Vanessa Fox. Nude.

The thing about Feedburner subscriber numbers is that Feedburner has to rely on the feed readers to report accurate numbers. If a reader doesn’t report or reports incorrectly, then the whole Feedburner stat is thrown off. In reality, subscriber numbers are even less useful to track than page views (my in-depth review of how Feedburner reports numbers on Search Engine Land explains why reach (the number of people reading your feed each day) is a better indicator of audience engagement than subscribers (for instance, since the total subscriber number includes those who subscribed but never read and those who subscribed on one service, then switched services and subscribed again).

Feedburner could make it easier. They could have handy historical charts for reach like they do for total subscriber numbers. Not that it would do that much good. We would continue to measure subscriptions like we do page views — more is better! Even if it’s not.

That the total Feedburner number is made up of lots of individual services with their own quirks makes measurement difficult as well. I would love to be able to see historical charts by service, to make it easy to pinpoint anomalies within trends. For instance, when Google Reader doesn’t report numbers one day, that’s not obvious from the overall count, but is when you compare subscriber numbers by service by day. But the only way to do that is to click through to each day and look at the pie charts. Or if you’re super geeky, you might manually put all the numbers into a spreadsheet.

Take this week. My total number went from 1279 on Monday to 1450 on Thursday. Just looking at the overall numbers, it looks like my subscriber base was steadily growing:

But then, Friday’s numbers dropped down to 1321.

What happened?

The only way to tell is to dive into each day’s numbers. Compare Monday:

to Tuesday:

Everything looks about the same except that my Netvibes subscribers went from 181 to 305. (This was around the same time they released their newest version in private beta.) This new Netvibes number stayed pretty constant on Wednesday and Thursday, but on Friday, dropped back down to 182.

Who knows what happened. Maybe Netvibes was double counting those users who moved to the new private beta (counting both their old accounts and new accounts)? Maybe upgrading their database just caused a glitch. In any case, it appears that the anomaly has been corrected.

Of course, this same type thing will happen (without correction) anytime a new service opens. People who previously had subscriptions on other services will try the new one, causing double counts. Which is part of why Rick Klau is right about reach being a better indicator of reader engagement. Although my total subscriber count went down yesterday, my reach number was way up (likely thanks to the fact that I actually wrote something for people to read).

Did anyone else notice a bump in subscribers then a subsequent dip this week? Or am I the only obsessed one?

For the recent webinar I did on link building, I was researching how use of social networks can help with SEO. Businesses can gain all kinds of value from social networking: build brand recognition, increase customer loyalty, help them be responsive to customer issues and better understand the audience, get more links and exposure… Er, etc.

But one value that is sometimes overlooked is increased opportunity to rank. I wrote about this a bit in the context of reputation management. But it can work for any search query you want to rank for. You can capture more positions in the SERPs if in addition to having content from your site rank, you can get content from social networks that point to your content to rank.

You can easily see this with Flickr.

1. Host images for your content on Flickr.
2. Use keyword-rich titles for the images.
3. In the image descriptions, link to the article using keyword-rich anchor text.
4. Er… profit!

Take, for instance, this article I wrote for Search Engine Land about Hakia’s Meet Others feature. Here’s an image, hosted on Flickr, that I used in the article:

And here’s that image at position #13 (and #14) for a Google search for Hakia Meet Others:

So, sure. Hosting the image on Flickr is great just for storage and organization. It helps me share what I’m doing with anyone who’s interested and who’s added me as a Flickr contact. I can get traffic from the link. But it’s also giving me another opportunity (in addition to the article itself, which is ranked #3 for the query) to rank. Sounds good to me.

On Tuesday, I gave a webinar with Rupali Shah for Search Marketing Now called SEO Strategies for Large Web Sites: Using Content to Build Links and to Drive Traffic. I talked about using viral marketing for linking building (you can watch the archive at that link).

Giving a webinar is different from speaking in front of people or as part of a live podcast. It’s like talking to yourself for 20 minutes. Is anyone listening? Is what you’re saying useful or are you just randomly babbling? At least with a podcast, I generally have someone else to talk to and mostly am seeing live chat and twitters about what I’m saying. “@vanessafox - you are randomly babbling” is immediate feedback.

In my part of the webinar, I talked about:

Why linking building is important
Authoritative, relevant links help your ranking in search engines, but also drive traffic and build brand awareness.

The different types of link building and when you should do each
You can do all kinds of link building, but I tend to group things into traditional link building and viral link building. I think you should try a combination of things, particularly since viral links tend to be cyclical (you get lots of traffic then no traffic), and more traditional links bring less, but more long-term traffic.

Important factors to consider when link building
Authoritative, relevant links are more valuable. These types of links give you the best results for ranking purposes as well for traffic. Don’t forget the anchor text. Sometimes people get so caught up in getting the link that they overlook that the content of the anchor text can be just as important as the link itself. You can have a million links to your site with the anchor text “buffy and angel” and that will never help you rank for “willow and oz”. You can influence external anchor text in lots of ways including, using descriptive, keyword-rich title tags and headings on your site, picking a keyword-relevant domain name, and linking to your content on social media and social networking with descriptive anchor text as those who see that link and post about it are likely to use the same anchor text.

What is viral link building?
Word-of-mouth marketing has been around forever, since Eve said to Adam, “hey, so I heard about this great apple when I was out walking the jungle. You should totally try it.” Today, of course, Eve would be sending Adam a virtual apple on Facebook, but the same general idea applies. Someone finds something cool and interesting (or delicious and full of sin) and tells their friends about it: in person (”I saw this great YouTube video…”), in email (”today is spam everyone you know, I mean “special friend” day; forward this email to 500 people or a house will fall on you”), by blogging about it or posting about it in forums, or in artificially constructed social settings where you have conversations with your “friends” by voting for stories you like.

They key to all of this — from the apple of sin and deception to the mentos/coke cocktail is that the content catches people’s attention. It could be super useful, really entertaining, highly educational, or just really weird. Possibly it’s full of sin. But it’s more than just the same old thing.

Last week, I spoke in Portland at an SEMpdx event about the emergence of social browsing on the web. Because people are browsing (whether it’s their Facebook newsfeed, to see what their friends have been doing or Digg to see what the top stories are) rather than searching for the answer to something specific, the content you make available for these browsers needs to be easy to scan, attention-grabbing, compelling enough to get the browser to leave what they’re doing and check out what you have to offer.

Remember this not only for headlines and descriptions when you’re submitting to social media sites and linking from social networking discussions (snappy headlines with initial caps, numeric digits, etc.), but when structuring the content itself (lots of bullets, numbers, short chunks of text…).

And don’t think that because you’re not in the most exciting industry in the world, you can’t come up with compelling content. What’s more boring than a blender? Until you put an iPod in it!

Targeting your audience
With viral efforts, you have two audiences: your target audience who’s going to come to your site and buy stuff (or do whatever it is you want people on your site to do) and the influencers who can reach your target audience. Figure out who both are, what they’re interested in, and where they go online. It doesn’t do a lot of good to spend all of your marketing efforts to get your content on the home page of Digg if none of your audience reads Digg.

There are all kinds of social media sites for just about every topic you might imagine. All it takes is a little research.

The content needs to be relevant for your audience as well. If you write an article about mountain bikes and your site is about knitting cozies for candlesticks, then you may get a bunch of mountain bikers to your site, but the conversion rate on that traffic may be a little low. Not that I’m saying there’s zero overlap between the mountain biking and candlestick cozy knitting audiences, I’m just thinking there’s a chance that the knitting council of america or the candlestick fans unite Facebook group might be a better bet.

Keeping your audience
Once you’ve got the candlestick fans on your candlestick cozy site, let them know what else your site has to offer. Make sure your viral content page has a description of the overall site to provide some context and think about what other pages of your site would be relevant for the candlestick-loving crowd. Maybe your lantern cozy knitting pattern! Or your selection of incense. Now that you’ve brought all of these visitors to your site, don’t lead them to a dead end. (Note the huge “order your totalblender” call to action on the Will it Blend? site.)

Listening to your audience
The internet is super awesome in a lot of ways, but one of them is that you can listen in on and join the conversations about your brand. Take advantage of this. Don’t just spam social networking sites with links. Listen to what people are saying — not just about your brand, but your competition and the industry as a whole. Get engaged with the community and you’ll not only learn a lot, but you’ll build brand loyalty and make your customers happy. Who doesn’t want happy customers?

Creating really useful content that is relevant to your customer base doesn’t guarantee popularity on social media sites, tons of traffic, lots of links into your site, and an influx of buying customers, but it sure seems like a pretty good bet.

In August of 2005, Google Sitemaps was a fledging new product (it launched in June with little more than an XML definition, a Python script, and a submission UI) and we were looking for a way to let our users know when we added features. Google has lots of blogs now, but it had very few back then. The main Google blog was going strong, of course, and AdSense and AdWords had popular blogs as well, but most other products didn’t. (Now there are more than 70!)

Matt Cutts had been out talking to webmasters for years and had recently started a blog of his own. I worked with Karen Wickre, who leads the Google corporate blogging efforts, and our product marketing manager on the best way to launch this crazy new blog idea. As those of you who blog know so well, launching a new blog is a huge undertaking. You need a plan for updating it with fresh and interesting content and when blogging isn’t your full-time (or even part-time) job, that plan becomes not only more difficult, but more vital.

At first, the blog mostly fulfilled its original purpose. We posted when we added features to let our users know to go check them out.

The first few posts were about Sitemap index files, Sitemap file naming, and the launch of mobile Sitemaps.

And Then, A Shift
However, a curious thing happened. Looking back now, it doesn’t seem quite so curious, but at the time, it was a substantial shift that was amazingly positive for our team (and in my view, for the industry). Our team started thinking of ourselves — our product, our blog, our related Sitemaps Google Group — as serving all the search engine-related needs of the webmaster community, not just their Sitemaps protocol-related needs. (The first non-Sitemaps specific post seems to be from October 2005 about using advanced operators to learn more about what Google knows about your site.)

We started working even more closely with Matt, who after all, has more experience than anyone at Google in knowing what webmasters want and need. The blog began changing focus as part of an entire team shift, which was reflected in the product as well. In April of 2006, we took our Sitemaps documentation and merged that with the existing webmaster guidelines and other documentation, worked with the support team who tirelessly answered webmaster email questions, and created an entirely new webmaster help center. By August 2006, this shift from Sitemaps support to webmaster support was complete. It was clear through our now fairly robust support suite (tools, blog, discussion forum, and help center) that what we offered went well beyond “Sitemaps” and a name change was in order.

The Launch Of Webmaster Central
We launched Webmaster Central, which incorporated all of these components into one comprehensive offering. As part of that, we changed the name of the Google Sitemaps product to Google Webmaster Tools, the name of the Inside Google Sitemaps blog to the Google Webmaster Central blog, and we created a multi-category Google Group, with major sections to reflect the types of issues webmasters were discussing in our previous, less-accurately named “Google Sitemaps” group.

This was an exciting change. It paved the way for a number of positive initiatives: we could more easily expand the scope of the product since it was positioned as a comprehensive webmaster resource, so both internally and externally, things like Sitelink information and geographic location control made more sense; creating the new “webmaster trends analyst” position was a logical extension of the team, as the value of understanding the issues of the webmaster community easily complimented a comprehensive webmaster support system; and specific to the blog, it made even more sense to get various search-related teams to write blog posts and share what they were doing with the webmaster community.

Out of Beta! Comments!
In February 2007, we took Webmaster Tools out of beta and we enabled comments on the blog. Not long after we launched in the initial blog in 2005, other teams began adding blogs about their products, but as with launching a blog, enabling comments is not a small undertaking. You have to understand the time involved to read the comments, research information when need be, and reply when appropriate. When we enabled comments, Jonathan Simon, our first webmaster trends analyst, did a great job in managing that. We were the first existing blog to enable comments (although the Librarian Central blog launched with comments enabled from the start, so they were technically the first to have comments.)

The Intricacies of Corporate Blogging
While I was at Google, I managed the blog: I wrote posts, worked with those on my team and on other teams to write posts, kept track of stats, and stayed in close contact with Karen Wickre about what Google was doing generally with blogging. Corporate blogging is different than personal blogging. You have to remember that you’re not only representing yourself — you’re representing your team, your product, and the entire company.

When you’re blogging for yourself, you may have a sense of your audience, but with corporate blogging, this is even more critical. You want to deliver the information your audience is looking for in a timely, accurate way. We got ideas for blog posts a number of ways: from issues people raised in the forums and elsewhere on the web, from questions people asked or presentations we gave at conferences, and from internal Googlers who had things they wanted to talk about.

It’s Only Gotten Better Since I Left! (Heh, what does that say about me…?)
Maile Ohye has taken over a lot of the blog management responsibility, and the blog is ROCKING. The variety of topics and writers have continued to increase and the quality of the information they publish is fantastic. So, as you might imagine, I was ecstatic to see that the blog had won the Search Engine Journal Best Search Engine Corporate Blog of 2007. I know how hard everyone worked to get the blog to the place it is now, and how passionate Googlers are about providing useful and timely information via the blog. I cannot tell you how happy I am that webmasters find it to be a valuable resource. I never imagined, back when we first had discussions about launching a blog in mid 2005, that it would grow to what you see today, and its success is definitely the result of people you see (like Matt and Maile) and people you may not (like Karen Wickre).

Little known fact! Find it difficult to remember the long URL of googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com? Just type in kirklandwc.com. It redirects to the blog. What’s kirklandwc, you might ask? Well WC stands for “webmaster central” and the team is based in Kirkland!

Want another tip? All the old posts from the Sitemaps blog as still available, but they’re difficult to get to since the home page URL redirects to the new blog. Check out some of the highlights of the old blog or search through the archives.

And Google isn’t the only one dispensing webmaster-centric advice. Yahoo! often posts webmaster-specific information on the Yahoo! Search Blog, and Microsoft recently started a webmaster-specific blog as part of their Live Search Webmaster Center. Along with the engines’ discussion forums and their active presence at conferences and online discussions around the web, those involved with search marketing have access to more official information than ever.

It’s like that Coke commercial on the hill with the flowers and the singing. Maybe we should make the engine reps re-enact that commercial at SMX West….

You Twitter haters can say what you want about it, but it surely is helping fulfill the early promise of the web to make the world smaller.

Yesterday, I asked (via Twitter) about everyone’s favorite Mexican food appetizer, as I was making chicken enchiladas for Buffy night and wanted input on what to serve with that. Within 10 minutes, I had nearly 15 replies. The verdict? Chips and salsa are big favorites, as is guacamole, queso, and the traditional appetizer, everyone’s favorite: tequila. (So, of course, I had to make them all. Well, I didn’t actually make tequila. I didn’t have any agave plants handy.)

Speaking of Twitter’s usefulness, I also learned that today that Britney Spears lost custody of her kids. If not for Twitter, I would have such more limited knowledge about the world around me.