SearchEngineWatch.com and ClickZ.com have been running articles recently about search engine marketing and social media. The odd thing, in my mind, is the focus on the social bookmarking sites.

“These days, it seems that social media marketing is on the minds of every search engine marketer. With the importance of links in the algorithms of all the major search engines, along with the benefits of putting your pages in front of a broad, targeted audience, getting your articles popular on major social media sites like del.icio.us and StumbleUpon is an important part of any search marketing strategy. ” - Eric Enge

For the last 5 years, SEM has been a large part of my web duties, so I can understand the SEM focus on StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, Digg, et al. SEM and SEO is about traffic, pure and simple. However, search engine marketers are marketing technicians, not social marketers (duck! here comes the storm!) in that SEM is about the technical aspects of web sites, algorithms, etc. while SMM is about talking to people. If SEM is focusing on the social bookmarking sites, they are missing the picture of social marketing.

Admittedly, SEM talks big about optimizing text and content for the web site users (well, for Google search bots, really), and they talk about the art and science of search engine optimization. They also talk about user-centric experiences (because that’s what the search engines like), but rarely - if ever - have I heard SEM talk about talking to people. Enge goes on in his article to talk about the advantages of making friends on StumbleUpon and del.icio.us, but again, this is one small part of the big picture of SMM.

An analogy: SEM is like taking tons of video footage of people in a store and arranging the products on the shelves, the position of the cash registers and the signage on the building to get people coming into the store and optimizing the buying flow. SMM is about talking to those people and finding out what they like to buy. And, for success, one needs the other.

The general impression I am getting (except from those who read blogs like Webwalker) is that the majority of (traditional) marketers, PR people, advertising people and SEM people are looking at SMM like the proverbial elephant (and SMM is large and somewhat ill-defined). Everyone is feeling a different part of the elephant and defining that as SMM. (I’m not innocent - I also have a perception of SMM that probably doesn’t match yours).

Instead of trying to claim the SM space for themselves, the different specialties need to join forces and combine their knowledge. Smart companies who want to make an impact will do this (and some are doing this quite successfully). The rest of us will be left holding onto the tail of the elephant.

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Yesterday, I promised I’d look at where my blog traffic comes from, and I’ll gove some insight into some of the marketing tactics I use to get traffic.

We all want people to come to our blog, but if you simply write a post and let it sit there, it’ll be hard for anyone to find. You need to actively get your information out there; the good news is that the basic steps are quite easy, and can give decent results.

Couple of things:

1. I use Google Analytics on every page of my site, including pages outside of my blog. The direct referrals usually come to the home page, not the blog.
2. I’m doing basic marketing, not aggressive marketing so the volume of traffic may not seem impressive, but I’m happy with it. I don’t have any goals for the blog - just get it out there. I’m using this blog as a test arena for a few theories, too.
3. The blog is two weeks old; it’s too early to get fine patterns, but there are some obvious trends.

Overall traffic

Since October 14:

• 352 Visits
• 678 Pageviews
• 1.93 Pages/Visit
• 56.82% Bounce Rate
• 00:02:27 Average time on site
• 77.27% New visits

I’m OK with the visits; this week has been a significantly higher average over last week because I’ve tried a new bookmarking tactic. I’m not thrilled about the 1.93 pages/visit - I need to cross-link other parts of the site much more heavily. This should help with the bounce rate as well. Time on site is OK, and the % new visits is OK for a new blog - I’m still building a regular audience.

Sources

I’m really interested in this one, especially with the PageRank reshuffle this week.

• 17.9% direct traffic
• 74.72 referring traffic
• 7.39% search engine

The low search engine traffic is interesting - very few people come to the blog (or the main site) via search engines. I’m OK with that - the terms I’m using on the main site are very competitive, and I’m not doing any PPC campaigns. This volume of organic traffic is OK since this isn’t the focus of the marketing. I’m pretty pleased with the 75% referral traffic - people are linking from other sites. The backlink strategy is working.

The actual sources are even more interesting:

1. StumbleUpon: this is amazing. This is my single biggest source by a wide margin, and I’ve only been Stumbling the site for 3 days. I’ve had 118 visits, but the best part is the bounce rate from Stumblers is a very respectable 35%. They are reading and exploring the site. Thanks, Stumblers!
2. Direct: 63 visits
3. Digg: 61 visits. I’m surprised here. Even though Digg is a respectable third place, I’ve been Digging for two weeks, and the bounce rate from Diggers is high. The thing I don’t like about Digg is the categorization - I still need to find the performing categories.
4. Seth Godin’s Blog trackbacks. This is the next strategy of commenting on other people’s blogs and linking back to yor own. Seth’s blog is an excellent read, and there’s always an insightful observation to comment on. I’m trying to limit myself to one trackback a week, but it’s hard. Interesting thing: I would have expected traffic spikes on the days I comment, and complete drop-offs on non-commenting days, but there is still traffic coming from the non-sommenting days. People read the archives, and the comments in the archives there. I’d love to know what his average pages per visit is.
5. Google (organic). This is highly disappointing. Plenty of traffic, but 91% bounce rate and an average of 7 seconds on the site. People come, see that it isn’t what they are looking for, and bail. I need a better SEO/page content strategy.
6.  and on. This is mostly linkbacks from comments I’ve made on other blogs. It’s the long tail, but respectable traffic.

Visitors

• USA: #1 by a long shot, with California, esp. Silicon Valley, leading the way. No surprise there.
• Canada: #2. Thanks, countrymates!
• Great Britain #3
• and into the long tail. Hi to everyone from outside North America, and thanks for reading!

Loyalty

Not a surprise here, but I can do better. 1 visit is the top spot (no surprise), but I’d like to say ‘hi’ to everyone in the 9-14, 15-25 and the 26-50 (which is probably me before I took my IP address out of the equation) groups; I have some regular readers! Yay!

Browsers

This floored me. But, upon reflection, not surprising, considering the audience.

1. Firefox: 63.35% (Wow - this is *waaay* above the typical market share of browsers)
2. IE: 33.24% Again, surprising, considering Microsoft’s market dominance
3. Safari: 3.12% Hi, Mac people!
4. Opera: 0.28% This represents 1 visitor, which was probably my testing the CSS.

The IE 6/7 split is about 67%/33% for v6. v7 is coming on fast. Firefox is interesting. Even though it sent nearly 2/3 of my traffic, the time-on-site is low (1:11 min) and viewed 1.61 pages on average. IE users, on the other hand, spent, on average, over 5 minutes on the site and looked at 2.5 pages. IE users, despite the lower number, are using the site much more.

I’m not going for any conclusions right now; I’ll do that later when I have more data. There are a few strategies I’ll be testing in the coming week, and blogging about the results. Stay tuned!

Thanks to all my visitors, and I hope you are enjoying the blog!

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Yesterday, many of the big blogs woke up to find their PageRank lower by up to 3 points. And here I thought Pagerank became irrelevant two years ago…

Google PageRank is (theoretically) used by Google to weight pages in their search engine. The higher the PageRank, the better a page would do in the search engine. However, the PR system has been gamed and abused time after time, and Google’s Jaguar update in 2005 reset the criteria for PR, killing link farms and a lot of black hat SEO. When I wear my SEO hat, the last thing I look at is PR; it doesn’t tell me much. However, evidently many site sell advertising based on their PR. The Neilsen ratings system for TV has many of the same problems - see James Surowiecki’s analysis in his book The Wisdom of Crowds.

The remarkable thing about this PR shift is that (on one day’s data) these sites do not seem to be losing traffic.

Is PR, or even search engine marketing/optimization, even relevant in the social media sphere anymore? Yes and no, depending on the site. I’ve argued before that SEO is not dead, but there are better ways to get qualified traffic.

Many commerce sites still rely on the search engines for their traffic - the organic and paid listings are critical to their success. Strong organic optimization and good AdWords campaigns are the lifeblood of most businesses. But how relevant is this to bloggers, and are bloggers relying on the SEs for traffic? If they are, they’re hooped.

Referrals from other sites accounts for over 75% of my traffic. StumbleUpon is, by far, my biggest traffic generator, and Digg is a solid second place (I’ll talk about my traffic sources tomorrow). Admittedly, my numbers are not huge, but for a two-week-old blog and minimal marketing of the blog, I’m pretty happy. Social bookmark sites and referrals from other blogs have helped me far more than the search engines, and I’ll bet that other bloggers with strong SMO and SMM will say the same things.

Optimize for the search engines, keep the Google in mind, but don’t rely on them - there’s better ways to generate traffic.

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