I'm please to be speaking at the .Net user group in West Palm, my old stomping ground!  Many thanks to Scott Klein, noted .Net author and coder for having me down to the beach to spend some time with the great folks down there.  I will be giving a lecture on the Atomic Data Model, the X-Y-Z method of site expansion, and an in-depth analysis of one of their website projects live while we discuss it.

The event will be held at the following address at 6:30 for pizza and 7:30 for the lecture:

1750 North Florida Mango
Suites 302 & 303
West Palm Beach, Fl 33409
561-840-8080

Get Directions

For more information on the Atomic Data Model, please see my blog entries about that at:  Atomic Data Modeling - Part 1

Ranking #1 on Google is a great objective, but dominating the web so exclusively that your competitors get starved out is even better.  This method of Exclusionary Dominance™ is the secret to many online success including our case study today of Football Fanatics that has managed to dominate the JU Dolphins T-Shirts search result.  We will delve into how they managed to accomplish this and see if we can learn from their success for our own website projects.

First we need to Google for "JU Dolphins T-Shirts".  We have chosen a very niche product name so we can see this exclusionary effect on the competiton.  This is a keyword phrase that is broad enough to have competition but specific enough to predict that a buyer typed it in and he's looking to purchase a JU Dolphins T-Shirt.

See how they dominate search results #1-#10

• Football Fanatics (FF) is the central money portal
• College Football Store is the pay per click venue
• Football Fanatics is the comparison shop channel
• eSportsMania has 2 competitive placements
• YahooSports is an FF private label store
• ShopNCAASports is another FF store
• JaxFanShop is an FF hyper targeting domain
• Note the other ShopNCAASports double tap
• Shopping.com is an FF comparison shop channel

13 out of 16 listings exclude competitors

All channels are being targeted including:

• Military Procurement (AAFES)
• Bizrate/Nextag comparison shop
• Froogle/Vast shopping directories
• Amazon/Yahoo/MSN marketplaces
• eBay auctions
• Affiliate websites (de-ranked in Google on purpose)
• Hyper targeting domains (super-focused on keywords)
• Private label (Yahoo Sports, NCAA) with Google ranking

Other techniques ensure dominance:

• Double tap stacking (two listings per natural result)
• URL rewrite ensures keyword relevance
• Verbose and repetitive descriptions (title, META)
• High density and unique keywords (META + content)
• Keyword Domain matching (JaxFanShop targets Jacksonville)

Traditional advertisers are spending in the millions to target these products and consumers.  The natural consequence of a television ad 10 years ago was to “remember” the brand or to write down a response PO box and send a letter.  Now the customer simply remembers the brand and product (not the domain name necessarily) and “googles” for it.

This causes search engine “piracy” where the traditional advertiser motivates the customer to purchase, but when they go to purchase, the top ranked websites covet the “conversion.”  This means that whomever ranks substantially #1-#10 have the highest chance of converting the sales that were funded by the other advertisers…  Effectively the top ranked sites get the majority of the benefit of the entire industry’s advertising in that topic.

In physical commercial real estate there are thousands of good “street intersections” to sell JU Dolphins T-Shirts.  On the internet, this single search result page is the ONLY PAGE ON PLANET EARTH (statistically speaking) where the competition can compete for online conversions.  This makes the value of being listed on this page high and #1-#10 dominance very exclusionary.

They call it a website for a reason

Most first-time websites are designed with some flawed theories in mind.  The theoretical flaw is that the homepage must lead the customer quickly to what they were looking for which assumes that the customer enters at the homepage and then discovers what they need by clicking.  This “rapid funnel” concept is based on the idea that a customer doesn’t have the patience to “click through” too many pages and the site should be designed to streamline that as much as possible.  While the idea has some merit for the customer interaction, the biggest flaw is that customers simply do not enter your website through the homepage at all (at least the vast majority of them).

The Homepage is the Least Important Page of your Site

We will use the www.JaxTires.com website as the example to illustrate this.  If a customer owns a car in Jacksonville, Florida, they might think to type in www.JaxTires.com, but the vast majority are simply going to visit Google and type in “new tires Honda Accord” to find the specific product that they want.  If a website were a funnel, we would force them to enter at our homepage, click on Vehicles, then Honda, then Accord, then Tires.  In actuality, they click on Google, enter their search, find the results, and then they land directly on the specific item page for the Honda Accord at www.JaxTires.com.  Instead of the website funneling the traffic to the specific page, the tens of thousands of specific pages expanded out from the center like a web, trapping the web surfing customer with a highly specific keyword that best matched their search.

You can see now how the homepage’s job is not to be all things for all people… It’s simply the very center of the web that spawns out threads in circles around it in a web form with the purpose being to “capture” every possible web searcher and land them on the most specific, most highly targeted page.  The larger the expansion of that web and the more comprehensive the possible combinations, the more apt your website is to trap the flies that are buzzing around.

The Most Lucrative Keywords are the Most Specific Ones

Let’s take a look at an alternate way of looking at a website.  Here we have a diagram that more clearly explains how entry into the website actually happens.  Instead of making our homepage a “catch-all” with tons of keywords loaded onto that one page (a common mistake), we have a tightly focused homepage whose subpages lose focus and their specific targeting the closer to the outside that we get.

We now have millions of possible combinations of keywords that interlink like a spider web, lying in wait for a web searcher to put in that highly specific keyword combination… and once they do, they are landed artfully onto the very specific page that matched their search… not some general purpose “inbox” like most homepages.

Focus less on your homepage, and more on your specific micropages…

06-A-Website-is-a-web-Not-a-Funnel-Jared-Nielsen-FUZION.pdf (390.99 kb)

It's about that time again so I'm going to be speaking once again.  Please join me at the Houston Tech Fest in Houston (naturally) Texas for my seminar on finding your Search Engine and Data "Superman" amid your "Clark Kent" business.  Being able to identify as a coder the business methods needed to get proper search engine (SEO) rankings while satisfying good design criteria an reusability is important.  This seminar will walk you through such advanced topics as:

• Atomic Data Modeling
• Fast Page Load with Highly Normalized Data
• Content Distribution Networks and Edge Caching
• SEO and SEM Techniques in Code
• Funneling "Juice" with your Web Traffic
• Comparison Shopping Syndication
• Expanding Marketing Channels through Code

Join my Houston Tech Fest Group on Facebook!