David Pitlyuk

I’m intrigued by the idea of websites that sell one product or concept. A great example of what I mean is I Park Like An Idiot. This site is a simple one page site that sells bumper stickers that says “I Park Like An Idiot”:

They sell these in 20, 40, and 100 packs with the idea that you will buy a pack and put them on cars that are parked like idiots. Now keep in mind, I don’t condone this since I admit to parking like an idiot sometimes myself ;).  Their website also has a gallery of pictures of vehicles that have this on them.

I love this concept about creating a viral product/concept/idea, and trying to generate money from it.  Do you know of any other sites that are based off the same idea?

I have at least one site idea that I’ll be doing in the near future that is based on this concept.  It’s meant to be a funny and viral idea that hopefully gets spread around, generates sales on novel products (t-shirts, bumper stickers, etc), and that’s that.  It should take all of one weekend to make the whole thing.  I’ll be posting more about it whenever I get time to actually do this, but I’m looking forward to seeing if it can actually generate some good traffic and make some money.

A standard dynamic url will look something like this:

http://www.davidpitlyuk.com/?p=139

There are some major advantages to re-mapping the URL to something more relevant, as well as including select keywords.

Advantages

SEOmoz’s Google Search Engine Factor Rankings sheet lists this as a 2.8/5 in terms of importance. Here’s a bunch of quotes from leaders in the SEO community with their opinions:

Barry Schwartz - Having them bolded in the search results are worth a lot in my opinion.

Aaron Wall - Not weighted anywhere near as much as an exact match domain name, but helps improve CTR (and thus relevancy if CTR factors into relevancy scores) and some people will link to pages using the URL as anchor text.

Ben Pfeiffer - Works very well in Yahoo. Great for user navigation and still worth while to do as a basic SEO methodology. Use hyphens.

Jonah Stein - Information Architecture plays a large role in establishing themes.

Scottie Claiborne - This only influences rankings where you have many sites linking to that page using the URL as the anchor text. This isn’t seen very often as most sites use your site name or a descriptive phrase as anchor text. It doesn’t hurt to do it, but I would never change a page that is already indexed just so that you can add keywords in the URL.

Eric Ward - Again, depends on the content, the source, and the trust earned previously.

Eric Enge - The influence of this one is microscopic. Main value is to help the use understand what your site is about.

Russ Jones - Dependent upon a number of factors including the number of words, dashes and slashes. Also good, though, for CTR (as mentioned above)

Wil Reynolds - Remember this also helps people know what a page in their history is about.

Thomas Bindl - Importance is mainly due to the keyword in links when people use the URL as anchor text.

Mike McDonald - Similar to the domain name, I think it’s always a good thing to have your keywords associated with your address. If someone is going to link to your page, they will by default be linking to your page using one of your keywords.

Guillaume - I’ve seen very little effect on that

Lucas Ng (aka shor) - Not from Google itself, but you will get some pages linking to that page using your URL keywords, so there is that benefit.

Marcus Tandler - Matt himself recently said in a blogpost, that the keyword in a page´s URL might help a little - quote: “Most bloggy sites tend to have words from the title of a post in the url; having keywords from the post title in the url also can help search engines judge the quality of a page.”

Jill Whalen - Same comments as keywords in domains.

Ani Kortikar - dont overdo it.

Chris Boggs - Even Matt Cutts said this helps. Again though, this is dependent on other factors such as the page content as well as IBL anchor text.

Caveman - Is G helped by seeing that a file has been named “large-long-widgets”? Of course. Even spammers won’t often name files in a way unrelated to page contents. The only reason it’s not more important, is *because* spammers name files according to page contents.

Todd Malicoat - It certainly doesn’t hurt, and provides bolded listings on many search results which assists clickthrough rates. It is good practice, but likely only has marginal value by itself.

Rae Hoffman - Again, depends on the search engine. I think algo wise it carries some importance, but isn’t “needed”. That said, I think having a page named something that clearly says to users “this is about the topic your looking for!” may help increase CTR for the ranks you *do* have.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster - I’m not certain that it helps all that much. Having one keyword in the URL is probably fine. Two keywords, might help the organic CTR (for rankings it’s debatable). Beyond that I think the likelihood of a URL looking spammy goes way up.

SearchEngineWatch did a case study using PlumberSurplus.com and found that the number of pages indexed by Google/MSN/Yahoo as well as the amount of site traffic drastically increased. Check out the results:

Indexed Pages

Site Traffic

There are ways to re-map a URL, whether you are using Apache or IIS as your webserver, but for the majority of us using Wordpress, it’s very easy.  By default Wordpress will not remap your URLs, but you can turn it on.  Head to your admin, click the options link, and then in the submenu click Permalink:

I use the common date and name based option, but you’ll see many others want a flat structure.  In this case they would just specify this in the custom structure and do just /%postname/ and the URL will be domain.com/postname.

Have you switched your blog or site at any time from a dynamic URL and seen some major differences?  If so, tell me about it.

There are two businesses up for sale that seem like pretty decent bargains, and you should consider buying them.

1) The first is WootAgent. I wrote about WootAgent back in March when I wrote about Woot! in general. WootAgent is a simple tool that will track Woots for you. This is especially useful in a WootOff when new products are offered once the previous has sold out. A little display pops up in your taskbar to show you what’s new. As of writing this, WootAgent has close to 16,000 users. They are selling everything around the $2,000 mark (Auctioning off starting at $2,000). You can find full details of what you get in this PDF file, and to make an offer e-mail wootagent@gmail.com. $2,000 seems inexpensive, and I don’t think it would be too hard to make your money back.

2) The second is the blog, NorthXEast. This is a great blog that gets a ton of traffic, has good content, a great design, and many backlinks. You can read more details about the sale, and why it’s being sold here. The site is up at the Sitepoint Marketplace and is at $5,700 at the time of writing, with 7 days left. I think this is a great purchase, and the site can also make its money back easily with the right owner.

I’ll be interested to see how much both of these end up getting sold for.

I had originally made a post trying to get bloggers to show their workspaces off.  We got a few responses (including my own office if you want to see), but Darren Rowse did the same thing and has quite a bit more

•  27 Blog Workspaces Explored
• 27 More Blog Workspaces

There are a few pretty cool ones, but nothing stood out as insane to me.  Check them out, and let me know which ones you like the best.

The guys from 97th Floor have come up with an awesome extension for Firefox that I’m sure many of you will find useful. They call it Social Media for Firefox. This simple tool goes on the bottom of your browser window, and will automatically show you the number of Diggs, Reddits, Stumble Upons, and Del.icio.us’s the page you are on has gotten.

You can set this to automatically update as you browse through websites, or you can manually update to ensure the numbers you’re looking at are accurate. On top of this, you can click any of the icons in order to submit that page to one of those social media sites. Talk about easy!

Another cool feature is the extension actually adds a box next to each story on the social media sites that show you how many votes it has on the other sites:

This is a simple little plugin that I thought was pretty cool, and amazing piece of linkbait for 97th Floor.  If you have the capability of developing something like this, start getting creative.

The Dutch lottery has produced an interactive website seeing if you can handle the life of a millionaire. The video is an instant classic, and you can tell it is of very high quality production. The video is interactive, so you play as yourself, following your butler and doing things like choosing a woman, a car, and more. Here’s some of my story:

My butler provides me with my own robe…with my name on the back of course:

I’m rich, I should be able to choose my women, right?

I had a choice between a classic Rolls Royce or a new Lamborghini Gallardo…I’ll take the Lambo please:

Before I could drive anywhere, a nice young lady wants to chat:

But wait! She was actually setting me up for a kidnapping:

Have no fear, my butler has come to rescue me in my helicopter:

And to get me out of the car, he threatens the kidnappers with a bazooka:

For the rest of the story, check out The Millionaire Film.

I’m looking for somebody to do some custom coding to integrate a couple basic features into Wordpress for my new design. After stumbling with a couple word-of-mouth options, I looked to Google. My obvious first search was “custom wordpress coding“. The only sponsored link here is from eLance! I can’t believe there is nobody else that has sponsored links on this keyword! I’d say that a plethora of new business can be made if it is wanted.

Update: Even “wordpress development” doesn’t have much in it.  Sounds like it’s time for a development/design firm to step in and own this niche.

I noticed that QuadsZilla from SEO Black Hat is looking for an unpaid intern.  Expect to work 25 hours a week, put up with all his crap, and do mostly boring work, all while making nothing.  Sounds great, right?  Keep reading:

However, you will get hands on experience and training on how to:

• run extremely profitable web businesses
• build sites from scratch to profitability
• grow web communities
• network and develop a digital rolodex of successful web entrepreneurs

Most Good SEOs are taking home more than $350k per year and doing it on their own terms. Look at me – I basically work when I want, where I want, and with whom I want.

All you gotta do is convince QuadsZilla why you should get the job.  Good luck!

Travis over at Young Go Getter found a video which had me cracking up. It’s a parody of what would happen if we all spoke like we posted comments…the end is the best part!

You can find part 2 here:

Travis from Young Go Getter came up with a little creative idea where they are letting their readers create the logo for their blog.  All you need to do is print out a PDF of their logo and take a picture with it in some sort of creative way.  As a thanks, Travis is making the logo click-through to your site.  Just a few people have submitted their logos so far, and I just sent mine in:

The picture is of the two Viper’s in my garage.  Young Go Getter is a site about young entrepreneurs like myself, people that I also directly target with my blog.  I’ve found that young entrepreneurs are often inspired by nice things, like cars for example.  I think the Viper’s are a status of some sort of success and inspiration, which is why I decided to use them in the logo.  Travis informed me that it’s now in rotation on the site, and here’s a screenshot of it live on the site: