Andrew Nagy » Business

Organic SEO Should be Organic

Andrew — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 22:24:53 +0000

Update:I’ve decided to change the diagram below because development and SMO don’t really overlap all that much (it could be argued they don’t at all), so I think my new diagram is a bit more appropriate. You be the judge. – Andrew 8/19/08
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I’ve been toying around with what I guess you could call the philosophical underpinnings of SEO lately, and I think I’ve come to the conclusion that SEO shouldn’t be a pursuit in and of itself, but should be an organic result of work put into development and social media marketing. And I would be remiss if I didn’t include a Venn diagram to illustrate my point.

Obviously a developer should have an eye for SEO so he knows how to code. I’ve also lumped content writing into development because that’s where it belongs historically. This person should also be aware of how search engines work so he can write accordingly.

The social media side is really just the kind of marketing that draws traffic to your sites and generates quality links. Essentially, the SEO part of social media is link bait.

I’m pretty sure that these positions, coder, writer, and social marketer, combine to form the heart of SEO. Sort of like Captain Planet. Thoughts?

Useful Feature + Easily Monetized = Everyone Happy

Andrew Nagy — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:48:15 +0000

For several years now, I’ve maintained one iTunes database even when I buy a new computer or reformat. It’s been important to me to have things like play count, last played, date added, etc. because it helps me create dynamic playlists for work. So I was stoked when I found out about Last.fm because it does more tracking of that kind of thing and throws a social networking edge in there to boot.

So seeing who my top artist was last week is pretty cool and all, but I’ve noticed that the site overall lacks some really useful features.

1. First, I’d really like to see more realtime updating of top artists this week (instead of saying “this week” but showing last week’s numbers).

2. What about showing one artist’s weekly playcount over a 3 month time period? There’s just so much you can do with that much data, it’s astounding.
But really, all that data stuff is just kind of cool to look at, and it would be pretty difficult to implement. Last.fm would have to beef up their features with no direct monetization. Now you can argue that making the site better leads to more people using it more frequently which leads to more people buying music through the site, and I’ll agree. However, when you’re talking about development for web applications, there’s only so much you can do in the hopes of attracting new users. Sometimes you really need something that will directly help you make money.

Okay, Last.fm, are you listening? This is a doozie. It looks like to me that quite a bit of your revenue comes from affiliate links to Amazon and such, where people buy music they like and you get a cut. If that’s so, I’ve got a useful product feature for you that will boost the number of albums you sell.

It’s pretty simple, actually. You scan the top 100 artists of a user. Then you discover which albums the user owns from that artist, and which ones they don’t. Then you have an album suggestion page which shows the user which albums from their favorite artists they don’t own. I know I would really benefit from this, since it can be difficult to keep up with as many artists as there are these days.

So how about it? We get a useful feature, and you get an easy revenue stream. It’s not often you get something that works for both sides that well.

Make Your Site Description Relevant By Deleting It

Andrew Nagy — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 19:02:24 +0000

Many times, the difference between getting seen on a search engine and getting clicked on from a search engine is your title and description. If they’re not compelling, the potential visitor isn’t going to think you have what they need. One of the obvious ways to increase your relevancy to the user is to include the terms you rank for in the page title and meta description. That way, when they see your website on the results page, they see the terms they searched for in bold.

That’s all well and good, and many website owners use that method with great success, but what happens when you rank (or want to rank) for a variety of terms that are hard to fit together in the short amount of space you have for your page title and description?

Hello makes-sense, my name’s counterintuitive, and I’m here to kill you. Secret weapon of the webmaster? Get rid of your meta description.

Think I’m crazy? Think about this. When Google, Yahoo!, or Live Search (hereafter referred to as Goohoolive, and yes goohoolive.com is taken) doesn’t find a meta description, what do they do? They scan the rest of your page for relevant content and will often times display the portion of it that contains the terms being searched for. So if you’ve got a decent amount of content on your homepage (and you should) relating to all of those terms you want to rank for, then you should have enough info for Google, Yahoo!, Live Search, et al to find and display.

Okay, I know it sounds risky, so I’ll try some assurance. First, you don’t have to get rid of your description altogether. I found one very large retail site that shortened it enough to achieve the same effect. Since large retail = big money and therefore (hopefully) less crazy, I’ll use them to back up my point.

Crucial.com is by far the largest internet retailer of computer memory there is. That probably has something to do with the fact that they’re owned by Micron, one of the world’s largest memory manufacturers, but I digress. If you go to their homepage and view their source code, here’s what you’ll see for their meta description:

Pretty short, right? That should be absolutely killing them on the SERPs, but it’s not. Below are screenshots of the search engine results page from Google for the top three terms in their industry: memory, computer memory, and ram.

As you can see, each of the descriptions vary somewhat, according to the keyword. Now, while I don’t think the content on their homepage is ideal, it gets the point across. For each of these three searches, they have bolded terms in a description that might otherwise be without.

Now, I haven’t tried this yet with any of the sites I manage, but I am thinking about it. What I’d like to know is if anyone else out there will admit to trying it and let me know what the results were/are.

A Bit of a Change

Andrew Nagy — Fri, 16 May 2008 20:47:07 +0000

Well, it’s time to say farewell to the old theme. I liked it while I had it, but I needed a three column theme so I have room for all the widgets I keep adding. Also, I’ve recently decided that my favorite color is red, so this seemed fitting. I like this theme because it’s simple, clean, and easy to tweak.

Passion and Profit?

Andrew Nagy — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 18:39:04 +0000

I hear a lot about how to start a new business or product line. What startles me the most about these discussions (at least the ones I hear most frequently) is how backwards they are. The person I am discussing with will start out by asking, “What can I sell that will make money?” To me, this is approaching a business in the wrong order.

In my opinion, there are two important motivations for starting a business. First, you have to be passionate about what you are selling. Secondly, there should be a healthy demand and undercrowded market for it. The people with whom I discuss business that ask, “What can I sell that will make money?” are missing the point. They only want business as a means to an end: wealth. They think wealth will satisfy them. ROI, king of thieves.

But I think the best businesses are run by those who see the businsess as the end. Running your business, or if you’re an employee, marketing/fulfilling/supporting your product should fulfill you in some way. You should be happy that you offer this product or service.

This sort of thinking trickles down into all sorts of practicle applications in everyday business. When you’re thinking more about how to meet the needs and wants of your customers and less about how to make a quick buck, you’re more likely to innovate/create/stumble upon something that is actually worthwhile and contributes to the general community. When you’re deciding how to design a page on a website, do you think more about how helpful it is for a visitor or are you worried about whether it will get crawled, indexed, and ranked for a specific keyword by Google?

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you shouldn’t be concerned about SEO or any kind of online marketing. Marketing efforts (online and offline) are important. But if you are a company that doesn’t care more about its customer than its immediate ROI, in the long run I think your marketing is bunk. With all the talk about value propositions, I think it’s worth mentioning that being a great company in the eyes of consumers is a fantastic and compelling value proposition. Letting consumers see that you’re a company made up of real people who are excited about what they do is maybe one of the most important things you can do.

That’s my $0.02.

Something Viral

Andrew Nagy — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 20:15:59 +0000

I’ve written before my thoughts that viral marketing isn’t new, and today I was sent a link to a fantastic example of what viral marketing is all about. It’s called SomethingStore and the basic premise is this: pay $10 and receive a totally random something in the mail 5 to 10 days later.

What you get is completely random and may or may not be of value to you. However, looking through the list of sent products, it seems most of the things are at least fun. You can see examples of random somethings on their site.

The reason I really wanted to point this out was to draw a correlation to my previous post about viral. Both word of mouth and viral marketing depend very greatly on one thing: value. Your business/site has to have something of value if it’s going to get anyone else talking/blogging about it. You can hire whatever agency you want, but at the end of the day, if you’re not offering something of value, you’re not going to succeed. At least not honestly.

Searching the Searchers

Andrew Nagy — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 23:18:12 +0000

Okay, so employer realizes we have a license to Web Position 4. Wants to know if it’s worth it. Asks me. Typically, I do PPC. I dabble in SEO, but I have no idea about Web Position 4. So I think to myself, Hello, myself. I should research this on Google! So I of course did, submitting “Web Position 4 reviews” to which I received a lot of affiliate reviews, obviously canned marketing junk.

Plan B: Check Sphinn since it’s full of useful info. Surely someone has Sphunn a review or some such. Type in “Web Position 4″ in the search box and…

Crap. Nothing. Nothing useful, anyway. Thing is, tons of articles were returned as search results. Lots. How come none of them were relevant? Not a single one, and I looked.

I’ve tried several times to search on Sphinn, and I’ve never found anything relevant. Does anyone else find it even slightly ironic that Sphinn, the social site for search marketing has a crappy search feature? I mean, I know they use Pligg for the engine, but can’t they at least integrate Google into the search or something?

At least Google is honest:

So riddle me this.

Is Sphinn aware of this?
Are they gonna fix it?
Does anyone know about Web Position 4?

Google Product Search is NOT Useless!

Andrew Nagy — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 15:53:48 +0000

For a while now I’ve been trying to use Google product search to look for stuff I want. I don’t like eBay because it’s been infiltrated by unwanted persons, and I absolutely can’t stand the comparison shopping engines. Part of it I think is that I know how these businesses work, and I don’t like it. So, knowing that Google product search does not charge for listings and that I generally like Google anyway, I thought I’d give it a shot. Unfortunately, when I sort by price (low to high, of course), here’s what I always got…

But wait! After much obsessing and trying of hacks (such as -ebay) a coworker suggested the following:

-inurl:(ebay.com)

It worked like a charm. Check it out:

So turns out, Google product search is not useless!

Send an Email that Sells!

Andrew Nagy — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 20:40:57 +0000

Today I received an email from Microsoft extolling a free new eBook they are going to give me called, “Build a Website that Sells.” Now, typically, I don’t click on Microsoft stuff… even when it’s free. Who am I kidding, especially when it’s free. But since this pertains to my career, I thought, why not. Let’s see what M$FT has to say about building a great website. Below are two screenshots. The first is the email, the second is the page it sent me to. Enjoy!

This is the email I got today, promising a free eBook that will help me build a website that sells! Oh joy!

Consider me sold, Microsoft!