson.

Advertisers can use the data to help them match content with their target audience. They can also find new partners of interest.

When you upload content, you have the ability to turn the feature on or off for each individual video. This can be done in the privacy settings under "My Account".

There has been a lot of talk about the DiggBar and its handling of URLs this week, after the company implemented some changes in its service. To clear the air, Digg has addressed the situation.

Digg CEO Jay Adelson issued the following statement on Digg the Blog:

I wanted to clear up some confusion created over the past couple of days surrounding the DiggBar, specifically how Digg short URLs work. As we’ve stated in the past, the DiggBar is meant to streamline the Digg experience and provide our registered users with the opportunity to catch up on comments, related stories and additional source content. Our strategy with Digg short URLs is to facilitate sharing of Digg content, not to be a conventional redirection service.

Last week, we made a change that began directing non-logged in traffic generated from Digg short URLs to Digg story pages where they can view the comments and related content. In response to feedback, all short URLs that were generated *before* today will now behave as they did prior to last week’s change by taking the user directly to the source content. Logged-in Digg users will continue to be directed to the source content with the DiggBar (if they have it turned on). Of course, if the content has never been submitted to Digg, viewers will continue to be sent directly to the source.

The DiggBar seems to have invoked nothing but controversy ever since it was launched. Digg seems to only want to use it to help promote its content, but the problem that people have had with this is that Digg’s content is not really Digg’s content. The content that appears on Digg of course comes from other sources, and when traffic becomes an issue, you’re going to have some angry publishers.

Digg continues to encourage feedback about the product, and seemingly wishes to stay on everybody’s good side, but clearly wants some traffic of its own out of the DiggBar. What do you think of how they’re handling it?

A number of people have noticed that Google is viewing their websites as blogs when they are not really blogs. They are finding that Google is placing them in blog search portions of universal search results in regular Google searches.

This is the topic being discussed in a thread at the WebmasterWorld forum. "There are a lot of mixed emotions; I’m on the first page but in the wrong place," says one WebmasterWorld member, who started the thread on the issue.  

Why would Google do this?

Another person suggests the inclusion of commenting on a site, but the original poster says their site doesn’t allow comments. A different user suggests that RSS feeds could be the reason that Google is viewing sites as blogs. At Search Engine Roundtable, Barry Schwartz also discusses this as a possibility.

He does note, however, that Apple.com has RSS feeds, but is not included in blog search results, so there must be more to it than that. Many sites that aren’t blogs are included in blog search though, he says. He also makes another good point.

"Should webmasters be upset if their sites are included in Google Blog Search?" he asks. "Can it hurt?"

If you’re getting into blog search results (particularly in Universal results), you’re opening up your site for additional traffic. If your site isn’t a blog, there’s a good chance users will figure this out once they click through to it. Hopefully the content on the site is at least relevant to the user’s query.

Last month, there was a lot of hubbub about Twitter’s growth flat lining. Matthew Daines, the lead developer of our own Twitter app, Twellow, showed me a graph that he put together from the user IDs he found in the Twitter API, based on when they registered with Twitter.

What Matthew found was that there was a significantly larger number of new registrations in April – the month Oprah joined, which caused a well-publicized surge in new Twitter users. So naturally, the next month didn’t see as many new users flocking to Twitter, but it was still i decent increase from the month before Oprah joined.

Daines has now shared a new graph with me, which seems to suggest Twitter is still growing just fine. June shows that new registrations are right at what they were in April, when Oprah joined, which means that there are quite a few new people.

We should be able to get a really good idea of Twitter’s growth when we can take a look at July’s numbers in a month. At that point, we can see which direction the trend goes. I think we’re going to see growth though. Take a look at this other graph Daines shared with me, which shows the number of tweets. It looks like there is a lot more tweeting going on.

"Looks like the total tweets chart shows that the claim last month that Twitter traffic had come to a stop was not quite accurate," says Daines. "The total tweet numbers are not exact, but should be within a few hundred thousand."

So, do you think we will consider to see significant Twitter growth as the year goes on? Or do you believe Twitter as already peaked? Share your thoughts.

StumleUpon announced today that it has launched a new URL-shortening service called Su.pr. The twist, however, is that this one is designed to help content creators actually increase their traffic with it. According to StumbleUpon, this is the first such service that does this.

The growing popularity (which is seemingly dwindling after looking at some recent numbers) has made URL shortening services popular as well. Digg saw this a while back, and released the DiggBar, which not only serves as such a service, but also lends to a classic StumbleUpon-like functionality, allowing users to share and rate stories from the toolbar.

It is no surprise that StumbleUpon would choose to include a URL-shortener in its own portfolio. One knock against the DiggBar was that it was not getting content creators the traffic they were previously getting from Digg stories. It looks like StumbleUpon took note of this.

The company says that with Su.pr, publishers can drive traffic to their content and post across multiple platforms with a single click, all while preserving search ranking and branding.Also like the DiggBar, users can post content to Facebook and Twitter. The company lists the following as benefits to Su.pr:

- More traffic — Every Su.pr URL exposes content to StumbleUpon’s nearly 8 million users and allows publishers to showcase their site’s best content alongside each link.

- Better results in less time — Publishers can identify the optimal times to post (highest likely traffic) and schedule as many posts as they like, for whenever they want.

- One-click posting – With Su.pr, publishers can post to StumbleUpon, Twitter and Facebook with just one click. (More platforms to be added in the future).

- Real-time Analytics – Su.pr provides real-time reports on clicks and traffic, including the number of retweets for each post.

- Custom short URLs – Su.pr users have the option to have their own domain-name in the short URLs (i.e. mysite.com/a2b).

- Redirect friendly – Publishers can choose to create links that redirect traffic to their own site (301 redirect), preserving their search ranking.

"Su.pr makes it faster and easier to syndicate and measure your content, helping publishers increase their reach and efficiency," said Garrett Camp, StumbleUpon CEO. "And from every Su.pr link, users can discover other great content from that publisher."

Right now, Su.pr is in beta, and is only available on an invitation basis. They are letting a few people in each week to gather feedback and test the service. StumbleUpon says it will be ready for more people in a few days.

Search engines are the vehicles that drive potential customers to your websites. But in order for visitors to reach their destination—your website—you need to provide them with effective signs that direct them right to your site by creating carefully chosen keywords.

Think of the right keywords as the “Open Sesame!” of the Internet. Find the exactly right words, and presto! Hoards of traffic will be pulling up to your front door. But if your keywords are too general or overused, the possibility of visitors actually making it all the way to your site—or of seeing any real profits from the visitors that do arrive—decreases dramatically.

Your keywords serve as the foundation of your marketing strategy. If they are not chosen with great precision, no matter how aggressive your marketing campaign may be, the right people may never get the chance to find out about it. So your first step in plotting your strategy is to gather and evaluate keywords and phrases.

You probably think you already know EXACTLY the right words for your search phrases. Unfortunately, if you haven’t followed certain specific steps, you are probably WRONG. It’s hard to be objective when you are right in the center of your business network, which is the reason that you may not be able to choose the most efficient keywords from the inside. You need to be able to think like your customers. And since you are a business owner and not the consumer, your best bet is to go directly to the source.

Instead of plunging in and scribbling down a list of potential search words and phrases yourself, ask for words from as many potential customers as you can. You will most likely find out that your understanding of your business and your customers’ understanding is significantly different.

The consumer is an invaluable resource. You will find the words you accumulate from them are words and phrases you probably never would have considered from deep inside the trenches of your business.

Only after you have gathered as many words and phrases from outside resources should you add your own keyword to the list. Once you have this list in hand, you are ready for the next step: evaluation.

The aim of evaluation is to narrow down your list to a small number of words and phrases that will direct the highest number of quality visitors to your website. By “quality visitors” I mean those consumers who are most likely to make a purchase rather than just cruise around your site and take off for greener pastures. In evaluating the effectiveness of keywords, bear in mind three elements: popularity, specificity, and motivation.

Popularity is the easiest to evaluate because it is an objective quality. The more popular your keyword is, the more likely the chances are that it will be typed into a search engine which will then bring up your URL.

You can now purchase software that will rate the popularity of keywords and phrases by giving words a number rating based on real search engine activity. Software such as WordTracker will even suggest variations of your words and phrases. The higher the number this software assigns to a given keyword, the more traffic you can logically expect to be directed to your site. The only fallacy with this concept is the more popular the keyword is, the greater the search engine position you will need to obtain. If you are down at the bottom of the search results, the consumer will probably never scroll down to find you.

Popularity isn’t enough to declare a keyword a good choice. You must move on to the next criteria, which is specificity. The more specific your keyword is, the greater the likelihood that the consumer who is ready to purchase your goods or services will find you.

Let’s look at a hypothetical example. Imagine that you have obtained popularity rankings for the keyword “automobile companies.” However, you company specializes in bodywork only. The keyword “automobile body shops” would rank lower on the popularity scale than “automobile companies,” but it would nevertheless serve you much better. Instead of getting a slew of people interested in everything from buying a car to changing their oil filters, you will get only those consumers with trashed front ends or crumpled fenders being directed to your site. In other words, consumers ready to buy your services are the ones who will immediately find you. Not only that, but the greater the specificity of your keyword is, the less competition you will face.

The third factor is consumer motivation. Once again, this requires putting yourself inside the mind of the customer rather than the seller to figure out what motivation prompts a person looking for a service or product to type in a particular word or phrase.

Let’s look at another example, such as a consumer who is searching for a job as an IT manager in a new city. If you have to choose between “Seattle job listings” and “Seattle IT recruiters” which do you think will benefit the consumer more? If you were looking for this type of specific job, which keyword would you type in? The second one, of course! Using the second keyword targets people who have decided on their career, have the necessary experience, and are ready to enlist you as their recruiter, rather than someone just out of school who is casually trying to figure out what to do with his or her life in between beer parties.

You want to find people who are ready to act or make a purchase, and this requires subtle tinkering of your keywords until your find the most specific and directly targeted phrases to bring the most motivated traffic to your site.

Once you have chosen your keywords, your work is not done. You must continually evaluate performance across a variety of search engines, bearing in mind that times and trends change, as does popular lingo. You cannot rely on your log traffic analysis alone because it will not tell you how many of your visitors actually made a purchase.

Luckily, some new tools have been invented to help you judge the effectiveness of your keywords in individual search engines. There is now software available that analyzes consumer behavior in relation to consumer traffic. This allows you to discern which keywords are bringing you the most valuable customers.

This is an essential concept: numbers alone do not make a good keyword; profits per visitor do. You need to find keywords that direct consumers to your site who actually buy your product, fill out your forms, or download your product. This is the most important factor in evaluating the efficacy of a keyword or phrase, and should be the sword you wield when discarding and replacing ineffective or inefficient keywords with keywords that bring in better profits.

Ongoing analysis of tested keywords is the formula for search engine success. This may sound like a lot of work—and it is! But the amount of informed effort you put into your keyword campaign is what will ultimately generate your business’ rewards.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

How To Find The Right Keywords To Optimize Search Engine Results

StumleUpon announced today that it has launched a new URL-shortening service called Su.pr. The twist, however, is that this one is designed to help content creators actually increase their traffic with it. According to StumbleUpon, this is the first such service that does this.

The growing popularity (which is seemingly dwindling after looking at some recent numbers) has made URL shortening services popular as well. Digg saw this a while back, and released the DiggBar, which not only serves as such a service, but also lends to a classic StumbleUpon-like functionality, allowing users to share and rate stories from the toolbar.

It is no surprise that StumbleUpon would choose to include a URL-shortener in its own portfolio. One knock against the DiggBar was that it was not getting content creators the traffic they were previously getting from Digg stories. It looks like StumbleUpon took note of this.

The company says that with Su.pr, publishers can drive traffic to their content and post across multiple platforms with a single click, all while preserving search ranking and branding.Also like the DiggBar, users can post content to Facebook and Twitter. The company lists the following as benefits to Su.pr:

- More traffic — Every Su.pr URL exposes content to StumbleUpon’s nearly 8 million users and allows publishers to showcase their site’s best content alongside each link.

- Better results in less time — Publishers can identify the optimal times to post (highest likely traffic) and schedule as many posts as they like, for whenever they want.

- One-click posting – With Su.pr, publishers can post to StumbleUpon, Twitter and Facebook with just one click. (More platforms to be added in the future).

- Real-time Analytics – Su.pr provides real-time reports on clicks and traffic, including the number of retweets for each post.

- Custom short URLs – Su.pr users have the option to have their own domain-name in the short URLs (i.e. mysite.com/a2b).

- Redirect friendly – Publishers can choose to create links that redirect traffic to their own site (301 redirect), preserving their search ranking.

"Su.pr makes it faster and easier to syndicate and measure your content, helping publishers increase their reach and efficiency," said Garrett Camp, StumbleUpon CEO. "And from every Su.pr link, users can discover other great content from that publisher."

Right now, Su.pr is in beta, and is only available on an invitation basis. They are letting a few people in each week to gather feedback and test the service. StumbleUpon says it will be ready for more people in a few days.

Use the right software

Selecting the right software for blogging can go a great way in making you stand out among the crowd. Custom blog software would be very useful, since users can customize it themselves.

Blog hosting

Always host your blog on your own domain. If you place your blog on another domain, it may not be able to attract public attention, build confidence, and improve rating in search results. So using a different domain is the biggest mistake one can ever make.

Title tag

Whenever you put a title tag, make sure that it is relevant to the subject matter, and is not just a random one. You put a title to attract your visitors, so ensure that it is short, and snappy.

Article marketing

Notwithstanding which area of article marketing for your blog you have ventured into, there are many public forums for that topic, which you must actively participate in. There are quite a few online communities, where you can post messages or initiate a discussion to increase your visibility, and attract a huge community of people to your website.

Tagging

Tagging is very important. You can visit Technorati for this purpose. If you have many tags on your page, then it will show in the search results.

Technorati

Testing Technorati is extremely important. You must notify Technorati whenever you have made a comment on a blog. For this purpose, you will need to ping Technorati, or else, you may take the help of Ping-o-matic, which automatically alerts Technorati whenever a comment is posted by you.

Boosting blog’s visibility

To increase your and your blog’s visibility, it has become clear that commenting on other people’s blog is extremely important. But a primary concern is that you must comment on a subject which you are comfortable with. You need to search to get across a proper blog where your comment will be appreciated.

WTF at Technorati

Bloggers are allowed to comment on why few of the topics are a hot favorite. This can be done on a Technorati feature known as WTF.

Rate and ranks

Technorati can rate and rank any blog, based on the links to the blog. That is, your blog will get a higher ranking if other blogs link to your blog.

Blog commenting

Commenting on other blogs has also become important because others will then comment on your blog. A blog becomes dry and dull if there are no comments on it.

Choose your blog topics

There are people who simply join in the bandwagon without much knowledge on what it is all about. If there is some great news about something related to your industry, it does not necessarily mean that you should jump to cover it, or even mention it. Yes, that does help to increase your popularity, and sharing something is always good. But if you don’t feel the need for doing it, simply leave it!

Intelligent linking

If you link things in your blog, then do so in an intelligent manner. Don’t link each and every issue that you want to, but maintain a fine balance between linking important topics. Both under-linking, as well as over-linking, are not good. So conventions and creativity should be used only when the circumstances so warrant.

Invite contributors

You may invite a famous person to contribute something to your blog. It may be something that he specializes in, but that will surely add sheen to your blog. by doing so, other people become aware that you have an association with famed people, and invariably, your blog will get more hits. Also, the celebrated person will feel flattered on the status you provide him or her.

Interaction

Make your blog interactive. Mere textual data becomes monotonous after a point of time. So use graphics, images and charts to make the blog appealing to the readers.

Provide answers!

Whatever niches you might be in, there are always some questions whose answer remains vague. So you can focus on those important issues and provide a concrete answer for those questions.

Tracking visitors

Software which tracks visitors can analyze the areas most frequented by visitors, the ones which hardly get any hits, etc. so these vital information can be used for betterment of your blog. Feedburner is very good for RSS purpose.

Charisma

Online, as well as offline, charisma is always valued. The voice presenting something in a blog is extremely important, as people appreciate honesty, compassion, empathy and other emotions associated with it.

Proper archives

Proper archives need to be maintained. Sorting them out date-wise or subject-wise always helps. Generally, archives must include every article that has ever been posted on the blog, but from the usability point of view, you can just link interrelated topics in a blog post.

Blog URL

URL’s are also important as it gives the readers a view of what lies on that page. The best URL’s should be short, but having enough information regarding the content of that webpage.

Sharing information

An open source on the internet is always welcome. Sharing private information on the internet is always considered a good marketing strategy.

Don’t go overboard

If you over-market all your blog posts, negative sentiments will prevail. So be cautious on this front.

Link bait

Capitalize on linkbait, if you have got it. Your website needs to be very much presentable if it hits the front page of Reddit, Digg or any other place where a constant flow of visitors will be ensuing.

Writing style

Your readers will personally take your style of writing and your focus on subjects. If you constantly modify that style, you will disappoint those segments of people who rely on you for that subject or style.

Branding tool

Building a brand is very important. A good brand is one which people feel pride associating themselves with, so such a brand must be built.

Blog submission

Blog submission to blog directories is very important. BlogCatalog.com, blogarma.com and bloggernity.com are some famous blog directories.

Yahoo feed

You must create a feed on Yahoo! This option is available under the “My Yahoo!” tab.

Google Adwords

Google Adwords is expensive, but a great marketing tool nonetheless. A low-cost option is also available with them.

Blog name

If you can, buy a domain name for the blog, which costs about $10 annually. You won’t even have to shell out money for hosting.

Frequency of blog posts

Regularly update your blog.

Signatures

Make it a habit to use signatures. Put a link of your blog in your signature, and use it while sending emails, posting on forums, etc.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Traffic Tactics For Your Blog