startup hustle

In my never-ending quest for more web data, I have added Quantcast to my arsenal. Quantcast is a mix of traffic rankings and analytics that gives you an additional data point when researching competitor movements and shifts in traffic segments.

I prefer to use multiple data points when calculating both traffic for my sites and competitor sites. There are not many options that provide realistic data when comparing site traffic. Alexa.com and Compete.com are the two “best” options for traffic rankings currently. Compete also gives you an estimated number of visitors, as does Quantcast. You will notice large deviations in the data for some sites, but that is expected as traffic estimation is difficult.

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A common adjustment businesses make in a recession, (I’m not saying we are in a recession, although many indications point in that direction), is to cut their advertising budget.

That is often found to be the wrong reaction, as cutting your advertising budget wont lead to more sales. Since cutting the ad budget is still practiced by many, your competitors might join that crowd. Or, you can go crazy and expand your marketing spend during a down turn.

I have noticed a reduction in the number of AdWords advertisers. This decreases spend per click and reduces the options searchers have, which could lead to more sales for you. Even if the general populace is buying less, they still research products which could lead to sales down the road.

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Google has begun the PageRank update. I have seen updates on multiple site that I work on.

Some of the potential changes per the Search Engine Roundtable blog:

1. Internal links and external links on the same page may not be splitting the PageRank vote equally.
2. Depending on the location of the link, PR may be weighted differently.
3. Multiple links to the same url from the same page may not each get the same piece of the PR vote.
4. “Run-of-site” external links, like Blogrolls, may now have diminished PR.
5. Links between domains that Google sees as “related” may have their PR significantly damped down. Possibly the same goes for sites that link to subdomains.

Although many deem PageRank unimportant I still contend that it is one way to tell how relevant Google deems your site.

With the launch of the new iPhone App Store, a new platform has been created to reach millions of tech savvy users. With new platforms, comes new marketing channels. While the cost of entry is higher to build an app for the iPhone, that also limits the number of competitors.

You have three options when building an iPhone app:

1. Build an app that promotes your service (MLB has a paid app for scores and stats)
2. Build an app that replicates your service (ebay, facebook, paypal and myspace all do this)
3. Build an independent app (an app that is not tied to a current product or service)

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Adobe Flash is a pain to the SEO community. Flash has never been indexed well by the search engines which reduces the amount of copy/images to work with. The best work around was to produce an HTML version of the Flash page so search engines could index all the awesome unique content that you produced. I work with a sketchbook site that uses Flash (against my wishes ). As you can see there is very little on-page material for the search engines to work with.

The fight against the use of Flash is going to get a little harder. Adobe has announced that they are working with Google and Yahoo to make Flash and rich Internet application (RIA’s) files searchable. Google also announced that they have built a better “Flash indexing algorithm”. How well they index and exactly how much information can be pulled from Flash files is still to be seen.

On a side note, the Flash site I referenced above has released new, one-of-a-kind sketchbooks signed by the artist. If you know anyone that is into original art please forward the link.

Source: Adobe makes Flash Searchable – ReadWriteWeb