The other day one of my clients shot me an email about a site I have not worked on in a while. A highly trafficked private image tracking website that shall remain nameless in this case that needed to not only display large amounts of images at once, but do it quickly.

Page load times were below the 5 second mark but being a scalability engineer at heart, I knew I could get the site under 1 second page loads with a little work. The first step was to put a bullet in the dynamic images. They had moved to using the GD library to render thumbnails a quarter of the size of the larger images. Some of them being larger than 5 mb in size and 3200×2500 + in resolution. Doing this over and over again on a page of 25 thumbnails is quite intensive. Simply caching a static version of the image cut load times of the pages back to the 1.65 second mark.

Next, non of the static images on the site had any type of cache control or expires headers.  This is much easier to do when all of you images are in a certain location:

Version 1 - Filetype Directives > Add this to an .htaccess file and it will only cache the allowed extensions.

<FilesMatch ".(flv|gif|jpg|jpeg|png|ico|swf)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=2592000"
</FilesMatch>

Version 2 – Cache it all > The method I took in this case was to simply use an .htaccess file in the root images folder containing:

Header set Cache-Control “max-age=2592000″

The result? First page-loads stay in the 1 second range, and cached views load in less than half a second! A great feat when you are getting a million plus hits a day.

What did we learn: static images are your friend, a lot of people like to use the GD lib / imagemagick lib because they are easy and you do not have to worry about file management. But, it takes much longer to render those images every time than to render them once and then copy() them to the server and cache them out. If you need some php post a comment and maybe ill through up some source.

I should also note we obtained the 1.65 second base load by pre-caching images on upload. That way the user never actually has to generate the thumbnail on page view. It’s generated on upload so the user simply caches it as soon as the page comes up.

With LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) being the latest tool in the belt to thwart spammers, LSI has not only changed the way content is looked at but incoming links as well. While having incoming links is important, their effect is now lessened as not just any link will help your rankings anymore. The idea is to build a theme of links to all of your pages, or deep link them.

For example, deep linking to many pages within a website using anchor text that relates to the “theme” of the page is much more crucial than having a bunch of links back to your homepage. Anchor text keywords must also be thematically altered for inbound links to any one page. If this sounds confusing let me try and clear this shit up. Lets say the page you are linking to is about the “flu.” Right off the bat, LSI would determine if the phrase “naturally” occurs within the domain name [ie. www.fluhelp.com]. Next, LSI would look for some variations of related key phrases that could/should be used within the anchor text of the links:

“stomach flu”
“flu symptoms”
“bird flu”
“common cold”
“flu treatments”
“flu vaccine”
etc…

This is not a new practice by any means. Any real, decent SEO has probably been using themed strategies to achieve top rankings for years as the natural theming builds much stronger rankings and content. Most people who are new to the game think these new techniques have derived from the introduction of LSI technology when in fact “themed websites” have just been a closely guarded secret.

For some reason people think Digg is the only website that can send them traffic in their social media campaign. I am here to tell you a secret so devious, so true in nature that it may be shocking: Digg is not the only source of social media traffic. Whether you have been unpleasantly banned from Digg, or you are looking for a new network to establish yourself in, it’s time to start looking.

I am not an SEO and have no formal SEO training (who needs it?) but I do know that relying on Digg alone is pretty much like relying just on organic search rankings. You can’t put all your eggs in one basket, certainly not when it comes to social media marketing.

Digg as a time waster.
Obviously reaching the front page of Digg can bring a lot of goodies but let’s look at something else for once. The time and effort you spend trying to get there. For most Digg users trying to make the front page may seem like luck while for some it seems like every post becomes popular. While there is a small bit of luck involved it’s more Digg itself that has become the problem. The community is full of highly volatile users who love to bury content at even the slightest hint of linkbait.

Which is better in the end?
You can spend countless hours trying to get the immature Digg audience to promote your content, or you can move on. Move on to a variety of new networks that not only drive traffic and backlinks but help build a more targeted audience. For most, if you put the amount of time into other networks that you do at Digg, you will reap much larger rewards.

Design Float [Design]
A network focusing on design across many mediums, Design Float does not send much traffic but gives you access to many bloggers in the niche.

Bazooka Buzz [General News]
This is a Swedish network that sends a few thousands hits per popular story. The great part, stories can be written and submitted in English.

eBaumsWorld eLinks [Offbeat]
eBaums world has been around for a long time and has the power to drive a lot of traffic and links. Funny images and videos are the norm so if that’s your niche you are good to go. On another note the kid who started the site (Eric Bauman) went to my high school and turned the website into a multi-million dollar giant over the course of 2 years. The website started with videos of teachers getting pissed off in class at him for pulling pranks.

Cracked Pipeline [Offbeat]
This is more of a humor based network that you can exploit like Fark. If you are taking an offbeat approach to your linkbait, this is a network you defiantly want to try.

Meneame [General News]
A popular Spanish social media site that can easily send you a few thousand hits per submission, and even more links to go with it.

Lipstick [Celebrity]
Think of Lipstick as the Reddit of celebrity news. It won’t be crashing your server but a decent post can bring targeted traffic and great backlinks.

SugarLoving [General News]
By submitting your content here, you run the chance of having it pushed to other blogs in the Sugar Inc. network.

Keep in mind that I left out a few that you should already know like Mixx, Sphinn, Shoutwire, and Fark as I have covered them in various posts. Also don’t forget about all of these social networks as well.

A lot of making something popular in social media is who you know. Exercising a few of these techniques and learning from your mistakes will allow you to create better content, and network with people who can make it more visible. If you want your content to go popular on social networks, it has to be good. People won’t just promote it because it’s there. They may promote it just because of the headline, but not just because its there.

The headline is not up to par.
Without a kick-ass headline your dead before your pretty much DOA. Headlines are a tip that I seem to stress over and over because even still people do not listen. I have seen great content that fails on social media sites because the writer decided to use a dumb ass title that had little or no bite to it. Take a few minuets to write up a list of other possible titles, and see if you find one that you like.

Who da’ fu©k is you?
One thing I have found that a lot of big bloggers hate, is when their content is submitted by a nobody on a given social network. Why does it bother them? Someone who spams and does not take the time to build an account often does not have the number of friends or likely visitors to promote content and make it popular. If you are not yet in a position to submit your own content, make sure whoever does is up to the task. Don’t waste your good content on nobodies.

Find your target.
Finding your target audience has also been covered about a billion times. Pretty much every type of marketing requires you have some idea of what your target audience is and social media is no different. Even if you are just trying to drive some traffic to a blog you will need to place your content in front of the right eyes. There are many ways to do this and its imperative you take advantage if you want you content to become more popular.

Why do you submit at dinner time?
Timing can be very important, especially on some social networks like Digg, Mixx, and Sphinn. Submitting your content in the evening and late at night seems to do no good so learn from other’s trials. If content performs better earlier in the day then why do you continue to submit your content at 5 PM? The topic can also come into play with the time. For instance business related news probably won’t perform well on the weekends considering most business takes place during the week. Think about what you are doing when you go to submit your content.

How does it look?
Make your content easy to read, easy to navigate, quick, and to the point. Remember you are online and people move fast. Dragging out every bit of information will not get you anywhere, and most likely create more people who don’t like your site than those that do. Make sure some part of the content is above the fold and the font is easy to read. Another fun tactic is to insert an eye catching image or graphic to go along with your content. Also take into account your ad spaces and whether or not there may be to many, if I go to a site and the first thing I notice are three giant AdSense blocks that tab will be closed in seconds.

Content with no audience.
Lets face it, people like what they like and chances are that more popular topics will be easier to create a website around. If you are creating content for crap flavored soda you might have a hard time getting people to read about it. In order to have something become popular, you will need a large amount of people interested in that topic or niche. Even if your niche is not that popular, learn to go outside of it and draw traffic with the use of other niches.

Tag and categorize correctly.
This is very important on sites like Mixx, and more importantly StumbleUpon where your tags and categories will play a heavy role in the content’s visibility on that network. Use big broad keywords that describe your content and appeal to large groups of people. For instance instead of tagging your post about Dog food with the keyword “dog food,” you can use terms such as “pets”, “animals”, “food”, and others. Broad categories receive more traffic which means more possible eyes for your content.

Be prepared for failure as it is inevitbale. Not every piece of content will become viral and bring you all kinds of traffic, comments, and backlinks. That’s why its important to know where you can go wrong, and capitalize on those making the same mistakes. Practice using these tips and I can assure you that your content will get better and better. I find that most of the people who fail are those thinking strictly about monetary gains. There is nothing wrong with this but most of the time people have a tendency to overlook some of the easiest ways to make the content more valuable.

The other day I was going through some of the recent profiles on Twitter who added me as a friend. While picking through them I remember thinking “dam, I wish there was a tool to rank my followers.” So I made one. The FollowBack tool will give you a vary basic but powerful ratio to rank the people following you. Based off the ratio of how many friends/followers a given user has you can draw a lot of information from what they use their account for. FollowBack will give you three different color coded levels that indicate whether or not a person is worth following back. The tool can also help you hunt down spammers and those with suspended/private accounts which do not help you when trying to build a powerful account.

Another nice Twitter tool that has popped up is Qwitter. What it does is it check your followers and notifies you of people who have stopped following you on Twitter. The service checks as often as possible but with a large amount of friends and followers it all depends. You will get an email letter you know whats good, as well as a link in every email to remove yourself from the Qwitter service. All you need to do for sign up is enter your email address, and your Twitter user name. Then your good to go, the service will do everything else for you. Again, just another little tool for anyone trying to build a power account over at Twitter. These two will defiantly help you.

With all of the social news and bookmarking sites out there people tend to miss out on big traffic because they don’t pay attention to lesser known social networks. With a little work, I can tell you that Fark can drive well over 100,000 hits a month to your site if you know how to get your foot in the door. Here’s some tips on getting into Fark, and then owning it for your personal gain.

Format For Success
Fark has their own way of doing things that most Digg, and Mixx users may not be used to. First off, no capitalizing every word in your titles, write them out normally. Also make sure to add a funny tagline to your submission. Although Fark has a different atmosphere, explicit content is still defiantly not allowed and neither is NSFW content. Obviously the humor does better on Fark so the funnier you make your title, body, and submission, the better your chances are of diving traffic by the hundreds of thousands.

Become a Power User
Having power user status will bring you more to play with as usual. On Fark, the top submitters can be found right on the homepage making it a bomb place to get your submissions noticed if you put in the effort. Start submitted something easy like humours content to build up your account. Submit quality content and let your reputation build, in no time you will begin to see what kind of benefits having your submission visible to the masses include.

The Fark This Plugin
Another tip is to grab the Fark This extension for Firefox. If you are looking to build your account and make your day a lot easier than this should be your new best friend. the plugin can take a lot of work getting your submission almost totally ready for you including title, url, source, and topic choosing. Combine the ease of submission with the endless amounts of funny content on the internet and you have a recipe for success.

Fark Your Logo
Send a copy of your logo (72px x 27px) to Drew @ Fark.com. The image will worked into your submissions and can really make your link submissions stand out with the use of a good looking logo. This is also important for when you start to submit your own content. Don’t flood the site with your own content and remember that you walk a thin line when you are submitting your own goods. People may like what you submit, but if they notice you are going all out for self promotion they may not be as nice.

Humor Is King
Creating funny content also does not have to be exactly what it seems. Creating humorous titles for relatively informative posts can work as well. However, if you are really looking to just boost traffic then you should be looking into submitting for funny content. It performs well on Fark and if you don’t care about the traffic being targeted, your in business. Only 5% of submissions make it to the front page and most of them are “funny / humorous”, and “unbelievable”.

So the bottom line is quite simple. Fark, like every other social network has a type of content that does better over anything else. Here are some main points to remember and recap on:

• Submit humours content to build your account.
• “Stupid / Unbelievable” breaking news also performs very well.
• Only 5% of submissions see the front page.
• FarkThis plugin can save you crap loads of time.

I did a post not to long ago on Twitter Grader and I must say this tool blows it out of the water. twInfluence gives you information that is actually interesting such as your network reach, veloticty, acceleration, and more from your Twitter account. Over all it help you show what type of influence you have in the Twitter network.

While more and more people start to realize the power of Twitter when you get an audience, tools like this will be even more usefull. Looking at it from a sales standpoint it would be an added bonus to tell your clients you have a 1 Million plus user reach on Twitter. Having real stats like this when doing consutancy is a bonus when it comes to social media.

Here are some other cool feature that would be nice to have. Whether or not these are all possible for a third party service I don’t know but it would be cool.

Active Followers - Check the followers to see who is active, and who has not updated in months.

Link Tracking - It would be nice to see how many times a shared link appears across your network.

Spam Buster - Another idea would be a feature that checks the users of your network for common signs of spam and displays a warning about those users.

Geographic Features - A nice Google Maps mashup would be nice… Show all of your network that has their location set, on Google Maps.

If you have any ideas on features, or use of the tool leave a comment. I feel like a smmGuru Twitter tool is on the way for my readers.

To build up backlinks there are many different ways you can go about getting the job done. Its an important process to developing long term standings and traffic within search engines, and other websites alike. With a little time, creativity, and these tips you can build strong backlinks by the masses.

1. Donate / Sponsor
If you can through something relatively cheap like an iPod to a site running a contest, you will get a pretty good amount of exposure. Most of the time what happens is the people holding the contest announce the contest and who sponsored the winnings. Everyone who then participates or covers the contest will write something about it, and who is putting up the goods (you.) A very solid method for building backlinks, and as a bonus they will be solid links without “nofollow” attributes.

2. Do Some Interviews
Whether you are being interviewed, or you are doing the interview there is a way to get some links. If you are doing the interview, make sure to let everyone involved know when its published so they can link to it or post about it on their website. If you are the interviewee than work links into your interview. If you mention something relevant, insert a link to it. Its that easy, and most people don’t mind a little self promotion.

3. Link To Others
Most people visit the sites linking to them when they pop up in WordPress’s Admin dashboard. If you find a piece of content that works good with what your writing, link out to it. More than likely if you do it enough people will return the favor. And if you do not get the link, look at it this way: Your post is strengthened with relevant content, and you will be noticed by the other site in some way.

4. Interlink Your Posts
Don’t be afraid to go back and edit content that has performed well, to include links to your newer content. For example if you have a list on Twitter resources, you could go back and edit it to include links to some new Twitter resources you have put together. The high trafficked list will then be pushing juice to your new content along with traffic increasing your chances of people commenting, sharing, and coming back.

5. Submit More Guest Posts
Guest posting has been glorified pretty much everywhere so I don’t think I need to get to in depth with this one. Obviously you want to be writing articles for relative sites, that of course are within your niche. Start at the top with the best sites in your niche (most traffic) and work your way down until someone takes the post. Also make sure you are not inserting to many links into the post. It could hurt your image, and more importantly your chances of coming back. If you want to do another guest posting on a site, make sure your first one is top notch.

6. Run A Contest or Two
Another technique that has been covered everywhere is running a contest. This is very easy and can be done many ways with the most popular being comment contests. Just make sure whatever you are giving away has some sort of value. For newer blogs, most people are not going to give two shots about winning advertising on your blog. If you cant afford a cash prize or iPod to give away, see if you can find a site that will sponsor the contest in return for a review post or something of that nature.

Increasing your social media credibility will defiantly make your job a lot easier when it comes to promotion. Having power user status on various social media sites allows you to funnel traffic in a number of ways, to pretty much any page you want. Obviously, this has its many benefits but in order to get that status you need some credibility. Here’s how to get it.

1. Pick a Good Name
If you are looking for long term social media traffic and not just rankings, don’t pick a spammy keyword filled name. If you are not using your own name pick something original that people will not shy away from. In other words, don’t make your name BigAssSerialKiller. People will most likely stay away from you.

2. Try Not to Spam
Most likely you are going to submit some of your own content sooner or later. Just try to save it for later once you have established power user status. Submitting your own content on a new account will quickly give you spammer status and you don’t want that now do you. Instead, take some time to flesh out your account by submitting other good content you find. Or just go to a popular website and submit their content.

3. Don’t Be A Vote Whore
This is one of those situations where quality beats quantity. If people see you voting for everything under the sun including the most crap of posts, you will get nowhere real fast. Take your time to pick through the content and vote for the good stuff and the stuff you find interesting only. Start to friend people who submit relevant content and don’t go crazy on this objective either. Sure you can go crazy and friend everyone in your niche but stay away from going nuts and making everyone on that network your friend. Chances are no one will return the favor if they notice what you are doing.

4. Get a Dam Picture Already
If you don’t have an avatar in your profile I can almost guarantee people will skip right over you. It’s the first tell tale sign that you are to lazy to be worth looking into. I would recommend a real photo of yourself, not those gay cartoon looking avatars. People respond much better when they see another human, and not a skull and crossbones ya dig.

5. Cross Link Your Social Sites
Chances are that if you are in a certain niche you have friends on multiple social networks in the same niche. Look for these friends on every social network you use. Creating a network like this will not only strengthen your account but make you more visible, and more importantly more prominent in your niche.

6. Perfect Timing
Most of the social media sites you are using have predominantly U.S. traffic. Use that to your benefit when you are submitting content. Chances are if you submit a story at 9:00PM you will have a hard time getting it to the front page or voted up. Submit your content early in the day, or in the afternoon when there is more people scouring across all of the social networks. The more people that are online when you submit, the better your chances.

7. Have Depth In Your Posting
Not submitting your own content at first is important, but you also have to diversify what you are submitting. Try to submit real news stories, or news related to your niche. Submitting 100 pieces of content a week on making money online will most likely place you in the spammer category to those who see what you have submitted.

Before you can use social media for your own personal gain you must create some credibility, and authority. Without those two key components, you will never be able to create a large enough audience to be of any use. There are other routes you can take, and if you are looking to spam for some quick traffic then by all means go ahead. It will work, but be warned the aftermath will be worse. Not only will the traffic die out quickly but you will alienate everyone on the network and possibly get your accounts banned.

There are quite a few ways to build traffic, and decent backlinks using Digg. This particular idea uses the sites Digg links to, instead of the Digg article pages to generate traffic and backlinks. And if your lucky, they won’t be no-follow backlinks.

This method does not have to be used just on Digg either. Any relevant social media news site will work. What it comes down to, is finding content that is going to become popular or has just become popular. Once you find the content, chances are there will be an option to leave a comment. Very simple, go and leave a comment on the content page and on the Digg/Social Site you found it on. The idea behind this is that the content page itself most likely does not have many links pointing to it yet. Once it becomes popular (espcially with Digg) the page will recieve tons of exposure and dozens of backlinks. That linkjuice will now be passed on to you. Propeller, Newsvine, and Shoutwire are some other great places to snipe.

Keep in mind that you should keep any and all comments relative to the content. Spam most likely won’t stick once the traffic gets jacked up becuase people are going to all over that page and notice you are simply dropping a link.