This is part one in a series about ways you can deal with the trials and tribulations of a growing user community. Part two will be posted in the next few days and will deal with iterating on your site’s features and usability in order to accomodate the needs of your user base. Interested? Subscribe to my feed to keep informed of new additions to the series.

As many of you are aware, the reason I’ve been quiet over here of late is because I’ve been busy maintaining Protagonize and blogging regularly (in video and otherwise) on the official Protagonize blog.

What you may not be aware of is that the site is growing quite steadily, and with little fanfare, is starting to run in to the inevitable growing pains that social networks and communities tend to experience in their formative months (and years.)

I thought it would be useful to explore and discuss some of these issues, without getting into serious technical detail. If you can manage to avoid these problems, you’re well ahead of the pack.

Ouch, that hurts

These days, you can’t toss a brick without hitting another blog post or microblog entry about Twitter’s downtime issues and inferior system architecture. While I don’t disagree that they’re not scaling very well to meet demand, I will state that I doubt the system was originally designed to handle the kind of exponential growth and volume they’re seeing right now. With over a million registered users, and some incredibly vocal and/or popular members — such as Robert Scoble (who appears to have toned down his Twitter usage in recent days), Jason Calacanis, or Leo Laporte — Twitter is experiencing inevitable growing pains. All three of these social media heavyweights have upwards of 25,000 followers and “tweet” on a regular basis. Apparently, this causes Twitter to have fits. While many have tried to blame their technology platform, Ruby on Rails, for the scalability issues, Twitter has gone so far as to shift the blame to these highly-followed users for some of the architectural issues they’re currently suffering from.

While some sporadic downtime would be understandable for most organizations in Twitter’s situation — where they’ve generated massive amounts of traffic in a relatively short span of time — much of Twitter’s user base consists of edge cases: hardcore early-adopters and tech-savvy users familiar with social media, neither of which is coping with the frequent downtime well (though one might assume those more in the know would be more forgiving.) Every big event, with Apple keynote speeches and conferences like SXSW leading the charge, seems to cause them more and more grief. This leads to hordes of disillusioned users complaining about their application, ON their application. You know what they say about all press being good press? It’s not so great if the bulk that bad press is being dispersed using your software.

Early adopters are notoriously fickle creatures, generally willing to jump ship to the “next big thing”, be it a similar service (remember Pownce? I’m still not using it), or a shiny new toy with a little overlap (Friendfeed, Pluck, or Brightkite.) Amusingly enough, Plurk and Brightkite are starting to run into similar issues of scale, with significant downtime since the media blitz they suffered about a week ago. Twitter, on the other hand, is a veteran in the lifestreaming world and is slowly starting to break into the mainstream, but if they don’t get their architectural issues dealt with quickly, they’re going to miss the boat. Is Twitter the next Friendster, unable to capitalize on a rabid, exponentially expanding user base and great press coverage? I sure hope not, because as a community developer, I’m completely able to understand their situation.

The pitfalls of rapid development

Most of the largest and most popular applications developed during the unfortunately named Web 2.0 era have been built by small development teams with limited (or non-existent) budgets. Very few were backed by large organizations with deep pockets before launching and reaching a tipping point of some kind. This approach makes getting a new site off the ground cheap and simple, requiring only time and elbow grease, but little in terms of funds or manpower.

The converse dilemma created by this approach is that lack of sufficient time, funding, or staff creates a vaccuum effect. Regular best practices of software design and maintenance — which would normally be standard fare for any large-scale application with a proper release cycle in place — start to fall by the wayside to accomodate new, off-the-cuff features, designed to meet the ever-expanding user base’s demands. Why is this? Because you’ll hear from your power users — your community evangelists, if you treat them right — on a regular basis. They’ll message you, they’ll complain, they’ll tell you when something’s wrong, and eventually, they’ll give you suggestions. All of this, be it negative or positive, is good feedback to aggregate and parse. If you’re not hearing anything at all from your users, you’re probably in a pretty deep hole and should start making attempts to communicate with your community on a regular basis.

Maintaining the uneasy balance

The issue at hand is keeping system architecture and maintenance in a balance with new features. For instance, your users won’t likely be aware of the fact that your application server’s single CPU is running at 100% with only a handful of simultaneous users. They’ll just see that a page is taking an inordinate amount of time to load, or a server error due to a timeout, and they’ll bail out on you. They’ll vent at you, telling you that one feature or another needs to be added, or fixed, or tweaked to their specifications. Take this with a grain of salt, but don’t forget it altogether.

With Protagonize, I try and maintain a balance, alternating site optimization and performance or usability enhancements with new feature development. It’s obviously a gargantuan task, with a staff of one (part-time, to boot!), but if you parcel out your tasks accordingly, it can definitely be accomplished.

Formulate a Roadmap

I have a to-do list (that I maintain on on Basecamp) that’s a good 300+ items long. It’s basically a rough product roadmap for Protagonize, that I’ll build on as the site grows and as I have more time to develop it. I chip away at these tasks one by one, organizing them by priority and by type of task. Outstanding bug fixes, while there aren’t many, rank high on the list, as do serious performance deficiencies that need to be addressed immediately. At the same time, major new features are ranked by necessity and spread out evenly amongst maintenance-related tasks.

Try and break your task list down so that you can get a few small changes in before taking on something big — this makes you feel like you’re actually accomplishing something, and surprisingly, the smallest of changes on your site can make your users supremely happy. A tiny change like extending the story editing window to 24 hours (from one hour) on Protagonize generated all sorts of thanks from my members. Little things add up, so try and squeeze a few in before you take on a major feature.

Communicate with your users

Everyone is familiar with the “Digg effect”, “getting Slashdotted”, “being Techcrunched”, or any number of other variants on the theme of getting hit with (and succumbing to) a huge influx of users in a very short span of time. Most people are understanding of this kind of downtime, as it’s a one-off, unpredictable occurrence and is generally due to a major spike in traffic for a short span of time, measured in hours (or worse yet, days.) What people aren’t willing to put up with is extended downtime or system sluggishness with no obvious cause. If something is causing your site to run slowly, or requires a server maintenance window longer than a few minutes, communicate this with your users. The importance of a good back-and-forth discussion with your community cannot be understated. They’ll be much more willing to suffer through the tough times if they’re not in the dark.

Joshua Porter’s newly published book, Designing for the Social Web (affiliate link), has some excellent examples of how to communicate change with users in chapter 3, “Authentic Conversations”. I recommend this book to anyone building or managing a community — the advice Porter offers is invaluable, especially customer-relations case studies such as Dreamhost’s billing nightmare earlier this year, or the “Dell Hell” episode. His blog, Bokardo, is also definitely worth subscribing to, as he writes articles about community building on a regular basis (much of which provided fodder for his book.)

Sympathy for the Goliath

While I don’t (quite) have the audacity to compare Protagonize to a site that has over 500 times the number of registered users, I’ve discovered that nothing really compares to speaking from experience. I can definitely feel some sympathy for Twitter’s precarious position. As Protagonize’s user base has ramped up from a couple of hundred users to several thousand, I’m noticing issues with the site where none were obvious before. Most of this is because I just didn’t have the time or resources to properly load test the site when I developed it (and still don’t, to some extent.) Some of it is due to poor architectural decisions that I’ve since overhauled, and some of it is simply due to a lack of development time. Either way, your users won’t quickly forgive you unless you communicate with them, and make serious attempts to resolve the situation at hand in a timely fashion.

Features you may add as an afterthought can and will work against you if you let them. A rushed change can wreak all sorts of havoc if you let it, but it may not become obvious until much later. Basic additions, such as the addition of images to user profiles, something I added a few weeks after launching Protagonize, have a way of coming back to bite you in the ass if you don’t plan for them properly. Worse yet, they can become obfuscated by other issues or complexity that you’ve introduced since that point.

Small changes can spell big trouble

The problem in my case, without boring you too much with technical jargon, was that all database queries that pulled back user data were suddenly pulling back image information as well. While I store all of the user images on the filesystem for faster access, Protagonize has an original source copy of each image in the user records stored in the database as well. I added profile images well after the original site was built, and I was hurried while doing it. The result was that with a large influx of users, pages making user requests (especially aggregator pages like our central Authors page) were suffering from longer and longer load times. More comical still was the fact that we had dealt with a similar issue last year when I worked on ThoughtFarmer and it had totally slipped my mind.

Of course, as a developer, I immediately thought it was one of the more complex queries strewn around the page that was slowing things down. I proceeded to make little optimizations here and there to try and make things faster. Only after two days of tweaking did the thought occur to me that it might be the images on user records that were causing the excessive slowness. A half-hour later, I had the problem solved, and any page loading author information was suddenly loading a good five times faster. I have no idea how many potential new users I may have lost due to the sluggishness of various pages around the site, and I don’t really want to think about it, to be honest. :)

This all comes back to the fact that while the smallest of changes can please your audience to no end, it can also break stuff rather badly as well. I learned my lesson the hard way. While I don’t plan on repeating the experience, I’ll concede that it’s entirely possible it can happen again due to the way I work and iterate on the site rapidly. I can, however, take precautions against this kind of thing happening again. Now that I’m aware of the impact of a larger user base, I’ll be more careful with seemingly insignificant additions in the future. I can’t imagine the impact it would have had if my site’s membership was anywhere near the size of Twitter’s. My understanding for their troubles in recent weeks grows as I start to feel similar issues, even on a smaller scale.

In part two, I’ll discuss how to approach developing your site’s features incrementally and responding to user feedback, positive or negative.

Photo credit: yoannlb on Flickr.

1. I thought making a short video blog entry wouldn’t take long. Then I spent two hours figuring out the best spot to shoot it and then doing trial runs to see how it looked.
2. Wow, do I need a new webcam. My old Logitech QuickCam just doesn’t cut it.
3. You need some serious balls to talk in front of a camera for ten minutes.
4. I need some decent video editing tools to make things look more professional. (And better lighting.) Badly. Anyone have any suggestions? (Windows)
5. If you make a mistake with no editing tools, you’re kinda screwed. Especially 8 or 9 minutes into a ten-minute segment.
6. It’s a lot easier to make a fool of yourself if you’re alone in a dark room and not on a stage somewhere.
7. I look and sound way better in person. (I hope.)
8. Ten minutes goes by scarily fast, even when you don’t have much to say.
9. Once recording the video is complete, you still have a good hour or more of uploading, encoding, tagging, describing, etc. Viddler is pretty slick, though.
10. Watching yourself on video is rough. I thought I was a helluva lot wittier when I was recording it.

Curious as to what I’m talking about? Check out this week’s roundup blog post at Protagonize.

I came across an interesting blog post on ReadWriteWeb this morning that got me to thinking a little about how Protagonize works versus many of the diverse other collaborative writing systems available on the web right now. The author of the post referred to Protagonize as “very slick”, which is all well and good, but the user comments were actually what caught my attention.

In the general sense, there are many similarities between the larger sites out there; many provide author profiles, many allow authors to collaborate on the same stories. What I have noticed is that the prevalent theme amongst many of them appears to be that the end goal is to produce a novel, novella, or something “publishable.”

One of the comments lambasting collaborative writing over on the RWW post was of particular interest:

“Penguin publishing house tried this already and it was an EPIC FAIL! It was called a Million Penguins … it was a wiki novel…and…it was awful. Never published, and they abandoned the project - but best of luck!”

As a brief disclaimer, I didn’t become aware of A Million Penguins until well after the project was over, probably about six weeks ago. It definitely has some parallels with Protagonize, but the goal of the project is entirely different. I think what the commenter above unintentionally hit on is the grey area between many of the collaborative writing projects out there right now.

I think of Protagonize as a writer’s playground; aspiring authors (and some professionals) post ideas for stories, either something they’ve come up with offline that they want both direct and indirect feedback on from other writers, or just as way to flex their creative muscles. Aside from the direct feedback provided to authors by branch and chapter ratings, Protagonize creates an indirect feedback mechanism in the form of activity on the stories published. The popularity of your story, based on a combination of new branches or chapters posted, comments generated by the post, views, and number of favourites and page markers added, provides the author with feedback that they likely wouldn’t be able to receive any other way.

I’ve never really considered Protagonize as trying to accomplish the nigh-impossible task of creating entire novels based on the input of dozens or more users. This has long been the major point latched onto by critics of collaborative fiction writing: the more chefs with their hands in the pot, the more the story loses its flow, and the worse the quality level of the writing. I don’t disagree with this, but I think it definitely falls more under the umbrella of interactive fiction sites trying to reproduce the great (insert your nationality here) novel. They could go against the trend and tailor their sites more to the potential upside of collaborative fiction, instead of constantly reinventing the wheel, recreating failed (depending on your point of view) collaborative experiments of the past.

From the last three months of watching both stories develop and authors evolve in their writing techniques on Protagonize, I’ve found that we manage to (mostly) avoid this problem. Addventure-style stories generally fall outside of this critique, as they end up becoming the equivalent of a gamebook after they’ve been branched enough times. The collaborative novel writing conundrum reared its ugly head with the addition of linear stories, but thus far, the bulk of the content produced within linear stories has been limited to a handful of authors per storyline.

Interestingly, the addventure stories tend to bring in many more authors into the fold. It’s not uncommon to find that 20 or more authors have participated in a single addventure. However, linear stories seem to generate more of a small-team approach; two or three authors, sometimes a few more, usually round out even the longest linear stories published. This likely comes down to the fact that readers are able to follow a linear plotline much better, but they become slightly wary of contributing to a story where there’s only one possible ending. In addition, the longer the story gets, the more monolithic it appears, and by default limits the potential pool of authors to those who’ve participated early on in the process. Trying to write chapter 462 of a novel requires much more of a time investment (in keeping up with the storyline and plot twists) and fidelity to the storyline than writing a branch of an addventure, or even a late chapter of a short story.

This means that, generally speaking, the first few adventurous souls tend to produce the bulk of the material in a linear story. An excellent example of this would be Amo1143’s “Drop point“, which has been one of our most popular linear stories in the last month with nearly 40 chapters published. To throw some basic statistics out, the breakdown of chapter posts by author in the story so far comes out be nearly dead even. Three different authors have written portions of the story; two of them have posted 12 chapters each, and the other has posted 13. The trend continues among other linear stories. However, a popular addventure such as the currently top-ranked “Choose Your Own Adventure” has a similar 45 posts as of this writing, contributed by six different authors.

What I’m getting at with these high-level statistics is that to be a successful site in the collaborative writing arena requires the ability to both diversify your offerings — which we will be doing more of in the future — and to not limit yourself to lofty, difficult-to-attain goals such as generating entire novels. The concept is grand and I’m sure it’ll happen eventually, but coordinating dozens or hundreds of authors on a single story becomes like trying to herd cats. This medium excels at the distribution of small chunks of information, be it crowdsourcing written content or peer-to-peer file sharing systems; allowing users to develop a large selection of short stories instead of a single, elaborate tale is just that. It doesn’t require quite the cohesiveness that writing a novel entails, yet it still engenders that same sense of community and a common bond with other authors (perhaps moreso) that communal novel writing generates.

In any case, I think we’re doing pretty well so far, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter. What do you think is working well? What could we be doing better? What would you like to see added to the site in the future?

Tags: addventure,, collaboration,, linear,, novels,, opinion,, protagonize,, statistics,, suggestions,, writing

Twitter has been blogged about, covered by the media, and discussed to death countless times, I’m sure, but I’m thinking about it from a slightly different perspective. I’m trying to analyze how why it’s so successful and where that success lies in terms of application development; i.e. what can I learn from Twitter’s (and other microblogging platforms’) success, and what can I apply to my own products.

Something that struck my in the shower yesterday morning was how much Twitter reminded me of a certain period of my life. Back in the early-to-mid ’90s, I — along with many other socially-challenged folk I knew at the time — spent a lot of time sitting around, chatting online, sometimes mindlessly, sometimes with a bone to pick, but generally just because we had nothing else to do. Where did I spend much of this time? In the underground (uhm, yeah, well, that might be slightly overrated now) art scene on IRC (Internet Relay Chat, for those of you not familiar with it.)

IRC still exists; a last, proud bastion of the golden days of BBSes, MUDs, and the mostly pre-web (but not quite prehistoric) era of the Internet. I quit it cold turkey back when I was seventeen, in 1995, mainly because I was wasting an inordinate amount of time on it instead of doing schoolwork. Eventually, the combined foundations I built in both graphic design and software development, from discussions with other like-minded kids and twenty-somethings, helped me work my way into the web industry. I give it the props it deserves as it pretty much set the tone and pace of my career henceforth.

Since I’ve started using Twitter more frequently, I’ve started to see the resemblance to IRC. Semi-private conversations held in a public fashion; an obscene amount of egocentric grandstanding by larger-than-life internet personalities; blatantly opinionated people, many of whom hide behind a thin veneer of pseudo-anonymity; and a whole lot of what most would consider useless trash talk. Then, mix in a good bunch of mundane, bland minutiae from bored people commenting on their day, looking to generate conversation. The parallels are there in spades; I’d even wager that many of the people who frequent Twitter regularly today are the same people who moderated and monopolized IRC in the ’90s (or hell, probably even now — I wouldn’t know anymore.)

Of course, this last week and a half being dedicated to MIX 08 and SXSW, there’s a huge amount of worthless conference chit-chat that wouldn’t interest anyone who wasn’t actually attending those conferences — aside from discovering the fact that SXSW appears to be mainly about heckling bad interviewers and a whole lot of BBQ action.

Behind that hazy façade, though, you find some interesting, thought-provoking and insightful discussion. You just need to be paying close enough attention, and following the right people. I’ve made a concerted effort to follow most of the big names in technology, blogging, web development, and graphic design that I respect; at least, those who actually use Twitter. Some are worth it, some aren’t, and some post inane spam at epic rates.

But within that morass, I’ve managed to discover a local scene of people who work in or around my field, and discuss things that I’m actually interested in hearing about. Getting past the unsurprisingly high noise-to-signal ratio may be difficult, but discovering that local scene is interesting in that it lets me hook into a sub-current of conversation that I might not be privy to without following Twitter regularly. In addition, it let me discover a less obvious network of people in my field (or related to it in some way) in Vancouver, of which I would likely never have been aware of otherwise.

As a developer and as an entrepreneur, I look at Twitter as a bit of a Holy Grail; my products (thus far) are much more niche, but generating the same level of user engagement as does Twitter with a minimalist and almost developer intervention-free application is exactly what I’d like to accomplish with Protagonize and/or my future projects. They’ve managed to create a huge community of people who fundamentally depend on the service for a variety of reasons. Not only that, like Facebook, the system’s users spread knowledge of it virally, and it ends up becoming a necessity and no longer an option or choice, if you want to keep in touch with a specific segment of people. On top of that, from a site marketing perspective, Twitter is an invaluable tool: having people follow your product and subscribe to your updates gives you additional means to market your site or service at absolutely no cost, and lets users disseminate information about your product without requiring a guiding hand.

As Jason Calacanis, CEO of Mahalo, twittered earlier today — could Twitter have reached the tipping point in which their previously unique service has become completely mainstream? 

I’m still figuring the whole thing out — I realize that I’m late to the game; as I’m usually an early tech adopter, this is new to me. However, I also try to be quite discerning when adopting new technologies, as I’m one of those people who tends to stick with an application or service they believe in, through thick and thin.

I’d be curious to hear of others’ observations on the subject. Feel free to post your thoughts, or drop me a line on Twitter.

(Beware, this is pretty long, but I hope it’ll be of use to you.)

Curiously, until I launched Protagonize, I really hadn’t given much explicit thought to optimizing my site for search engines. I just kind of assumed that if people wanted to find me, they would, and if not, I didn’t really care. Of course, with a personal blog, it’s easy to blow off doing any kind of serious SEO work. I had no real incentive to get myself ranked higher, so why bother?

Along came Protagonize, shortly before New Year’s eve last year. After spending several months working on the site, I immediately launched into trying to get the site to rank higher in various search engines. Apparently, this is a slightly more difficult task than I had imagined. I’m by no means an expert (obviously not, since my blog’s PageRank currently ranks higher than Protagonize’s, for whatever reason), but since I did manage to generate a decent amount of daily traffic out of absolutely nothing, I figured I’d publish my unscientific findings so far and post updates as I experiment.

I’ll try and keep these concise, from the more general to the more specific. Feel free to suggest other techniques or alternatives, and I’ll add them to the list. I also keep track of various SEO links on del.icio.us, so feel free to subscribe to my SEO bookmarks feed there as well.

General SEO Tips

• Content is king. Really. Your spamblog isn’t going to generate much traffic — the more content you produce, and the better the quality, the more you have to work with. This is a given, but you’d be surprised how many people sit around bitching and moaning about lack of traffic when their site is a piece of crap to begin with. If you don’t have a good foundation to build on, you may as well stop here.
• Build your personal brand. There’s nothing wrong with being an individual and standing behind your site or product; in fact, many of the biggest breakthrough products and sites out there have a single, outspoken iconic visionary behind them. Think Steve Jobs, Kevin Rose, Jimmy Wales, Michael Arrington, Scott Guthrie, Robert Scoble, Om Malik, Nick Denton, Jason Calacanis, Evan Williams, Guy Kawasaki, Pete Cashmore, etc. The list goes on. Larger-than-life personalities, but each backing a site or corporation in which they’re seen as brand leaders and product evangelists. Keep working on your personal blog, and build a following. Write insightful, thought-provoking posts on topics you’re familiar with or passionate about. Or just make yourself known as an expert in your selected field. Technosailor has an excellent post elaborating on this topic here.
• Haven’t launched yet? Post previews. Post blog entries or even Flickr screenshots of your site or product. If it hasn’t launched yet, this will help generating some initial buzz, and will get your key search terms indexed before your site is even available.
• Use Firefox. Even if you use Internet Explorer or Safari (or heaven forbid, Opera) as your main browser, make sure you at least have Firefox installed. There are a variety of plugins available (see below) that will make your site marketing and management life much easier.

Self-Promotion & Marketing

• Submit to search engines. This is pretty much a given, and can be done automatically via a hundred different web tools. Hit up the big players — Google, Yahoo, MSN Live Search, and so on. There are others, too, but those are the three you need to make sure to be included in quickly.
• Get listed on social news sites. Hit up Digg, Reddit, Mixx, Propeller, Stumbleupon, etc. Create an account on each if you don’t have one. Fill out your profile, complete with your info and your site’s info. Then go and post your site. Some sites may not like this quite so much and consider it unsavoury behaviour (try and watch the terms and conditions of use before posting, but all the ones I’ve listed have allowed me to post my own content.) Traditional news/link filter sites like Slashdot or MetaFilter can also generate amazing amouts of traffic, but are much more difficult to get listed on as they depend mainly on editorial staff or community veto power to get onto the homepage. Either way, these kinds of sites (especially Stumbleupon and MetaFilter so far) have generated an avalanche of traffic for me.
• List yourself on social bookmarking sites. This goes hand-in-hand with the last step. Hit up del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, Yahoo!’s My Web, etc. Create accounts, list your site. With any luck, someone will have already done the deed for you, but if your site is brand new, getting a del.icio.us Popular listing for an evening can do wonders for your traffic.
• Submit your site. Are you (yet another) Web 2.0 startup? Hit up the usual suspects: TechCrunch, Mashable, Ajaxian, ReadWriteWeb, GigaOM. There are plenty of others out there. If you’re not sure of the appeal of your site, pick a slow news day to submit on. If you’ve got the next big thing — do the opposite. Pitch your site to the editors at prime time on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. Those are the days most likely to catch eyeballs.
• Submit your site, redux. Are you a niche site? Do you appeal to a smaller, specific segment of web users? In Protagonize’s case, I submitted the site manually (i.e. via email) to a variety of literary sites and blogs, interactive fiction sites and indexes, mainstream media sites, etc. This will help build up your credibility outside of the tech blogs (if, like in my case, you started with those.) Protagonize was featured on CBC.ca/Arts and will soon be covered in the Georgia Straight’s Techno Logic column — I count both of these articles as more important than most blog coverage I’ve had to date because they’re directly aimed at my target audience.
• Get setup on the traffic monitoring sites. By that, I mean setup a profile for your site on Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast at the very least. For very little effort invested, at worst you’ll gain some serious insight into your site’s audience, and with a little more effort, you may even generate more buzz and traffic to your site. There are a couple of others like Ranking.com that are smaller but may still be worthwhile. On top of the freebies, Netcraft, Nielsen//NetRatings and ComScore are also out there, but generally require paid accounts.
• Get listed in the bigger directories. DMOZ, Yahoo, etc. This can take a while, especially with the open directory (DMOZ) because they’re completely volunteer-driven. Protagonize still isn’t listed in the open directory (after over two months!), but I’ve done a little better with the others. This is especially important because Google’s own directory comes directly from DMOZ.
• Get in touch with startup and local tech bloggers. I ran into Tris Hussey of Maple Leaf 2.0 and Jevon MacDonald of StartupNorth.ca a few months back at the Office 2.0 conference and kept in touch with both of them. This turned into some decent coverage on both blogs, and contacts I can update with new site features or even new products down the line. Rob Lewis of Techvibes Vancouver is another one I plan on contacting regularly with updates.
• Blog religiously. I’m sure many people have a tough time with this, because I do. Writing is a bitch (except on Protagonize, /shameless plug/). But the more you write, the more of a persona you build up, the more people take notice. Especially if what you produce is quality. Talk about yourself, discuss your passions, evangelize your product. Either way, just make sure you keep writing.
• Feedburner. Assuming your site or service produces an RSS feed, you shouldn’t miss out on this. You can also embed Google AdSense advertisements in your FeedBurner feeds, now.
• Technorati. Make sure your blog pings Technorati with all updates. On the flip side, keep track of your blog reactions on Technorati to see what people are saying about you or your product. This can be very interesting to follow. Technorati posts also tend to get indexed by Google very quickly (i.e. within minutes), and if that happens, it’ll drive up your Google ranking (or generate one if you hadn’t already had one) in a hurry.
• Setup a Facebook page. This takes only a couple of minutes and lets you harness the viral beast that is Facebook. Even if you’re a hater, do it. It’s worth it. Then you can also tie into Facebook social actions and use their advertising service / platform to get qualified site leads on the cheap.
• Microblogging. You have Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, and Jaiku accounts, don’t you? Post your site on all of them. Information is king — so keep on spreading it. The viral nature of Facebook’s news feed alone can bring you huge amounts of traffic. Twitter and Pownce (especially if you have a lot of followers/friends) can give you an excellent boost, too.
• Create a Twitter account for your product. If you have a product, setup an account for it on Twitter and let your users follow it. Follow them in return and spread your updates out to an even larger audience. If you do this, though, make sure to update regularly. I’ve just recently setup a Twitter account for Protagonize and I plan on posting updates to it several times a week.
• List yourself in various wikis. From Wikipedia to AboutUs.org, there are a variety of wikis out there where you can get yourself listed. Since most are fully editable, this should be one of your easier tasks to accomplish. Also, while not completely a wiki, TechCrunch’s CrunchBase is worth adding your organization to, as well.
• Nurture your community. Building and nurturing a user community within your site’s confines is probably one of the most important things you can do to enhance your site’s rankings and build traffic. It all ties back into content quality, as well. There are a million explanations out there of how to go about doing this (and it’s not easy), so I’ll just refer you to Derek Powazek’s excellent (if slightly dated) book, Design for Community, and point you over to Web Social Architecture for further reference.

Site Tweaks and Optimizations

• Get your META tags straight. First things first. Make sure your META tags are within appropriate lengths for each field, and make sense. Various tools listed below will help you optimize these. Google AdWords can also help you narrow down appropriate keywords without actually paying for AdWords placements (in addition to searching each term you want to use to make sure it’s not completely inundated with results.) When browsing site sub-pages, if you can include a snippet of page content in the META description instead of a canned description from your homepage; that’s probably a better idea than reusing the same description everywhere.
• Make sure your page content makes sense to crawlers. Make sure your HTML TITLE tag is consistent and scores highly in SEO tests. Make sure there’s enough content on your pages (especially if you have aggregator pages) to allow for the page to be indexed properly. Try and stick within reasonable limits for total links on the page, headings, and important tag content (WebCEO is great for testing this.) Use semantic markup and make sure the most important content on your page is arranged in order of importance and is enclosed in appropriate tags (i.e. make sure headlines use H1, H2, H3 tags, etc.)
• Set your site up with Google Webmaster Tools. Google’s webmaster toolkit allows you to run a variety of site diagnostics and statistics, verify that your site has been properly crawled, check for HTTP errors during crawling, consolidate search results to a single domain/subdomain, setup sitemaps (see next item), etc. Very handy.
• Create a Google Sitemap. It’ll help Google index your site content properly. This is one that I have yet to accomplish as my site is completely custom-built and I’d need to accomodate Google by producing some kind of dynamically updated sitemap. There are a variety of tools out there to automatically generate a Google Sitemap from existing content, though, including for blogs packages like WordPress.
• Add a robots.txt file. See the Web Robots Pages for more info.
• Add social media links. For bloggers, there are a variety of modules that you can just plugin, but if you’re running a custom-built site, make sure to add visible links for users to fan you on Facebook, post your site on MySpace, follow you on Twitter, Digg or Mixx your site, etc. Let your users spread the word!
• Produce RSS feeds. Bloggers can disregard this since it should already be happening auto-magically for you… but if your product doesn’t already generate RSS feeds, do so. They’ll get picked up all over the place and the more content you have being spread around, the better for your site.
• Setup friendly URLs. Semantically meaningful URLs (for example, http://www.protagonize.com/story/joyride links to the currently featured story on Protagonize) will not only get indexed higher due to having keywords directly in the URL string, they’ll also be easier to remember for both yourself and your users. Consult your web host about setting up mod_rewrite (on Apache) or a 3rd party tool like Helicon’s ISAPI Rewrite 3 on IIS in order to rewrite friendly URLs for your site, if it can’t do it out of the box. Most blog software packages will handle this for you with some very minor customization.
• Build an API. I’m guilty of not having built an API for Protagonize out of the gate. I’m hoping to get something going within the next month or two, even if it’s basic, but I have so many features planned (and a day job) that it’ll be tough to squeeze in.
• Build a Facebook app. This one is a bit more extreme; if you have the time, resources, and will to build one, and if it can actually be of use to your users, building a Facebook application to pull Facebook users back to your site can be a major draw. Again, Facebook’s viral nature can lay down a world of hurt on your site if you happen to become popular, but if nothing else, this can be a good, free value-add to your existing membership.

Useful Tools

• Google Analytics. The obvious choice for stats tracking and site metrics. I don’t think I need to get into any detail here.
• DomainTools. This one actually came in quite handy. I accidentally came across this while searching for Protagonize entries on Google. I ended up at the DomainTools Protagonize.com listing and started tweaking away. Very useful.
• Use the SEO Workers Search Engine Optimization Analysis Tool. Yes, it’s a mouthful, but it works wonders when you’re optimizing page content, descriptions, and keywords. I can’t say enough good things about this one, and it’s totally free.
• WebCEO. A desktop application that I discovered via the UK’s Practical Web Design magazine. A totally free version is available that does a lot of SEO analysis and suggests performance optimizations for your site. They will, however, spam you like crazy. Be prepared to be emailed by them at least once or twice a week after downloading the app.
• Xinu. A nifty little site that lets you analyze your backlinks and social bookmarking site rankings.
• SEO blogs. There are quite a few out there worth checking out (and no, they’re not all horribly cheesy.) I’d recommend SearchEngineWatch, SEONoobs, GrayWolf’s SEO Blog, SEOmoz, SEOCracy, and the Google Webmaster Central blog are among my favourites.

Firefox Plugins

A quick list of can’t-live-without SEO and site marketing-related plugins:

• Firefox Web Developer Toolbar. Easy management of your META tags.
• SearchStatus Firefox plugin. Lets you monitor Google PageRank, Alexa and Compete ranks all in one handy Firefox status bar.
• Alexa Sparky Firefox plugin. Nice little graph of your Alexa rank and 3-month trend.
• Compete Site Profile Firefox plugin. I don’t use this one since I already get the Compete ranking via SearchStatus, but it’s available in case you like the added benefits.
• Firebug for FireFox. Not an SEO tool, but as a site operator you really ought to use it. :)
• Yahoo!’s YSlow for Firebug. Provides valuable site performance enhancement and optimization tips.
• SeoQuake. Recommended by a reader. Allows you to see many search engine parameters on the fly. Looks like it offers the possibility of some dodgy practices, though. (There’s also an IE version of this one.)

Whew, that was a lot longer than I expected. If this was of value to you, please let me know! Also, if you have suggestions or comments on things I have have missed, please comment here and I’ll make changes to the list as necessary.

Tags: seo, search, engine, optimization, howto, tips, tools, reference, resources