I’ve been having a look at the free reports and software that Ryan Diess has been giving out this week in the build up to the launch of his Perpetual Traffic Formula. I didn’t bother downloading his Cherry Picker software as I already have the full version of market samurai which does everything and more that Cherry Picker does. I’ve read people saying that these two software programs give different results, and asking which is most accurate but seeing as you can’t get fully accurate results for this kind of thing anywhere anyway, it seems a bit pointless to worry about that.

The two reports that have come out contain a few interesting stats and some solid bits of content, but most of it wasn’t new to me and won’t be news to anyone who’s done much search engine optimization. He starts with the ‘Perpetual Traffic Report’ showing some stats on the decline of pay per click traffic and a switch back to organic traffic which was (if true) pretty interesting, I have to admit I didn’t realise that sponsered ads got such a small percentage of clicks these days although I don’t do much PPC so that’s not surprising.

Getting to the meat of the first report, he claims that a combination of content, backlinks and activity will boost your rankings but that you MUST do all three and most people just concentrate on the first two. He emphasises that if google doesn’t see activity on your site in the form of comments, feed subscriptions and changing content then they will not rank your site highly. I’m not sure whether this is true, he talks about a google algorithm shift but seeing as google never realeases information like this I am currently taking his claim with a pinch of salt. It seems his course will teach you how to use google tools like feedburner to make it look like your site has a lot of activity, although he’s making the assumption that google uses these tools in it’s website search engine rankings.

Of course, results are king in my book. I’m looking forward to seeing what he comes up with in his course next week and if implementing it shows the massive gain in traffic that he is claiming it will then he obviously knows what he’s talking about!

The second report, the authority codes, is useful if you don’t know them but they’re not really secret codes they’re just search expressions to find high PR blogs that you can comment on to get links. If you don’t know how to do this then download them by all means.