More advice from google guy

Here’s another great excerpt from Google Guy Google Guy Wrote:

“”GG, your advice makes a lot of sense for information or content publishers, but how should widget marketers interpret that statement? Are you suggesting that they make their commerce sites more like information sites, using editorial or advertorial content to attract prospects? Or does clearly written, descriptive, and original catalog copy qualify as “good content” from a Googlesque point of view?”
Good question. I think both can qualify as good content. It’s easier for me to think of it as a user though. If I want to buy a diamond for someone, I might go on the web and just search for a place to buy a diamond. But a typical user is also going to want to know about their purchase. Things like color, carats, clarity, and so on that people want to find out about. I probably would want to know about the different organizations that certify diamonds, along with some believable opinions about the organizations themselves and their value.

If you have a “buy it now” site, you’re definitely going to attract a certain type of visitor (maybe the most valuable single type, by the way). But the more unique information you can provide to distinguish your site, the better off you’ll be. A buy-it-now site with nothing but boilerplate or affiliate links doesn’t add a lot of value for a searcher who is looking for context, comparison-shopping, or more background.

This is all just my personal take of course, but I’d recommend building the sort of resource site that people can use to read and research, the sort of site that people bookmark and return to. That can come from original content: a good newsletter, for example, or a forum where people have a good community and discuss the pros and cons of different types of widgets. It can come from honest, unbiased reviews. It can come from providing more information than anyone else about a product. But if there’s nothing that makes a site stand out–if a user perceives it as a cookie cutter site with little additional reason to use it versus another site–then you can see where it’s not of as much use to a searcher.

Again, this is all just my two cents. We want quality sites to do well–ideally without worrying too much about SEO. And if you know of sites that are doing well but appear to be doing it against our guidelines, drop an email to webmaster [at] google.com or do a spamreport and mention the keyword brandyupdate. I’d like to make sure that we keep looking at any issues with our scoring, so that people with good sites can keep working on making their sites better, without worrying about the people trying to take shortcuts. Feedback helped in our last iteration of algorithms, and we appreciate getting it.

By the way, the front page is talking about “The Semantic Web”. I was talking about plain old semantics–understanding documents better, for example. The “Semantic Web” is a different topic altogether–more about RDF and XML and (OWL?) and lots of other things. “

Forget about keywords

Don’t get bogged down with looking at wordtracker to figure out what keywords you want to target for your website. Spend that time creating content instead. I’d like to suggest people to put some caution on the emphasis on the keywords when building their websites. If you have five hours to put into working on your site this week, and you can chose between spending some or all of that time researching keywords or creating content, just get writing. Write naturally. If your keywords come up naturally when you’re writing, that’s great. Write naturally, because you’ll end up with keywords you wouldn’t have thought of if you spend that time using wordtracker. Don’t obsess over keywords, obsess over creating content. Actually, you’ll be better off in the long-run if you completely forget about keywords and spend all that time writing content for your site. I’ve obsessed plenty over keywords, but have found that my time is best spent when I’m writing and creating content for my websites.

Would you sell ads on your hosting company site?

When I was running a hosting company, I would get contacted by some web designers at least once a week and they’d always be wanting me to link to their site. Sometimes they’d promise me a percent of any business I send them. I never took up any of those offers. Why should I send them my customers? When I was running a hosting company, I would get contacted by some web designers at least once a week and they’d always be wanting me to link to their site. Sometimes they’d promise me a percent of any business I send them. I never took up any of those offers. Why should I send them my customers?

It occurred to me recently that I should have sold them an advertising link on my site. Even something cheap, like $5 a month, would have added up. Even if ust 5% of the people who contacted me asking for a link accepted my offer, I estimate about a hundred would have been paying for ads by the end of the first year.

That’s an extra $500 a month. I could have used that to hire a remote server admin in India or something, LoL.

Site Build It

I have been investigating Site Build It for a few weeks now, and wanted to put down in writing some of my thoughts. They bill themselves as “E-Commerce for the Rest of Us”, and in fact seem to have registered that as a trademark. What I’ve found most
interesting about their service is its effectiveness with internet marketing.

The best aspect of Site Build It is the amount of time it saves you on the behind the scenes stuff. You can build your site without any knowledge of HTML. Also, search engine optimization, building a newsletter and opt-in mailing list, are the features that really stand out and save you a lot of time. You can have Site Build It Manager research your theme and keywords, giving you a head-start in marketing, for example. The “AnalyzeIt” function might be worth the price by itself.

For the new person just starting out I think it is an excellent place to start. Take the time learn it and move forward. Following the Site Build It guide is essential, it’s the keystone of the system. Visit Site Build It for more information.

Selling Web Sites On Ebay

Before you consider selling websites on Ebay, take a careful look at the marketplace. You might be scared off by what you see. It’s good that you looked before you started putting time into this. The problem with most of the things you see in that category on Ebay is that hundreds of the same exact site have already sold. The way to get a good sale in Ebay is to have a unique site for sale. That, of course, takes time to build and IME it’s a very low return for the amount of time you need to invest into it. If you want to spend a lot of time and hard work and make a little bit of money, it might work out for you. The other problems, you might see a glimpse if you look at the category regularly (I do), are it’s full of spammers and scammers. I’d say that about 95% of the listings in the category are junk spam. A lot of stuff in there isn’t even a website for sale, it’s people selling garbage on the hope that an idiot will actually give them money. Most of the websites for sale are template sites that took five minutes to build. The sellers put them up over and over again hoping to catch a sucker. Or, they’re a hosting company and this is a way for them to bring in new hosting customers. Then, there’s the deadbeat bidders. Some of those have buyers remorse, some are your competitors trying to mess with you. Ebay has done a very poor job of keeping categories like this clean. This one is one of the worst.

Adding Another One

I’ve added a number of sites to my collection recently, the most notable one is http://www.osforge.com

I’m not really that much of an expert on Linux, but the site is a great site, and a great deal was offered to me for it. I’ve been working to put together a team of people to work on the site now. It should be an interesting experience.

Web Site Menu

What not to do when you’re making a menu for your website. I snipped this from an article giving tips to web developers, by Carolyn Snyder.

“People use various terms to describe these menus — rollover, fly-out, pop-up, hierarchical, or cascading. These are menus that pop up automatically when the user positions the cursor over a particular item onscreen. Whatever you call them, these things can be so difficult to use that they border on evil.

I don’t care that prominent software vendors have been using cascading menus for years — obviously they have forgotten that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. And that’s exactly what users do — they try to take the diagonal route to their desired menu option rather than across and down. And as soon as they move off the menu, they lose it (or even worse, get an unrelated one). Depending on where the user leaves the cursor after clicking, another menu might pop up, possibly covering part of the page the user wanted.

I recently tested a site that used rollover menus. Of the 17 users who took part, four complained of difficulty using the menus, and one was so stymied that I had to help him. Even users who understood this interaction model sometimes had difficulty selecting the menu options they wanted.”

I couldn’t agree more. Plain text menus are so much better, for two reasons really. The author of that article talks about the useability issue, but there’s another reason to not use these types of menus. They’re not search engine friendly. A plain text menu is much more search engine friendly. Use text, and have the text be related to the keywords important for the page it links to. Don’t just put “home”, have the text say something about your site.

business forum online small

I’m going to bite the bullet and upgrate Business Forum to vBulletin 3.0 before the release candidate. It’s been too long, and I’m sick of waiting. I closed down Business Forum on the old host, and I’m going to upgrade it and recreate it over again. I’ve had too much down time with my old host, nearly lost the entire database once. The past few days we’ve had hours and hours of down time. I’m just going to host it myself and not bother with having a sponsor for now.

It hasn’t been as easy to design in vBulletin 3.0 as it has in vBulletin 2.x. I expect that to even out after the release candidate. Jelsoft makes a great product, and they provide great support, I’m always singing their praises, but damn they’re slow. They’ve asked the community of users to refrain from developing addons to vBulletin 3.0 until the final release candidiate is out. It seems like years that the final release has been right around the corner.

For the sake of Business Forum, though, it’s time to make the move. I probably would have waited longer were it not for the unreliability of the host. Upgrading will do wonders for the SEO, though, we’ll just have to deal with an ugly looking site for a few months.

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