skiing in France

If you want to go skiing in France, a good piece of advise is to contact directly the resorts, and try to deal with local hotels - don't go for UK based companies, you are more likely to be quite disappointed.

A friend used ski-fidelity as a catered chalet company: 1) The way it was advertised on the site 2) The actual state of the chalet.

wikis ad search engines optimisation

Just had a look at http://www.ruyakunst.com/ this morning - very neat, clean. Even if Wikis have still this "techy" edge, it really improves usability and the way people can browse information in a non linear fashion.

Tags have been around for a while now, and this wiki demonstrates all the power of tags, and how they can help structuring dynamically the information in a way it is easier to browse and find what you are looking for.

But the issue here is that most of it is handled by Javascript - dynamic hyperlinks generated from the Tags manager are embedeed in Javascript, and all the nice looking browsing experience becomes completely invisible to search engines.

One of best SEO practice is to cross links within the site:
if I have got "widget" on my page, linking to the "widget" page, it will definitely help my ranking for the keyword "widget" (on site linking is about as important as offsite linking!).

No doubt we will see more and more tags systems integrating with each others, and hiding offsites links exactely the same way as onsite links are currently hidden.

what does it mean in terms of search engines optimisation?
1) Sceptical approach: Google etc .. will keep the same type of algorythm for a while, and optimising for new generation wikis will soon become the same issue as optimising for flash sites.
2) Open minded approach: Google and co may already look into a way to identify tags (relying for instance on "authority" tags portal and put a new system together to take them into account. I think that this is something to look into more in details if you are serious about search engines optimisation, and want to keep ahead of the game.

open source radio

While browsing the good looking site atmedia2006, and reading about speakers, I found a link to a radio broadcasting programs about open source. Excellent idea - you now get SEO radios, Online Marketing radios, why not Open Source radios.

The only issue I have got with it is that as far as I am concerned, it doesn't offer what I expect from a radio. You get a fortnight broadcast, which is not much - if I tune in a thematic radio, I want to be able to hear interviews, analysis, etc... all the day long, every day - I don't want to have to wait 2 weeks to listen to a specific program. otherwise, it is just podcast - not really radio!

shopping figures - UK 2005

Internet shopping among UK consumers soared almost 50% in the 10 weeks before Christmas, a report has found.

Shoppers spent £4.98bn online during the period, compared with £3.3bn for the same time a year earlier, according to e-commerce trade body IMRG.
For 2005 as a whole, it calculated that spending over the internet in the UK totalled £19.2bn, 32% more than 2004.

Overall retail sales rose by 4% in December compared to the same month in 2004, official figures have shown.

The figure from the Office for National Statistics was in line with expectations.
IMRG managing director Jo Tucker said the 50% growth in online sales represented a "step change in retailing at Christmas".

Jeff clavier points out a new way of advertising. With new products such as yahoo or google map, businesses may start thinking that there roof is a perfect product placement platform!

Example: a target store.


Since adult industry is always the first market to roll out new tactics, we will probably see naked body all over google and yahoo map very soon.

I guess engineers at Google and Yahoo should already start working on Video filters!

managing scalability

or "The challenges of managing a megaservice". I was interview of Phil Smoot, who manages the product development teams in Silicon Valley that are responsible for the Hotmail-MSN Communication platform. I wish Google or Yahoo was as keen as he is, and share a bit of their insight too.

He is talking about "Internet-style pace of shipping features and functionality every three and six months", which is definitely a challenge for all web products developers. Internet is moving so fast, and it can become distressing for a product developer to keep up with all the new features suggested!

Regarding the CMS developed by Jazar for instance, we have to keep a tonnes of features out, provide our limited set of resources. But if we had 500 engineers working on it, which will become soon a reality once we have released the platform under open source license, we will still need to go through the same selection process, and plan all major releases carefully.

He comes then to scalabitly, load management, etc ...

Then to the comparison between products shipping and services shipping, which is quite interesting. Web is moving from products development to services development (this is my definition of web1.0 => web2.0 anyway). quote:

"Another big difference that I’ve found in shipping products versus shipping
services is that you have to have a real awareness of exactly what effect an
error or failure is going to have on the operations team. You have to ask: Is
this really going to pull an engineer out of bed in the middle of the night? "

an other piece of advice which I will write in big red on my desk - once error or failure happens, which you didn't anticipate - what happens? well, you start panicking, start calling your engineers every 5 minutes for updates, and basically go through a very hard time. At the end, everyone wants to take a break and hear that it will not happen again. you would be tempted to say:"Damn, just watch what you are doing next time, and don't add all these f** bugs in your lines of code". (if you are running your business from your garage and both product developper & programmer, you basically shout that to yourself, which is not very pleasant either). Well, best way to demotivate the troops, and it will not change anything to the issue. The issue is risk management, and should be considered even before drafting the functional requirements.

Phil then talk about new starters:

"New hires tend to want to do complex things, but we know complex things break
in complex ways. The veterans want simple designs, with simple interfaces and
simple constructs that are easy to understand and debug and easy to put back
together after they break."

and concludes with:

"
The best advice is just basically to keep everything as simple as
possible—simple processes, simple SKUs, simple engineering. These systems
get to be very big very fast. I don’t think there’s really any one particularly hard,
gnarly problem, but when you add them all up, there are
lots and lots of little problems. As long as you can keep each of
those pieces simple, that seems to be the key. It’s more of a philosophy, I think,
than anything else.
"

More comments on this interview:

Data trolling and the cached life by ZDNet's Dan Farber -- Worth reading: In the wake of the DOJ's quest for search logs from Google (and the other personal information data banks), Om Malik echoes Scott McNealy's remark from 1999 ("You have zero privacy anyway… Get over it.") in his post about living a cached life. He writes:Somewhere on some server, in some SAN your life is [...]

Andre stetchert comments

Keith Devens comments

Jeff clavier: "Hotmail runs on 10,000 servers and involves several petabytes of storage (i.e millions of gigabytes) and serves, according to this Wikipedia article, 221M users who are operating billions of e-mail transactions daily. It is operated by 100 sysadmins, which is not that large a team."

best blond joke ever

I don't usually post joke on this blog , but could not help posting this one!
http://bgeiger.net/weblog/archives/2005/11/12/best-blonde-joke-ever/

create your own mashup

Mashup? smashup? what's that.

It's basically a way to build dynamic content provided by the current internet giants (yahoo, google, amazon...) using a specific API.

Building an affiliation shopping portal for instance becomes then quite easy (need a bit of techincal skills), no need to go and grab the products, store then in a db, update them regurlarly. all is done dynamically.

More about it:
http://www.programmableweb.com/howto

SEO Daily routine

I found this post reading Feedblitz this morning:
http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=9494

It is a bit scary:
8am - 10am give or take 1-4hrs: Check client rankings with proprietary tool, get my SEO news fix through my 27feeds on Google reader, and check and respond to emails.
10am - Noon give or take 1-4hrs: Optimization tweaks, link building, competition research
1pm - 3pm give or take 1-4hrs: Keyword research, web design, blogging, forums, etc
3pm - 5pm give or take 1-4hrs: New client research, optimization, meetings
5pm: Go home.
5:30pm - 10:30pm give or take 1-4hrs: Webdesign, SEO, and PPC for my own personal websites and clients

Well, if you work more than 8h in average a day, it means that there is something wrong in your "business model"!

Regarding my schedule, let's say that I want to book a whole day for SEO. It would be more like this:
7am-8.30am: Wake up, shower, breadfeast, watch news on BBC, get ready.
8.30am-10am: read blogs, news, and write down new ideas or findings - reply urgent emails.
10am - 10.15: coffee time!
10.15am-12.15am: programming
12.15am-1.30pm: Lunch time
1.30pm-3pm: meetings - phone calls to clients -
3pm-3.15pm: break
3.15pm-5pm: Boring stuff (keywords selection, content tuning, etc .. )
5pm-5.15pm: break
5.15.6pm: go through automated reports generated for clients and myself - send them once reviewed.

that's about 7.30h work - try to attend a social networking event in the evening (SEO related even better), or just get back home and relax.

who is hosted on your shared server

MSN offers a nice feature to let you find out who is hosted on your shared server, or which website your competitor has got in his sleeves, etc ...

example:
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=ip%3A81.29.82.96&FORM=QBRE

eyetracking results

After one month of complete inactivity on this blog, I am back, with nice eyetracking results, taken from an article on Marketing Sherpa: how the human eye sees search engine marketing

1) Incredibly short attention span: 0.7 seconds:
As you probably guessed, no searcher looks at every single search result on a page. People's eyes skitter around seeking the most interesting and relevant listings and ads to read. For us the shocking discovery was how little time a searcher actually spent looking at an ad or listing once he decided to actually focus on it.

Two-thirds of the consumers studied looked at a typical result for only 0.7 seconds (that's less than an entire second). Search results are generally very short--perhaps 20 words in all including headline, body copy, and click link. But even at that length, it would take more than 0.7 seconds to read all that copy properly.

Doesn't matter -- consumers don't both reading the copy properly. They don't read every word you've written. They make click or not-click decisions on a microsecond's worth of reading time.

2) Copywriting really matters:
Since you have only that microsecond of time, copywriting search marketing ads may be one of the most challenging copy assignments on the planet. A 15-second TV spot is insanely luxurious by comparison.

In addition to displaying the actual search term in your headline (something so many marketers are doing now that it may lose effectiveness in 2006) best copy tactics to test include:

• Use of bold
• Words and capitalization within your visible click link
• Displaying actual prices
• Featuring a phone number
• Writing in keyword phrases rather than sentences

3) The role of organic vs. paid listings:
If you think you're covered because you have a paid ad (PPC listing) in a search engine for a search term that's important to your business, think again. Organic results (free listings) are far more important and can get more viewership and clicks.

Experienced search marketers have known this for years. That's why if their search budget is limited, they focus first on gaining the best organic listings they can for a wide range of targeted key terms. Mainstream marketers, however, are only now starting to catch on. This partially explains why marketers spent $5.5 billion on paid listings in 2005 compared with just $660 million on optimization for organic listings.

MarketingSherpa's research team expects to see optimization crack $1 billion at long last in 2006.

4) Multiple listings improve results:
Eye-tracking data revealed that if you show up in just one place on a results page, your campaign may not be truly effective.

That's because people's eyes are skimming results so quickly that if they don't see your one listing, you won't get a second chance. Plus, not everyone reads and clicks on search results in the same way. In fact, there are five specific patterns consumers tend to use depending on where they are in the sales/educational cycle:

• The Quick Click
• The Linear Scan
• The Golden Triangle Scan
• The Deliberate Scan
• The Pickup Search

5) Only shopping engines get right-column attention:
Consumers tend to view different search engines' results in slightly different ways. which makes sense because every search engine lays out results in a slightly different format. That said, one factor applied across the board for major search engines: Almost no searchers look at the right side of the page.

This result is of critical concern to search engine advertisers because the vast majority of paid ads appear in that far right column on most engines. Again this points out the need for you to be in the organic listings (which are on the left side of the page) and for you to never rely on a right-side ad alone to catch attention on the search terms most important for your business.

Interestingly, although we hadn't expected to see a big difference between shopping engine eye-tracking lab results and traditional search engine eye-tracking results, it turns out that for shopping engines the right column is different. Most consumers still spend most of their eye time on the left column. A significant number of them, however, also view the top right column results on shopping search.

Why? It may be because consumers using shopping engines are in a different stage of the buying cycle. They may be slightly more serious about evaluating the results on the page, so they're willing to look harder. It may also be due to the way shopping engines such as Shopzilla and NexTag lay out their results page.

No matter the reason, the results data (presented in colorful eye-tracking "heat maps") is fascinating.