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Do you have your Bathing Suit On?

3/29/2007 by Leave a Comment

Let’s have a little fun today, shall we? Google Maps is providing some fascinating directions, such as this one from Stanford University to KTH-hallen, Stockholm, Sweden. Take a look at step 33 below:

Google Maps Directions Step 33

Here is a visual look at your swim:

Google Maps Directions Swim

That’s one heck of a swim! But at least they have an idea that these directions are not particularly efficient:

Google Maps Directions Time

It looks like it takes about 31 days and 18 hours. Note that Google must think we are extraordinarily fast swimmers. Even if you allowed all the estimated time to just the swim, it still comes out to about 4.5 miles per hour, or about the speed of a brisk walk. Now that’s cooking!

Philipp Lenssen picked up on this too, and provides a different example for going from Harvard University in Cambridge Mass to King’s College, Cambridge England.

Filed Under: Google

Rand Fishkin Podcast about SEOmoz

3/27/2007 by 1 Comment

Recently I had a chance to speak with Rand Fishkin about the recent changes at SEOmoz, and got an update on the progress. Rand is the well known and popular CEO of SEOmoz, and it was great to be able to sit down and talk to him about it.

I have also generated a transcript of the Podcast for those of you that would prefer to read the interview.

Filed Under: Search Engine Marketing, SEO

SEO: Publish or Perish?

3/26/2007 by Leave a Comment

Rand Fishkin recently put up a post titled: Wasting Time or Clearly Incompetent – The SEO Consulting Debate. In it Rand refers to a post by Brian Provost at ScoreBoard Media Group titled: The First Question You Should Ask Your SEO Consultant. Brian has since published an update titled: Attack of the SEOmoz Clones: More Thoughts On SEO Consulting.

The gist of it is – if you are such a great SEO, wouldn’t you make a ton more money publishing your own sites? And even though it reeks a little bit of the SEO are scum debates that were raging through the blogoshpere a short while back, and I stayed out of that one because I just don’t dignify questions like “when did you stop beating your wife?”, Brian Provost’s question does have some merit (note that Brian’s update post does make it clear that it was not specifically an attack on SEOs

We happen to use a mix of consulting and publishing our own sites here at STC. Without question, I have made far more money on the sites we publish ourselves than the consulting business. But launching a new site in a highly competitive market is an investment and takes time. Particularly since our model is to build up valuable assets for sale at a later date to a third party.

Consulting provides short term cash flow while you are building your sites up. It also provides exposure to different aspects of search, and helps me broaden my horizons, and learn lessons that I apply in our own sites (lessons go the other way too …). It also becomes a platform for developing relationships and contacts that are invaluable for our publishing business. We have a veritable win-win situation where the two businesses feed each other.

Other high quality SEOs have their own reasons for preferring to consult. It can be as simple as wanting to have greater degrees of freedom over one’s schedule. Some people consult because they can go to their kids chess tournament at school even when it happens during the work day. Hard to do when you are a publisher fighting for market share day in and day out.

And then there are the Rand’s of the world, that simply have a great passion for developing and publishing great content. A mix of a media personality and a consultant at the same time. And so it can simply be about what makes you get excited about getting out of bed in the morning. And this is perfectly valid too.

Don’t buy into the SEO’s are scum hype, or spend your time defending yourself from it, it’s truly a waste of time. There are scum in every profession. Enough people write about SEO’s being scum that I can assure you that some (not all, but some) of those writers are scum too. It’s just about statistics. If enough people are doing something, then some of them are bad people.

You want a good thing to look for in an SEO? See if they have a passion for success, and a passion for winning. I am not saying that this is a question you ask, it’s a thing you sense when you talk to them. Of course, make sure they are competent, check references, whatever, but more importantly, make sure they will be passionate about winning with your business. If you have those 2 things, then they are probably a good bet for you to work with.

But hey, with tweaks to each situation, that advice will work in any part of your life.

Filed Under: SEO

12 Quick Site Architecture Tips

3/22/2007 by 6 Comments

Site Architecture is a critical component of SEO. When you are starting on a new site design, you have to begin by thinking through the SEO plan as part of the design. Here are 12 quick tips on how to get your site architecture right:

  1. Complete the steps below before writing 1 line of code for your site. It will save you time and money.
  2. Have an experienced person do keyword analysis for your business. Keyword tools, such as Wordtracker, and Keyword Discovery provide wonderful insight into the mind set of your potential customers.What terms to they search on when looking for products like yours? Keyword tools can tell you that. You need to map your web site copy to these terms, because these are the terms that will engage them the most. This would be great tools to use even if SEO did not exist.
  3. Use your keyword analysis to define what content you need for the site. Each major keyword is a potential topic for you to write about. If your potential customers use these phrases when looking for products like yours, then you want to grab their attention by writing content related to those phrases.
  4. Search engines (and users) like sites that have a simple hierarchical structure. These types of sites are also easier to maintain, so everybody wins when you build a site with a simple tree like structure.
  5. Search engines (and users) like to see a simple, clean global navigation scheme, that uses the same approach across all the pages of your site.
  6. Users also benefit from the use of breadcrumb bars that help them understand where they have been, and how they got to the current page. Not so much for search engines this one, but still a really good idea to implement.
  7. Keep your site relatively flat. Search engines look to us for clues as to what content you find important on our sites. If the content is 4 clicks from the home page, how important can it be?
  8. Keep the link density low. A good rule of thumb is to have less than 200 links on your most link dense page. Unless your site is considered quite important by the search engines, they probably don’t look at much more than that on the page. It’s also not very user friendly.
  9. Avoid parameters on your URLs. If you are generating your site from a database, use Mod Rewrite (or equivalent) to re map the URLs. Map www.yourdomain.com?catid=1345&prodid=164 to something more like www.yourdomain.com?catid=cars&prodid=ford+taurus. Once again, it’s also more user friendly to look at too.
  10. Oldies, but goodies #1: Every single page on your site should have one unique URL that brings you to that page, and no more than one. This saves you the enormous headache of duplicate content problems, and you don’t want to go there. This means you can’t use session IDs. You also need to make sure that your web site application does not allow a given page to be described by 2 or more different URLs. It also means that you need to:
    1. 301 redirect all your http://yourdomain.com/* pages to http://www.yourdomain.com/* pages (OR vice versa)
    2. 301 redirect http://www.yourdomain.com/index,html to http://www.yourdomain.com
    3. 301 redirect http://www.yourdomain.com/index.htm to http://www.yourdomain.com
    4. 301 redirect http://www.yourdomain.com/index.shtml to http://www.yourdomain.com
  11. Oldies, but goodies #2 Don’t bury your pages in Flash. If you are going to use Flash, then read this article for tips on implementing Flash in a search engine friendly manner.
  12. Oldies but goodies #3: Don’t bury your pages in Javascript either. It’s fine to use it, but don’t have 5000 lines of Javascript on a page with 20 lines of search engine crawlable text.

I am sure there are more. I am trying to keep the above list focused on site architecture, so I stayed away from things like link building. If anyone wants to make suggestions, I will be happy to add them.

Filed Under: SEO, Site Architecture

How to Come Up With Online Business Ideas

3/21/2007 by Leave a Comment

NicheGeek recently posted some examples of Unconventional Online Business Ideas. If you review this list you will see a bunch of nifty ideas here. Lots of people are doing these types of sites and carving out a nice niche for themselves.

There are a lot of these types of opportunities in the market. If you are looking to start a business and want to work from home, running a site like one of these is a great way to go. There are tons of such ideas that you can come up with. If you read through the NicheGeek article, you will see a common theme running through them all.

All of the ideas grew out of the personal experience of the people involved. This ranges from people who are dealing with the solution to a health issue, to people who are leveraging a personal passion. Some of the businesses have grown to be quite sizable – Greekgear.com has revenues of $1.9M per year.

If you are trying to think about how to start an online business, start with your passion(s). Most likely you have a real chance of bringing some value add to the business that way, and you will be in a better position to market it effectively. In addition, you will probably enjoy it more, and that will make it easier for you to continue to work on it while you are still trying to build your initial revenue stream.

Filed Under: SEO

You Gotta Have Bid Management

3/14/2007 by 5 Comments

While I usually focus on organic web marketing or web analytics issues in this blog, today I want to talk about bid management. I could be wrong, but I have this sense that it is greatly underutilized in the market.

A little over a year ago we sold off a set of sites that we had been operating for a few years. The sites had a very strong organic traffic flow, but we also did a substantial amount of PPC on these sites – about $50K per month. Them there’s real dollars!

We began our PPC, like many people do, by flinging keywords into Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing. We were building a nice traffic volume from this activity, but when we analyzed our results we found that we were only breaking even. Given that we were investing 20 hours per week into the effort, this did not seem like smart business!

But we made a strategic decision and implemented a bid management solution. We actually used a product that is no longer available, Overture’s Search Optimizer. The tool provided us with automated tracking of our accounts, including the calculation of keyword by keyword return on ad spend.

In addition, all of our bids in Overture were now automatically adjusted for us to meet our Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) goals. Very quickly we found that the time we were spending on PPC got cut by more than half, to less than 10 hours per week.

Better still, within 90 days of implementing the bid management system, our profit margin grew from 0% to 30%. So I became a convert. If you manage campaigns that are complex and hard to manage, you gotta have automated bid management.

Filed Under: Bid Management, PPC, Search Engine Marketing
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