Alex Schultz: APIs

Getting YouTube Videos Up Again

My parents bought me a flip mino camera for my birthday this year specifically so I could start filming and uploading YouTube videos again. My paper airplanes youtube channel gets around 1-2Million views a year growing at 50% year on year and has 500 subscribers. Yesterday I uploaded 3 new videos which within 7hours had 200views 15 ratings and 5comments, including this awesome comment

Whoa! Finally a new video! Nice. You were my first subscription ever. And sometimes I thought of unsubscribing. Recently actually. But I thought... what if he makes a new video. But I also thought it was 2 years since you did. But you did make a new video. It's awesome btw.

My goal is to build this video channel further. I have never done a minute of work to optimize it and have just used it as a vehicle to store videos for my website. I am going to turn every plane page on my site into a video page primarily and probably add more planes and then start to upload videos of me creating and flying stunt planes since those are pretty easy to do then see how far it is possible to get with a video channel and I will keep you all up to date. 10MM views a year takes 27k views a day or a little under 10x where I am today. Maybe I can do that, we’ll see.

Challenges facing enterprise SEO marketing

Working on enterprise internet marketing (100MM’s of pages and visits) is very different from sites with 100,000s or 1,000,000s of visits are very different. I am very lucky to have had the chance to work across both of these scales with my personal sites and professional experience. This difference is becoming clearer and clearer to me and I hope to write a few posts on this over the next year or so (yes I don’t blog a lot so we’ll see what happens)

I was recently asked for my personal thoughts in a survey on the challenges facing SEO in a large internet company so I thought I’d start by sharing them:

• Understanding the addressable market & actual current marketshare
• When you address a whole market like a category of e-commerce it’s hard to figure out what  the total volume of searches truly are to get the potential addressable market. Sometimes it’s hard to even find all the keywords (esp. if you don’t own your own search)
• Even when you know what the market size is it’s hard to know what % of the potential listings you have if you are looking across a million or more keywords. What sample size should you look at to understand your total market for example?
• Duplicate content issues
• Every large company I know has or has had huge duplicate content issues either with ?ref=’s and ?src=’s etc… etc… and often for valid reasons where folks want to track things properly or change the ordering of a search result.
• Getting deep links at scale to 100MM's of pages
• Self processing huge volumes of traffic data
• Again sites like Yahoo or Craigslist or others have such traffic volumes they can’t really afford existing web tracking products and the free versions don’t scale well plus often you want custom views to understand demographic of traffic by keyword and cross multiple visits etc… this seems inevitably to lead to some kind of in house processing of huge data files.
• optimizing 100MM’s of landing pages
• calculating the value of a given potential seo change
• often it’s a trade off of resources to make SEO changes but even the best SEO experts find it hard to put a precise value on kws in the URL vs the difference between 5 and 10% kw density and so on.
• The benefit of owning a huge media vehicle is you can calculate some of this… the detriment is you don’t have full control of the resources so may not get the chance to use them without a clear value of any change
• dealing with international
• wow, content localization especially around navigational terms like “shopping” when you even want to localize the URL can be tricky

So anyway those are my thoughts on the challenges of enterprise SEO. Despite these it’s a really rewarding area to work and very possible to have success in this field.

Crowdsourcing by the Guardian

I have to say I am super impressed by the Guardian’s crowdsourced analysis of the MP expenses scandal in the UK. Awesome fast turnaround to get it up and a third of the documents human reviewed. This kind of mash up is amazing and I think puts pay to the statement that the web will destroy great investigative journalism. Instead it seems really clever use of the web will enable more impressive journalism.

Of course one of the main reasons folks think the web and blogging will destroy great investigative journalism is that it needs to be funded by good advertising revenue. My perspective is that excellent use of targeting and loyal customers will allow newspapers online to fund the journalism with advertising. One thing that stands out to me is we need better targeting… the Guardian and other newspapers clearly have precisely the audience I want to target somewhere within their 30MM monthly unique visitors but no one seem to have a product yet through which I can buy exactly who I would want unless they allow a third party ad retargeting network to be live on their site.

Found via the awesome Dan Wilson and props to Tanya a friend at the guardian from eBay.co.uk days.

Amazing Speakers I have heard recently

I wanted to share a little list of folks I have heard talk recently (online or in person) who I think are totally amazing and worth listening to:

• Christine Churchill http://www.keyrelevance.com/ on keyword research using advanced tools at SMX. Top tips:
• Use http://stats.grok.se/ I continually forget about this tool but it’s ace for really detailed keyword research
• Also a great reminder about the recency attribute value pair on Google
• Matt Cutts on the canonical link tag
• http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/canonical-link-tag/
• Rand Fishkin on just about anything but specifically page rank sculpting
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-says-yes-you-can-still-sculpt-pagerank-no-you-cant-do-it-with-nofollow
• Mark Mahaney http://biz.yahoo.com/a/1/137122.html on the future of the internet
• Mary Meeker on the state of the internet around the world from her numerous web 2.0 presentations
• As someone who led international paid search and affiliate co-ordination and all international internet marketing at facebook I think her analysis of which markets are the most advanced in different internet areas (esp. advertising and ecommerce) are very accurate from my experience.
• Sean Parker from the founders fund/napster/plaxo/facebook talking about viral loops
• if you ever get to listen to him on this topic it’s amazing… he has a really simple description (which I won’t spoil by sharing here) that helps you understand them extremely well.

Behavioral targeting is getting almost ridiculous

Below is kind of amazing. I am on The Guardian website (a British newspaper website) and I am being advertised to by the Mirage for rooms there (based on the fact that I have been browsing their site). On the whole I love retargeting, I think better ads are a good thing. That being said I would love to see folks being a bit more subtle about their retargeting.

Yelp linking to Yahoo!

I hope I am not slow on the uptake spotting this but are yelp and yahoo working together on local search? At the foot of the following las vegas steakhouse review (this is my favorite steakhouse in las vegas by the way): http://www.yelp.com/biz/golden-steer-las-vegas there is a link to Yahoo! local which says:

 

The link is not “no followed” and points to http://local.yahoo.com/NV/Las+Vegas/Food+Dining/Restaurants/Steak+Houses and this yahoo page is currently top ten in Google for a search for “las vegas steak houses” and is actually ahead of Yelp! I can’t see any reason Yelp! would be doing this unless it’s some kind of business relationship.

I looked into a few other verticals and the same thing is happening in Italian restaurants ( http://www.yelp.com/biz/enoteca-san-marco-las-vegas ) and so on:

Looking at the link profile for the yahoo local steakhouse page you see the following results ( https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Flocal.yahoo.com%2FNV%2FLas%2BVegas%2FFood%2BDining%2FRestaurants%2FSteak%2BHouses&bwm=i&bwmo=d ):

All 90 back links come from Yelp. It would be great if Google is ok with this for big companies since that would totally alter my backlinking strategy but I guess that the better user experience would be for Google to contain the links to the main web location for all the las vegas restaurants that yelp or yahoo have on their search results pages (wherever their main web presence is, be that on Yelp! or a standalone website). I’m going to keep an eye on this one.

Testing a powerful domain on internal linking

One of the most interesting things I have noticed about SEO is that as you develop a site with a lot of credibility in a field you can do a lot to drive results in related long tail terms in that field by just leveraging your own domain. This is old hat and I have long used it for areas like playing with getting long tail cocktail terms ranked.

I however have never really tested doing this from scratch until recently, with my cocktail site, I found the time to create a new section of the sites for all ingredients that exist in the database. For example: http://www.cocktailmaking.co.uk/displayingredient.php/74-grenadine

The way I wanted to increase the SEO traffic for these pages was by linking from each cocktail’s page to the pages of the ingredients in that cocktail using the name of the ingredient in the cocktail as you can see on this page http://www.cocktailmaking.co.uk/displaycocktail.php/2390-Malibu-Sunrise 

Within a month this entirely new site section has become 5% of total traffic entering the site and is growing as you can see very nicely. One other really nice factor is the targeted nature of these visits means that they have only a 20% bounce rate and so are engaging v. nicely with the site in general since on entering they probably want to browse around… this is different to cocktails where typically they want that one cocktail and then are done and leave in >40% of the cases.

 

At the moment my big question is whether or not to launch a US version of the site or just port this entire site to .com and try and leverage the backlinks and SEO success into being a top 5 cocktail site globally instead of just in the UK. I also need to get the cocktail recommendation engine restarted because after migrating servers last year to deal with the increasing volume of the site I forgot to turn the engine on, broke the code and since the impact was only gradual only finally noticed this year that I had screwed up and my bounce rates for cocktails were once again through the roof.

One of the most successful viral campaigns on Facebook yet

The election has been a watershed in interactive and social marketing with the first really mainstream multi hundred million dollar use of social media for one campaign. There is a lot to be said about this (beyond hero worshipping Chris Hughes and co.) and I intend to post a few comments about this here.

The best recent completely novel use (that simply couldn’t have existed 4years ago) was run by the causes application. They asked users to donate their statuses to the vote and changed the status to a link and a message to promote an issue in the election or the election itself. Below is a screen dump of how you do it on the causes application.

My understanding is that 5MM plus users donated their status to promote something to do with the election. I am not going to comment on the impact of that on the election but the impact on Causes is incredible. Every one of those status updates (whichever candidates or propositions were being pushed) promoted the causes application. Given the prevalence of status updates in the newsfeed  it is almost certain that every user in the US will have seen the causes application promoted on election day and that real estate was immensely valuable.

There are more ways to game this system and that is in fact a pretty scary spaming opportunity now the idea is out there but this was a truly viral campaign using something that is unique to facebook. Great job causes even if there are debates about whether this is a fair or genuine use of status updates.

How to be an effective seo within your organization: PubCon 08 - be positive

This year was my first presentation at pubcon and I was super excited to get the opportunity to participate. The area of my presentation was to evaluate how to be an effective in house SEO and I was lucky enough to be on the panel with Aaron Shear, Tony Adam, Jessica Bowman and Scott Polk. Lou Ragg was the moderator which in Vegas was pretty cool.

The main topic of all our talks was how do you convince your company to support you in doing SEO and the talks split into two fronts… play company politics or push positive results and momentum. I was definitely in the second bucket.

I essentially had 5 points:

1. alignment
   • You must be aligned with your companies #1 goal in SEO
   • Discard everything but that target: eBay = ROI, facebook = user growth
2. measurement
   • sometimes you can get support just by measuring how much value seo is generating
   • whatever happens you are in a measurable field, you can quantify your impact and so be that guy, measure your results and hang your hat on them
3. results
   • do something simple and get a result to build credibility…
   • for example a really really small thing like swapping “<company name> | <page title>” to “<page title> | <company name>” can drive results and doing that and instantly driving the company’s #1 goal is so powerful
4. double down
   • you got a result… now get more. Keep it small, keep it coming and show that you are an expert
   • I think this momentum building is 10x more positive as an approach rather than going out and producing a powerpoint strategy deck
5. share
   • now start to share your success, start to teach people how to do it themselves. Build that powerpoint and let the senior folks know what you need to do even more.

I think this is the secret to be successful in almost any internet marketing role to get success. You can be the person who says “I am positive”,”I can do more with less than you believe” and above all let your work speak for itself and you can do no wrong.

Recovering from the Hack

Getting hacked was one of the most traumatic things that has happened to me since I first launched a website in the 1990s. My traffic was completely pulverized dropping 60% year on year when I had been growing at a nice 20-30% rate, I have lost a tonne of repeat visitors who have lost trust with the site, my search rankings seem to have been adversely affected which really sucks and all of my social media marketing is shot. The bottom line is now that I am over the hack and clean and all the major places that were blocking me have opened up again my traffic is down 20% year on year and roughly 1/3 from where I would have expected it to be.

 

Rebuilding is going to be tough but I am planning to do some of the things I have been holding off of for a long time:

 

   
1. redesign the site – I am stuck in 2004 with design and need to fix
   
2. move the videos back to youtube – revver isn’t worth it for the money any more and youtube generates traffic when used right
   
3. work out a way for users to contribute more easily – cocktailmaking.co.uk has benefited tremendously from users contributing paper airplanes could do so too.

 

Wish me luck in this new endeavor, as always I will try and post progress on the project to this  blog and would be keen to get your advice on how to proceed.