Alex Schultz

Blog

  • Quality work from traditional media in UK

    Above shows high quality advertising and editorial work from Telegraph. Below shows a story from the same day.

    I 100% get the glass houses and stones argument but I find it really painful to see the (successful) digg spam attempts, headline grabbing, publish and be a weak imitation of a blog approach that newspapers seem to be taking in the UK. Then you couple with that absolutely caving on principle for the ads they are selling. On visiting the guardian earlier this year in the UK they seem to be the only paper who are not engaged in a race to the bottom in the UK newspaper industry. Perhaps that is why they are the biggest newspaper site in the UK.

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  • using php to update status via the Twitter API – cocktail of the day on Twitter

    You can now follow Alex’s Cocktail Making on Twitter @cocktaildaily so I’d love it if you followed me.

    I have heard a lot about the twitter API lately being really easy to use and so having hacked things together with the delicious, flickr, eBay, typepad and facebook apis in the past I thought it was time to give twitter a go. The whole development process start to finish took me 25minutes (started at 18:11 and finished at 18:36) from creating a new twitter account to having a daily updating script which pushed a random cocktail with over a certain score and a reasonable likelihood of not being rude to twitter. It took me 12minutes to write this blog post!

    For completeness here’s the code I used:

    $message = "enter your message here";
$curl_handle = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_URL, "$url");
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "status=$message");
$buffer = curl_exec($curl_handle);
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  • Bloat vs Lite

    A few colleagues here at Facebook put together a product called facebook lite. It launched last week to great acclaim and really set me thinking about bloat on my sites.

    My paper airplanes site is where I have focused so far. All the site does is show you how to make 27 paper airplanes. There are video and diagram instructions and you can vote on something as your favorite plane. That’s it. Somehow I bloated this into 90 different php scripts to run the site ignoring include files and so on. No wonder I got hacked (it happened again in February and I failed to notice) and always felt sick when it came to planning to update the site.

    Videos – I specifically created a section to make my users view more pages using video. I have reversed this decision now making it better for the users even if less page views for me. 3000 people a day are viewing these videos, they are better than the diagrams. This is my most compelling feature and was buried.

    Unusual/Fast/Alex’s Favorites/Gliders – Together these made up <10% of my page views and yet were linked from the main pages. They initiated <5% of my visits. Gone.

    search – On every page on my site I link to a search product from atomz. In the last year this page was viewed a total of 1000 times. What a waste of valuable real estate. Gone.

    paperairplanes.co.uk does one thing and does it well: show you how to make a paper airplane. It doesn’t take 90 php scripts to do that. It takes one page for each paper airplane and a couple of navigation pages. That is it.

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  • 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.

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  • 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. 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.

    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
    • Duplicate content issues
    • Getting deep links at scale to 100MM’s of pages
    • Self processing huge volumes of traffic data
    • optimizing 100MM’s of landing pages
    • calculating the value of a given potential seo change
    • dealing with international

    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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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:

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  • Behavioral targeting is getting almost ridiculous

    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.

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  • 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 a las vegas steakhouse review (this is my favorite steakhouse in las vegas by the way) there is a link to Yahoo! local.

    The link is not “no followed” and points to Yahoo local’s las vegas steakhouse page which 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.

    Looking at the link profile for the yahoo local steakhouse page 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. I’m going to keep an eye on this one.

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  • 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.

    Within a month this entirely new site section has become 5% of total traffic entering the site and is growing 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.

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