I will be doing what I’m pretty good at (I like to think) which is handle the SEO, PPC and Affiliate’s for BigBathroomShop.com, The affiliate program is due to go live in a week or so, so I’ll be hitting some of you up about joining us :).

But we still do our best (and some of us are pretty damn good at it), when I talk to people I explain how much I love longtail, whilst being at number one for shoes is fantastic for brand and traffic, longtail terms have some amazing value.

Let’s say that the keyword “shoes” gets 10,000 searches a day, now if your number one, that will get you lets say about 50% of that traffic thats 5,000 visitors a day - FANTASTIC……but wait a minute… shoes? what types of shoes are there?

tennis, work, riding, running, sport, pumps, sandles, slippers, boots, mules, flip flops, high heels, bowling, golf, walking, winter, open toe, croc, wheel, leather, climbing, baby, dancing, tap, ice skating, snowboarding, clogs, steel toe and many many MANY more (that I and other people in the current room couldn’t remember).

So you’re a small retailer of trainers (what I assume is one of the most common shoes) and because of your rankings your getting 5,000 visitors a day, how many of those searches will be looking for trainers? You don’t know, because all they’ve typed into the engine is “Shoes”. So this leads to a high bounce rate, low conversation rate and an all together useless visitor on this occasion, it does however create a lot of brand awareness “well if they are at the top of Google for shoes they must be good”,

I prefer the longtail keywords down to the size and colour.

Going back to my shoes example and lets say Nike have brought out a new range called “HodgeTrotters”, I’d work my optimisation on things like

• Size 5 green nike hodgetrotters
• blue hodgetrotters size 11
• cheap hodgetrotters size 8

By using some PHP fun and database manipulation, theres no reason you carnnot optimise each product in your database, with shoes its not hard to get 10,000 products in an online catalogue (including unique sizes and colours), so 10,000 products, lets say for each name your in the top 10 for the longtail keyword of productname + size + colour, now these searches may only get 1-10 searches a day they will be very low volume, however because of the nature of the search, the user knows exactly what they want and how big they want it, if the usability and call to action of your website is up to scratch, you should be able to convert an extraordinary amount of these visitors.

So lets look at the numbers again (and these are complete estimates just to give you an idea)

High Volume (shoes) = 1 term x 10,000 searches = 10,000 possible visitors

Longtail (product + size + color) 10,000 terms x 5 searches = 50,000 possible visitors.

This all depends on a lot of factors of course but for me, the longtail brings a quicker benefit and more targeted users.

HodgeOut

First Published at www.thehodge.co.uk

Photo From yuankuei

in a default feedburner set you your feed is at feeds.feedburner.com/yourFeedName, thats all well and good but what if you want to leave feedburner at a later date, maybe you’ve developed your own feedtracking service or you’ve decided to go without… you carn’t change that feed and you’ve lost all those subscribers…

When Google bought feedburner they made all the “pro” features completely free the best one of these has to be myBrand with a simple DNS entry you can have feeds.yourdomain.com/yourFeedName and have complete control over the links and the subscribers and if you feel at a later date you want to leave… you just create that subdomain and 301 people to the new url (which I also hope is on your domain name)

Version Control by Lorna

Q and A by Rockstar

(half of) TV 3 by Mark

and a few others, I really was intending on podcasting the day and doing some interivews but that really didn’t go to plan, however people seemed to like the day and have blogged some good stuff (especially about my session) and who could forget the ultimate barcamp battle of Rockstar’s latest game - Wii Table Tennis, in one corner - DOM, someone who never touched the game before, in the other corner IAN - Art Director for Rockstar Leeds, it was a tense battle with the warmup game handed to Ian first off but when The Hodge got into it Rockstar was defeated!.

The best bit about barcamp is the evening, and thanks to Rockstar for helping us out with that (congratulations to all afterparty attendees for out geeking a Rockstar coder), theres a lot of pictures floating around the internet, (do a search on flickr for barcampleeds)

God knows when the next one will be but I’m sure you’ll be informed..

As for geekup, last night I did a presentation about MTGCast and how it grew from this small little podcast to a network of casts thats too big for its own good ;), it was a 20:20 presentation that I felt went badly because well basiclly with everything that had been going on this week, I didn’t have time to sit down and go through it, but the information was there and it was a starting point for people to ask me questions after the presentation (of which I got quite a few).

We also announced the development of Northcast (I’ll link when things are up), a podcast that will demonstrate the abilities of northen companies and developers, the presentation was a “test the waters” thing to gauge peoples reaction and I’m glad I did a lot of people had comments and seems genuinely enthusiastic about it, a lot offered advice and quite a few wanted to book a slot to demo / talk about there site, company, experience, Ryan and Paul of Havoc Stuidos also joined as partners in podcasting, podcasting with people you know and gel with works a lot better (as was said in my presentation).

At the moment theres a lot of stuff happening around here, I have a lot of personal sites that really need some attention and work has started to get really busy, I’ve tried not to talk about Stickyeyes on here much because I know the boss and other staff members take a peek every now and then and really didn’t want to put my foot in it (and I came close with my silly seo post ), but when the new site finally launches there might be some of the things I would publish on here going onto there, (I’m writing a post at the moment on the best wordpress SEO plugins that I use).

I’m at this point when I get home that I have so many things to do that I’m not quite sure what to work on first, I’m looking at starting a new podcast, I have 3 site ideas that are underway but need some cash to get coded and tarted up and a fe w other bits and bobs to do, I am hopeful that my order of two flat screen 17″ monitors will arrive tomorrow and they will be great to do work on, (dual monitors increase productivity, I know your reading this Craig )

There are plans for a Rockstart’s Party in the evening however that hasn’t been finailised yet…

Thanks to everyone at Rockstar Leeds for being so accommodating and we look forward to kicking your arse…at the game you made?

(since I’ve had a few questions,

• I’m one of the organisers so this isn’t a load of Bollocks
• Rockstar Make Grand Theft Auto
• I don’t know if they are looking for developers.. ask them on the day

• Anger
  • They assume I’m the one who has knocked their precious website to #2 in Google
• Confusion
  • They don’t understand and when the next person asks, chips in with “He makes websites”
• Ok”
  • They understand what it is and leave it there or want to know a bit more..

Its completey obvious me to 90% of them they didn’t understand what I do…whilst some people were engaging and asked questions, other dismissed the work I do off hand and marked me as a blackhat spammer stating

“Google has a whole bunch of programmers to stop what you do”

…. not so much? or else these pages on Google’s site wouldn’t exist, let me pull a quite out from one of these.

“However, a few unethical SEOs have given the industry a black eye through their overly aggressive marketing efforts and their attempts to unfairly manipulate search engine results.” #

and these few are the ones that people hear about, but search IS important, I was talking to someone last night who was spending £200 a day on PPC but nothing on SEO, using the outdated but still used Yahoo Keyword Tool, we could see his term had 40,000 searches a month on Yahoo UK online in Janurary 2007.. if he was in the top ten and got just 10% of that traffic, that would mean 4000 clicks a month on one term alone, with an average CPC of £0.30.

4000 x 0.30 = £1200 a month in free clicks on one term alone..

if we take my podcast network, we recently had an upserge in downloads and we are looking at around 10,000 downloads per week, I really like looking at stats and use a mixture of Heatmaps tracking, server side tracking and Google analytics, you’d expect a podcast network to get most of its traffic from directories and referring sites…. not this one!

55% of all traffic comes from organic search… on longtail terms, sure we are number one for magic the gathering podcast and mtg podcast but those arn’t the terms that bring us the most traffic, its 4, 5 and 6 word keyphrases that do it..

I’m not going to belittle you by explaining the longtail theory but with search and certain niches it really works.. I’m working on a project right now that will prove it because its such a niche area that it’s main market will be.. long tail searches..

SEO has a bad rap at the moment because in the early day’s it was all about “keyword stuffing” and “hidden text”, however the game has changed, the engines have evolved and so has the optimisation, last year I could have posted that SEO is all about TLC

• Titles
  • Make sure your titles are optimised and short
• Links
  • Get good links onto your pages and also have a good linking matrix within your site
• Content
  • Get some good original content, optmised and something that would want to be read by your readers

However now there are just so many other things to consider

• Social Media
• Universal Search
• Local Search
• Competitors sites using blackhat

It’s a funny ol’ game this SEO lark…

Don’t get me wrong its a great advert but to me, nothing special..however the genius comes in when you think of what comes after an ad like this is released, uploaded onto sites like youtube, google video and others and instead of the company asking for the videos to be removed as would have happened 2-3 years ago, they leave them..

The Cadbury’s Gorilla is a perfect advertisement to edit, with no speech dialog just a backing track and a monkey hitting the drum’s you can edit and sync it pretty easy with any piece of music for example

at the time of posting this that video has 232,960 views, but thats not all, you don’t even need the original ad footage

Over 100,000 views and is defiantly one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a while, but what do you notice about these videos…

They still have the Cadbury’s logo at the start and end of each video, lets say the average TV commercial costs £0.10 per viewer (this is not based off of anything, I honestly have no idea how much a TV commercial will cost) right now on YouTube I can see around 15 videos featuring the Gorilla and branding, lets count up those views ;

• 899,670
• 190,286
• 132,169
• 665,354
• 232,960
• 102,117
• 412,275
• 1,100,220
• 850,956
• 61,932
• 128,549
• 11,925
• 15,689
• 11,816

Total number of views :4,815,918

Total cost if this was on TV : £481,591.80

That’s an amazing amount of views for just letting people share your work or in the case of some companies, sticking it up yourself, its not just adverts that are on TV that are getting stuck on youTube, at the launch of the Xbox 360, Microsoft’s own PR department got a nice little bundle of joy when a commercial of theirs was not allowed to be shown on television, it was leaked (I believe) and immediately uploaded onto video sharing sites and hit the tech news websites very quickly, whilst I cannot find the original video, there is still a copy on youtube with a lot less views (I am 90% sure the original had around 3 Million views)

Monday, the MELD launch event, which arrived and went with mixed reaction, a lot of people were disapointed at been asked to make posters as a “MELDING” event, but the concepts and the ideas discussed were worth the crappy drawings :), I like MELD as a concept though I think the implementation of it at the moment is too broad and lacks focus, not to mention you had to apply for a place to come to the event and a lot of people were put off by the “invitation only” status..

Tuesday, the Apple launch event at Old Broadcasting House, I feel I will be blogging a lot more about this place over the coming months, not only because Linda is constantly bugging me to join, but also because thats were we Barcamp Leeds will be, but more on that later

Wednesday, Good old Geekup, upstairs this time in a more intimate environment,  good presentations and good company, I may be presenting next time.. IF I can get my skillz in order

Thursday, Work Night Out… nuff said!

Friday, Spent the evening playing Magic, something I havn’t done for a couple of months, which is Ironic considering I run a magic the gathering podcast network

and somewhere inbetween that we announced the date for Barcamp Leeds… which looks to be an awesome event..

I was giving out “The Hodge” cards, which people either thought they were weird or loved (either reaction is fine by me), anyway I realised I hadn’t posted since the last GeekUp, a lot has happened since then

• I Survived the Great North Run
  • (Dressed As Mario!)
• I Finally started my start up (not legally but thats next)
• The podcast network gained another 1000 listeners a week (average)
• I’m pregnant

Ok one of those is a lie……. I didn’t start the start up..

But seriously there seems to be a lot of energy at the moment about Leeds and northen developers and entrpuners, its a really good time to be here, and if we pull our finger out and get to work on .North and BarCamp Leeds eh Imran  mabey that will help the community a bit more…

anyway I will be blogging a bit more now I’m a bit more organized…. Ok i’m not kidding anyone I’m never organized!