facesærch blog

Yahoo site explorer got a major (design) update - (strangly with some javascript error alert boxes??)

• Google Adwords keyword tool - Now with real figures.
• Google Insights - Dissection of the search world, region by region.
• Google Trends for websites
• Google Analytics, or course
• Google Docs (with the cool Google Charts Gadgets)
• Yahoo site explorer
• Netvibes
• Google and Google blogsearch
• Facesaerch
• Google suggest
• Google sets

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[18.08.2008]
I love Google docs. And yeah, I’m kinda big in the USA and working on the other markets.
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the first 50.000 visits took about 2 months, well the next 50.000 about 15 1/2 days.

facesaerch reached some kind of tipping point when posted at lifehacker. This does not mean that lifehacker sent 50.000 visits directly to me (it’s more like  5,715 refereed visits from lifehacker) but the inlinks-rate from all over the web (different markets, different languages, …) explode and shortly after this the search engine related traffic went straight up. Even if other sites (i.e. techchrunch which linked to a prior version of facesaerch) lead more visits to your directly, lifehacker seems to have a better link-multiplying user group.

Simple said: facesaerch.com since 27.05.2008 to today 12.08.2008 13:20 MET

• 100,118 Visits
• 90,929 Absolute Unique Visitors
• 267,351 Pageviews

And yes, i know that PageRank is just a placebo for marketing people who don’t know or care how search engines work, but nothingtheless this site reached a Google Toolbar PR 5 of 10 in two months.

lucky me. facesaerch.

Freely embeddable into your affiliate site.

What to do?

1. Become an Amazon affiliate.
2. Get a suitable Amazon product RSS feed.
3. Tag the RSS URL with your affiliate ID (&tag=youraffiliateid)
4. Copy&Paste the tagged RSS URL into the facesaerch.com search box & click on search
5. Click on “free … Widget“
6. Customize your RSSflow widget
7. Copy source code
8. Paste code into your affiliate site.

Done.

Your affiliate tag stay in there, even if the users chooses to click the centered navigation link. (As long as he/she browses the specific tagged feed, of course).

site links are the nice deep links you get for top dog (nr. 1) rankings on google if your site is seen as a perfect match for that query. so mostly the brand name - so bwin gets sitelinks for bwin, NASA gets sitelinks for nasa, ….

Strangely my brand seems to be facesearch (ea spelled “right”) instead of facesaerch (with the nifty “ae” in saerch). So now it’s offically: facesaerch is the perfect match for everything facesearch. (And i have  high hopes for the term face search (currently about nr. 9)).

i just took a look at the distribution of search terms typed into facesaerch.com (without the RSS stuff for now).

1. i love self grown tomatoes

2. it is a classic long tail distribution

I already explained what SEO is all about and that SEO is not free traffic but a serious business, now lets take a look at what you have to do, SEO wise.

simplified SEO view

SEO deals with

• Website architecture
• Internal and external links
• Content

Simple enough, isn’t it? OK, but sadly all these aspects are greatly screwed up.

Yes, the website reality is this bad, and this are just examples. So in order to achieve successful SEO you must

1. Change the basics (architecture).
2. Change the way your business deals with your website (content).
3. Change the way your business deals with the internet (links).

And no, nobody ever got it right from the beginning.

About 50.500 Visits, 187.000 Page views, 42.000 Absolute Unique Visitors in the first two months (27.05.2008 - 27.07.2008). Not bad for a site without marketing budget (only word to mouth, maven sites, some SEO) or any major capital.

And yes, Facesaerch.com is still a minor player, but i’m working on it.

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Continuing from “SEO - a definition” we now take a closer look at the business aspect:

SEO, search engine optimization, is a business!

With a start point and a goal you want to reach. Money is a great measurement, but you can also calculate with leads, registrations, active users, …

You need to know your start point. Only if comprehensive web-measurement is installed, you can start with SEO. Google analytic has the best return on investment (It’s free and quite powerful). Web analytics is not a part of SEO but a necessary prerequisite. Really, never ever start without it, because:
You need to know where you are if you want to reach where you are going. (Plus: you should know when you are there.)

SEO is a business with milestones. You can identify what the issues are and what the competitive situation is and what you need to do next.

And most importantly, you can (and you must) attach a price tag to the actions you need to do to achieve your milestones and ultimately your goal.

SEO is

• not a black art
• not any other kind of art
• not white hat magic
• and not black hat magic
• not a science
• and not free traffic

but SEO is

• a business
• with a start point and a goal
• with milestones
• milestones with estimated and real costs

p.s.: yes blogging about SEO has nothing directly to do with face search. but running a search engine and knowing about SEO are two sided of the same “search business” coin. and i’m lookin at both of them.