Natural disasters are good for search engine results
By Yokota Fritz
The cooling weather means fewer people are reading bicycle blogs in the Northern Hemisphere, so traffic has dropped off significantly here at Cyclelicious. I've discovered that a local disaster does wonders for website traffic, though. It even earned me a link from a high ranking website (and thanks for that, Jordan!).
I posted a note about the San Jose Earthquake within minutes of the quake. That evening, my unique visitor count tripled from my previous day's count. I suppose I could write something either profound or sophomoric on our need to connect with other human beings in a dramatic shared experience and how Web 2.0 enables this human interaction in powerful new ways, but I'm just a computer nerd who likes to ride a bicycle.
The technology of the web held up just fine in Silicon Valley. My cellphone didn't work, but Twitter, Flickr, Blogger and the World Wide Web in general all stayed up and running, along with my Internet phone service. The Internet is descended from "ARPANET", a U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency project. While the Internet would not survive a world-ending nuclear exchange, it hummed along with nary a hiccup during the quake in the heart of Silicon Valley. It helped, of course, that damage was limited to falling merchandise and hundreds of thousands of library books.
While I'm talking web stats, Alta Bikes is still in my top ten . Kirsten Gum remains a favorite at number four on the list; there's quite a bit of interest in the Chanel bicycle; and more than a few people are still looking at Interbike 2007 information.
Speaking of manpris, I sewed some up Tuesday night. I didn't damage the sewing machine too badly. They'll go on their inaugural ride tomorrow. Photos may appear on Flickr.
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If you participate in pay per click advertising, pay attention to your links. This is what I saw when I clicked on an ad from Specialized Bicycles.
"Pay Per Click" or PPC is how the big search engines pay their bills. Google calls their program AdWords. Yahoo's is merely "Yahoo Search Marketing." MSN Search calls their PPC program adCenter.
The gist of all of these programs is you pay for placement when somebody searches using keywords you're interested in. If you search for "bicycle," bicycle-related ads appears as "Sponsored Links," "Sponsor Results," or "Sponsored Sites" for, respectively, Google, Yahoo and MSN. If you click on one of these sponsored links, the sponsor pays a few dimes and the search engine receives the money.
Companies with marketing often utilize the services of PPC campaign managers. These are, hopefully, professionals who understand the ins and outs of search marketing. In the example, here, though, the PPC manager really screwed it up.
Specialized apparently uses Reporting Center to manage their PPC advertising. Unfortunately, when I searched for a Specialized product and clicked on Specialized advertising, I got a bad link. Specialized still pays Google for the click -- after all, Google doesn't know the page is bad -- but Specialized isn't receiving any marketing value from my click. It's money badly spent on Specialized's part.
It's not just Specialized that has this problem. I was searching for information about the Sierra Club's Clair Tappaan Lodge. I clicked on the Sierra Club ad that appeared and it was a bad link.
If you use PPC marketing, be absolutely certain your links are good!
Note: I participate in AdSense, in which Google's ads are shown on Cyclelicious and my other websites.
Natural disasters are good for search engine results
Interesting. I sometimes look at daily hits, but I hardly ever look at wht people are searching for. Maybe I should take a look from time to time.
Another kind of top ten
Fritz, I went to the Chicago Bicycle Film Festival last year and saw a compilation of (outstanding) short films by Lucas Brunelle. Some time ago, I was reminded of them and tried to find him on YouTube and on the web, but couldn't remember his exact name or how to spell his last name. Thanks to this post, I now found him on the web and there are about 10 of his videos on YouTube. You should see his bike.
Pay attention to your Pay Per Click campaigns
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