Why I won't pay for SEO

The oddly but effectively named Vanessa Fox. Nude, discusses "white hat" vs. "black hat" SEO. Despite what you're about to read, I absolutely love Vanessa Fox. Nude. It's on my must-read list.

However, I want to focus on the last paragraph where white hat SEO is defined:

So what is white hat SEO? The panlists [sic] agreed it was about creating quality content — being the most relevant result for a desired query.

This very popular take on SEO is total horse crap. Search Engine Optimization is not about producing good content. It's about getting content in front of as many relevant people as possible by means of a search engine. It's about my crappy content to coming up ahead of someone else's great content. This definition is 100% backwards.

That so many SEO spin doctors rely on the "great content" card shows me that they don't really have anything worth selling. If SEO consultants could truly game the search engines in ways that wouldn't get them banned, wouldn't they stop telling me to write better? Probably. But instead, they say, in effect, "All we can do is make sure your site is visible to the search engines, the rest is out of our hands." That's great (and true), but not very valuable. I can make header tags and alt tags and page titles for free. What I need is insight into how the search engines work and where they work poorly so that I can crack them open like a thief and steal their secret nectar. But SEO gurus never seem to know that stuff. A great SEO guy is like a bond trader - able to see movements and market inefficiencies where others can't, and thereby gain an advantage, all the while staying on the right side of the law with his ethics intact.

I propose we rename SEO to SEBP - Search Engine Best Practices, because that's all it is.

Y Combinator Legal Documents

Thanks to the Startup Lawyer (Ryan Roberts), I'm now aware that the legal documents used by Y Combinator are available for download. This is particularly interesting to me because I believe that a distinct disconnect has emerged over the last few years where venture capital firms swelled with money just as internet startup costs began to plunge. The result, of course, is that some VC's struggle to find effective ways to deploy their piles of capital, and that entrepreneurs can't quite figure out how to fund their companies with digestible amounts of money. As a result, we've seen the emergence of two phenomena: More organized angel investors and groups like Y Combinator.

I don't know if either of these investor types will fill the gap that I am seeing (if, in fact it exists - I have no actual data to support my theory - just anecdotes). I do know that they're much more in line with what I want to see as an entrepreneur. I don't need $5 million. In fact, I can't quite figure out what I'd do with more than $50,000 or so to get started.

Online Ads Aren't Quite the New Tip Jar

Seth Godin has a post up this morning proclaiming that online ads could be the new tip jar. Boiled down to a sentence, he's stating that if you like someone's writing, say thanks by clicking an ad.

The implications of that behavioral change when applied across the entire web are pretty big (not necessarily good, but definitely big). But he left out one pretty important point: advertisers aren't interested in paying for tip-clicks. So while I'm all for supporting people who write great stuff on the web and distribute it freely, please do make sure you're interested in an ad before you click it, or at least pay attention to what you just clicked. Bouncing off without so much as viewing the page isn't too far from click fraud.

In other words, make sure you're tipping with your own money (or attention).

UPDATE: Seth predictably got a lot of email on this one (he is the master, isn't he?), and has a follow up post that better explains the concept he's exploring.

Google: Too Much of a Good Thing

Alexander Muse is one of the few people I know of who has resisted the Siren call of the Google Apps hosted email solution, and does some interesting macro-level math to show the dangers of everyone jumping on the same bandwagon.

I have not followed in his footsteps, and looking my dependence on Google right now is cause for concern.

Google Apps: I have no less than four domains running email through Google Apps. My personal email is Gmail. When Gmail goes down, I go down, at least as far as email is concerned. Initially, the auto-generated email from Your Neighbor's Place will come via Google. It takes me 5 minutes to set up Google Apps Email and it's free. Hard to beat when you are bootstrapping a business. But I kinda need it to work...

AdSense: This is the initial revenue source for Your Neighbor's Place. And they're way ahead of everyone else (or so I'm told). Losing it would be a significant hit to early cash flow.

Google Search: Google is the only search that matters. The initial figures on this blog are showing that Google is responsible for 100% of my search traffic. Not 99.999999%, but 100%.

Feedburner: I use it to get insight into how this blog is doing. Frankly, this is not a big deal, as it's only marginally useful. Losing it would probably just give me back the 30 seconds a day that I spend checking it.

Blogger: I've tried to make it as inconspicuous as possible, but the favicon will tell the observant reader that this blog is written on Google's platform. Probably not a big deal to lose - only the time getting it all set up again somewhere else would be lost.

AdWords: I haven't used it yet, but it's the front runner if I decide to use paid traffic.

What would happen if Google faltered Enron-style? Who would pick up the pieces? Would they be as effective? Could Yahoo handle the traffic or provide acceptable results? I have no idea, but the idea of competition in the search business is pretty appealing to me right about now.

I think I'm going to go back up this blog right now...

Don't Piss Off Your Customers

I have to comment on Jeff Nolan's post regarding his disapproval of VistaPrint's pricing silliness.

Seems they added another dollar to his order to cover a "Fuel Surcharge", despite the fact that the order was to be shipped via USPS.

VistaPrint is being incredibly short sighted here. Repeat after me: Your customers don't care how much your fuel costs. The only reason they care about shipping costs is that they get to pick an option and they want to know what they're paying for. But fuel? Totally irrelevant at best. Insulting at worst. If you're not making enough money, raise the price. Would Jeff have even noticed if the "Shipping & Processing" line item were 8.99 instead of 7.99? I wouldn't have.

All they've accomplished is that Jeff is now really pissed off because they had the audacity to try to pry another dollar out of his hand with a really, really lame excuse. This is what you call bad customer service at the worst possible time - right before the customer is about to click the button that transfers his money to the company's bank account!

Most people might just say, "that sucks, but it's only a dollar" and click the button anyway. But next time, they might not go back to that company that tries to stick them with another dollar at the last second.

I'm curious to know if Jeff canceled the order or just paid the dollar.


UPDATE: Turns out Seth Godin has a well thought-out post on a similar pricing add-on problem. Read it.

Monday Trivia: Contextual Ads Need Context

I understand that it takes a little time for Google to sort through your site and generate meaningful ads. However, it can be discouraging to see stuff like this show up:

I don't know what to make of it, but I hope it's not an indication of the quality of my work.

Why Venture Capital Probably Isn't For You

A couple days ago, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures posted a spreadsheet and commentary on the economics behind a typical early stage venture capital fund.

Paul Kedrosky provides, via an old post, an interesting chart detailing the overall returns that venture capitalists provide their investors. The data is a little old, but still relevant.

In a nutshell, what these two posts illustrate is that it is very difficult to be a successful venture investor. While looking from the outside, it seems like VC's have a gold-plated life with perks coming out the wazoo. But that just ain't so.

First look at Fred Wilson's projections. He's hoping to provide his investors IRR's in the high twenties. That's good, but not staggering. I've seen real estate deals do as well with considerably less risk (I know... it's not apples to apples). Compare that goal with the actual returns of the top 25% of VC funds - it's very similar. The bottom 75% of the VC world are basically failures, providing crap returns at high risk, as Paul Kedrosky''s chart shows . VC is a very scrappy, tough business.

What this means to you as an entrepreneur is that VC's are under a lot of pressure to fight an uphill battle to please their limited partners. Their own survival depends on their ability to stay in that top echelon of VCs. Does that pressure sometimes cause the VC's interests to diverge from your own goals as an entrepreneur? Absolutely. And the VC's know this all to well. "Most" startup businesses (and by most I mean "almost all") are fundamentally incompatible with the venture capital business model. That's why they're so darned picky about what they choose to invest in. It's not ego or that they "don't get it". It's that they do get it, and they know that the investments that make their own business work are few and far between.

It takes high revenue and growth potential that can be kick started very quickly and the ability to make a nice exit in a short time frame that makes the VC model work. If any of that conflicts with your business at any time along it's growth path, then VC is not for you. Any deviation from that plan will put you in the VC's "loser" column on the spreadsheet. Too many losers and that VC is also a loser when he tries to raise his next fund.

Just as you have to think about your product from your customer's point of view, you must view your business from your investors' (and their investors') points of view. It's easy to get distracted by the huge Google-like returns that some VCs sometimes get and assume that they have an easy job. They don't. And if you don't make it easier for them, VC isn't for you.

Flash 10 Breaks File Uploads?

I've been looking at muliple file uploads in Rails lately. The state of internet apps is getting to the point where it's a required feature for photo sharing apps.

Enter SWFUpload, an open source uploader that relies on Adobe's Flash and javascript. It's pretty cool, can be integrated with rails 2.1, not too much trouble, and doesn't wreck your user interface. It requires flash 8 or 9, but more than 98% of users meet that requirement these days. Even better, it's a widely-distributed library whose users include the folks at WordPress.

So all was right with the world as I set in to work up a slick new multi-file upload scheme with SWFUpload. Until I found out about Adobe's Flash Player 10:

It turns out that Adobe has fixed a security hole in Flash 10, which is currently in beta. Closing that security hole prevents SWFUpload from working at all, and basically puts the entire SWFUpload project's future in doubt.

The issue was raised on the Adobe Flash 10 forums and answered by the moderator:

Ok talked to our engineer on that feature. This new behavior is as designed for FP 10. Throwing error 2176 prevents a security vulnerability that could allow dialogs to be displayed without an explicit action by the user. WordPress will need to alter their code so that they do not indirectly call FileReference.browse to display the file dialog. (emphasis mine)

Pretty bold (even arrogant) statement, I thought, so I head over to the WordPress support forums, where the moderator had this to say:

Short version: Don't use Flash Player 10.

Long version: WordPress is not going to fix this. The flash in question is the SWFUpload library, so if it gets changed, then WordPress will likely upgrade. However, from what I'm reading over there, this is not fixable. Adobe crippled Flash 10 and made this sort of thing basically impossible. There's some back and forth trying to get Adobe to revert their broken changes, but unless that happens, it seems unlikely that Flash 10 will be able to do any sort of file uploading of any kind.

Note that flickr, yahoo, and all other flash-based uploaders will all be broken by this change in Flash 10. At the moment, everybody is recommending to NOT upgrade Flash any further than version 9. If you've installed the 10 beta, downgrade it.

If Flash 10 does not revert this change, then this will essentially end the SWFUpload project, and WordPress will likely look for some other project to use instead. Probably a Java based multi-file uploader, since Flash is proving itself to be unreliable in Adobe's hands. (again, emphasis mine)

Now, I'm no Flash expert by any measure, and I don't know if this is fixable. It doesn't look good. It also makes me very uneasy about using a product (Flash) that can't be managed any better than this. I don't think it's realistic to assume Flash 10 won't be adopted with tremendous speed by the masses. Saying, "Don't use Flash 10" is like saying, "Don't drive." If that's going to break sites like WordPress and Flickr, I'd think Adobe wouldn't be so dismissive.

In any case, I'm still on the prowl for a slick, easy to implement multi-file uploader for Rails. Some clarity regarding the future of Flash uploads would also be nice.