Posted on Feb 29th, 2008

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A few weeks ago I published my Link Attraction Factors report over on Read/WriteWeb and the response was awesome. I also made two tools: a keyword checking tool and a title checking tool.

The keyword checking tool
Enter a keyword and the tool will return data on popular stories on Digg that mentioned that keyword. The average story in my database got 299 links and this tool displays the difference between that average and the average number of links accumulated by stories using the word.

The title checking tool
Enter a title and the tool will breakdown the words and display the effect they had on the link accumulation of popular Digg stories. This tool is good for copywriters looking to find “words that word”. The scores are displayed in an easy to learn from way.

There have been a bunch of great blog posts about them, and some people have said some nice things:

I love it! Dan has developed a fascinating resource and I am sure it will only improve with time and tweaks.
-Chris Garrett

I love to see people passionate about their craft who work hard to develop tools and products that help the community. Many people have created Digg tools and Dan has worked hard to create a new, unique tool of his own like his LAF tool. Simply plug-in your future Digg submission title, hit Calculate, and it will return the potential effectiveness of each word contained within your title. The keyword effectiveness is crosschecked with titles of past successful submissions. A fun tool that I’m sure many people will get a lot of use out of.
-Brendan Picha

Great job, Dan! You’ve helped the industry take a huge leap towards quantifying the value of social media optimization.
-Hugo Guzman

Dan summarizes a large amount of Digg front page data to show us what categories typically get the greatest number of links. Interesting read, and I look forward to seeing other great studies from him in the future.
-Nowsourcing

This is an amazing tool.
-Troy Deck

This tool is great! Will try to write better titles using this tool in the future. Thanks for your great effort.
-Robert de Bock

Never one to get complacent I’ve also developed an XML API version of the title checking tool and a Wordpress Plugin version of the same tool.

LAF XML API
You can access the LAF (Link Attraction Factors) database via a new XML API by sending your title through a URL (GET) variable like this:

http://www.linkattraction.com/api.php?title=this+is+a+test+title

The API will return an XML document of your results that looks like this:

<titleresults>
	<title>this is a test title</title>
	<score>-6.96%</score>
	<word>
		<name>this</name>
		<score>-5.26%</score>
	</word>
	<word>
		<name>is</name>
		<score>-0.87%</score>
	</word>
	<word>
		<name>a</name>
		<score>-0.16%</score>
	</word>
	<word>
		<name>test</name>
		<score>2.29%</score&gt
	</word>
	<word>
		<name>title</name>
		<score>-30.79%</score>
	</word>
</titleresults>

The average number of links is ~299, and the scores are calculated by comparing the average number of links accumulated by stories using each keyword in their titles against the average. They’re displayed in percentage format.

WP-LAF
This is a plugin for the wordpress that checks a title against the LAF (Link Attraction Factors) database. The plugin will breakdown the words in your post title and display the effect they have on link accumulation.

A plugin version of the LAF Title Check tool, it uses the XML API LAF database interface. For more information about the LAF database, read the report.

Download the plugin now.

How to install WP-LAF

1. 1. Extract the WP-LAF folder from the zip file
2. 2. Upload the WP-LAF folder to your the plugins directory on your server
3. 3. Click the ‘Activate’ link for WP-LAF on your Plugins page (in the WordPress admin interface)

So go, check them out and let me know what you think.

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