CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) are efficient, typically distributed host environments that are in business to host the files that make your site go. These files include your images, videos, javascript libraries, stylesheets – really anything you want that isn’t used on the server side when compiling your pages.

CDNs can reduce your load times for a couple of reasons. First, referencing files from a SINGLE endpoint (ie the CDN) reduces the number of external connections that have to be made during load. Again, the more outside servers you load dependencies in from, the longer your site will take to load. Sites performing at the highest standards will typically load from as few storage locations as possible. Second, CDN hosts are optimized for really one thing: delivering content.

Bandwidth costs associated with delivering files are usually much cheaper through a CDN vs the cloud on which you host your site itself. For example, MaxCDN.com offers 1Tb of traffic for $40. That’s cheap.

We’ve implemented a CDN with both TweepMe and Spider.Cat and the results are dramatic – especially, with Spider.Cat which is mostly ajax driven. It’s important to get the Spider.Cat search interface loaded up as quickly as possible.

So if you are truly trying to build a world-class web app or site, be sure to choose the right hosting environment (Rackspace Cloud, Amazon EC2, etc) as well as a good CDN partner (MaxCDN, Akamai, etc).

When weighing the options for online ad campaigns for the promotion we elected to pause our Google Adwords initiative and go with an ad on a couple of small blogs via BuySellAds.com.

We chose this route because our measurable ROI during this campaign is essentially zero since we are giving the accounts away. So rather than pay per click, we thought running a few monthly ads on well optimized blogs would generate the push we need while keeping the ad spend fixed.

So which blogs? We looked to our analytics for the answer. We took a look at the top 4 blogs that referred traffic to us organically – meaning they linked to us as part of a story they had written. We figure since they are already sending TweepMe.com a good amount of traffic, we should grab the traffic that they’re NOT sending to us as well. With the ads placed through BuySellAds.com, we were able to do just that. From Pelfusion.com alone we recieved a couple thousand extra visitors for less than $100… Just pennies per click.

Advertising on sites that already send you traffic works because they are usually well optimized for the same search results you are targeting – otherwise the user wouldn’t have found the page where they wrote about you in the first place.

By placing a fixed cost ad on their site you are hooking into their SEM/SEO traffic at substantially lower CPCs that bidding on those keywords directly.

In fact, external in-bound linking is one of the most important factors of a high rank on the search engines.

So how can you get a large number of sites to link back to yours in a short amount of time? Do something outrageous!

The TweepMe.com web app that we developed has thousands of incoming links from sites we’ve never read. Not because the site is outrageous by any means, but because the idea of what the site does is controversial and caused an outrageous amount of feedback – both good and bad.

The people that love the site posted about how much they love it and the people that hate it won’t stop hating on it…. That’s a great thing!

It’s great because as people blogged and tweeted their opinions, they left links back to the site along the way – usually keyword laden links like ‘check out this site that gets you thousands of Twitter followers’.

Search engine algorithms can’t yet decide the nature of a link (if it’s positive or negative), only that a link exists. So whether good or bad, it’s ALL good.

Whether you have to skydive for charity, or swim the English Channel – doing something that sticks out in peoples’ minds will prompt them to spread the word.

Spider.cat is the newest internal project from Bobbr™. It’s currently top secret between us and our partners so we can’t tell you exactly what it is. But, you can visit www.spider.cat to join the Spider.cat email list and be notified when we’re ready to accept beta testers.