Best SEO Blog|Launch your site.

If you operate multiple blogs you’ll want to keep an eye on them. Most people know to sign up with an analytics service but there are other tools you can use. Here are some suggestions for you to look at. You may find alternative services that better fit your needs and expectations.

To begin with, you can add your blog feeds to IndividURLs (http://individurls.com/) and see at a glance which of your blogs has most recently updated. No one else can see your subscriptions, so this service helps you watch the progress of your blogging team.

Next, use a multi-website tracking tool. Some tools provide aggregate data for trends analysis. Some tools just let you add more than one site. If you’re analyzing server logs, you want to be able to manage your configurations easily. AW Stats (http://awstats.sourceforge.net/) is one example of a tool that lets you perform remote configuration management. Sitemeter (http://www.sitemeter.com/) tells me that they “will be introducing aggregated statistics in the next release of SiteMeter. If you have multiple SiteMeter accounts you will be able to aggregate statistics from each of these accounts including visits, unique visitors and page views.”

Manage your bibliography. If you’re like me you probably use spreadsheets out of pure laziness but there are actually free Bibliographic applications you can use to document your blog articles. Knowing what you’ve published, when you published it, where, and how it’s categorized can be pretty useful.

The more information you manage about what you publish on your blogs, the better you will be able to use your blogs to achieve your goals. A solid marketing campaign will help you promote any Web site but if you’re not using checks and balances to monitor your progress things will most likely slip through the cracks.

You only get one chance to actually “launch” a Web site. Once you’ve let the search engines start crawling it, all your incompleteness is out there on the Web, laid bare.

Many people, determined to “bring something to market” launch their sites before they are ready to go. If the site is going to be worth making a fuss about, it should be worthy of the fuss when the fuss is made.

We can all look back at what happened with Cuil’s search engine last year. They launched their site with a lot of hype and marketing buzz, attracted millions of visitors, and now their traffic has leveled off at a small percentage of a percentage of the initial traffic. The sadly ironic thing about Cuil’s failed marketing blitz is that the service is now a much better search engine than it was in July 2008.

Unfortunately, no almost one knows about Cuil’s improvements, new features, and virtually no one cares. They should have waited until they had more features ready — if only because they billed themselves as capable of taking on Google.

Microsoft tried a similar strategy with Live search three years ago. They told everyone in advance that they were willing to invest up to 5 years in building market share but people have steadfastly refused to ignore the timetable. That is, SEO pundits make noise about how worthless Microsoft is and yet 100 million people a month use Microsoft search. That’s sadly ironic, too.

Your marketing goals have to be in line with what you are able to deliver. Too many business people still believe in the days when vaporware rule the marketplace. The Internet pretty much makes vaporware a useless commodity — that is, if there is no substance to your product or service people can immediately find something else that does have substance.

That’s why it’s better to wait until the site really is ready. All the money-hungry investors in the world cannot change reality. If you let your investors call the shots, and they are demanding you launch the site before it’s ready, you are throwing their money away.

You’ll never get a second chance for a coming out party.

When you’re hunting with only a single bullet, you wait for the opportune moment and you take your best shot.

Through the years I have earned a lot of links by writing about other people’s Web sites. Of course, in the jaded world of SEO tactics and techniques, everyone now seems to know about using Web site reviews for link building. Since not everyone is yet doing it that technique hasn’t peaked out in its usefulness but here is a new angle to consider that will help keep you ahead of the SEO link building mob.

Write about other people, not their Web sites. It’s a subtle difference in some cases but there is more to the person than his or her Web site. You’ll find you get links from people who enjoy your interesting perspective about another person. We all love that human-interest factor.

It’s okay to be a bit formulaic because you’ll need to develop content that is relevant to your own sites. So the formula can be laid out like this:

My Site Topic + My Favorite Person In Topic + Sub-Topic = 1 Unique Article For My Site

Let’s say you sell jewelry and you’ve decided to create a microsite network. Now, this illustration is not a formula for promoting jewelry sites, it’s just an illustration. Your jewelry company operates stores in multiple cities, sells online, and participates in community/education initiatives. Hence, you create a corporate site, a retail site, and a partners/initiatives site. Where can you add copy to your network?

Technically, if it were me, I’d add articles to all three sites but most business people (in my experience) are too conservative to feature content about outside entities on their corporate sites and retail sites tend to be driven by CMS and Shopping Cart choices. But that still leaves the partnership/initiatives site.

This site can include feature articles about people who have made significant contributions (on any level, not just historic, news event quality contributions) to similar programs. Let’s say your jewelry company sponsors a scholarship at a local college. There are stories related to that college, your scholarship, and the recipients of your scholarship waiting to be written.

But there are other angles. You can write about other companies’ sponsorship of educational initiatives. You can write about high performing students in need of scholarships that you may not be able to help them earn. You can write about schools needing similar sponsorship.

In other words, the focus of the microsite can shift from being “Look how great we are for doing this” to “Hey, we want to help our community and we’re getting the word out about these needs and successes”.

When described in exactly those terms, which site do you think will attract more links and interest?