Seattle Startup Guy

Cherry Popped

2008-07-16T12:58:00.000-07:00

So my latest project FrugalMechanic.com, a shopping comparison engine for finding the cheapest auto part for your car, just made it's first $14.68 yesterday. Quite a milestone for a website that didn't exist until 10 days ago, and hadn't even started programming a little over 3 weeks ago (we launched our prototype in 14 days!)

It's been a long time since I've launched a new domain name. One of the first thinks I've noticed is watching the Search Engines scrape us. It's very clear who the leader is. Google is out in front in number of page scraped, followed by Yahoo, then Ask, then MSN...Yes I can't believe Ask is scraping us more than MSN. Where is all of that development money being spent?

We've seen an immediate pickup from the SEO work we've implemented. We're getting a handful of visits daily from Google on the pages index. I love seeing the index grow!

A couple SEO things we managed to hammer out in the 2 weeks include:

Canonical URL (The same page for each search (If you search for 1996 Audi A4 vs Audi A4 1996 - this results in the same URL))
Bread Crumbs (We created priorities of what the emphasis would be used based upon Keyword volumes using Google's Traffic Estimator)
Friendly URLs (http://frugalmechanic.com/cars/1996-audi-a4 - which is important for hit highlighting that improves CTR in algo results - and some say increases pagerank/etc)
SiteMap files - we generated sitemap files for all 4M pages we have on the site.

We've got a huge laundry list of priorities. I can't wait to get them done!

SEO is more of a science than you think...

2008-01-02T11:15:00.000-08:00

My friend/old college roommate Andrew Chen just posted a rather cynical blog entry on SEO Optimization and the "snakeoil" of SEO consultants.

Quoting "SEOIdiot" might illustrate just how cynical the posting actually is.

Google had done a great job of exposing some of the dashboard statistics already in Webmaster Central:

One of the charts I look at over time is the # of pages crawled/kilobytes/etc. I've seen a decrease in the number of pages crawled per day when the site has been slower, or a decrease in the number of pages when the time spent downloading increased.

I think Rand Fishkin over at SEOMoz (Ignition Partners recently put $1.25M into them as a Series A investment) has attacked the problem with more scientific approaches (though the nature of black-boxes like Google's PageRank does support the notion of "Tribal Knowledge" - and he (Rand) makes money on this "Tribal Knowledge" through a $49/month subscription service)

A couple interesting links that really talk about more scentific approaches:

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-pagerank-works-why-the-original-pr-formula-may-be-flawed
http://wiep.net/link-value-factors/
http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank_calculator.php3

Do you have other resources you use for SEO?

Measuring yourself, competitors, and the infamous “market”

2007-12-15T07:13:00.003-08:00

Once upon a time, in a land far far away, I dealt with competitive benchmarks at Microsoft for online measurement. I dealt a lot with Nielsen, comScore, HitWise and sat on a lot of conference calls drilling them on methodology of panel recruitment/measurement/etc.

In the last few months they’ve really jumped to the next level:

A former colleague sent met this comparison:

I’m still trying to get details on how their panel is setup - but it looks like hot shit. Does anyone have more information? I’ll post a followup as I get more info.

Putting my bookmarks up

2007-12-15T07:13:00.001-08:00

I’m starting to migrate my collection of bookmarks to a wiki location - I’m hoping to bootstrap it with enough links to make it a useful resource, but I also have hopes others will contribute to it.

I have had mixed results getting high-quality recommendations from social bookmarking services. I especially “hate” tags. My brain doesn’t think that way.

Check out the link in the blogroll (yeah I should create another name for it) or navigate to: http://seattlestartupguy.wetpaint.com/

GMail IMAP <3 for my iPhone

2007-12-15T07:12:00.003-08:00

I logged into my GMail account this morning and am officially hooked up with IMAP Love…which makes my iPhone hooked up with IMAP Love!

I also am happy to report, GMail handles my vanity domain name appropriately too on my iPhone! (So my @peters.org email address is my “from” address rather than @gmail.com). Sweet, I love it when things just work.

I also came across an article on Digg that helped me get the IMAP folders synchronized with the folders on the server (I wouldn’t have thought about the advanced options without having come across the post) So if you want Drafts/Sent/Trash to be the server copies checkout: http://5thirtyone.com/archives/862

What's in a CTO?

2007-12-15T07:12:00.001-08:00

I’m borrowing very liberally from a friend of mine’s old blog entry: How do you find a badass co-founder, Part 2
CTO

Really scrappy leader of people
Super smart, and also super communicative
Only needs pizza and coke to survive

How does this play in reality? I suspect not too much for a VC funded firm.

What really counts isn’t the # of lines they can produce, it’s the # of lines the people they recruit can produce. When you pair this with John Cooks 3.8% unemployment rate in Seattle - it becomes an even more statiscally significant number.

That being said, I would love to have all of the characteristics Andrew has outlined - but if you have a product that relies on first mover advantage - how do you hold out until you have all of the magical pieces? Doesn’t product outway perfection?

Rant - Early News

2007-12-15T07:11:00.002-08:00

So I’ve read all of the posts at Digg/Tech Crunch/TechMeme/etc on the new Google IMAP support…but F*()*$!$ why hasn’t it shown up in my profile yet? I can’t help but think how even more addicted I’ll become to my iPhone when I get email PUSHED to me rather than polled…I haven’t had a true “crack berry” yet - but looks like I’ll soon have one when my account gets IMAPed.
I find launches like this to be too much of a tease. Why can’t a company like Google figure out howto ship product out faster?

Sometimes it makes me feel better about my own rate of shipping code though.

Unleash your GoogleAnalytics

2007-12-15T07:11:00.001-08:00

At work I managed to convince my managers to let me release my Google Analytics Data Extractor into the realm of Open Source.
Check it out.