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

Dom’s got a mini lightsabre and not afraid to use it!

The Hodge “stars” in an intresting advert for everyones fav. leeds based rails hosting company

This would just be a bit of fun and for a couple of hours

Just throwing the idea out to anyone?

I think it was a really good day, although on the day I only sat in one session (and spoke in one session), I met a lot of old and new friends and learned a lot, We as NorthCrew had a good session and won an xbox (even if a bloke from the bbc blamed us for the north / south divide) but we will talk more about that on the northcrew blog when Ryan gives me access to it!

There seems to be a video floating around the internet of me, I believe its called Gravy in yer Servers… I deny all knowledge of it.

I will say on a personal level, having people tell you that they honestly think your doing a great thing for the community and give you ideas and suggestions is an amazing feeling and even the people who had concerns or didn’t find the service useful offered suggestions and ideas… we take each one and talk about them… we will be blogging about a few of them soon (but anyone paying attention to the northpack website will notice that we now have search button (I’m told theres an easter egg in there as well)

As for barcamp Leeds, im unsure what I’m going to be able to do with it this time around, work, northcrew and the missus take up a lot of time :)…

I can say that northcrew has some things up there sleeve but its more local developer / designer focused… *ooooooo** suspense!!

Last summer I wanted to do something good, a run or a walk (I eventually settled on the great north run) but I found the 1^st St. Gemma’s Hospice midnight walk, all was good and I was up for it until I read the small print that it was yet another women only event (much like the race for life) , I called up to ask why and was given the blank response that men are too competitive and less women would enter. I was quite pissed off at this overgeneralised statement (at 17st with some good sized man boob’s a competitive run was the last thing on my mind) but was assured they would run this years event and reconsider for next yet (which is on this year and still a women’s only event).

So the Geek Girl Dinner is soon, a good mate of mine (Imran Ali) has been on about organising one of these for months in Leeds and we’ve had the discussion several times that it defeats the point of the group if he organised it..

I think splitting things up into sexes does more harm that good in most cases, but with technology, I think that its such a visibly male dominated industry, I think we need groups like PHPWomen and GGD to provide not just support to women in the same field but also ideas and discussion.

This isn’t a dig at Imran (or Manoj)  for helping with organising these things (I know I’ll get an MSN message about it as soon as he reads this) because hes working on whatever he can to get the community working together however I carn’t help but feel that with (at least partly) male organisation and presence, the discussion, questions, answers and ideas generated will be affected.

Whilst thinking this it brought me back to the overgeneralised statement that the hospice made last year and how not everyone is the same but it also reminded me that just last year when I went to my first Geekup and didn’t know anyone how difficult it was to have the ball’s (a pun) to go to somewhere I’ve never been with a group of people I’ve never met).

I don’t think I can go to a Geek Girl Dinner as a participant (I’d go to give it some coverage from northcast if they wanted it) but I know I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from being the big gobbed guy from Leeds and I think that would be detrimental to the event

IE8 doesnt pass the ACID2 test…. am I right?

It’s been a hectic couple of weeks for the northcrew since the launch of NORTHPack, , we’ve had a lot of comments and feature suggestions and trust me, we are working on them (right now!)..

I’ve been speaking with a lot people who have added blogs this week but the one who has been most active has been Mark Sailes, he recently launched his website (SVN-Checkout.co.uk)  and has said (and he’s not the only one) that northpack has given him a bigger push to blog and write articles, the fact that people are going to at least see the title is enough of a boost for him to write around six articles in its first week…

Over half of traffic in the first week came from northpack and with the introduction of the NORTHPack RSS Feed, we hope this will continue

Our original aim was for 50 feeds in the first month, just over a week in we need 10 more feeds…. come on baby!

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)

Northcast

Northpack

Northcrew