swansonager – what is matt up to?

I thought this was funny today when searching for a driver for my new Dell display…Dell is inspecting the HTTP USER AGENT for IE to determine if the user can download using the Dell Scan tool – apparently Googlebot can’t download drivers for his 1080P Dell 100ft x 100ft LCD at the Icelandic Google Data Center.

Here’s the screenshot

If you’ve not read “The Search” by John Battelle then you’re missing out. It’s great recap of how things went down in the world of search in the late 1990’s and early into this decade. For those of you that use Google everyday, here’s a great recap video of how they’ve evolved in the last decade. Enjoy!

Google Street View is going beyond the road – and to the Trike to be more specific! Check it out:

We’re working hard to bring Street View to new places, but some interesting areas, like pedestrian malls and trails, cannot be reached by car. That’s why we’ve created the Street View trike; a mechanical masterpiece made of 3 bicycle wheels, a mounted Street View camera, and a very athletic cyclist.

The Street View trike has already collected some imagery, but now we’re accepting your suggestions for where to send it next in the United States. Send us your most inspired suggestions for the places you really want to see featured in Street View.

Matt has a great video on redirecting users that come to you on a mobile device vs. what you should do for Googlebot and other ‘typical users’. We want to make for certain we don’t cloak pages. This is an excellent summary.

Today we launched a new feature on Houses.net – the nation’s only distressed property and pre foreclosure mls type site. We’re now utilizing Google Maps StreetView. This allows potential buyers to not only get a feel of the the property that’s for sale, but also provides some great data about the neighborhood in general. Google Maps Streetview is really simple to integrate and the Google Maps team has done a great job with providing easy to access tools to utilize the product. Here’s an example of what a property looks like on Houses.net with the Street View implemented.

Yup, that’s it. We’re giving away a brand spanking new 19″ Widescreen Dell Monitor for one of our readers. All you have to do is one of the following: write a blog post and link to swansonager, link from your site, a forum or ‘click here to tweet the contest‘.

Increase your chances to win by doing all the things below:

1. Blog about the free dell widescreen contest going on at swansonager from June 5th-June 25th

2. Tweet the Dell Widescreen Monitor Contest at swansonager

3. Add a link to swansonager on your site

4. Leave a comment on this post about what topics you’d like to hear about on swansonager

5. Subscribe to swansonager via email using the subscribe box in the right nav

Then let us know what you did to enter…leave us a comment on this post and tell us how you decided to increase your chances to win.. i.e did you Tweet the contest, blog about it, etc.

Contest Length, Rules, and How to increase your chances

The contest will run from June 5th to June 25th 2009 ~ 20 days. At the end of the 20 days, we’ll look at the comments on the site, and assign points. Here’s how we’ll determine how many votes you get in the drawing for the free Dell 19″ Widescreen Monitor:

1 point – comment on this post with what topics you’d like to see addressed

2 points – tweet the Dell Widescreen Monitor Contest at swansonager

3 points – link to swansonager from your blog/site

5 points – Subscribe to swansonager via email (using the subscribe box in the right nav)

10 points – write a blog post about swansonager

On Monday, June 29th, 2009 – we’ll announce the winner of the free Dell 19″ Widescreen Monitor from the contest. Note: We’ll only be able to ship to US based addresses so only US based entries are eligible to win.

Why are we running this contest you ask?

In a time where the economy is tough, we thought it would be cool to help someone out that might be in a bind and was needing a super easy way to win a great new Widescreen LCD for their internet marketing efforts. Even if you only use the computer for facebook and twitter, you can still enter to win. Good luck!

When looking around tonight for a new Cannondale MTB, I came across this tonight in Google Suggest:

Google Suggest for Company Keywords

I hadn’t noticed this until today, and it looks like it works for big company names. I tried using “CareerBuilder” and “IBM” – both searches seem to work just like my Cannondale example above. How long has this feature been available on Google Suggest? I hadn’t noticed it before today, pretty cool stuff Google.

After deciding to finally get my new blog up and running last week, just a couple months after my 10 year anniversary of working in the online world, I thought it would be cool to let everyone know how I started getting natural google traffic to this site just 3 days after the launch of the site.

I always say that whenever someone that claims to be an SEO guru ‘promises’ or ‘guarantees’ they can deliver for you in the world of SEO, you should be skeptical. That being said, let’s take a look at the steps I took when starting this site to ensure I started down a path to building a firm foundation.

1. Settle on your domain – I am big fan or deferring decisions until the last second possible, but in the case of a domain, it’s best to make a good decision from the start. Whatever your niche – make sure you grab a domain that you’ll be happy with – after all, you’re going to be spending a great amount of time and effort to make your site great, right?

I went with Swansonager.com – thought that would be a memorable name for me since it was a nickname I had at one point growing up

2. Technology – What platform are you going to build your site on? Wordpress? Joomla? Rails? Asp.net? It doesn’t matter 100%, but you should look at the different languages, what they have to offer as far as community support goes, and how that can best fit into your strategy for building out your business.

For me, this was an easy one – Wordpress. Wordpress has a ton of support and it’s been only getting better since Matt started the project a few years back. Themes, plugins, you name it and want to do it online – Wordpress has the support for it – hands down.

3. Content for your site – this is a key issue. Most folks want the easy way out here – doing things that are blackhat or look phishy to the search engines is definitely no-no. Just ask Matt Cutts – his summary of how BMW .de did something not so good back in 2006 is always a reminder to me that we should be building things to make the best user experience and the best content for our users – not just doing things for SEO reasons. 99% of the time when you try and do things that are meant to game the system, you lose. Seth has a great article on “The spirit of the game” that I suggest you read if you haven’t already.

4. Process of launching – to make this easy, I’ll just sum up what I did to prepare for the launch of swansonager in addition to how long it took me to get things done (approximately).

This was my basic process, but you get the picture. In just over 100 minutes, I had put together the basics for what I needed to get my site up and running and all in a very lean fashion for deploying software.

What comes next is content. Yep, that’s it from a setup perspective – so in just over 100 minutes or over an hour and a half, I’m ready to go.

So I start writing a couple blog posts, and then my long lost friend Googlebot pays me a visit, thanks GoogleBot, I had missed you. The post I am going to share is the one from yesterday, just 3 days after my blog launched. I wrote about a funny ad in the Sunday AJC paper that featured steaks for a dollar.

Within a few hours of submitting that post to Swansonager.com, I’m ranking for the keywords dollar tree steak on page 2 of Google for this search term. Pretty cool, eh? Now before you jump in and say – hey! “dollar tree steaks” isn’t anywhere near a competitive keyword phrase to rank for, I already know that

This example was really just to illustrate that, given your niche, it’s entirely possible to rank for long tail, niche specific keywords in Google very quickly (in less than 3 days in this case for a brand new domain/site), despite what rumors you might hear.

Swansonager Ranking for Dollar Tree Steaks

Results from the lone user that found swansonager.com searching for Dollar Tree Steaks:

Natural Search Traffic to Swansonager.com