How to get on top of Digg? How to get popular on Digg? How to get a front page Digg?
These are questions being thrown upon day in and out at the forums, at the coffee club and everywhere bloggers get together. Everyone wants to know how to get to the top quickly with the minimum effort. It would be nice if someone found out a hack that helps anyone to get on top of Digg in 24 hours. Unfortunately there have been none so far, but yes there are theories flying around that claim to put you on top of Digg, or make you power users on Digg in even less than 48 hours. I wished if one of them truly worked.

Well, taking into consideration some basics, there are few facts all of them agree on.

• To get a front page Digg, you have to -
  - Be Popular
  - Have lot of “friends”
  - Have submitted lot of stories prior
  - Be popular on Digg
  - Have commented on many articles
  - Be regular with using Digg
  - Have a good reputation on Digg

Many of these points are easy to listen than achieve. For instance, it’s known that you have to have a good “following” or “friends” on Digg to get a top Digg. The reason is that when you submit an article, there has to be enough guys to digg the same without even checking the title, but just because you Dugg it first. Now, this is linked with “Reputation”. One would digg a story you submitted even without checking it’s title, only when they believe that whatever you are digging will be good, the truth may be/may not be right. “Reputation” on the other hand is linked with “Reference”. Where does one find you first? Either they could’ve found you on one of the top Dugg article OR they could’ve “befriended” them. “Reputation” is alos linked with “Image/Brand”. When one first sees you, what do they absorb from your profile? When you have some already top dugg stories, people get the idea that you are a top class digger. OR they might see the number of articles submitted and make out if you are active on Digg or not.

REFERENCE
( Seen first on top diggs/from a friend )
V
NO. OF FRIENDS
( the more the merrier )
V
REPUTATION
( based on latest dugg story/ top duggs )
V
HISTORY
( Topics active in/ top diggs )
V
V
Action : ADD AS FRIEND

So essentially, being a power user on Google has got to do more with “influencing” people and “making friends”.

Keeping all this in mind, here are a collection of resources that are worth a read and bookmarking. The best resources on the internet that will tell you how to be popular on Digg and always hit a front page with your submissions. It sounds a bit glossy, but there is value in each of these articles for sure.

• Become a power user on Digg in 48 hours -Earner’s blog
  Non realistic article, but the theories makes sense.
• Factors that will help get a story popular on Digg - Forum discussion
  A good thread where there are lot of information on the basics. There is some non-sense as well.
• How to submit stories that make to front page of Digg
  Pretty good article that gives a good insight on the behavior of Digg users.
• How to get popular on Digg - 15 Tips
  A presentation that will give you pointers on getting popular. Great illustration.
• What type of content is popular on Digg?
  A cool article that illustrates the crowds behavior and how you can utilize it. The statistics are awesome.
• Tuning your content for Digg
  Chris G has a small write up on writing content that is favorable and “likely” to get popular on Digg.
• Tips from a top 10 Digg user on how he made it to the top of Digg
  John TP extracts the best of tips from a active top 10 digg user.
• How to get on top of Digg
  Not a great article, but some excellent pointers on the importance of titles.
• How to be a top Digg user?
  Interesting article, especially the mentions on the shady practices and why you shouldn’t do them.

There are many more articles available, but many of them are repetitive and does not pass any value at all. Hence you won’t find them in this list.

Many a times, I get asked, what do you do in social media marketing? And before I answer, there would be a warning saying - I already submit to Digg and other social media sites…so what is it that you do apart from that?

That’s an interesting question altogether. The fact is that social media marketing is not just about Digg, or submitting to a few sites as Digg. There is a much larger picture to be revealed.

Submitting to Digg is in itself a big chapter. We’ve discussed it on this article and this one.

Anyone can submit to Digg. But not all of them get popular, be it a great story or not. There are strategies you must follow while submitting to Digg, a lot depend on who the submitter is, what the crowd is, what your story is about, who are your contacts, how long have you been digging…and 1432 other things as well. And that’s exactly the reason why everyone’s story isn’t the top dugg one. Precisely, that’s why you need experts help on it.

Coming back to social media, there’s more to it than Digg. It’s about connecting the dots. Between you and your target audience.
Your target audience is spread out and scattered everywhere on the internet. But what’s interesting is that every online entity has a target audience. Be it a porn site, a scientists blog or a movie review blog. The problem why your site is not popular is because you have either not connected to your audience at all or that you are with the wrong audience.

And the initial step of a social media marketing campaign is to find your target audience, define them and track them. Studying them for their behavior and delivering them “food” is the final stage of social media marketing. It almost ends with it. Post this phase, you start getting results and the beauty is that the bounce rate is very minimal unlike SEO.

So essentially, Social Media Marketing doesn’t end with digg or SU, it only starts there. A careful full stretch social media marketing goes through as many processes and steps as a market researcher and an ad-agency would go through combined with that of an SEO. It is a healthy combination of all that, and only someone who is well verse in all of these fields can help you through a successfull social media marketing campaign, or else you get stuck with a few submissions on digg with one number diggs.

It may be a big deal getting lots of fans on Digg. Most of us get minimum ten friend requests daily and there is a whole bunch of friends on Digg.Now, how many shouts do you get on email everyday from all of these friends? Quite some isn’t it? And how many do you reply to or digg? Well, keep the answer to yourself.

The question is - How can you effectively use the friends and community on digg to market your websites on Digg?
The answer probably is in the question itself - You are trying to “market” your sites.

Digg is a community where everyone is on the look out for networking. The basic motive of course is to harness the power of community. Let me take you through the process of “digging”.

Step 1.
Submit a story.

Step 2.
Shout/share it with your friends.

Step 3.
Grow your friend circle.

Step 1 and Step 2 are comparatively easier steps, but what matters most is the third one - growing your network.

How can you grow your network on Digg?

Anyone might have easily guessed that digging the maximum number of stories is enough to take you get popular on Digg.
Well, I don’t know about everyone, but this happened to me. I thought digging the maximum number of articles on digg can get me  popular. And I made it even a practice to digg a good number of articles every day, religiously. But, there was no big difference in the “popularity” as such.

Now, the bigger question is - What do you mean by popularity on Digg?

Well, popularity (or I’d call it power) to me is the power to submit a story and declare that this story is going to get 1000 diggs in the next couple of hours.

Unfortunately, that’s not a guarantee and I wonder if the top diggers would say such a thing. But essentially, what all of us are aiming to is to be able to submit a story and when you share it with friends, all of them digging it.

I’d call it the the  Digg Power Quotient.

Digg Power Quotient = (No. of diggs on an article in an hour / No. of friends in the circle) / No. of diggs from the community in an hour

This may not be the best metric though sometimes because we’ve all seen cases where a guy with less than ten friends submitted a story that made it to the top. Excluding all those “miracles”, if there is someone who has a very healthy “Digg Power Quotient”, then I think he has the potential to make a story popular.

This article may not make any sense at all because Digg is an unpredictable community sometimes, and things can work at a totally different pace and dimension than expected, for the good or the bad. But some pointers on how to be a popular guy on Digg is interesting !

What practices will get you popular on digg?

Again, with all the unpredictability taken into account, let me share a few observations.

1 - Digg ONLY relevant articles that are related to your interest.
In the frenzy to get more numbers, people go around digging anything and everything, and end up being everywhere. This may not look good on you if you are trying to build an image. For example, if you are a techno geek who blogs on technology, it makes sense for you to digg through articles in the technology corner and not the fashion and lifestyle section.
The reason is that, when people find that you are more active in one particular category, they’ll derive an impression that you are an authority on that topic and this is good for brand building.

2 - Participate in the community
In the rush to digg more articles, we tend to forget the fact that Digg is a community. A very sensitive community. Digg’s popular members are all very well networked and communicate with each other a lot on the digg platform. They see it more as a place to share thoughts with like minded people. And anyone who can’t adapt to this, may stand out of the crowd. And handling things single handed is not a good idea on digg.

3 - Comment as much as you digg
Rather than digging or submitting much , try commenting more, at least as much as you digg, and you will see the results. Commenting is a good way to generate interest among the community and gain trust. Here again, you got to really genuine while commenting or you’re gonna get burned out spamming.

4 - Create a circle of “trust worthy” friends
Friends are always good. The more the merrier. But make sure they are “trust worthy”. By trustable I mean, you got to make sure that whenever you send a shout, you get the story dugg by him. Well, it is not possible all the time, but a 90% hit ratio is satisfactory.There are a lot of guys who’ll add you and keep bombarding with shouts, at the same time never responds to your’s.

5 - Don’t digg stupid articles
Aww…did someone had to tell you this? These days there are lot of “spam” being submitted to digg. The titles make no sense, neither the description, nor the URL. If you are on a digging spree, it is most likely that you’ll digg one of those articles. So keep away from them so that, people don’t misunderstand you for a spammer.

6 - Respond well to shouts
Next time when someone see your shout notification in their email, they shouldn’t go “Oh no!  Not that guy again! “. The simple solution is that you have to respond well to others shouts whenever they send you one. Only then will the community recognize you a trust worthy guy.

7 - Create trust among the community
This is probably the most important and significant thing out of all these stuff mentioned here. And probably the most non-comprehensive. It is easy to talk about it, but to measure as to how much of it you actually earned is quite difficult. Simply because there are a lot of metrics that go into it, and it takes time to gain trust.

8 - Sharing is the key
While digging keep asking this question - “When is the last time I dugg a story just because it was interesting?” n
Essentially, the idea is to keep digging interesting articles from the web so that you can share it wit the world. Keep away your marketing interests and genuinely participate in the community. It will reward you.

This is no exaggeration. A true story I’d like to share with you, probably you’ll have something to take back home.

I had launched a new website this April 12, related to the IPL chennai super kings. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a cricket team in the Indian Premier League and I support them. I had started this website just because I had to support them and the official website was scrap. I had no intentions of monetizing it, as a matter of fact I wanted to have a better site for the fans, that’s about it. But things have gone totally out of hand now (for the good that is.). Let me tell you in detail.

This is how the whole thing began.

- April 12
Started the blog, put up a good theme from WP Designer, and put a few content as well.
- The next few days, I kept adding more content and used the social media to promote it. Well, that’s submitting content to all those guys out there.
- Placed a banner ad on DailySEOblog.(Check out the right hand panel)
Traffic - Nil

- April 13-15
- Site indexed on Google, picked up a few positions on the SERPs for terms such as “chennai super kings pics” and “chennai super kings wallpaper”.
Traffic - Around 50-100 uniques a day

- April 15-18
Added more unique content, wallpapers, pics, siggies (You know the boys stuff! )
Traffic - Around 50-200 uniques a day

- April 18 - 22
Nothing at all as I was attending the Bangalore Barcamp, and took a days leave further
When I left on 18th to bangalore the traffic was around 300-400 uniques a day. And when I came back, the traffic was around 500 uniques a day.
That got me exciting, as I saw the traffic trickling down, decided to do some “home work” on it.
Though on a tight schedule, decided to spend some time on it, since I saw that on Google Trends, the search frequency for IPL related terms were increasing.

Okay, so I went about doing a quick SEO campaign for the site, the next few days.

1. Went about using all the powers on my social media network and promoted some unique content that was there on the site.
2. Targeted some regional networks, like the star brand amassadors fan sites and networks, and gave them some exclusive viral content to feed on.
3. Link building, link building. No, not the typical directory submission for page rank, but the “new kind” that helps the content travel places and keeps the bots busy on the site. This worked and articles were now getting indexed within 30 minutes.
4. Used Google Trends to fish out the IPL related keywords
5. Wrote excellent SE optimized content targeting the keywords and their combinations.
6. Traffic just multiplied by 100 times (see the stats) in just two days.

Looks very simple eh? It is indeed. Simple strategies but doing the right thing at the right time really matters.
If you look at what I achieved in numbers, check the stats.

Current Stats

VISITS

Total 17,236
Average Per Day 2,097 (It was in 200-300 range 5 days earlier)
Average Visit Length 1:29
Last Hour 175
Today 1,159
This Week 14,677

PAGE VIEWS

Total 34,471
Average Per Day 3,863
Average Per Visit 1.8
Last Hour 345
Today 2,192
This Week 27,044

Traffic Stats over the last 7 days

I think for the little effort from my side, the results are very interesting.

Some crucial things that made me achieve the results are -

i) Putting up a banner ad on DailySEOblog. (If you want one, do let me know)
ii) Promoting the site genuinely on the social media (Mind you, this isn’t just about digging and thumbs ups)
iii) Some careful and timely Keyword research
iv) Some clever onsite SE optimization
v) Getting control over the bots as to when and how should they crawl

Now, that the traffic is there, I’ve put up AdSense ( bad choice huh?) and some banner ads, if at all they make some money, why not try them?

Social Media is the buzz. And it’s the carrot to many. A power user is a member with influential powers and has the potential of making any given article popular on the social medias.

Becoming a power user on all the social medias is sure big deal, despite everyone using the social media only a few make it to the top or grabs the powers of a power user. Now, it’s a fact probably that no one can make it easily to the top as a power user in a short time. It requires the effort and time that it deserves. But there are pointers for sure that will help you make it to the top if you get your basics right. It’s all about doing the right thing and following the right methodologies daily in a very religious manner, and one day you’ll find yourself there on the top showered with digg and stumble requests and friend invitations.

So what are the good practices that you should follow to make it  to the top as a power user on the popular social medias?

Understanding Which Social Media works best for you - The behavioral differences of the popular social media sites

First off let me tell you that each social media channel has it’s own unique quality. You cannote use all the media at the same time to get a story popular. Each community has it’s own characteristics and behavioural pattern.

Digg
- Is a news oriented website where there’s no place for internet marketers and bloggers.
- The community gives more importance to breaking news, exclusive stories and articles.
- The community is more techno savvy and if you are targeting to get the attention of technology related crowd, then Digg is the best place for you.
- Digg community does not entertain marketing, self promotion and press releases kind of articles.
- They give more value to the “uniqueness” of the stories and the real value it passes on to the community.
- The secret of getting popular on Digg is to get the maximum diggs in the shortest time span. If you get late getting the diggs, you lose the game.

Stumble Upon
SU is a community which has a different chemistry altogether from Digg - it loves sharing all the lite things(photos, videos, funny stuff) and in between some news articles too.
- SU community does not like anything that is related to promoting your blog.
- Neither does it like people selling their service or products.

Linked in
- Linked in has a very focused community.
- It’s a no nonsense one with no frills but all serious guys out there. Business consultants, CEOs, bloggers and the like.
- If it’s business that you’d like to promote, then probably this is the right place.

Here are the good practices to become a social media power user.

1. Share
   Social media sites are nothing but places to share. If you used to share interesting stories on email two years earlier, now you have Digg and Su to share. This way the original sources of the story also gets benefited and you get a place to share thoughts with like minded people too.
   So rather than seeing them as platforms that generate traffic, see them as places to share ideas, stories and interesting pieces of articles over the internet.
2. Participate
   Social medias are all about participation. Along with user generated content they are also platforms where lot of ideas and thoughts are shared. Most of the social medias today has the groups feature where people create groups based on their interest. These are excellent places to find similar minded people. I’ve seen that making use of these groups and participating in them attaches a special honour to your profiles in the social media and it helps you get make more friends in the community.
3. Be proactive
   I’ve seen many guys complain that one of their friend/friends on the social media never responds to their nudge and they are simply pissed off. It’s completely understandable a problem. It may ask you - why did you add him/her as a friend in the first place?
   The answer to this question is to get proactive. By getting proactive I mean, making sure that you do everything in the first place that you want your friend to do. If you want your friend to digg your articles and respond to shouts, you respond to other peoples shouts first.
   So give before you start to take. If you make a habit of this, it makes life easier at the communities.
4. Contribute to the community
   Social media sites out there are not marketing channels. They are not out there to buy somethign from you. instead they are out there to learn from the internet, from you. So give them something to learn, if you have the resources pass them on, if you don’t pass it on from other useful resources.
5. Be Regular
   Imagine you were with your friends, wouldn’t you be spending time with them daily? And not approach them when you have something to show off?
   The same formula works here. Be a frequent participant in all the social medias that you want to be popular in. Many of them shows the last login time details so others can easily judge from your login patterns as to whether you are a frequent member or not. If you are not, they probably will take you for a spammer, and I think they have all the right to believe so.
6. Be generous, pass information
   While in the community, make sure that you are a generous person. A generous person is someone who will share value with others without a second thought. In a community others give respect to you based on whether you are generous or not. No matter where you get it from, if you are someone who provides valuable conent to the community, then others will accept you and respect you as a master, yes , even if the information you passed on was not really yours.
7. Buy ideas never sell
   Communities are for everyone, for those who are buying and selling. But make sure you are always on the buying part. At least for a major part of your time. Because there are more sellers in this world than buyers. So when everyone is looking for a buyer, be one, so that you have their attention. At a later point, may be, if they find you interesting, you could be a seller. But let that not be your point of interest.
8. Never promote yourself
   Do you have a product to sell or  service to offer? I’d suggest that you keep away your marketing strategies away from the communities. The problem is that the social media community is so sensitive that they can easily make out a marketing guy and a contributor. So don;t act smart trying to sell your product/service by promoting yourself. That’s for the community to decide.
9. Adapt to the customs
   Every social media site out there is a community. And every community has its rules and customs just like in real ife. So in order to get in to one you got to gel to their customs first. If you stand apart from them, you’ll probably end up being an island. You don’t want that to happen.
10. Its almost like real life
    See communities on social media just like real life communities. They are not a bunch of robots out there. They are indeed a bunch of clever guys like you sitting at eth other end of the world. So try to make friends with them treating them just like you are meeting a real person.
11. Make friends
    Forget diggs or stumbles. During your initial days in the social media, make sure you make more friends than anything. Communicate to them through comments, groups etc and make yourself comfortable with the community and learn what’s happening there. Sit back relax and study tha patterns. Don’t do the mistake of going ahead and digging your favorite story in the very first day. There’s no problem as such but had you submitted after making some friends, it would’ve got a better visibility.
12. Never beg
    One of the mistakes I see people repeating time and again is to beg for votes. Well, I’m not talking about you letting know your friend about a new submission or shots. But begging someone , a stranger may be, to vote for you. This creates a negative impression about you to the other perrson and although he may digg your story, the next time you approach him he’ll avoid you. Because you are not passing any quality or value to him.
13. Develop niche groups within
    This is one of the very effective strategies I’ve seen people use in social media communities. Develop small interest groups within the community so that you can share and communicate with the like minded people. Although, please do not confuse this with closed communities. I’m totally against closed communities, they are no good for the sharing purpose. Let your communities be open so that like minded peple can jon and communicate within.
    
14. Reply and respond
    I understand that you have no interest in responding to shouts on email or IM, and yes you may be completely true. Why do you want to reply to those emails, after all you have someone whoting eery minute. But hey, let me tell you, if you does not reply to any of them - fine, nothing bad. But try responding to each of them. Yes respond to every shout you receive and see what happens. I can assure you that, you’ll have at least 10 guys daily adding you as friend on the network. And that’s not a bad thing. All those guys add you as friend because they respect your actions and they see value in you. So I’d suggest that you try reply and respond to every little nudge that you get on the network.
15. Quick guys are smart
    You knew it already. Quick guys are smart. Here in the social media, being quick means being being qucik in responding, being quick in digging stories up the top, being quick in all the activities in the community.
16. Be the first
    if you got to do exceptionally good in the community, one short cut to getting poplar is to be the first in submitting breaking news or interesting stories. If you pick up the best happening story first, others are sure to follow. but this is no easy task, you got to keep a hawk’s eye on the news that is of interest to the community and act quick once it’s out.
17. Believe in quality
    It’s all about quality. If you have 1000 submissions with all of them stories that have been heard before, no one’s going to even bother talking to you. but if you have a couple of breaking stories and interesting, exclusive ones, that sure is going to earn you the respect you deserve.
18. Give before you take
    Essentially the point to keep in mind is before you start thinking about your returns, learn to contribute and share. Don’t count your returns on the very first day. It’s a natural process of getting popular and doesn’t happen over night. Once you have your basics in place, it will automatically throw you up to the top.

I’d love to hear your contributions/additions to the above points.

So what comes to your mind when you think about link building? Directory submissions, link baits, link exchanges..?

Recently, there was this client of mine who had a wonderful website. It was beautifully designed, good layout, good linking pattern and all that. Onsite optimization was really good on the site. He would easily score a 9/10 on it. So why did he approach me?
He was running short of links. Incoming links that is. The client was already aware of the SEO metrics and suggested me that we go ahead with a link building strategy and source as many links as possible.

Now, in such cases the normal tendency is to go about link hunting. Ask/beg people for links, submit to directories etc. Well, this I’d call is the PUSH STRATEGY.

Some common characteristics of the PUSH strategy are.

- You already have rich content on your website.
- You go about marketing it to anyone and everyone.
- You beg for links to others.
- You submit to directories/ blog comments.
- You get good traffic.

Now there’s nothing wrong with this strategy except for the fact that its a short lifecycle, and you get no or less value to your business.

Imagine this, you have an “Online magazine” which has got amazing content. Now when you go about doing the “Push” strategy what happens is that you build traffic, you interact with the rest of the world, you get the attention you want. But all this happens outside your site. Right? And that’s where you miss the point.

You do everything to let people know of your product, and you get the attention you deserve. But what happens after that? The whole traffic is at your site and you “assume” that people will like your content. Does that ring a bell?

Not necessarily. Now that you’ve invited everyone to your site, all of them needn’t like the content on your site. They wont.

The problem here is “Null Targeting”

Coming back to the example. Your online magazine would’ve been a women oriented one, but while you were marketing your mag through link building, directories and all that, you missed a point. You went ahead calling everyone to your site and that included women, men, seniors …..and the like. So the traffic you got (although in good numbers, wasn’t the most appropriate one for you).

And what’s the result? An increased bounce rate.

Now, in my opinion, the best strategy in such cases would be a PULL STRATEGY rather than a PUSH STRATEGY. Let me explain.

A pull strategy is one where you focus on developing value on your site and naturally allow it to travel places.

In the online magazine example, what could’ve been a better strategy?

Stage 1
Study your target.
Who are they? (In this case, women)
Where can you find them? (Facebook/Orkut/Myspace?)
What content are they consuming right now?
What are the channels they subscribe to?

Stage 2
More time and focus should be given on developing value content (a.k.a kickass content).
Brainstorm with the team and develop viral content that matches with the content your target prefers consuming.
Make sure that once the traffic is here, you have all the content to “engage the visitor”.
Develop tools to subscribe the new visitors. (RSS, Video Channels, Email subscriptions, Facebook applications)

Stage 3
Go to the places or communities where your target is.
Go about delivering your viral content to them.
Spread it.
Do it again.

Results
- Increased traffic (not one time traffic but recurring traffic)
- Reach to the right audience.
- Less bounce rate.
- Increased subscriptions.
- A complete vicious circle of target to conversion ratio.

So, essentially the point is, instead of wasting  time on pushing your content to the wrong target, go about developing value focussed on your target and naturally allow it to travel with a little bit of push through the channels and you’ll see better results, time and again.

Why should you save bandwidth? You’ve got enough of it haven’t you?
You should ask that question to someone who gets lot of traffic, especially from Digg/ SU etc. They’d immediately gulp down anything you suggest to save the bandwidth.

Recently, there have been server breakdowns with many bloggers because of the social media outburst. Many of them did nothing wrong but some ardent reader of their’s picked up one of the stories and submitted to Digg. The story went viral and made it to the top of the Digg’s most dugg pages. Unfortunately the blogger was running on a shared hosting platform and the server could not stand the immediate traffic burst that was created from Digg making it to go crash. The site went offline soon after the story was popular resulting in some bad reputation too.

Now this would happen only if you make it to the top of Digg, anyways it makes sense to save some bandwidth with some common, unharming tips right?
One of the things that eat up your bandwidth is images - when you upload images in wordpress it goes to the default directory - wp-admin/uploads
Now, when ever a story is accessed with the picture on it, file is being accessed and it doubles your bandwidth usage.

What you can do in this case is upload the images to flickr or any other image upload utility so that the image gets accessed from there and not your server.

Now, I know how hard it is to upload image to flickr while you are writing a post, it takes another 10 minutes of your time (unless you are using the upload function from the Flock browser).

So here is a wordpress plugin that will help you upload images to flickr just the way you do it on wordpress. Yes, while you are writing the post with no extra time lost.
Download the plugin here.

Hey, have you ever checked out those SEO firms claims on the features page? I always make it a point to thoroughly go through all those points mentioned in those sites, particularly the “We do it all” segment.I mean clients too should go through this and let me tell you there are a few things by which you can easily mark out a fraud guy from genuine.

Recently, been to a popular SEO firms website who claimed to do “everything SEO”. Curious enough, I checked their features page to get an idea of what exactly dos they mean by saying “Everything SEO”.

Well, basically what the guys have done is, put in everything they could find as SEO and arrange them randomly in the features list.
One interesting feature list went something like below -

We do all SEO services.

• Search Engine Submissions
• Directories
• Link building Experts
• Google Pr Rank Increase solution
• Paid Inclusion solution
• Software Marketing
• Meta tags
• Title tags etc..

Brilliant isn’t it?
More than half of what’s said there is BS and is in no way related to SEO.

You see there is a common misconception in peoples mind about SEO. The reason is that many people give their own definitions of SEO and SO services. For instance take the elements discussed in the above list.

Search Engine Submissions - I’m assuming it means submitting your site to Google/Yahoo/MSN etc. Though it sounds interesting to a client who wants to get his post atop search engines, the real catch is that he is paying the SEO guys for doing nothing.

Search Engine Submissions are no longer valid. In the sense that there are smarter, assured and safer ways of getting indexed and there is no need for submitting to search engines. And even if you are keen on that, anyone can do it in five minutes. So what’s the point in paying someone USD 500 to submit our site to search engines?

And directories are so old my friend, nobody uses them except for spam and unacceptable content. Of course there are the great directories like BOTW and V7, but none of them carry any weightage nor can they help you earn search engine rankings. As a matter of fact, many of the directories are banned from Googles index.
And if you are keen on paying for directories, anyone can use the Yahoo directory. Who needs a “professional SEO” to show you how to?

And of course there is “Paid Inclusion solution”. I’m assuming it’s a SEM/paid marketing that the SEO guy is referring to. Now, wasn’t that called SEM and not SEO? If you are going to pay someone to get you “top ranks” (well, almost) then why do you need an SEO? Hire an SEM company in the first place, they’ll manage your funds properly.

So essentially, I find that many professional SEO guys are limited to doing things like directory submissions, meta tags and link exchanges. All of them makes no or little sense to SEO.

The real or toughest part of SEO is to think like the search engines and frame a strategical approach to take your site to the next level gaining it respect, authority and popularity. Everything else will follow.

The next google page rank update is round the corner. No no no…easy, now don’t bug me on IM asking when is the date, I honestly have no clue. The grapewines say it’s around in April mid/last, so let’s watch and see.

Everytime there’s a page rank update the most excited would be the bloggers who started their blogging venture is less than three months earlier. This is the time when there are more searches for the term “when is the next google page rank update” and the related long tail ones on Google. Rest of the best, the boring daily bloggers wouldn’t be as excited as the young blogger because he’d have gone through the  update - downgrade - upgrade process by now and (probably penalized) lost his affinity to the green bar.

Now, the enthusiasm of the young bloggers is something that’s universal. Everyone is worried about whether their blog will get the green bar filled or not.

My question is - How much value does Google page give to your blog?

So you are a young blogger with a blog less than an year old. You have around 100 posts and gathered a few links from around the blogosphere. Hell, you’ve even submitted to directories only to know that they are a waste of time. I’m sure some of you might have even bought links from others in the blogsphere for as chaep as 5-10 bucks. So what value is Google Page Rank going to give you once you are calibrated?

You might sell some links? But Google will penalize you.
You might show off the page rank to potential advertisers? But they are more interested in your subscriber count.
You might show off your PR to a fellow blogger? They might have a better one.

Essentially, Google Page rank does not give you any value what so ever other than a fancy green bar.
It is just a publicly available visualization of Google’s own standards of rating sites to gather information.

And yes, please do not mistake that if you get a higher Google Page Rank you’d get better search engine rankings. That’s a mistake.

Google Page Rank has got no effect whatsoever on the search engine rankings position of a site. It is just an internal metric of Google to grade sites to make it convenient for them for data collection (or something similar).

So this time around, rather than fretting over the green bar, try gathering one way incoming links to your blog and developing unique content rich pages. Those two things can earn you lot of respect from Google, this page rank update.

I thought I might be the only guy who prefers it. In fact, it was an easy guess to me that it would die out soon as any other social media mushroom. But the fact that it managed to get into the good books of many and stood face up to the criticism made me like it more.

ChrisG liked it and I completely agree with him. It has all the features, carefully planned to take down Digg (I assume). Community, UI, Ease to handle, Content - everything is just rich enough to take down any existing social media site. Some of the features made me think - “Why did not Digg implement this earlier, or why aren’t they?” Now, if you compare Digg to Mixx, clearly there are differences that puts Mixx on the forefront.

1. Digg takes more time to submit a story.
   Digg
   A normal story submission process on Digg will take me 2 minutes or more, since there are more clicks involved.
   - First the waiting screen.
   - Second, I’ve to write a description myself and select from a picture.
   - Third, select a category.(No miss here)
   - Four, Enter Captcha.
   - Five, Submit.
   - Six, Duplicate check.
   - Seven, final submission.Mixx
   A normal story takes lesser time to submit, with lesser clicks.
   - First, submit URL.
   - Duplicate check.
   - Three, title and description automatically filled.Select category,tags (optional)
   - Four, Submission.

2. Digg wastes my time and confuses me during a submission
   Ssince it checks for duplicate entries only after I’ve taken time out to write a description about the story. While MIxx checks for duplicate content even before you provide the description, and quickly after you’ve submitted the URL. Makes sense this way.

3. Digg always aks for a captcha, Mixx requires it only when they find you submitting stories too frequently.
   This probably may have something to do with the traffic and spam ratio. But as a end user, I’m not bothered about it, I’m worried about my time, my effort and how easy the process is. Digg fails here.

4. Digg is Spam, has no room for development
   Digg is controlled by the mafia you know it. There is very little or No chance at all for fresh stories to get popular, however good it is, unless you have the help of the mafia.
   Mixx is all new, there is lot of quality submission done and every one gets appreciation. Again, down the line Mixx may become like Digg, but as of now, it’s pretty good.

5. I can’t find an appropriate category on Digg, Mixx has better categories
   It’s a shame that Digg has no apt categories for submitting blogging related stories or niche topics like it. You have very narrow choices that doesn’t make any sense at all. Everyone can’t be running a TV station or a Gizmodo to break stories. Why don’t they understand it?
   On the other hand, Mixx has got a better array of categories, and even if you fail to find one, there’s the option of tags. Which is awesome!

6. Digg throws up stories that it thinks is interesting. Mixx shows me stories that are of interest to me.

7. Digg does not have groups and Communities, Mixx has lot of them
   I think one killer feature of Mixx is that it has groups and communities to share your stories according to your taste and preferences. After all, that’s the whole fun in Social Media isn’t it ?

8. Digg is harsh, It thinks some sites are unworthy of submission
   That’s bull s**t. While I tried to submit a story from a nice site, Digg says that the site is banned from submission, and I can’t submit any article from that site, despite them being good articles.

9. Digg is Dull, Mixx is Hot !
   Looks matter after all. Especially when you are spending more time on one site , you don’t want to strain your eyes looking at dull and pale colours. Mixx on te other hand has got soothing colour scheme for your eyes, not too bright not too dull, just perfect with the best UI and user friendlyness.

So those are the nine points I think makes me prefer Mixx over Digg. Hope they make sense. If you really like Mixx, feel free to join The Mixx Fans group and get the company of the most passionate mixxers.