Scott Porad

I’ve been thinking a lot about Google lately, or more specifically GOOG.  I would be interested in knowing your thoughts…leave them in the comments.

As I understand it, the hottest things in technology these days (besides lolcats) are mobile and social (and geo-location, but humor me and ignore that).

With respect to mobile, primarily the battle is between Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android.  I see a lot of analogy between Google and Apple at present with mobile operating systems, and Microsoft and Apple about 20 years ago with desktop operating systems.

In other words, Google is Microsoft with the more open operating system, and Apple is Apple (again) with the more closed system.  Even though AAPL is high-flying now, it’s pretty obvious that Microsoft won that war.

On the other hand, Google can’t seem to tell its knee from it’s elbow when it comes to social.  Apple doesn’t really have a dog in the social fight, but Google is being defeated by Facebook and Twitter (and, to some extent, Bing who seemingly has better relationships with each).  Adam Rifkin wrote a fun piece about Google and why they’re not optimized to succeed at social, haven’t succeeded at social, and won’t succeed at social.

So, in the question of GOOG, it all boils down to this: which is going to be more important for Google in the next 5-10 years—owning the leading social applications or owning the leading mobile operating system?

To me, it’s pretty clear that Google is placing it’s bet on the mobile OS.  Is that the right bet?

What happens if Google wins the mobile OS battle, but loses the social ground to Facebook et al.?  What about the opposite?  What if Google somehow, magically, wins social, but loses mobile?  (Obviously, winning both is good, and losing both is bad.)

I don’t know the answer to these questions, but find them very interesting.  What do you think?

Last week I promised you some data about why reducing HTTP requests the most important thing for improving page load speed.

• Shopzilla: reduced page load time by 3.5 seconds and all sorts of good things happened…the highlights: conversion increased by 7%, page views by 25% ⁽¹⁾
• AOL: 3x improvements in page views per visit based on page load times ⁽¹⁾
• Google and Bing: increasing page load time by as little as 200 milliseconds causes measurable declines in usage ⁽¹⁾
• Google Maps: decreasing page size by 20-30% resulted in 10% increase in traffic ⁽²⁾
• Amazon: increasing page load time by 100 milliseconds decreases conversion by 1% ⁽²⁾

The data shows unequivocally that reducing HTTP requests is really important for improving site performance and key business metrics.  And, I would argue, that 75% of developers think this type of work is a lot of fun.   So, here’s the funny thing about this: why can’t business people and technology people get aligned?

This is one of the things that always drove me nuts at back in the heyday at drugstore.com: the business people would want to grow, so they’d advocate for new ideas.  Those ideas were unproven and uncertain, and the majority of them failed.  That’s okay…the nature of new ideas is that most of them fail.  Just check out small business success rates.

Yet, here’s the thing: right in front of every business person is a proven, certain and quantifiable project that can improve critical business metrics.  It’s called “Improve Page Load Speed”.  So, if you’re a technical type, perhaps you should forward a link to this blog post to the business folks in order to get a site optimization project on the schedule.

Sources:

1. Nicolle Sullivan’s AEA Seattle presentation [excerpt]
2. Andrew King, Website Optimization, Page 148

I’ve read in many places that the number important thing for improving page load time is to reduce HTTP requests on a page.  However, sometimes people say if you set an Expires header far in the future it doesn’t matter because it will be in the browser cache.

I wanted to be sure I understood how the Expires header in the future worked because at CheezHQ we’ve been discussing how aggressive we should be with images sprites.  As part of my research, I found this performance research from Yahoo:

40-60% of Yahoo!’s users have an empty cache experience and ~20% of all page views are done with an empty cache. To my knowledge, there’s no other research that shows this kind of information. And I don’t know about you, but these results came to us as a big surprise. It says that even if your assets are optimized for maximum caching, there are a significant number of users that will always have an empty cache. This goes back to the earlier point that reducing the number of HTTP requests has the biggest impact on reducing response time. The percentage of users with an empty cache for different web pages may vary, especially for pages with a high number of active (daily) users. However, we found in our study that regardless of usage patterns, the percentage of page views with an empty cache is always ~20%.

Like the researchers, that surprised me too.

Now, they made the caveat for “pages with a high number of active (daily) users”.   I wondered if that was us because we have a high percentage of users who visit the site every day.

After digging in some analytics data, I determined that unless you’re a very frequent visitor to one of our sites, you’re visiting us with a cache that is effectively empty—downloading many or all of the objects on our homepage.  Why?  Because we update our pages multiple times per day.

Even sites like ours with a very high segment of users who visit daily (or more than once per day!), still have a high number of visits with an empty cache.  The reason being that even if you were on the site just a few hours ago, the all the content on the pages is new and therefore needs to be downloaded.

In other words, the frequency of visits as a factor in reducing empty cache visits is counteracted by the frequency that a site’s content is updated.  Of course, this makes sense because unless a site updates it’s content frequently users don’t have a reason to return frequently.

The bottom line: reducing HTTP requests continues to be most important for improving site performance.

Just how important?  Great question!  Stay tuned: I have some data that I can share with you that illustrates just how valuable improvements in page load times can be…I’ll post it soon.

Update: Data Illustrating the Benefits of Improved Page Load Times

I wrote a post for Seattle 2.0 about my thoughts on why conferences are worth attending, and in particular SXSW.

The money graph, as they say, is:

All that being said, when someone asks me, “Should I attend SXSW?” I tell them this: the sessions will be valuable and interesting, some better than others. But to get the most out of it, you have to go there with people in mind. If you’re willing to be social and friendly, to stick your hand out and introduce yourself, and focus on developing relationships as opposed to developing business, then you’ll come home with something money can’t buy.

You can read the whole post by clicking here.

UPDATE: A loyal reader pointed out that I’ve written before about the value of attending conferences.

Often I am asked about search engine optimization (SEO), so I’ve asked Joel Gross, a search engine optimization expert based in Los Angeles, to write a guest post that goes beyond the basics of SEO.

As an search engine optimization expert working in the industry for four years now, I have come across quite a few tidbits that only professional SEO’s are privy to. The blog post you are about to read will share some of the strategies and tactics that I have found many web designers, businesspeople and even some marketing people don’t know about or overlook.

Clickthrough & Bounce Rates

Links and copy might be the two most important factors in where your website ranks in Google search results, but clickthrough & bounce rates are quickly becoming the third most important factor. If users don’t click on your page in the search results or if they go to your page then quickly bounce out, that is a clear signal to search engines that your page is not meeting the users query. Google makes 99.9% of it’s revenue from its advertising system that uses Quality Score * Max CPC to determine where to rank ads (the Sponsored Listings area of search results). Quality Score’s chief component is clickthrough rate. Clickthrough rate is very important for both advertising on Google and for ranking well in organic search. Monitor your clickthrough & bounce rates closely and do what it takes to help increase each one.

Calling for Links

Many people think they can reach out and get links from people with bulk emails or personalized emails requesting partnerships. I have discovered that the best use of time though for getting great links from authority websites and your competitors is by picking up the phone and calling them. Response rates on emails about links are very low since people have been spammed to death. I have followed this strategy on my LA math tutoring website and have had really great response rates. 40% of people I get ahold of on the phone agree to put a link to my site on theirs and about half of those actually follow through. Compare that to emailing for links 2-3% response rate with maybe one in ten of those people actually putting your link on their site. Calling and making a personal connection is far more successful than sending bulk email to get ignored. Strategies for a successful call:

• Talk about building a “partnership” instead of just asking for the link right away
• Tell them how linking to your site will benefit their customers/readers
• Offer a link in return from another website (to avoid reciprocal links)

Use Wordpress

Wordpress is not only free to use, easy to develop on and supported by a large community of developers, but it has had the input of tons of SEO experts and web designers and is the best optimized CMS package out of the box. It is also easily customizable and you can find tons of cheap developers to build on it. You are also able to safely allow people with no web experience to create & add new pages with impunity by giving them an author/contributor role. I used Wordpress + a few plugins to build my online marketing blog into a powerhouse with 80,000+ unique visitors each month. Even highly professional non-blog websites such as the Beverly Hills cosmetic surgery site and the guide to Los Angeles site use it.

To quickly set up Wordpress, go to this page and follow the instructions to install on your host. 1and1.com has good cheap web hosting, more advanced users with heavy traffic should look at mediatemple’s hosting packages. Once wordpress is installed, choose your theme (make sure it allows html text for your title and not just an image) and install these plugins in order of importance: Akismet (no comment spam), Google Analyticator (measuring & tracking performance), Feedburner Feedsmith (more tracking & some publicizing), Yet Another Related Posts plugin (auto generated links at the bottom of each post), aLinks (auto placed links in text on certain keywords), Dagon Design Sitemap Generator (important for crawling), Google XML sitemaps (crawling), All in one SEO pack (not really necessary anymore), Increase Sociability (call to action for certain types of visitors).

Pay for Copy

During the last year, I have had outsourced copywriters produce over 3,000 pages of keyword-optimized 500+ word articles for between $4-7 per page. Copy is one of the major cornerstones of SEO and you can never have too much of it (unless you use copy generators which search engines can spot). Having unique articles written for your websites by outsourced copywriters will far outstrip your abilities to write alone and gives you a major leg up on your competitors in search rankings. It enables you to specially target many long tail terms that otherwise you would be forced to overlook and provides readers of that content valuable information that pertains specifically to what they had searched for. All of the copy on my Carpet Cleaners Bellevue website was written for $40 total. Not the best copy, but a great price to help me quickly get up a site & test the market.

Outsourcing copy on the cheap can be done using Elance.com to find inexpensive copywriters. You will have to carefully screen their work to find good ones, but when you do it can be very profitable for both parties. Ask your writer to send you the first five articles they write for you so you can check and make sure it’s a good fit before having them run off 50 or a 100. Many books have been written on how to write good copy, but a favorite resource of mine is Copyblogger. If I was you, I would come up with a list of instructions for how you want your copy written & add to it with each new writer. Eventually you will have a very effective document to help them get started. To write keyword-optimized articles, you need to use the keyword in the title tag, meta description tag, page title tag, multiple times in the page copy and in anchored links pointing to the page. You can do research on long tail terms using the Google Adwords external keyword tool and selecting “exact” phrase matching.

If you are interested in other general SEO tips & tricks, please feel free to ask in the comments section!

Thanks for reading,

Joel Gross

After my deification of Microsoft Excel, I was thinking that there is one feature I wish Excel had that it doesn’t.  Note: this is a serious power user feature.

Why can’t an Excel Workbook be queried with a SQL Query Tool?  A workbook is a database, each worksheet is a table, and each row is a record.  Isn’t this obvious?

I often find myself importing an Excel Worksheet into Microsoft Access, so that I can then run queries against the data.  In fact, I do this regularly.

Does this tool already exist?

It doesn’t seem like this should be very hard to build, and I’m certain there are all sorts of people out there in the business and academic worlds that benefit from it.

An informal survey of marketing and PR professionals who work with social media asked the following question:

What is the one tool you can’t live without?

Do you think the answer was TweetDeck or an iPhone or the latest and greatest sentiment-reputation analytics package?

Think again. The answer: Microsoft Excel.

If you think about it, that makes perfect sense.   Excel is like Playdoh—it can be used for anything.  It’s powerful and malleable at same time.

It’s the perfect tool for the long tail…for all the little niche parts of business that aren’t big enough to have their own specialized tool.  Likewise, it’s the perfect tool for emerging industries that have not stabilized to the point where suitable tools can be built.

Excel is the MacGuyver of software.

My view is that Excel is the single most valuable software application in the history of software.

Is it more valuable than e-mail?  Well, before e-mail we still had means of written communication.  Email simply made it faster.

Is it more valuable than a word processor?  Well, before word processors we still had typewriters.  Word processors simply made drafting documents easier.

On the other hand, Excel gives us the power to do things we couldn’t do before.  In an instant, Excel can do calculations that would have taken a team of mathematicians to do in the past.  In an instant, it can do calculations that would have been prohibitively expensive for even a team of math whizzes to do…calculations that would have taken them years.  And, in an instant, you can tweak one number and it will do all of them again.

Just think about that power!!

But, aren’t there other software applications that have empowered people to do things that couldn’t be done before?  Yes, I’m sure there are, but here’s what pushes Excel over the top: this power is given to the masses.  For a few hundred bucks, you can have this power and it takes barely any specialized skill to perform these calculations.

My goodness, Excel is a marvel!!

When a good portion of your revenue is running on Wordpress.com servers, this is not a tweet that causes my heart to go pitter-patter:

It’s more of a sinking feeling, to be perfectly honest.

Recently, Wordpress.com was down for almost two hours.  Dave Moyer, the host of WordCast, interviewed me about the outage, how it affected our business and my thoughts about Wordpress.com going forward.  You can listen to the interview, and I’ll outline my thoughts here:

• We continue to be very supportive of Wordpress.com and view them as an excellent partner.  I recommend Wordpress all the time without hesitation.
• I did not view this as a serious issue because Wordpress has a history of outstanding reliability.  (OMG!  Did I just jinx them?)  The last outage of this magnitude was 4 years ago.  In addition to Wordpress, we run our own infrastructure and we’ve had at least one outage in the last 2 years, so they’re doing better than us in that regard.  Obviously, if a pattern develops, we would have to review our point of view.
• Yes, we lost revenue that day.  But, if you think about it, that lost revenue is simply part of the cost of the service.  If we wanted an even more reliable service (and by no means is Wordpress.com unreliable), then it would cost us significantly more than the amount of revenue we lost that day.
• Why do we use Wordpress.com?  Simply put, it’s cheaper.  It might not be cheaper cash-wise, but when you look at the total cost of ownerhship it’s way cheaper.
  • First, we’d have to own and manage all that infrastructure which costs money and management overhead.
  • In addition, we’d have to develop the expertise required to host an extremely large Wordpress installation.  Wordpress.com already has this expertise.
  • And, there’s the stress of operating a 24/7/365 operation.
  • Most importantly, the opportunity cost of focus and cost distraction.  At the end of the day, Cheezburger benefits from having our full attention focused on building great sites and creating a great community.

For those of you reading this who might not give a hoot about technology or Wordpress.com, that final point really is relevant to so much of life.  The opportunity cost of focus and the cost distraction are such critical elements to success.  I wish I had words to express that concept more eloquently; somehow I just feel in my gut that it’s true.

To buy an iPad, or to not buy an iPad, that is the question.

The answer is no.

I love the idea.  It would live on my sofa and everyone in my family would use it.  Instantly, it would become an indispensable part of our every day life.  Five years ago my friend Lee had a NEC Tablet which just ran ordinary Windows and used a stylus, but I thought it was awesome.  A perfect integration into everyday life.

So, why won’t I be buying an iPad?

In first place: no front-facing camera.  I’m sitting on the couch, watching a show or a game, I want to talk to my friend about it…video chat.  Awesome.  Except I can’t.  I have to get up to my computer.  In other words, it’s not a complete device.

Runner up: no multi-tasking.  Can’t write an e-mail and listen to audio online simultaneously.  Can’t write a document and research it simultaneously on the web.

Honorable mention: poor typing interface.  I’ll reserve my complete opinion until I have a chance to try it out, but from what it looks like in order to type I will have to set it down.  Lame.  I’m lying on the couch, watching a show our a game, I want type an e-mail.  Except I can’t.  I have to sit up and put it on my lap to type.  Major inconvenience.  In other words, it’s a laptop.

Maybe iPad 2.0 will have these missing features, but as far as I’m concerned without them it’s not a complete device.

Update: overnight, another deficiency occurred to me: the iPad needs to have a built-in kick-stand.  How am I going to watch a movie?  Hold in up for two hours?  It seems too heavy for that.  Set it up on a chair?  How will I be able to get the right angle on it?

At Cheezburger, we embrace incrementalism.  We’ve found that when we make changes in incremental, small pieces and there are several benefits:

1. Things get done and ship faster.  The result is regular progress and momentum.  Success begets success.
2. Things tend to be less late.  It’s hard to have a 2 day project be 2 months late.
3. You get the thing your making out to your customers faster.  As a result, a) you start learning if it works sooner, b) your customers get to start using it sooner, and c) assuming it’s valuable, you start capturing the value sooner.
4. There is less overhead (design, planning, etc.) in a 2 day project than a 2 month project.
5. Incremental changes have fewer dependencies.  Dependencies add complexity and can cause delays.
6. Developers like small projects because they seem easier and more fun.
7. A small project has less bugs and is easier to test.
8. It’s easier to A/B test incremental changes.
9. It’s less expensive to change your mind because changes cost less.
10. Incremental changes are less jarring to customers.

The bottom line is that we’ve found greater success through incrementalism.  I’m sure there are 101 other reasons that I’ve missed too  (and I’d love for you to share them in the comments…yes, I’m speaking to you Martin).