Robin Hood, The Biggest Let Down of 2010
Posted by David WhitehouseWhat a disappointment. Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe completely raped and pillaged this classic old English Tale.
So, where to start…
Some French dudes come across the channel and destroy Barnsdale, then York, Darlington and Peterborough – on their way to Nottingham?! They’ve only got 200 men, but that is plenty enough to sack York.
So Robin Hood gets in his first proper fight in Nottingham, being a superb bowman, Robin decides to go for the sword – low and behold he’s a natural! Obviously he was being modest at the start of the film where he was storming a castle and avoiding hand to hand combat.
The rest of the film is pretty much the same, they beat the French in Nottingham and then travel down to Dover as the French are landing, it appears that they got their inspiration from 1066 here. Basically the whole of the French army is coming, and if 200 was enough to sack York, then they are proper fucked now, there is a whole 500 of them here to sack London! But don’t worry, the enitre English army is there to meet them, and there is at least 100 of them!
His pretend wife shows up to fight alongside him (she’s not had any experience at fighting as far as I can tell). Robin Hood being an honorable man that will protect his woman at all costs naturally let’s her fight with him, low and behold the main bad guy gets a hold of her and Robin has to save her life (who’d have seen that coming).
Finally at the end of the film Robin shoots his 5th arrow(?) and kills the bad guy, before being outlawed by the king for stirring up unrest.
Hence begins the story of Robin Hood.
What a load of bollocks! Go see Iron Man 2 instead, its awesome, and more realistic.
Is the SEO industry becoming more competitive?
Posted by David WhitehouseLike any market, there comes a point where saturation is reached, this is the peak of the product life cycle:
Image courtesy of Wikimedia
Now we can compare this to a graph of people looking for SEO services in the UK, and it would seem to me that we are most likely in the maturity area.
I’ve also noticed things get more and more competitive in the SERPS recently, with local search being increasingly targeted by SEO’s. For instance I’ve seen 3 new domains this year that have been created purely to target local SEO search volumes: seospecialistbirmingham.co.uk (damn him he knocked me down to #5 for SEO specialist, fair play though), seoyorkshire.org.uk (which I believe was started earlier this year and knocked Dave Naylor down to #2 for “SEO Yorkshire”) and finally the new kid on the block, seoleeds.org (which was created by Branded3 and appears to have been registered in the past week and is obviously targeting SEO Leeds).
So things are really hotting up! Everything is becoming much more competitive, and it’s going to become increasingly time consuming and expensive to rank for SEO terms whilst also trying to work on current clients.
Combine this with the fact that doing freelance SEO (i.e. not for an agency) is becoming increasingly time consuming and competitive, (Patrick Altoft has recently commented on this also with his post on SEO Freelancers) and I think we are going to see a lot of freelancers die off. Instead the SEO agencies that perform are going to grow and as a result the reputation of the industry will improve, a lot – which is certainly what we need right now!
WordPress Plugins to avoid LIKE THE PLAGUE MOFO!
Posted by David WhitehouseOk guys, so lots of people out there post about various plugins and how they are “great” etc. But half of the time you get all excited, install the plugin, only to be disappointed. Even worse, some of you guys might install a plugin and actually think it is doing you some good, so I thought I’d write this guide to try to help you choose plugins that don’t suck (trust me, I AM an expert at this, I install crappy plugins all the time)!
Social Bookmarking Plugins
Don’t bother installing a plugin that completely covers your blog post in social bookmarks (see example below – I won’t say what site it is from, but it does rank on page 1 for “how to make money online” in Google.co.uk.)
There are a few reasons for this:
- Each one of those stupid links is actually leaking you page rank out of your site
- The majority of people only use Twitter of Facebook, so the chances of you attracting someone to your blog that uses one of these services AND will submit it is slim (unless your Shoemoney or Problogger, in which case you really don’t need to read this).
- Is having your blog post announce you’ve only got one re-tweet a really good idea? I did this earlier last year, it’s a bad idea. It puts people off, and they are likely to re-tweet you from Twitter or their Twitter client, not from your site anyways!
Instead why not try using one of those “share this” or “add this” buttons – they keep the social bookmarking up-to-date and it doesn’t cover your page in links. Alternatively use WP greet box – the reason why this is good is it only shows a message appropriate to that user, so they see a Digg box if they came from Digg. If you do use WP Greet Box, I recommend adapting it to encourage:
- People to add you as a friend
- Sign up to your email newsletter
- Take action on your site e.g. buy something
SEO Plugins
Ok some SEO plugins are really, really, really, REALLY bad. First up, SEO plugins that remove stop words and numbers from the URL – this is unbelievably irritating and quite frankly, a bit pointless. We had a client at Bronco recently with one of these and they happened to require model numbers in their posts, but all of them were cutting short, so they were ending up with stuff like iPhone-1, iPhone-2 (for example) – yeah like that is better than iPhone-3gs?!?!?!
Next up is automatic link plugins, so basically you put in a keyword and a URL and it replaces all instances of that keyword up to a maximum of 1 or 2 per post with a link to that URL. Again I hate these – they slow your site down (my site is slow enough cos I’m a lazy bastard and I can’t be bothered to move it, so stop pestering me people)! They also create some stupid, stupid links, where you are writing a sentence and it just puts one in, but it looks totally inappropriate – not very classy seo.
SEO Friendly images plugins – HOW LAZY DO YOU HAVE TO BE THAT YOU CAN’T TYPE 50 CHARACTERS?! Plus it fills it with a load of crap, I have a horrible feeling I’ve got this installed still. Instead, when you upload an image, manually edit a beautifully crafted keyword rich ALT text.
Comment Redirect and Spam Plugins
I used these for a while, and quite frankly I think they are a little bit spammy. Comment Relish actually sends unsolicited email (unless you of course add a simple tick box on the comment saying “I don’t mind you sending me unsolicited email”) – which is obviously against all spam legislation. The other one, Comment Redirect – well to be honest I’m in two minds about it, but I think it pisses people off being re-directed after they are their comment to the post, I know it does with me – so why piss off your readers?
The Rest
Now I am the worst offender here, but I am learning through experience (I’m good at failing over and over – but thats called progress, right?). To finish this big long rant of a post off, and because I want to go to bed, I’m just going to list a few plugins I think suck to high heaven and should be avoided at all costs:
- Twitterupdater (I used this, it is pants – use Feedburner’s socialise functionality for Twitter, like Patrick Altoft does)
- Redirection plugin (again I used this, I’m pretty sure it slowed my site down even further, which is pretty bad as it runs at a snail pace anyways – learn to edit your .htaccess file instead, it’s much more fun)!
- The Odiogo plugin – great in theory, but super slow load times.
- Most of the plugins I recommend – as usually I haven’t tested them and I’m dead excited about them, but they turn out to be shit – see appendix A, B and C
Anyways, that is my rant for the night – perhaps I’ll do a post on some decent WordPress plugins, such as the superb Google Website Optimizer for WordPress Plugin (or perhaps that’s just me being excited again).
I’m off to bed. </RANT>
Blogging with Dragon Naturally Speaking 10
Posted by David WhitehouseWell I’ve just installed Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 and it does seem to be a little bit better, although saying that I have had to correct a couple of things already in this sentence.
I started this post at lunchtime and since then I’ve done all the easy training on Dragon naturally speaking, but unfortunately it’s still having difficulties. I’m going to continue to persevere with it, do all the medium and hard training and then see if I am still having problems.
I’ve had to resort to typing now as it just can’t do the job well enough, thoroughly disappointed right now, but we’ll see how it goes…
The Forgotten Split Test – a 3 Year Test!
Posted by David WhitehouseI was writing a post for the Dave Naylor blog about Google Analytics and Website Optimizer when I thought “have I ever done a split test?”, so I logged into Google Website Optimizer briefly and noticed the following test from 9th May 2007! And it was still running!!!
I’m not entirely sure what is happening over time, but it seems as those my initial test increased conversions by around 33%. But it seems over time that the effectiveness of this has decreased. The test in question was for an old site, originally designed by SEO Doofus, when he was at 9XB (sorry to point the finger Carps).
Here is the original:
And here is the alternative which performed significantly better (awful design I know – but it shows how it was a user interface problem rather than a “style” problem):
So this awfully designed changed actually increased conversions coming through the home page by 35%!!! So can anyone explain the convergence of the split test over time? I’m really perplexed!!!
Facebook Campaign Followup
Posted by David WhitehouseLast week I started my first real Facebook campaign for The Old Deanery, the campaign was only meant to run for a week, sadly it didn’t quite have the effect I had hoped for, but still it gave us some useful data to work with, here come the stats!
220,352 impressions
60 clicks (0.027% CTR)
$26.20 spent ($0.44 CPC)
11 Fans signed up (18.33% Signup rate)
$2.38 CPA (£1.54 CPA)
So the real weakness in this campaign was the click through rate, it was shockingly bad – I’m not sure about what the averages are for Facebook, but I still think this is below average. The reason behind this bad CTR is the photo I used, it is just the photo of the building, I should have used a photo of a nice plate of food instead – I think this would have got a much higher CTR.
I am very pleased with the conversion rate as 18.33% is quite high, unfortunately I don’t know if all those new fans were as a direct result of the campaign, but since I didn’t see any other communication about the Old Deanery I think the increase was due to an indirect result of the campaign (people see someone else become a fan of the Deanery, so they do too).
On the whole the CPA was £1.54, which I think was about three times what I wanted to pay, but in the grand scheme of things, if the Facebook Fans perform as well as the email subscribers do, then I think over the period of a year, if we do one offer per week, then these fans are likely to be worth around £36 each.
Overall an interesting and useful experience, next we will be testing the % of fans that actually respond to an offer.
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