Alex Schultz

Category: natural search

  • SEO table stakes, my top 3 – Porthos.com

    So I spent a little while chatting to the awesome folks (Hal and Ryan) over at porthos.com over the weekend. They have been making an effort to improve the SEO on their website and after a chat we had back in december their results have improved considerably. This chat really set me thinking alongside a few articles by Rand over at SEOmoz.org which talked about the basics of SEO and how having been involved in SEO for almost a decade many people who know about SEO consider the basics to be universally known and understood. That of course isn’t true! So I thought I would post my 3 SEO basics here and share the knowledge:

    1. Think of the keyword first: there are three components. This holds true for every small and large web retailer I have worked with.
    2. Content is king: You hear this a lot in the market these days esp. with social media but I don’t neccessarily mean huge volumes of user generated content (although this has worked for me in cocktails). I mean make good quality content for search engines and users.
    3. Get your linking strategy right: I see this as having three components

    It was esp. interesting to me going through these points with Hal and Ryan because in return they treated me to some fun wine tasting and taught me a little bit more about wine. Perhaps whenever someone talks to you about SEO you will remember that just maybe the stuff we take for granted as universally held fact just isn’t!

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  • Starting To Promote the Widget

    Today I made a change to the cocktail making widget I have blogged about a couple of times. I added a link at the bottom saying “get this on your blog” and linking back to the widget generation page. We will see how that does in trying to convince people to add this widget to their blog. I am pretty excited about the potential though, one month in and a couple of large blogs have started using the widget (most notably get real denver) which means the widget is now at well over 10 000 views a day. I was thinking if I could convince just 2 of those viewers daily (0.02% of those who see the widget) to install the widget I could hit 1000 blogs in a year (with the blogs already signed up and not taking into account the exponential growth potential).

    I am going to be really interested to see how this experiment grows and am already wondering what I can make my next experiment do!!!

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  • The Power of Focussing on Something

    Today’s post is something that is very interesting to me. How you can acheive results by just shifting your focus. I have 3 main websites: cocktail making, paper airplanes and butterfly tattoos. A great set of comments on this can be found in the awesome book good to great in which particularly the discussion on Chrysler Acquiring Gulfstream is particularly enlightening. If you deviate from your core, if you look somewhere else than 100% at what is most important to you it will not succeed as well as when you have 100% focus on your most important project.

    For me an example of this can be seen in the image below which is the % year on year growth rates for my website traffic and website revenue (I have removed actual amounts) and this graph is mid way through Nov. hence Nov 2006 not looking so great.

    When I looked at this graph I was shocked (I first looked at it in March 2006) to see my revenue growth year on year had gone negative in Nov and Dec 2005 (actually first time in 10yrs of running my own websites). This corresponded with me planning and executing emigrating to the US in December 2006. After settling into the US things clearly recovered until March 2006. This was a huge month for me with my first major international summit, the first class I taught at our marketing college and my parents visiting the US.

    I did a lot of things to produce this reacceleration (I launched a cocktail widget, I totally recoded my cocktail site, I added videos to my paper airplanes site and more) but the key point is the focus and this is what I want to say. When you can contribute significant focus to something it will go better than with partial focus. I am now thinking about that a lot as I work and play.

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  • How to use the Typepad Widget API with PHP

    The Typepad Widget API is awesome. The concept is that you have a great widget you want users to add to their sidebar. Typepad want this to be a small self contained piece of DHTML code and want to be able to do all the verification of the user on their side without giving the widget owner any access to the user’s account.

    Browser based authentication used at both the eBay and Yahoo! developer programs (and explained beautifully in diagram form on the Yahoo! site) simply won’t work for this since it gives the programmer access to your eBay/Yahoo/Typepad account (were they to use it). So Typepad found a solution to the problem that is really simple and elegant.

    All data is sent to the API in a POST command along with redirecting the user themselves (rather than just a server to server POST call). Typepad’s Widget API requires fields identifying you as a developer, your application, what it is called, verifying you are who you say you are (with a token) and finally containing the FULL HTML you want inserted in the user’s sidebar to be sent to them through the POST command.

    The user then lands at a Typepad log in page and all the data is carried through with them to a page where they can effectively suggest whether or not to keep the Typepad widget. GREAT!

    I love this method, it’s secure, clever, simple and behaves exactly as you would expect… Having worked with Google AdWords/Base/Adsense APIs, Yahoo! APIs, eBay APIs and a fair few others I have to say this Typepad Widget API has been the simplest yet. Well done Typepad!

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  • Linkbait for Typepad

    I have been playing with the joy that are widgets for some time now. You can see a lot of my attempts at www.randomdomainname.co.uk. Widgets are simple and fun to program but they are also a great potential source of linkbait.

    The concept of linkbait is really simple indeed. You create an awesome article which other people on the web want to link to or a great tool/widget which other users want to place on their site and contains a link. Distribute said article or widget through any promotion you have available to you and suddenly you have hundreds of high value links across the net.

    My latest experiment in this field is my cocktail of the day widget on typepad. Using Yahoo! site explorer I have followed the progress of the back links tracked to my cocktails site since I launched the widget. On launching the widget I had 186 tracked backlinks, within 2 weeks of certification I am now at 494 links and growing at c. 20links a day still. Many of these links are from high page rank pages and blogs.

    The Blog owners get a cool tool that let’s them show a cocktail of the day on their blog and I get a really awesome set of backlinks to my website. Everyone’s a winner and I hope this will help me to continue to build traffic to my cocktails site.

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  • All your base are belonging to Google Base

    This weekend I have been completing the user sign in functionality for my cocktail making website. I have been monitoring the SEO results for key terms such as “cocktail recipes”. A competitor has uploaded 10k cocktail recipes to google base and as such google has added a cocktail search box to the top of the search results page.

    As a publisher I want traffic from google badly and to get that traffic it looks like I am going to have to gift them some content… in fact not just some content but all the content I have taken 5yrs to get hold of. At what stage will google say thanks for the content, give me an attribution and then not refer the users to my site 100% of the time?

    Should the search engines be competing with every niche webmaster at the same time for content while being their lifeblood for traffic? Right now I simply don’t know but I am scared they will kill my little sites with their own content within the next few years.

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  • Affiliate Marketing 2007

    I spent a lot of time in 2005 encouraging friends in the affiliate community to build apple widgets and get into the widget space. With Vista coming and live gadgets being a large part of that, I honestly believe that 2006 is the year to position yourself for entering the widget space.

    Widgets rock, widgets can make money, widgets can be link bait. If you aren’t already moving rapidly you will need a really good idea to beat those first movers.

    I will stick my neck out and suggest we are about to enter an era of back to the future and in 2007 push technologies will make a resurgence. VOIP is growing like crazy and instant messengers have never been larger. More products like sony mylo will launch and you will soon be reachable almost anywhere for free by instant messenger.

    So think about it… what can be done when you can alert anyone, anywhere to anything and how can you make money from that. In 2007 this will be a big new:old thing.

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  • Cocktailmaking.co.uk v3.0 Launched

    w00t it is finally out of the door, for almost 3 months now I have been playing around with how to launch a strong upgrade to my existing cocktail making site. I have been told at times that the design is grade school, it doesn’t work in firefox, it isn’t very intuitive, it’s ugly and so on. All the while it’s been unattractive visits have climbed and I topped 1/4 million page views last month.

    v1.0 launched in 2001 and simply consisted of a few hundred hard coded cocktails. In 2003 I upgraded the site to be fully user generated with approvals by me and this was release v2.0.

    For this release, I have totally changed the appearance of the site, the cocktail list is pulled in a new way with far fewer lines of code and most of the key pages are now cached. The site also works again in firefox but the key thing is the code is now clean, self contained and fully rewritten. I have an architecture and platform I can finally expand and build on with new modules.

    Over the next 3 months I am going to start adding some really exciting user functionality including membership of the site, site emails, the ability to store your bar and more.

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  • Great Analytics are Crucial to Website Success

    Google Analytics just received a round drubbing from one of my favorite blogs seomoz. The drubbing was somewhat fair and very true of all pixel/image based tracking tools. The pixel doesn’t load everytime, cookies used are deleted/read, sessions are lost.

    I agree that having analytics that aren’t perfect is annoying. I look at my server logs as well as my google analytics and addfreestats accounts and despite the fact that pixel tracker based tools do have some inaccuracies I will happily stand up and say that all these stats tools are similarly informative to me on user behaviour.

    For me data is a means to an end… for a deep dive into user behaviour you should study server logs. For big trends affecting your site, the major entry routes, the massive exit routes – I believe the free analytics software offered by google and addfreestats should be a useful port of call.

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  • Search Engine’s opening up free API’s for their results

    Rand Fishkin makes an excellent post on his blog about why search engines should offer APIs for all SEOs to be able to pull search results without scraping. He argues people are doing it anyway and opening complete, accurate APIs could reduce the incidence.

    Certainly exposing this data gives SEOs a head start. It would make it trivial to detect who is the #1 site in a field, ripping apart all the variables in that site and by running a comparison getting significant clues towards improving your rankings.

    From a search engine’s point of view I personally wouldn’t expose search APIs. Unlike eBay the search engines don’t benefit from allowing people to use their search results platform without visiting it.

    I think Rand’s post was really awesome and his blog is fantastic. If you are into SEO you should definitely read it.

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