A1 Cardone Ignition Distributors

Sometimes you have to go to extreme lengths to solve an automotive problem. In this case its an SEO problem too. I'm creating a shameless backlink to A1 Cardone 30-2895 Ignition Distributor To test whether google is giving a penalty for the page, our links are being heavily discounted. +1 for Testing!

Update: 11 Minutes after Posting (the screenshot is from 28 minutes) this blog posting is ranking on page #1 for "Cardone 30-2895" on Google WTF http://www.google.com/search?q=Cardone+30-2895

Cherry Popped

So my latest project FrugalMechanic.com, a shopping comparison engine for finding the cheapest auto part for your car, just made it's first $14.68 yesterday. Quite a milestone for a website that didn't exist until 10 days ago, and hadn't even started programming a little over 3 weeks ago (we launched our prototype in 14 days!)

It's been a long time since I've launched a new domain name. One of the first thinks I've noticed is watching the Search Engines scrape us. It's very clear who the leader is. Google is out in front in number of page scraped, followed by Yahoo, then Ask, then MSN...Yes I can't believe Ask is scraping us more than MSN. Where is all of that development money being spent?

We've seen an immediate pickup from the SEO work we've implemented. We're getting a handful of visits daily from Google on the pages index. I love seeing the index grow!

A couple SEO things we managed to hammer out in the 2 weeks include:

• Canonical URL (The same page for each search (If you search for 1996 Audi A4 vs Audi A4 1996 - this results in the same URL))
  
• Bread Crumbs (We created priorities of what the emphasis would be used based upon Keyword volumes using Google's Traffic Estimator)
  
• Friendly URLs (http://frugalmechanic.com/cars/1996-audi-a4 - which is important for hit highlighting that improves CTR in algo results - and some say increases pagerank/etc)
• SiteMap files - we generated sitemap files for all 4M pages we have on the site.

We've got a huge laundry list of priorities. I can't wait to get them done!

SEO is more of a science than you think...

My friend/old college roommate Andrew Chen just posted a rather cynical blog entry on SEO Optimization and the "snakeoil" of SEO consultants.

Quoting "SEOIdiot" might illustrate just how cynical the posting actually is.

Google had done a great job of exposing some of the dashboard statistics already in Webmaster Central:




One of the charts I look at over time is the # of pages crawled/kilobytes/etc. I've seen a decrease in the number of pages crawled per day when the site has been slower, or a decrease in the number of pages when the time spent downloading increased.



I think Rand Fishkin over at SEOMoz (Ignition Partners recently put $1.25M into them as a Series A investment) has attacked the problem with more scientific approaches (though the nature of black-boxes like Google's PageRank does support the notion of "Tribal Knowledge" - and he (Rand) makes money on this "Tribal Knowledge" through a $49/month subscription service)

A couple interesting links that really talk about more scentific approaches:

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-pagerank-works-why-the-original-pr-formula-may-be-flawed
http://wiep.net/link-value-factors/
http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank_calculator.php3

Do you have other resources you use for SEO?

Measuring yourself, competitors, and the infamous “market”

Once upon a time, in a land far far away, I dealt with competitive benchmarks at Microsoft for online measurement. I dealt a lot with Nielsen, comScore, HitWise and sat on a lot of conference calls drilling them on methodology of panel recruitment/measurement/etc.

In the last few months they’ve really jumped to the next level:

A former colleague sent met this comparison:

I’m still trying to get details on how their panel is setup - but it looks like hot shit. Does anyone have more information? I’ll post a followup as I get more info.

Putting my bookmarks up

I’m starting to migrate my collection of bookmarks to a wiki location - I’m hoping to bootstrap it with enough links to make it a useful resource, but I also have hopes others will contribute to it.

I have had mixed results getting high-quality recommendations from social bookmarking services. I especially “hate” tags. My brain doesn’t think that way.

Check out the link in the blogroll (yeah I should create another name for it) or navigate to: http://seattlestartupguy.wetpaint.com/

GMail IMAP <3 for my iPhone

I logged into my GMail account this morning and am officially hooked up with IMAP Love…which makes my iPhone hooked up with IMAP Love!

I also am happy to report, GMail handles my vanity domain name appropriately too on my iPhone! (So my @peters.org email address is my “from” address rather than @gmail.com). Sweet, I love it when things just work.

I also came across an article on Digg that helped me get the IMAP folders synchronized with the folders on the server (I wouldn’t have thought about the advanced options without having come across the post) So if you want Drafts/Sent/Trash to be the server copies checkout: http://5thirtyone.com/archives/862

What's in a CTO?

I’m borrowing very liberally from a friend of mine’s old blog entry: How do you find a badass co-founder, Part 2
CTO

• Really scrappy leader of people
• Super smart, and also super communicative
• Only needs pizza and coke to survive

How does this play in reality? I suspect not too much for a VC funded firm.

What really counts isn’t the # of lines they can produce, it’s the # of lines the people they recruit can produce. When you pair this with John Cooks 3.8% unemployment rate in Seattle - it becomes an even more statiscally significant number.

That being said, I would love to have all of the characteristics Andrew has outlined - but if you have a product that relies on first mover advantage - how do you hold out until you have all of the magical pieces? Doesn’t product outway perfection?