Summary
This article is reporting the process of search engine optimization using web2.0 tools, digg.com and deli.cio.us, and its impact upon website frequentation and page ranking.
Context :
Some weeks ago i had a discussion with a friend of mine about a technical process on creating a css using photoshop for web publishing. When i explained himmy way of doing it he was a bit surprised and amazed therefore I decided to blog it in order to share this little tip with everyone.
Content :
I’ve created a step by step tutorial, with precise explanations augmented by a screenshot.
Moreover I tried to entitle my tutorial with a rather appealing title « creating a css using photoshop in less than 30 seconds » (this title sounds like a dream for a lot of web designers and i tried to use some meaningful keywords in order to be catched by rss agregators filters).
Search engine optimization, the web2.0 way !
As I’ve always loved experimenting I thought that it would be a good idea to try new SEO tricks, I was a little bit tired of the good old SEO tips and tricks, and I wanted to come into the web2.0 way of referencing a content.
Instead of waiting for the bots I wanted to drive some traffic to my website rather quickly, normally I would have to wait a few weeks but this time it was a bit different.
I went on digg.com’s website and created an account, afterward I submitted my story about photoshop and css.
I’ve also been to my del.icio.us account and bookmarked my article with the appropriate tags and I’ve also bookmarked the webpage to dig the story on digg.com (this was a failure nearly anybody did it this way).
Here are some paradoxal statistics :
The story started to be digged and it was really fast. Since I submitted it to digg.com on the 8th of February, the story had been digged 1030 times and tagged 517 times in del.icio.us.
The impact on the number of visitors was really fast, approximately 6400 unique visitors in 12 hours,so about 1.7 new visitor per second which is a good performance for a very standard blog used to receive less than 50 visitors per day usually.
I tried to monitor as close as possible the progression of the number of people who digged my story and I tried to compare it with the behaviour of del.icio.us users.
The aim of this comparison is not to reach the fact that digg.com is more efficient than del.icio.us, I just wanted to highlight the point that digg.com was really fast in mobilizing crowds unlike del.icio.us which is more mid-term oriented perspective (60 days later 519 peoples had bookmarked the content).
Here are the frequentation statistics (made by google analytics) of the 8th of February:
Here it’s rather clear that a vast majority of users were coming from digg.com this day.
Content analysis
In order to measure the performance of my content inside google I tried to search for it using very popular keywords, I typed into google photoshop css, I was a bit surprised to see that my webpage was displayed in the top ten results (on the 28th of March 2006).
By the way I wanted to mention that there is a strong competition on these keywords, there is 238′000′000 results for photoshop and 806′000′000 for CSS.
http://www.google.ch/search?hl=fr&q=photoshop+css&btnG=Recherche+Google&meta=
As I was convinced that my content hadn’t been optimized for google referencing I’ve made a litlle density analysis using http://www.webrankinfo.com . The density analysis tool showed me that the performances of my content were a bit poor in terms of density as for the keywords “css photoshop” I had a global indice of 0.05% which is really bad compared to other links presented inside the top 10 results returned by google.
Comments
This experience was very interesting as I’ve been able to measure the influence of websites like digg.com and del.icio.us.
Moreover while I was reading the comments on digg.com website and on my blog it was really surprising as criticism was sometimes exacerbate and sometimes very constructive and positive, I really do agree with Seth Godin about Critics, Criticism and Remarkability when he said that « if I had written a boring book, there’d be no criticism. No conversations. The products and services that get talked about are the ones that are worth talking about. » (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/05/on_critics_crit.html)
This is a great book about google’s impact on business and culture:
