Written on August 30, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: seo
Posted by Suzzicks
So here is the deal: Traditional websites frequently rank in mobile search results – especially if you are searching from a SmartPhone. What you may not realize is that the converse is also true – mobile pages can rank well in traditional search. This is quite an interesting phenomenon, and something that we need to address strategically.
All One Index Soon?
Why does this happen?
Well, Google has said that they really don’t want to index two versions of the web – one mobile and one traditional. Even though they do have different mobile-specific bots, they want those their bots all to feed into one index. Hmmmm….Is it just an interesting coincidence that they just launched the multi-format site mapping in Google, where you can combine all the different types of sitemaps that we previously had to submit separately? Possibly. At least it that could indicate a shift away from multiple indexes.
Did anyone notice that this shift happened pretty soon after Caffeine, as did the re-launch of Google Images, and some significant changes in Google Places?
Hmmmm…..It seems that now things might be all moving to one index with different types of ‘indexing attributes’ that will replace the need for different indexes in the long run. That would actually do lots of things that Caffeine has done, like speed up searches, and allow them to algorithmically prioritize things by freshness more effectively….
Different Indexes for Smart Phones and Feature Phones
But I have gone astray – We were talking about mobile. We can’t know for sure if there are different mobile indexes. There definitely was in the beginning of ‘mobile’ – you could always tell because the results were SO bad! Even in the past two years, I have seen mobile search results that were way off base – For example, the top result for a search on ‘subway sandwiches’ was a Gawker article for a long time; then Subway.com, and then m.subway.com. I just checked, and they have finally sorted that one out! About 18 months ago Google changed the location of their mobile engine from m.Google.com to Google.com/m, and it did seem that the ‘/m’ feature phone search results were a bit better than they had been, but who knows!
As I have mentioned, there are different mobile search engine crawlers that are evaluating your website as if it was being rendered on a mobile phone. These mobile bots actually have generic and more specific user agent strings that will spoof actual phone handset models in order to understand how the website would behave on the different phones. While they don’t do a great job, Google actually does try to only provide you with mobile search results that will actually work well on your particular handset – What that means is that there are slight variations on search results from phone to phone.
There are some simple ways to check what I am now describing as ‘mobile indexing attributes.’ I always start mobile rankings research by doing a normal search from my traditional computer. We know more about the traditional algorithm, so that sets my baseline for comparison. From there, I will do the same search from Google.com/m to see the differences. In most cases, the websites that are included in the traditional search results will be included in the SmartPhone search results – but sometimes in a slightly different order.
You don’t have to have tons of different phones to get a sense for what is going on in mobile search. There are a couple quick tips and tricks to help you do this all from the web. The first thing to know, is that you can do searches from your computer directly from Google.com/m. The results you get will be generic ‘SmartPhone’ search results. From that page, you can move on to see the results for the same query on feature phones by simply scrolling to the bottom of the page and changing the drop-down that says ‘web’ to say ‘mobile,’ and hit ‘go.’ This set of results will be the generic FeaturePhone results.
Mobile-Friendly Signals for the Search Engines
The best way to indicate to the search engines that your page is mobile-ready, (beyond including the ‘no-transform’ tag, discussed more in another post called What is Mobile Search Engine Transcoding?),
Written on May 11, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: searchengineguide
by Mike Moran
Frequently asked questions are a staple of the Internet–even predating the Web. And the idea makes sense. If people are continually asking the same questions, why not answer them once on your Web site so then you won’t have to answer them over and over again? That’s the theory, anyway. But, in practice, getting the same question over and over again might point you to some other ideas besides updating your FAQ page.
Now, it’s not bad to have an FAQ page, necessarily. I check them out when I am looking at a small Web site and really trying to understand the company. But, increasingly, they are not the sign of a professional Web site–many companies have eliminated them.
The idea of collecting up customer questions and answering them is a good one, but an FAQ page is not the only place to answer questions. Let me give you an example.
I am a crazy baseball fan, so much so, that whenever I have a business trip, I try to sneak away one evening to a ballgame. And I always have the same question: “Can I bring my briefcase with my computer to the game?” Some ballparks are OK with this and some aren’t. And they hardly ever answer that question anywhere on the site except at the FAQ page, along with eight million other questions. And I rarely know what words to use to search for it on the page.
Now, there is nothing wrong with the FAQ page except that those questions ought to be answered in other places, too. I am a big proponent of task-based information. In this case, the task is “going to the game” (as opposed to “checking the schedule” or buying a ticket”). Every ball club’s Web site could have a page about going to the game, where it listed the driving and mass transit directions, the parking fees, the time the gates open for batting practice, what you are allowed to carry into the park, special accommodations for the disabled, and whatever else someone going to the game might need to know.
Instead, check out this typical A to Z Guide for the Baltimore Orioles. (I’m not picking on the Orioles–most of the baseball team Web sites look the same.) This is a variant of a frequently asked question page–it just lists topics in alphabetical order rather than as questions. First, give the Orioles some credit–at least they have some kind of organization, while many FAQ pages list the questions in random order, even when there are dozens.
When you first look at the page, you are struck by how long it is. You obviously can’t scroll down through it and read it all, but all you have to help you is the A to Z navigation, which would be fine if you had any idea what letter your topic was under. Where would you look for “What am I allowed to carry into the park?” Turns out that you look under “Bags” if you want to know how big your briefcase can be (which I did) or you look under “Container policy” if you want to know whether you can bring a bottle of soda. You might need to refer to the “Camera/Video Equipment” and “Banner/Signs” topics depending on what else you wanted to bring.
And if all of the A-Z topics pertained to going to a game, maybe it would be OK, but these topics are all over the map, ranging from the location of defibrillators to requests to sing the national anthem to nearby hotels. Again, I have no issue with the A to Z Guide except, “Why is that the only place for this information?” It should also be presented in other places where it might be more natural to find it.
I wish this was an isolated case, but I see it all the time. The Web site owner has good intentions by parking the answers to questions on the site so that someone can find it, but this seems like a lazy way to do the job. If it is really an important question, I’d think that you’d want to place that answer in as many places as make sense so that the most people can find it. I’ve seen sites that relegate their hours of operation to their FAQ page. I have no problem with it being there, but couldn’t it be on your home page, too?
That is the problem with FAQ pages. They make it easy to be disorganized with your information. It is easy for the site owner to throw a few more questions up there, but it’s not so easy for site visitors. Site owners need to think about how they are organizing the information they put out there. A long list of questions or topics (even alphabetized) is not good enough.
So, the next time you think you have a new frequently-asked question to answer on your site, go ahead and do that. But also ask yourself a couple of questions. “Is this a question I could eliminate by changing or simplifying a policy rather than constantly answering it?” And, “Where else should I be answering this question on my site besides the FAQ page?” If you ask yourself those questions before posting a new frequently asked question, you might find that your customers aren’t questioning you so much.
Be sure and visit our small business news site.
Excerpt from:
Is your FAQ page a crutch for a bad Web site?
Written on April 8, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: book, marketing, seo
A couple years ago my wife and I had our big wedding in the Philippines (we even had the mayor of Manila show up). She was so beautiful that day. And lucky for me she is just as beautiful when she wakes up each day. 
But she can be hard on herself and if she gains a single pound she worries. Truth is I am the chubby one who needs to drop weight.
Beauty (and the perception of it) is a wonder commodity to sell because there is no limit. Almost everyone could be in better shape or be stronger or eat healthier or not have this or that birthmark or the odd finger that bends backwards.
We are imperfect beings by our very nature.
We get sick.
We break.
And we all fight the battle of aging one day at a time - every single day!
But no matter where you go, whatever is rare is typically considered desirable & beautiful. This is not done as an accident, but as a way to generate profits. If the human condition is flawed (and can’t be fixed) then the person selling a bogus solution to that problem is going to make a lot more money than a person who sells something which is actually attainable.
And so we live in a world where we treat symptoms, rather than problems. Anything to make the numbers look good and make the sale. From there you are on your own! If you feel bad, we can give you more drugs!
Spending too much time at the computer and eating unhealthy has made me a bit too chubby. No good in obese America! But did you know that in the certain times & cultures being fat was considered a sign of beauty, like when few people could afford to be fat! 
There is too much high fructose corn syrup in the typical American diet for obesity to be considered beautiful:
“Our findings lend support to the theory that the excessive consumption of high-fructose corn syrup found in many beverages may be an important factor in the obesity epidemic,” Avena said.
The new research complements previous work led by Hoebel and Avena demonstrating that sucrose can be addictive, having effects on the brain similar to some drugs of abuse.
In the United States many girls not only label anorexia as beauty, but some go to tanning salons so they can darken their skin to look beautiful, at least until they get older:
Long-term exposure to artificial sources of ultraviolet rays like tanning beds (or to the sun’s natural rays) increases both men and women’s risk of developing skin cancer. In addition, exposure to tanning salon rays increases damage caused by sunlight because ultraviolet light actually thins the skin, making it less able to heal. Women who use tanning beds more than once a month are 55 percent more likely to develop malignant melanoma, the most deadly form of skin cancer.
A service which has no lasting positive tangible value AND certainly has a lasting negative tangible risk can grow to become a multi-billion Dollar industry
Anything to be beautiful! This is what beautiful people do. I want to beautiful.
The above never really made sense to me and always felt a wee bit scammy. There was an odd odor to it, but it was hard to appreciate how scammy it was, until…
When it really hit home for me was when my wife and I were in the Philippines. Many of the department stores sell skin whitening soap! Having a lighter skin tone is supposed to be a sign that you are from a wealthier family. And since wealth is concentrated that is rare. And so that is what is considered beautiful.
Original post:
Beauty is Rare - Elusive so it Can be Easily Sold
Tags: a-lighter-skin ,a-lot-more ,a-month-are ,a-single-pound- ,book ,computer ,effects-on-the ,marketing ,mayor ,perception ,seo ,stronger-or-eat ,then-the-person ,theory
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Written on April 7, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: Advertising, book, chat, marketing, seo, stuntdubl
Firstly, I think domainers are geniuses. They are the only group of people that I know that can work as little as they do, and make as much as they do. Top level domainers are the TRUE optimizers, and saw the biggest gapping hole in the economics of the web ever created, and are now driving trucks of money through it. The true pioneers and geniuses within the community have started to develop an appreciation of what it takes to create successful online properties instead of just making money from parked landing pages. Unfortunately there is still a lot of laziness and blindness to some of the myths their community has helped to perpetuate. The thoughts below are from nearly a decade purchasing ~500 domain names of which I think only 10% at best hold very strong value. The rest are stinkers that I should probably not pay the $6 a year hosting if I was more dilligent with my accounting and renewal tracking.
I have been a lurker in domain and affiliate communities for years. I think it’s time to point out some of the domainer myths as the world’s of SEO’s and domainers start to collide, and the best domainers realize they need to actually develop their properties to continue to reap the rewards of their investments. Seeing “potential” through to fruition is both rewarding and extremely challenging (for a bit of credibility at this point, I invested, helped develop, and ultimately exited from CollegeDegree.com just over 3 years ago to help fund future projects.)
A perfect storm is brewing from the climate of need from marketers needing top domains and domainers needing marketing talent. It takes a lot to build a great site - so you might as well do it on a domain that people will remember when you finally put it in front of them. Landing page revenues are decreasing, and users are a bit more saavy, so many of the smart domainers are doing their best to at least develop sites on their domains to hedge their bets on big ticket domain valuations with some base level website monetization. It will definitely only continue to be more difficult to capture the “free traffic” of organic search, only as the myth that it should have ever been “free” in the first place is finally being dispelled.
We are FINALLY seeing tools to project the value of a site’s organic search traffic (like SEMRush, SpyFu, and Aaron’s awesome competitive analysis tool) to properly quantify at least a ball park range of the value of “free organic traffic”, and make projections of bottom line revenue based on these projections accordingly. The really sharp domainers, have been reaching out to folks in the SEO community, and have been attempting to learn about development and driving more traffic. To properly understand the myths, I think we must first take a look at how I appraise potential domain names (primarily for the intention of development).
1. Search term value (cost per click)
2. Exact match search term volume
3. Overall query diversity (is there longtail from the exact match that is valuable?)
4. Brand-ability (how easy is it to remember and type in)
5. Domain top level extension (.net/.orgs are still a great deal worth 10 - 20% of .com value - everything else is 2nd tier)
6. Potential type in traffic (only for very top level keyword.coms in select verticals, and really mainly good for branding)
7. Ease of future development (How easy is it to realize the “potential” of a brandable domain creating content, software, etc?)
8. Ease of monetization (is the market liquid, or does it have a high barrier to entry?)
There’s probably some others to add, but these 8 factors pretty much sum up most of the important areas up for consideration when looking at if you can earn a return from purchasing a domain name. For a more in depth guide to website valuation as a whole, you can see my older post on the subject - How to appraise a website - Website Value 101.
Bargain domains has a good handle on what is important using cpc, volume, competition, ease of monetization. Doing business development for a site that does not have existing affiliate programs is among the most difficult barriers to entry for creating a successful site in a given space, and where a lot of errors from the below myths comes into play. I think a lot of domainers are discounting a lot of their domains - with little or no clue why, other than trying to cover costs. I’ve definitely snagged my fair share of nice ones in what seems to be a pretty good buyer’s market in the right places. I’ve also got a lot of garbage from mistakes like domaining after drinking;) To make the right buys, you definitely can’t fall for the top 11 myths domainers find themselves falling victim to:
1. Myth of the Type in.
Type in traffic occurs at a very small level that is constantly diminishing. I make no argument that some percentage of people type in Cameras.com when thinking about purchasing a digital camera. However, the impact of this type of traffic, overall is quite minimal. Type in traffic comes through google, bing, yahoo, and your Internet Service Provider. If your ISP decides to serve a 404 page for the domain or country code it will render to their landing page. Richard Kershaw has more about the dangers of the type in traffic myth based on some data he dug up from Sedo, so I’ll defer to his better post to explain this one further:
“… 0.001% of domains parked with Sedo get double digit per day traffic. Or to put it another way, 99.999% of domains parked with Sedo don’t hit double digits daily.“
Even Kevin Ham’s genius .CM wildcard tld strategy isn’t really working in most places anymore. What really perpetuates this myth is repeat visitors and DIRECT NAVIGATION. Direct navigation is much different from type in traffic. Direct navigation can easily come from other media sources and many times very easily owe it’s true attribution to a specific campaign or general “brand equity” which will likely always remain a somewhat vague metric for analysis and accountability.
2. Myth of the 1 Word .com
Just because it’s generic, doesn’t mean it’s good Crap.com is still crap. Yes, you can make an argument, that it is “brandable”, but so is Suudl.com or some other random character string of constants and vowels. There’s dozens of startups in Silicon Valley trying to build an awesome product on a garbage domain. Sometimes it actually works (Yoodle to go on and be better things.) Do you know how much money it costs to BUILD a true brand that people actually recognize?
Sharp entrepreneurs like domainshane.com have some solid 4 and 5 letter domains for web 2.0 startups, but there’s a difference between selling a few domains for 3 figures, and creating a full blown startup company. I will say that I do think any 4 and 5 letter .com value will only continue to rise. There are only a limited number of these and they will often be held by large corporations. A good four letter .com is HIGHLY brandable since it takes up less space for more traditional advertising (print/ radio/ tv).
The biggest myth with EVERY entrepreneur falls victim to is that it’s easy to build a company. Murphy’s law definitely applies to you, even though you think you’re the exception. You always hear the success stories of Mint.com and the like, but you miss the other 9 startups for every 1 that actually even gets a 2nd round of funding (as well as the thousands that failed to get to that point). You also miss the decades of misery endured by the executives and founders. I can count on less than two hands the number of successful entrepreneurs I know that have maintained their integrity. Any idea how hard it is to get the first round? 3 words: Tech Bubble, Recession
Having 20 or 30 single word domains may prove to be more of a blessing than a curse to either sell or develop when you look at how much money a startup has to raise to take a company to the next level past several rounds of venture funding, or the difficulty of creating a company that will sustain through a public offering.
3. Myth of the “Category Killer”
The underestimation of what it actually takes to build a real site that delivers value to real end users, and makes real revenue will be the common thread in most of these points. It’s real easy to say that you understand how to do it, and that you can do it. Even if you did it as a consultant, doesn’t mean you can do it all yourself and successfully pull it off (believe me, I fell victim to this myth for quite some time.)
Banca.com was a steal in a recent auction, but just because you own Bank.org, doesn’t mean you can build or run one and actualize the potential of such a domain.
4. Myth of “Revshare”
This begins with the fallacy that you’ll attract good people by offering them a revenue share of the project. Unfortunately, smart people realize it’s very difficult to craft these agreements, and setting expectations on the same page is a rare commodity. As a consultant, I’ve had lots of “rev-share” offers. Normally, building a long term working relationship works in a handful of ways through smaller projects.
The person who builds the house isn’t always happy to lease the land it’s built on, even if they get to share in the profits. Normally, they’d prefer to buy some less expensive land, and maintain complete control of the project, until they can be the master developer.
There are ultimately a few questions that get asked from both sides:
Domainer:
We would like to develop a site that makes millions from my genius idea of buying high quality domains in 1994.
Consultant: Did you live in Vancouver or nearby?
D: No, but I have been to some conferences around that area.
C: Cool - the domainer community fascinates me, and I’m a lurker there. I do a bit of domaining myself for myself as well.
So tell me about your site.
D: Elaborate beautiful description of properties and potential. Insert unrealistic expectations of marketing miracles.
C: screenshare examples of success.
D: More qualification of websites awesomeness.
C: More examples of wins, and answers to questions.
D: Sounds awesome, we’ll be in touch.
C: Okay cool. Have a good one.
The conversations sometimes go a few phone calls longer. The truth is, the cost of creating an amicable agreement, or in building the trust takes so much efforts, that both sides generally fall flat. The trust needed for such an arragement is generally too big of a gap to bridge in a few phone calls. The domainer opts for the cheap work with less than impressive results, and the consultant continues to consult and develop sites. Generally the domainers learn from the conversation and realize they should continue to further their search and social media marketing understanding.
A few examples:
Example #1http://www.namecake.com/venture-partners/
Some of our names experience a large volume of natural daily traffic. Couple this with their brandability and you have a powerful combination to immediately compete in your chosen field. All that’s needed to turn these domains into successful online destinations is a strong partner with the right resources.
…our ideal partners will likely have the resources to execute an entire business plan around developing the domain property. All aspects of the business will be the responsibility of the partner. While the preferred relationship is to partner with experienced companies/individuals on these projects, an outright sale of the domain name will also be considered.
A strong project manager with years of experience will likely always buy the domain outright (or find an alternative to use).
I understand that the core competency here is acquiring top level domains, but I’m wondering how many properties they have successfully built out to claim just how “easy” it is to immediately compete and make money with a top level domain. I have certainly heard the question before myself of “If you’re so good at this, why don’t you do it for yourself?” In fact, I heard it enough times that I decided I must build my own properties to disprove the naysayers. I’m sure the guys at namecake are super smart, and have made lots of money - but it if it DID come from underestimating the workload, and doing what was easy - they were extremely lucky.
Example #2 Reinvent, Marchex, and other companies have some amazing domain names, but each individual domain nearly warrants it’s own entire dedicated team to build out properly. I’m not sure some of these domainers have the true knack for creating gameplans for actual site development and launch that actualize the “potential” the domain names hold. Even though some of their large holdings are generic domains - the value in ranking for these phrases (and the business plan and development for monetizing them) often doesn’t justify the effort unfortunately. There are a handful of winners, and a lot of losers still left in these large, diverse portfolios. Focusing on one or two big areas could really do well, but trying to split the workload between a very large and diverse portfolio is spreading the resources very thin on some of the really GOOD domains they have like carfinancing.com, creditrating.com, or cheaptravel.com. By the time they realize this, the barrier to entry to start in these areas may well be much much higher.
Example #3
http://www.bigticketdomains.com/
Treatmentcenters.com – great site (doesn’t work in ff for mac), and awesome domain with the ability to create a great geo based lead generation campaign. Focus on the one site, and sell the others if you can to fund the development.
Focus on Brideloan.com, Tradeshows.com, NewYork.net, and develop StockMarket.com and MutualFunds.com. Those 4 domains could easily be enough for a lifetime. The rest might sell to an enlightened soul in one of their respective industries for fairly reasonable prices. I don’t imagine it takes lots of homeruns, and offering GOOD reasonable financing deals is a good step towards doing biz dev with saavy individuals and agencies.
5. Myth of Interlinking sites
The lesson in learned when a large group of sites is wiped off the map in terms of search traffic. This is generally the point where they search around for someone to fix the problem, and claim they did nothing wrong. At the very least - interlinking your domains is NOT doing you any favors. Start splitting them off now, and quit convincing yourself that you’re Barry Diller and you own IAC. His sites have entire enterprise level teams to “co-brand” and “cross-promote) his sites. Until your parent company is worth a billion dollars, you’re still just cross linking (with little to no benefit, and potentially a lot of detriment)
6. Myth of Parking pages (slowly dissolving value)
I bet it was awesome getting a 40% rip from the overture feed when type in traffic and search traffic was high for high value phrase .coms with little content and a phoney link profile. It’s a shame that things went down hill and everyone had to start working for a living. If it makes you feel better, SEO’s are providing an increasingly more commoditized service whose value at most levels is dimishing as well, and good folks are looking for better opportunities to monetize a skillset that is still not completely easy to build despite all the advances in search marketing training in the last three or four years.
7. Myth of Not Identifying and Underestimating Search and Social Strategy Value
Search marketing can help build direct cashflow. The tools to project the value of search marketing are still just starting to grow to a point of decent accuracy. 4 years ago before Google Analytics became great, no one had PPC data. It’s hard to understand SEO if you haven’t done PPC. Their are important economic systems in play on both that affect bottom line business. Search marketing is at the core of consumer intent.
8. Myth of Low Value Services Providing High Value
Amazingly willing to spend xxx,xxx on domains, but not more than $x,xxx per month on development. A good strategy should probably spend anywhere from 10 - 30% of the budget on the domain. Depending on the project this can seem excessive to some - but I definitely strongly agree with the high value in good domain names. The trouble is that you can only develop a few (not 100’s or 1000’s). I find that I’ve been able to develop about 10 - 12 sites per year at various qualities. That’s about one per month - with about 2-5 coming out very good at the end of a year. This is with a very strong desire to sit at the computer for 40 - 60 hrs per week consistently, and work at your maximum mental capacity.
9. Myth of Hype and Community Publicity
Woohoo! Joe the domainer launched motorcyclehelmets.com - It’s sure to be a category killer! I’m not a huge hater, but I’ve seen people fall into the same trap within the SEO and internet marketing community. Just because you’re a big deal in your little niche community does not mean you’ll make money, or that anyone else anywhere will actually care if you do. Most the successful people I know that have maintained their humanity tend to have a great deal of humility (and try to minimize the hype). The hater in me comes from my self loathe of blogging and enjoying using things like foursquare and twitter. For a circle jerk of publicity and drama in a small pondof life, there are many forums and blogs to visit, but perhaps the rise of the fall for the seo community came with Threadwatch.org (I think because it was like a giant sewing circle). It is only by spending time in such a place that you have an appreciation of just how information on the web truly travels (and just how little most things really mean).
10. Myth of second tier top level domain extensions
I bought into .info’s too. I feel your pain. I think I even have some .travel, .us, .mobi and some other second tier garbage. Firstly, they’ll never gain acceptance. Secondly, they’ll never rank for anything. Thirdly, no one will remember your extension (and they’ll type in .com), and you’ll lose most of the “type-ins” you were hoping for. Lastly, remember how much it costs to build a brand? It costs even more to get your .com AFTER the fact. The cost of GREAT .coms /.nets /.orgs on the other hand continues to see growth.
11. Myth that development is EASY
The owners of MutualFunds.com have a retail price of $5 Million listed. How much more likely are your odds for success buying Mutualfunds.net for $100k, and spending the other $4.9M on product development and marketing? For that matter, why not buy a $6 domain, and redirect it later? Even if you DO have a $10M budget, does it ever really make sense to make this type of purchase? Sure it’s an amazing domain name - no question, but your domain is only one function of your marketing budget. I am a large fan of big ticket domains, but if you are top heavy in terms of percentage of your budget being spent on your domain, and neglect your product and marketing, you will be clamoring about the “potential” until the point your domain goes up to foreclosure auction, and someone else gets it at the price it likely originally should have sold for (far less than you paid).
So why is it domainers (and most entrepreurs for that matter) underestimate the cost of development?
The number one reason this happens is because business goals aren’t developed before the project starts. One of the most exclusive problems to a business that fails online is a lack of understanding in execution the marketing and business development strategies. Underestimating the true nature of the project is a realization that nearly always occurs at the end of a failed businesses’ lifecycle.
In terms of one and two word keyword domains, domainers often forget that while there is a benefit in having an exact match keyword domain, it is still only easy to rank for that single term in the short term. Ranking for all the long tail phrases or other important phrases is an entirely different story. Even ranking for the exact match of a domain can be very difficult if the domain is in a already highly developed industry. To truly understand how difficult it is to rank for something, you must be able to do some competitive intelligence in a search result, and identify:
- how many links will you need?
- how much content will you need?
- what will it take for development of the great ideas you will use to retain users?
- will you be able to create content that will engage users, or is it highly specialized?
How many links you will need is often the critical underestimation. While you CAN go out and buy links, there is certainly a level of risk that comes along with this to your precious investment.
So what’s the moral of the story?
- Don’t believe the hype (least of all your own)
- No one will buy “potential” $1 worth of revenue is worth more than $100 in potential.
- Build a business model first
- Spend more money on engineering and strong development than hype and potential.
- Cut losses on a project that doesn’t succeed
I think this is most important. If you REALLY want to make money on the web - follow these rules. Start working in one small corner of a competitive marketplace, and prove to yourself you can make a living at it. Most of the money is made from: 1. telling people how to make money 2. telling people how to improve themselves 3. telling people how to find things 4. comparing things for people in high dollar areas. 5. lead generation in the above mentioned topics with massive scaleable solutions (generally aggregations and user generated content plays).
I understand that with writing this post, I will likely ostracize myself from a bit of the domainer community, but it is only out of watching and understanding a bit from the fringes that I understand some of the domainer “community” that I have been able to form these observations. It is with a great deal of respect that I have done so, and that I offer my constructive criticism. As mentioned above - I think most good domainers are among the smartest and luckiest folks I’ve ever heard about. I hope some day I get to catch up with some cool domainer folks and swap stories over boat drinks. If you want to train teams in the meantime - I’ll give a shameless promotion for MarketMotive - it’s a great place to train your teams on holistic goals with an understanding of business goals. If you got through this whole post, and got a little upset with some of the observations -it’s probably a great place to start, and I remind you that I criticize with the utmost respect.
More sites and references:
Domainer sites I like watching:
Original post:
Website Valuation and Domain Appraisal Myths: A Cautionary Tale for Domainers
Tags: Advertising ,chat ,computer ,economics ,general ,internet ,media ,money ,project ,random ,rewards ,seattle ,seo ,stuntdubl ,vancouver
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Written on March 29, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: book, marketing
I will file this under “I didn’t know that although I am not even close to surprised” for obvious reasons. Google gets to make a claim about its Chrome browser that others like Firefox and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 and Apple’s Safari can’t. That claim is that it survived the Pwn2Own 2010. Forbes tells us a little more
The Pwn2Own competition in Vancouver is a yearly demonstration of the software industry’s utter inability to keep its products safe from determined hackers. This year, researchers cracked Firefox, Internet Explorer 8, and Safari in minutes, winning $10,000 each, bragging rights and the hardware those applications were running on.
But more notable is the one survivor of the competition’s browser category: Google’s Chrome.
For the second year in a row, Chrome has left the Pwn2Own competition unscathed even as all of its competitors have been compromised.
In a world where security and privacy are more desired but maybe less available than ever this kind of competition is interesting. We all know there are folks out there who are interested in compromising Internet systems for monetary gain and many other times just for sport. We as end users know it exists and cross our fingers hoping it doesn’t happen to us.
While Google can talk about its victory here there is some skepticism among the researchers who participate in this competition as to just how secure Chrome really is. Apple hacker Charlie Miller was able to win for the third year in a row with his efforts to compromise the Safari browser. He also wonders about Google supposed invulnerability.
Miller argues in an email to us that Google isn’t necessarily more secure than its competitors–just that hackers hack the applications they use themselves. “Researchers tend to just pick on their favorite browser,” he writes.
This is the second year in a row that the Chrome browser was unscathed but there is plenty of speculation that this will not last. Why? As something gets a reputation of being impenetrable it gets the blood of any good researcher / hacker or whatever boiling. Also, there is $10,000 on the line each year at this competition. Which pays better than Google apparently because they have $1,337 limit on payment for security bugs.
So what is Google take on this? Of course, they have a better mousetrap
Google, for its part, would argue that Chrome simply has better security features, namely “sandboxing,” which drastically limits the privileges of a Web site to access your computer’s hardware. Google bought at least part of that sandboxing ability with its acquisition of software firm GreenBorders in May of 2007. Check out its comic book illustration of how sandboxing works.
Now that Google has put a bullseye on Chrome we’ll see just how long this streak will last.
Read the original:
Google’s Chrome Escapes Hack Contest Untouched
Tags: a-claim-about ,a-crucial-step ,a-little-more ,chrome ,computer ,everything-from ,firefox ,hardware ,internet ,microsoft ,safari ,second ,software ,valley
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