Not Yet Retitled

Just a quick note -- there are a couple of recent signals that Google will start to use site response times to affect how well you rank in their search results in 2010.

The first is found in a summary of a recent PubCon session with Matt Cutts:

He [Matt Cutts] hints that people at Google really want to use site speed as a factor in rankings. They’re not using it right now, but they want to be. They want search to be like a magazine. Google wants to make the Web fast. 2010 is a great time to pay attention to speeding up your site. HINT. HINT.

Source

The second is that Google Webmaster Tools now offers a page called "Site performance" which gives you feedback on how fast your site loads relative to other sites on the web. (Announcement is here.)

Have you thought about how quickly your site loads? Probably a good time to take it seriously.

I'm coming off an unhappy website redesign with 99Designs.com -- only 2 or 3 of the 13 designers submitted designs that seemed worthy of iterating on. This contrasted sharply with my previous experience having a logo designed at 99Designs when I had nearly 350 designs submitted (compared to 37), and 4 of them were very good. This time around I have 1 design that I'm pretty happy with (and the overall hit to my wallet is twice as high).

Part of the explanation appears to be that many more designers submit designs for logos -- they're probably much less work -- and payouts tend to be about half the payout for a website design, so designers opt for the logo projects.

One approach to designing a successful project:
If you sort the webpage designs by the number of designs that were submitted, you can find projects that received more designs than projects that offered to pay more. Sometimes these high-marketing / low-cost projects beat out projects offering to pay nearly 3x as much! These disproportionately successful projects suggest a few takeaways:

• Tell designers that there's a possibility of ongoing work in the 2nd line of the project description


• Projects that get lots of designs often offer a high payout but don't guarantee the project. Some of the projects that do guarantee a payout didn't get many designs. There doesn't seem to be a clear association between guaranteeing a project payout and the number of designs submitted.


• Making the project "blind" -- ie designers can't see what other designers have submitted -- doesn't appear to be correlated with the number of design submissions.
  

Here's what I'm going to do in the future:

1. Make an effort to "sell" the project, both by describing how tricky a project it is, and by approaching designers directly and asking them to take a crack at it (see the tips in the links at the bottom of this post).


2. Don't buy separate logo and webpage design projects for the same website.


3. Give feedback to everyone, even if you only give personalized feedback to the folks whose designs you like. My guess is that designers look at whether or not a contest-buyer gives feedback to everyone before they decide which sites to design


4. Avoid the "blind contest" option like the plague. I understand that designers love it, because it prevents less talented designers from stealing their best ideas. However, as the buyer, I kind of like designers riffing on other peoples designs. You probably get more designs overall, and more of them are going to be appealing. Plus, (granted with only two data points) I had about 1/10th the number of designs submitted in my "blind" contest.

Other tips for 99Designs Contests:

1. 10 Tips for Obtaining a Stellar Graphic Design via 99Designs.com


2. tips: crowdsourcing a design project


3. 4 tips to hosting a fun design competition

I attended the Cambridge SEO Meetup again tonight, and was once again reminded why I go: there are some great people that attend. Props to Derek Edmond for giving me a great link-building idea, and thanks to CentersAndSquares.com for bringing food!

Tonight's speaker was Stuart Foster. He has an interesting resume and it sounds like he's done some genuine legwork to create a meaningful following on Twitter. However, I'm iffy on his SEO recommendations, and I disagree pretty strongly with one of them. He recommended that people follow a strategy that he credited to Chris Brogan: that you "syndicate" the articles that you write to 5 or 6 "outposts", like Facebook, a blog, etc, and that you then funnel links from those "outposts" back to your main money-making site.

Now, I first heard the name "Chris Brogan" about two or three years ago when he came to speak at one of the Cambridge SEO meetups. I later heard him speak at Affiliate Summit in Boston after his star had ascended a bit, and I have to say that he came across as a genuinely decent human being. And further, he does appear to have written a post titled: "Using Outposts in Your Media Strategy" which uses a lot of the same words and concepts that Stuart used. But, for Chris' sake, I'm going to assume that this strategy makes more sense for personal branding than it does for SEO -- because it's a really bad idea for SEO.

Here's the idea behind using "outposts": if you set up 5 or 6 mini-sites on different hosts (maybe a Facebook page, a MySpace page, your LinkedIn account, etc) then you can point all of those sites to your main (money-making) site, and Presto! -- instant inbound links | PageRank | link juice. You'll have the magic of Facebook's PageRank 11 site to push your money-making site up in Google's rankings.

Here's the problem: If you want this to actually work, you now have 5 mini-sites plus your money-making site that you need to update. Let me say that differently: instead of simplifying the work it takes to get inbound links, you have multiplied it six-fold!

Let's say that your brand-spanking new Facebook page has exactly one article on it, plus a link to your money-making site. Guess how many visitors it will get per month if you don't promote it? 3,000? 1,200? 8? Nope. Zero. The only way to get people to visit your Facebook page is to go out and promote the page.

Make no mistake -- getting editorially chosen links is really, really hard. Why in the world would you want to increase your link-building workload by a factor of six? Especially when the link juice passed from 5 of those 6 sites doesn't flow directly to your money-making site? Insanity!

Take all that hard-earned content and publish it on your money-making site. Spend all the time you would tell your friends and acquaintances about your MySpace page, and tell them about your money-making site instead. Stop tweeting. Stop retweeting. Write more content; promote that content. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Just a quick note to folks out there that hire independent contractors. You should run, not walk, to your nearest web browser and order a copy of Nolo's Consultant and Independent Contractor Agreements book. It comes with a CD with stock contracts, and excellent explanations of each of the clauses within the contracts. I use it at least monthly.

(Those of you who know me know that I had a situation back in the Spring where I thought an independent contractor was trying to get their contracting work for me re-classified as an employee to get benefits after losing his full-time job. In the end, it just turned out to a mistake on his part, and he cleaned everything up. However, I now use this book with every new contractor I hire to be sure that I have good contracts in place up-front. $34.99 well spent!

I attended tonight's Cambridge SEO Meetup, and left the meeting somewhat frustrated. The speaker, Chris Baggott presented blogging software from his company, Compendium Blogware. Chris was articulate and well-informed, and dealt gracefully and with humor while being challenged by several people who seemed intent on proving that he isn't a Linux sysadmin -- which he's not.

That aside, here's what frustrated me: Chris was presenting a solution that really bothered me. He was recommending that clients use his company's blogging software to build web pages that target long tail keywords. That in-and-of-itself is laudable. It's relatively easy to rank for long-tail keywords, and a lot of high-volume "fat-head" keywords don't convert that well. His software has some proprietary sauce that helps to categorize those posts in several different categories, and post them with keyword-enhanced titles and using keyword-enhanced directory names. So, for example, the page might be:

CrazyToasters.com/four-slice-cuisinart-toaster/

And the resulting page would have the title "Four Slice Cuisinart Toaster". Aside from these basic SEO optimization techniques, he encourages his clients to write a 100-word blog post on what they're doing that day that relates to four-slice cuisinart toasters. I'm imagining posts that say something like: "My family ate four slices of sourdough toast this morning from our new Cuisinart toaster."

Compendium will then also helpfully categorize that post under:

CrazyToasters.com/four-slice-toaster/ and
CrazyToasters.com/cuisinart-toasters/

The result is made for Google psuedo-spam that takes very little effort by the end user, is easy to update on a regular basis, and probably ranks pretty well for queries involving these keywords. (Indeed, just several weeks after registering a $10 domain and pushing 150 posts live, he claims that they have sold 20 toasters.)

Why does psuedo-spam like this work?

It seems to me that when Google visualizes the web, it sees a vast topographical map. At the center of the map are commercial terms like "mortgage", "gambling", "viagra" and "insurance". And surrounding these keywords are vast mountains of pages that are attempting to optimize for those keywords. The 10 pages that make up the very peak of this mountain are displayed to the end user when they type the query "mortgage". Surrounding that peak are lesser peaks, such as "online mortgage", "second mortgage", "quick mortgage", and foothills such as "san diego mortgage", "interest-only mortgage new york". Within each of those lesser peaks and foothills there are 10 pages that fit the Google algorythm well enough to become local maxima.



Compendium's brand of psuedo-spam works because out beyond the mountains of high-volume, highly-commercial keywords, there are vast plains, with 4 and 5 word keywords that very few people search for. Because so few people search for them, few marketers optimize for them. And because few marketers optimize for them, it takes little work to create the sub-surface geology that gives these pages a moderately higher peak than the plains around them. By choosing a domain name with the "toasters" keyword, highly-targeted sub-directory names and titles, and a bit of text that hasn't been translated from English to Russian and back again, Compendium's clients gain enough altitude to rank for their long-tail keywords.

So, what's wrong with that? I guess nothing. It's certainly better than the true spam that's out there -- stuff scraped from RSS feeds, and then churned through an automated content re-writer and spewed onto the web. Stuff that almost reads as English, until you realized that the last few sentences you processed don't actually make sense. I mean, from one perspective, I'm glad that Compendium's software works. Certainly reading about what toaster people used for their breakfast is better than reading true spam. However, the problem is that it doesn't take that much additional work to create truly useful long-tail organic pages. In fact (in volume), it may even be easier.

Start by asking yourself: When someone types 'Four Slice Cuisinart Toaster' into Google, what are they hoping to find? What are the implicit questions that they're asking?

1. They probably want to know what models are available, how much they cost, and where they can buy them


2. They probably want to know what product features they have


3. They probably want to see pictures


4. They might want to know where the user manual is, or troubleshooting tips


5. They might want to see user reviews

Why not create that page for these users? If you're going to create 250 pages (which Chris recommended), it's probably faster to collect the data in a spreadsheet, and then have someone spit out that data into a web page. Include a link to a "Consumer Review" page, and then roll those reviews back into the page. The upside of this approach is that you have a page that genuinely ought to rank #1 in Google. The better it ranks, the more people will come and submit reviews, which creates a virtuous cycle.

Now, over time perhaps Chris's clients will create these higher-value pages that offer more substance to their readers. Or maybe domainers will adopt Compendium (or one of the the other similar CMSs) to monetize their middling domains. And maybe that shouldn't bother me -- I've certainly got one or two projects out there that I'm not really proud of. But my personal bias is that two-or-three years out you'll reap the rewards of building a platform that results in great pages, rather than pseudo-spam.

Update: Here's the danger of writing blog posts at 2:00 am. I slept on this and decided that I was being an idiot. Compendium is a much better solution than just ignoring your long-tail keywords, and clients certainly have the option to make those pages genuinely useful. The "pseudo-spam" aspect of it has nothing to do with Compendium's product -- just what I imagine most people would enter as blog posts.

Just a quick pointer. Ironman from Political Calculations just did an excellent job rating and ranking the 30 submissions to this week's Cavalcade of Risk. (Of course, I may be biased -- my submission on home insurance and hurricanes was tied for the highest rating that he handed out).

I've written in the past about the value of domain names. I thought I'd write a brief summary of some of the methods of buying domain names that I've found to be most successful.

1. Approaching domain owners directly

The best names I've ever bought I found by approaching the owners directly. FixItYourself.com and SepticSystem.com are 2 examples. Here's the story of a 3rd:

I recently decided that I wanted to buy a better domain name for my life insurance website. The old name was TermLifeOptions.com, and I felt like it detracted from the site's credibility. I generated a list of what I thought were the 20 best generic keyword names related to life insurance. (ie: Insurance.com, LifeInsurance.com, TermLife.com, InsurancePolicy.com, TermLifePolicy.com, etc.) I then checked each domain, and contacted all of the owners that hadn't built actual sites on their domain. Contacting the owner is often as simple as checking the record domain name at Whois.sc and sending an email to the administrative contact.

Given that life insurance is such a competitive niche, many of the names were unavailable. Prices on some of the available names were as high as $100,000. However, the owner of TermLifePolicy.com was willing to talk in a couple of months, if the deal he was working on at the time fell through. Luckily for me, it did, and we were able to agree on a price.

2. NameJet.com

NameJet is a drop-catching service. That is, when a domain owner allows a domain to expire the name "drops", and a number of services (such as NameJet, Pool.com and SnapNames.com) compete to register the name and then resell it. However, NameJet also has exclusive relationships with a number of registrars that guarantees that Pool and SnapNames can't compete to catch names. That means that many of the best names are only available through NameJet. I've purchased 8 names through NameJet in the last 2 years, including RoofingEstimate.com, AccessRamp.com and a third excellent name that I'm not going to mention here.

The trick with NameJet, I think, is to be patient and selective. Spend 10 minutes every day checking the service, and don't buy names of marginal value. (For example, one of the 8 names I bought was xShoe.com -- what in the world was I thinking?) If you want to buy names of marginal value, I'd recommend a different method.

3. Buying names for Reg Fee

"Reg fee" means that you pay only the registration cost of a name -- somewhere around $7 - $8. The trick for buying names for reg fee is simply to generate a large number of names (either via scripts or just through keyword munging in Excel). Then run 10,000 names through a Bulk Registration tool (like GoDaddy's bulk reg tool).

The advantage of this approach is that you can develop a relatively large portfolio at low cost. I've sold three "reg fee" names in the past few months for between $300 - $450 apiece.

However, the disadvantage is that you may be paying reg fee on 200 names a year to sell 3 or 4 names. If you don't have a repeatable method of selling names, then you may have a hard time making a profit, even if you bought the names for cheap.

The trick for all three of these approaches is not to fall in love with a particular domain name. If you must own a particular name, you're going to pay a premium for it. If you simply need a good name in a particular vertical, you can generally find one that represents good value. (If you simply want a good commercial name, and you don't care what niche it's in you can probably get a steal!)