It seems that Facebook is in the reviews game with their questions about your favorite places and apps. Is Facebook the sleeper that will kill off Yelp and other review sites? If past history is any indicator, they are the king at amassing user generated content.
I get pitched a ton of ideas and most of them are pretty good. No doubt, it’s a GREAT idea! Odds are that it might not be truly unique, as is typical in web entrepreneurship. However, the 
winner in the space is the first to properly execute. No experience founding a company before, don’t have a lot of money, need engineering expertise? Have no fear. My advice for you is to go out and buy “Founders at Work”– which has interviews with a dozen web entrepreneurs who went on to found Yahoo!, PayPal, and other ventures. Find out what it’s really like in taking something from concept to a multi-billion dollar reality– it’s probably not what you think.
Already have in mind an agency you want to pay to develop your concept? Don’t do it. That agency likely has solid experts in PHP, Facebook development , WordPress, or whatever,— but if you look at the stats, rarely does a tech startup succeed by having agency development resources. Unless you have a TON of cash and don’t need inspired engineering, the odds are not in your favor going this route. The catch-22 of agency work is that if these folks were so great, why aren’t they building their own ideas? Analogously, if you’re such a great stockbroker, then why aren’t you building your own portfolio? Great tech startups need a technical co-founder. If you’re paying a contractor or worse– an agency– you’re not getting someone who is sleeping, dreaming, and eating your idea, 24×7.
Ideas are a dime a dozen– execution is everything. And rarely can one person summon the energy needed to pull it off, even if you have all the skills needed. You might also read “Hackers and Painters” which goes into detail on how great builders, innovators, and engineers in the web space are the same thing.
So first order of business, before you’re looking at hiring other people or spending money on marketing is to find others who will join you in the cause. Let those other guys spent a year chasing those VC dollars, while you focus on execution, are absolutely frugal with every dollar, and have a lean, hungry team looking for results.
Earlier this year, I had the good fortune to meet Dharmesh Shah, founder of HubSpot. His tips, while seemingly anti-VC, are right on target. Fail quickly by releasing early– then you can suck less faster. Don’t release your product for free– charge for it. Start demoing on real customer, not your friends who will say what you want to hear. Focus on results, not on powerpoint presentations. Don’t go pitch everyone you know– you’ll end up spinning your wheels. And ignore those naysayers (often friend and family) who mean well, but serve only to pull you down.
Good luck on your idea!
Not much more needs to be said about this. Gotta wonder how this ad was approved by Facebook. The guy is naked and she probably is, too. What do you think the advertiser was targeting– old guys who say “creeper” in their profile? This is worse than the “date a cougar” ads from a few weeks ago.
If you’ve got 6 minutes and 31 seconds, give this a shot from my friend Alex, who has the most popular paper airplanes site on the web. If you’re one of those folks who likes to watch cooking shows, but doesn’t actually get around to following along– don’t worry, you can do this no sweat. The plane is called the Cobra– and it took me only one sheet of paper (proof below) to do it, although I had to pause and rewind a couple times. Flies perfectly as claimed– like a dart.
Check out Alex’s personal blog, as well as his cocktail making site. If you’re really brave, try making the sweaty bollock recipe, which has 3 shots of absinthe. If you don’t know what bollock are– look it up. Perhaps making cocktails and paper airplanes don’t mix!
Some pages on his site, such as the types of paper airplanes, don’t have page titles (SEO ooops!)– but all is forgiven for the man who is in charge of Facebook’s own SEO and online marketing. You can learn a lot from this man– not just about paper airplanes and cocktails.
A few days ago, I offered to perform a SEO analysis on the website of one lucky winner– something at BlitzLocal that we normally charge between $6k-10k to do. There were 23 responses and I’m choosing BusSongs.com, which is by Keith Mander, a current Facebook employee and ex-Googler (not to be confused with the other Keith that blogs here).
Let’s first start with an assumed goal of the site– to make money from ads, as there are no products to be found. Keith is using 4 cleverly-placed Google AdSense units on each page, in addition to serving ads via Google Ad Manager (GAM)– a product that kills OpenAds and will be merged into DART DoubleClick (that’s the subject of another post). Notice how the links on the left blend in well with the orange.
The site has a Google Toolbar PageRank of 4 and a MozRank of 4.58– moderate juice is flowing to the site. The MozRank, as developed by SEOMoz is a more accurate view of link juice that is flowing, as the toolbar PR is rarely updated, plus there’s a huge difference between a low 4 and a high 4.
This nice level of juice flows through the rest of the site nicely, allowing 3,130 pages to be reported indexed by Google, such that even lower level pages are getting crawled and are ranking. Site that have a low homepage PR peter out quickly– there’s not enough juice left by the time the bot gets to the pages that are 3-4 links away from the homepage, so they don’t get indexed. To validate, just go to one of the lower level pages, grab a paragraph of text (maybe 15-20 words) and paste the whole thing right into the search box. That will let you know what’s being indexed.
Also try some of the terms the site wants to rank on. In this case, I searched on “99 bottles of pop on the wall” and see his site taking the first position.
Of course, search on just the domain and you see him first– if you’re not first on your own name, something is quite wrong or you have a generic name.
Not only does Keith rank #1 on his name, but he has 8 sitelinks, the maximum number of sitelinks you can have. While you can’t choose which links are sitelinks, it’s great to have them anyway. You have to be in the #1 spot for a search and also have enough “authority”.
I’d guess that Keith wants to rank on “children’s songs”, as that is the first searchphrase in his home page title. He’s #2 from my search here in the US, and the #1 result is PR5. Let’s go to SEOmoz’s LinkScape tool (requires a subscription, but well worth it) to dig deeper….
While some SEO pundits like to wax on about LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) and how search engine theming can help you rank on terms that you don’t even have on your page– the more practical reality is that you want to have these terms on your page and for anchor text in sites that link to you. Note that in the above seoMOZ LinkScape report, that the #1 anchor text is “bus songs”. No surprise there, but “nursery rhymes” is #2 and “children’s songs” isn’t until #10, passing a piddly amount of juice from only a few domains.
Thus, Keith will have to decide whether it’s more important to go from #2 to to #1 on “children’s song” or try to get to the first page on “nursery rhymes”. It’s a question of big dwarf or little giant– which is bigger? Let’s find out how much volume is available:
For every 19 searches on “children’s songs”, there are 68 searches on “nursery rhymes”. Further, for every 19 searches on “children’s song”, there are 100 searches on “nursery songs”– the term you’d want to own if it were no extra effort. Note that Google’s Insights for Search tool doesn’t tell you the exact number of searches on each term– rather, they give you a relative figure, with the most popular term being indexed at 100 and every other term scaled against that term.
So how do you decide what term to go after? Let’s say that I was ranked #8 on “nursery rhymes” and #2 on “children’s songs”– good rankings on a highly popular term and great rankings on an okay term. Moving from #8 to #3 on the popular term would produce about as much increase as going from #2 to #1 on the okay term. As you get towards the top of the page, your CTR will go way up. I wouldn’t be surprised if moving from #2 to #1 yielded a 3x increase in clicks.
Of course, you wouldn’t do this in a spammy way, where overnight all your inbound links suddenly have identical anchor text of “children’s songs”. But you could kindly ask the 70 sites who gave you 81 links with anchor of “bus songs” to switch to something else. If you add “bus songs” to the list in Google Insights for Search, you’ll see it has a paltry 4 versus the 100 for “nursery songs”. I doubt you’d lose the #1 ranking on your name, largely because you get a boost from that being your domain, it’s not that competitive, and so many folks have already linked to you on that phrase.
Oh, and there are 26 inbound links that have BLANK anchor text– probably want to do something about that.
Finally, let’s take a look at bussongs.com through the eyes of a search engine spider, which reads text, not images. It looks like this:
One word of caution, a few months ago, Google started changing search results to biased by whether you’re logged in, where you are geographically, and what you’ve searched on before. Thus, check your rankings when you’re NOT logged in and also via proxies. Every is getting different search results, so you don’t want to be led down the garden path.
And a few non-SEO items
Keith, I hope you have enjoyed our SEO review today– congratulations on winning! You have a great site, as we’d expect from a former Google employee.
Readers, I’m considering making this a weekly review, so if you’re interested in seeing more of this, let me know by posting to my Facebook fan page at facebook.com/dennisyu.
