On the web, more than most other places, appearances really do matter. My friend Joe likes to say that in most cases websites “give the appearance of a successful business” even when very little business is being done. Just because a site has a shopping cart doesn’t mean anyone’s buying but you’d never know that unless you were the webmaster behind the curtain.
Unless you’re a natural at graphic design and layout, it’s generally best to find someone to help you give your website a professional appearance. Admittedly we hadn’t taken this approach ourselves until recently and I still prefer to build out new sites on my own before hiring a web designer. Once a site has proven itself to be viable and capable of returning a design investment I’m more than willing to take the plunge.
This site was designed by the guys at 45royale and obviously it rocks. The design is professional but not because it’s overly designed; rather it’s clean, easy to use, and consistent. Exhibit Instinct designed our site at Unity3.com and was able to give the e-commerce site a lifestyle look and feel that has suppliers knocking down our door to get placement (just remember what I said about the appearance of business though ). We’re in the process of giving our other sites a professional facelift and we’ll certainly keep you posted on the results in terms of increases in visits, conversions, pageviews, etc.
Rather than giving you a list of things to consider when choosing a web hosting service, I’ll keep this very simple: get a recommendation from someone you trust. Sure it’s easy to compare storage space, bandwidth, price, features, etc. among dozens of online hosting providers but you can’t quantify customer service and reliability which are arguably the most important things to consider.
We’ve been using the same hosting service, American Hosting, since 1999 (!) for our sites and we couldn’t be happier. American Hosting doesn’t have a super slick website, they aren’t the cheapest (though prices are reasonable), they don’t offer the most storage (but enough for most folks), and they certainly aren’t a big operation - and that’s why we like them. You can talk to them on the phone when you have an issue and unlike other services they don’t seem to have major turnover in support techs. We’ve recommended American Internet to all our clients and they have been extremely pleased as well.
Many years ago we decided to try out another hosting service (a Yahoo! branded option) and let’s just say it was a little too basic (and expensive) for our needs. If you’ve never built or managed a website you may want to stick with an option like Yahoo! but for most folks I don’t recommend it.
Anyway, this all comes back to my original point: get a recommendation, and not just from someone on a random internet forum. Find someone who knows what you’re capable of doing and what your needs are and let them help you find the right host. Everyone has different hosting needs and it pays to ask around until you find the web host that’s right for you.
Business Pundit posted an entertaining trip down memory lane covering 25 of the most spectacular internet failures over the last 10 years. This is certainly a good read if you’re feeling discouraged about your own internet business - at least you can say you didn’t blow through millions of dollars to get where you are today
My favorite failed internet startup on the list has to be the first one - GovWorks.com. For those who may not be familiar with the story, GovWorks was featured in a documentary titled Startup.com which gave an unprecedented inside look into the rise and fall of a real internet company in the late 1990s. This is perhaps my favorite documentary of all time and despite the sobering nature of this cautionary tale I somehow come away from watching it each time with a genuine sense of hope and excitement.
If you have some time today, read through the list and see what you can learn from these catastrophic internet failures. If nothing else it might make you feel good about your own struggle
You may have heard from your search engine optimization consultant that duplicate content is a no-no in the search engine ranking game - but what does this really mean? How strict are search engines in terms of duplicate content?
Let’s first consider the types of duplicate content that a webmaster might post on his or her website. Direct quotes, from articles or speakers, are a pretty common form of duplicate content but we wouldn’t expect to be penalized for this type of content, especially if it is properly credited. Online yellow pages and directories contain mostly business names, addresses, and phone numbers - not original content by any means - and yet somehow these sites get indexed and ranked by search engines as well. And how about online news sites that reproduce stories from the AP wire - these posts are IDENTICAL to content posted on hundreds of other sites yet there doesn’t seem to be any “penalty” applied to the local news sites.
So perhaps the search engines have written special rules to deal with this type of content - but I really doubt it. Instead I think search engines don’t expect web pages to be completely unique but they prefer pages that are MOSTLY unique. What constitutes a MOSTLY unique page versus a not-unique-enough page is certainly a mystery but if I were writing a search alogorithm I’d want to see the ratio of unique to duplicate content at about 1 to 1.
Applying a penalty to non-unique sites can also pose a challenge because search engines don’t always know which site posted the content first (i.e. who the owner is). If a plaigerizer copies your content within a day of posting it on your website, the search crawlers have a good chance of finding your content on his site first and thus applying the “penalty” to your site even though you did nothing wrong. Again, this leads me to believe the duplicate content penalty is a myth because it’s just too difficult to enforce fairly and accurately.
In our own search engine tests of duplicate content we found that two pages, each with identical content (title tags, content, markup, etc.), posted on the same domain, were both indexed by the major search engines. The only difference between the files was the filenames and the resulting search engine listing randomly placed one file as a part of “supplemental results.” Since both files were created at the same time the choice of “supplemental” versus “original” was complete chance.
The moral of the story is that you shouldn’t stress about original content on your website. Sure, you should never copy content from other sites but that’s because you’ll eventually receive nasty-grams accusing you of plaigerism - not because the search engines will start to hate you. Just use duplicate content judiciously and keep increasing your (mostly) unique pages to watch your search traffic soar!
These days there is a new way for webmasters to monetize their content that goes beyond Google Adsense and Amazon Associates: vertical ad networks. Vertical ad networks are basically ad sales agencies that target a particular niche or vertical (outdoor sports, for example). These agencies approach big name advertisers and sell hundreds of thousands of ad impressions across their network of small- to medium-sized sites and share the revenue with the publishers.
The concept for vertical ad networks isn’t a new one but up until recently we’ve found the whole concept oversold and underdelivered. Today we’re working with two vertical ad networks across our sites and are seeing revenues per thousand impressions roughly double what we were generating through Google Adsense alone. Vertical ad networks are able to charge premium rates over typical cost per click campaigns because they are more targeted and offer additional rich media ad capabilities (think flash).
One thing to keep in mind when signing on to a vertical ad network is that these companies will often ask publishers to sign exclusive one-year ad contracts. It’s important to do your homework and understand the CPMs, payment schedules, ad filtering capabilities, reporting tools, et al before you sign on the dotted line. Ask to speak with other publishers using the network and don’t be afraid to walk away if something seems fishy about the pitch (like it’s too good to be true), especially if you’re satisfied with the revenue you’re generating through Google Adsense.
Vertical ad networks are a great option for monetizing your site once you’re built a reasonable amount of online traffic (at least 25K impressions per month). If you haven’t already been contacted by a network in your niche, search online to find an appropriate partner - just remember to do your homework!
I’ve been running websites for over 10 years now and in that time I’ve owned dozens of domain names but I never had a need to transfer my domain registrar. In fact one of my first domains, singletracks.com, is still at Network Solutions where I continue to pay $35 a year to renew my domain registration just because I was never entirely sure how difficult a transfer would be.
Over the past couple of years I’ve generally used Yahoo! or 1and1 to register new domains and today I probably have about a dozen domains with each company. Regular readers will recall my recent rant about Yahoo!’s domain renewal price increases that went in effect July 1, 2008, effectively raising prices 350% from a year ago. With some of my domains I wasn’t too concerned - I figured I would just cancel them once they came up for renewal since I wasn’t using them anyway. But then my company domain name (bluespruceventures.com) came up for renewal and I knew I had to do something.
So, I started the mysterious “domain transfer process” between Yahoo! Domains and 1and1. Yahoo! actually makes it easy to unlock your domain in the online control panel and even gives you the transfer code you need to initiate the move. 1and1 provides good documentation for transferring domains as well and after adding the domain to my cart just as I would a “new domain,” I was asked for the transfer code. Now at this point, the process was a bit surprising: 1and1 requires you to further verify you are the domain owner by responding to an email sent to the address on record with your domain registration. Fortunately I still had access to this address and was able to complete the verification.
After about 5 business days 1and1 confirmed the process was complete and I was able to update DNS settings to point the domain to my server. The great thing is that during the whole process I was able to keep the name servers going with the correct info so there was no drop in availability for my site (as far as I know).
So if you’re getting the business from your domain registrar with renewal price increases, don’t fret. Just transfer your domain - it’s easier than you might think!
In the old days it was understood that search engines could not crawl web content (particulary dynamic content) that had to be accessed from drop down “select” menus. For example, if a site was about restaurant reviews in the US and users were asked to choose a state from a form menu (like the one below), the state listing pages would be all but invisible to search engines. But is this still the case?
In our test we “hid” pages with our keyword behind a select menu and found (to our surprise) that Google was able to quickly navigate the form with no problems. In fact the pages behind the select menu were picked up and indexed just as quickly (within a few days) as other, normal pages on our site. Yahoo!, on the other hand, still has not indexed the pages behind our select menu and it’s doubtful they ever will (we’ll keep you posted here).
This new finding begs the question: is it still necessary to have alternate entry points for search engine crawlers to access dynamic content? I say yes for two reasons: 1. because less sophisticated crawlers aren’t able to get past menus and 2. because it’s better to be safe than sorry for those that can access your content. It’s also important to consider the other ways folks may be accessing your content where drop-down menus aren’t ideal (mobile phones, text based browsers, screen readers, etc.). Sure it means more pages and more development but it also means even more pages indexed by those sophisticated search engines
Google Adsense has resuscitated many online publishers’ business models over the past 3 or 4 years and it’s easy to understand why: because it works. If you’re unfamiliar with the program, publishers (webmasters like you) can sign up for a free account and start serving targeted online ads immediately. The ads are automatically targeted to your site content which means you get reasonable click-through rates while adding a valuable service to your readers. No more need to serve annoying mortgage ads on your site (ahem, Weather.com).
Over the years Google has added more sophisticated features to the Adsense program that allow publishers even great flexibility. Publishers can, for example, block certain advertisers from their site; choose the ad types shown (image, text, video, etc.); and customize ad colors to fit virtually any site design. What’s amazing is that this free tool that’s available to everyone is being used by some of the biggest sites around (myspace, CNN, etc.). If it works for them it must be pretty powerful and effective.
On our own sites we typically see Google Adsense clickthrough rates between 0.5% and 1% which may not sound like much but is actually slighly above industry averages. Our payment is typically around $0.25 per click but this can vary widely depending on your site’s content, industry competitiveness, etc. Google isn’t saying what percentage of the revenue they collect from advertisers they pay out to publishers but suffice it to say it’s around 50%.
If you’re looking for the industry standard in website monetization, look no further than Google Adsense. It’s a great place to start to get a feel for the types of advertisers that might target your site’s content - and you’ll earn some dough in the process!
When your consumer review website grows beyond a certain size you may find that your users inadvertently add duplicate listings. This could be because folks are having a hard time searching through all your listings or it could just be that they didn’t even bother to search to see if a listing already exists before posting. In either case, it’s important to deal with duplicate content quickly and properly, particularly if your site is set up for user reviews.
When a site contains duplicate listings it gives users the impression that the site is not being actively managed and this makes them less inclined to add a review. Duplicate listings also make it tough to determine which one is the “right” listing where new reviews should be posted. Once reviews have been posted to both listings, neither is “complete” and the confusion grows.
It’s important to make it easy for your site manager to find and deal with duplicate listings quickly. Review App, for example, gives administrators the option to be notified whenever new listings are posted so they can double-check the uniqueness of the listing. Administrators can choose to either delete a listing or temporarily remove it from the public site for further review.
In some cases managers may wish to “convert” duplicate listings into a review of the original listing. For singletracks.com we created a custom tool that takes all the content associated with a duplicate listing (photos, reviews, wishlist entries, etc.) and reassigns that content to the original listing. Using this function singletracks is able to keep categories clean while avoiding potential duplicate content issues.
Consumer review website managers should create a duplicate content plan early on to ensure a clean and useful web experience for every visitor. Web based tools make dealing with duplicate listings quick and easy - be prepared!
We’re back with a fresh set of SEO tests results to share and this first one is pretty interesting: Do search engines count anchor text as page content?
One SEO specialist we spoke to claimed text within anchor (link) tags did not count toward the content of the page itself but rather assigned that text to the linked page. This makes alot of sense because the text within an anchor is describing the page you’re linking to and not necessarily the page the link is on. But it’s sorta wrong.
In our test, we built two pages - one with our keyword placed 6 times within the page content, the other with the keyword placed on the page in 6 anchors pointing to a third page on a different domain. After about a week or so we had 3 pages indexed for our keyword - the non-anchor text page, the anchor text page, and the linked page itself (which, by the way, does not contain our keyword at all). The non-anchor text page gets top billing which does lend some credence to the theory that linked keywords hold less power for a page than non-linked words.
We’re still waiting for Yahoo! to pick up our test page but the way things have been going over there it might be a while. We’ll keep you posted once the pages are indexed…
So what does this mean? For starters it means you shouldn’t “send” your most important keywords off your page through links, though doing so won’t completely tank your ranking. It also means that pages can be associated with keywords even without having the keyword itself anywhere on the page - so long as the keyword is in referring link text. Stay tuned next week for more search engine test results!
). We’re in the process of giving our other sites a professional facelift and we’ll certainly keep you posted on the results in terms of increases in visits, conversions, pageviews, etc.
