To great fanfare and presumably at great cost Google launched boutiques.com, their potential rival to eBay, or as they put it:

Boutiques.com is a personalized shopping experience, brought to you by Google, that lets you find and discover fashion goods through a collection of boutiques curated by taste-makers — celebrities, stylists, designers, and fashion bloggers. Boutiques uses visual technology to help fashionistas discover and shop their look and creates the opportunity for designers to showcase their collections and latest inspirations online

Firstly I noticed that despite getting top fashion bloggers on board to develop shops, they don’t have the good grace to follow the links out to them. Over here with Karla of Karlas Closet shop, you’ll notice that the link to karlascloset.com is nofollow. Surely if Google have recruited someone to create a shop they must trust them? The great and the good Google can’t be hoarding page rank can they?

On site SEO can still make a massive difference. I was recently building out a Stocking Fillers website, and in my research I noticed that a site went from number ten in the serps one day, to number one the next.

The difference seemed to be that they previously had the https version indexed.

The reason for their increase in ranking could be:

1. They are no longer splitting the page rank / link equity to two versions of the URL.
2. The https is slower to load and if Google are indexing that, it can impact the rankings.

I see over the Internet many Multi Level Marketing / Network Marketing schemes or how-to-spam adsense Q&As aiming to make a $100 a day from a website. The goal is automatic income generation. It feeds into most people’s innate laziness, occasional stupidity and most disgustingly (from the sellers) the buyers’ desperation.

The hawkers of the products promise something for nothing. To just flick a switch to massive wealth from passive incomes. Get rich whilst watching the Superbowl!

It’s all horseshit.
Continue reading “Building a $100 a Day Automatic Income Generating Website”

• 1. Why optimise your site?
• #1 gets 42% of clicks, #2 get 12%, #3 8%
• What difference would being number one make to your business?
• If only it was that simple:
• advertising
• indented listings
• "one box"
• "ten pack"
• maps
• images
• video
• and other stuff! Combine to complicate rankings and reduce CTR.
• 2. The simplest search engine optimisation stuff you can do today.
• Have you asked for a link today?
• Match the title tag of the page to the phrase you’re targeting.
• Headings – Use H1 to target your main phrase.
• Sub Headings – Use H2 and H3 for other variants.
• Description – Have a compelling meta description to encourage click through on the SERPs. Consider this advertising copy.
• Content – include further versions of your keyphrase to cover more "long tail" options.
• Perpetual motion – continuing to build content based on success and opportunity based upon analytics and conversions
• If you’re local, add your address.
• Speak to your customers – ask for links, reviews and testimonials.
• 3. The curse of knowledge
• Speak your customers’ language: is your "widget" a "thingy" to your customers?
• Don’t keep on doing something because it’s always been that way. Look for new angles and opportunities.
• 4. Keyword research
• Free tools
• Google Adwords
• Google Insight
• Google Trends
• Wordtracker
• 5. Evaluating Competition.
• Who ranks?
  • High Authority sites
  • Massive Corporations
  • News organisations
  • Domains that exactly match the keyphrase
• How many unique inbound links do the top results have?
  • Look for unique number of Class C subnets in Majestic SEO
  • Examine the anchor text of the links
• Are the top results spammy?
  • Don’t bring a knife to a gun fight.
  • The three Ps of internet marketing – Pills, Porn & Poker – require a different tool set and methodology and mindset to more conventional marketing.
• 6. Measure twice, cut once – statistics and analytics.
• Start to measure
• Google Analytics
• Piwik – Open source Web analytics
• AWStats – Free log file analyzer for advanced statistics.
• What to watch
• Six Web Metrics / KPI’s To Die For | Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik
• Building Web Success: Optimizing Online Conversions, Part One: Goals and Tracking
• Don’t forget to look for opportunity to improve upon success
• 7. Conversion Rate – How To Sell More
• Calculating Your Conversion Rate
• 16 Web Design Tips for Higher Sales
• Techniques to improve your conversion rate
• Ask for the sale
• Focus on highlighting benefits, versus features. (Thanks to Wine Guppy for the reminder!)
• Read The Big Red Fez & Don’t Make Me Think
• In a nutshell – Rank higher, convert more = print money.
• 8. Accept that a working website is never finished.

My initial thoughts on using Google Instant are that we have another example of an engineer creating a solution in search of a problem.
Continue reading “Google Instant – My Initial View”

Blekko is a new search engine founded by Rich Skrenta and Mike Markson.

I was delighted to be given an early Beta pass and just wanted to take a moment to thank them for the invite.

Naturally I have been playing a little with the search engine and have adapted my serps bookmarklet with a Blekko friendly version. As their service is beta, the bookmarklet is bound to break as they adjust things. Please leave a comment below if you find a problem.

Elsewhere:

• Aaron posted a good seo focused review of Blekko that had me salivating
• Search Engine World have also covered Blekko in detail and
• TechCrunch Review: The Blekko Search Engine Prepares To Launch
• Blekko Review – A search engine with a difference | Semto SEO Blog

Rae Hoffman of Outspoken Media has put together Link Building with the Experts – 2010 Edition..

A long article created from interviews with 10 other leading SEO / link building experts, it’s a must read for any business that wants to succeed on the web.