May 27, 2010 at 7:50 am · Filed under Venture capital, entrepreneurship
In discussions with SEO specialists I hear a lot lately that Google Pagerank is not important anymore. The reason for this statement is that Google has stated that PageRank is only one factor out of hundreds they use to determine the ranking of a page. So yes indeed, straight laced reasoning would lead to the conclusion that increasing your PageRank is not an exercise you should be doing when you try to get higher in the Search Results.
Or should you?
I disagree with this school of thought for three simple reasons:
- It is the only quick metric you can compare between sites (in the same sector). If I need to know the current state of a site and I see that they have a pagerank of 4 and higher, I can safely conclude that the site is not doing badly. It probably has some good visibility in the Search Engines. It doesnt say however that this site is optimised for the right keywords or gets the right traffic or has a high conversion rate. You can see it as a Quick Ratio in Finance: It says something about the current financial state of the company, but the firm still could be bankrupt in a weeks time.
- PageRank has a unfortunate name and most people who are not SEO specialist will see the word RANK as an indicator that it is ranked to something and that must mean that if there is a high number it is better then there is a low number.
- Most important: People in general and loads of people in the industry still think it is an important metric! So when you move from PR0 to PR3 you suddenly get a lot of link requests from other relevant sites. Those sites maybe only PR2 or 3, but when there is a link to your site there is still a benefit. Hwne you move above PR3 requesting links and automatic link building is suddenly very easy, accelerating the number of your inbound links. But not only SEO professionals, also Journalists trawling the web to find information use the PageRank indicator to measure authority, with again a higher change to be mentioned in an article. Any way….another proof of the Thomas-Theorema:
“If one defines a situation as real, it is real in its consequences”
So as long as PageRank is still perceived an an important indicator it is not a bad strategy to try to increase the PageRank of your homepage or landing pages. It will make the rest of your SEO work a lot easier!
Peter
February 9, 2010 at 7:22 am · Filed under Daily unimportant sh*t
I had a not so nice encounter with a paid search company called search rank results ( http://www.searchrankresults.co.uk ) next to the fact that these people are severely unpleasant to deal with, they try to trick small companies in paying way more for their advertising then needed. To challenge them I asked them to proof their case and yes they proofed that they can get someone at number 1 in Google’s Adwords (my nephew of 12 can do that as well) but they didn’t proof that they give a better alternative then doing the advertising yourself. The way that these people get you on number 1 in the adword list for 1 keyword or phrase is the following:
They charge between £300 and 800£ per month plus setup-fee for £99 to get you on number 1 … so what do they do?
Suppose you have a phrase like “buy flowers online” for which they wanted to charge £800. According to the Adwords interface you can get on number 1 for £1 and that will show you ad on Google search properties about 2900 times per day in the active month of February (in January it was around 1000). The average Click Through rate on Google is between 0.7% and 2.5% (Own observation). Lets take the positive number: 2.5%. That will deliver you 73 clicks. Most eCommerce sites have an conversion rate of about 2% but let us pretend we have a good site and we have a conversion rate of 3%. That means that you will make 2.1 sales per day. That ads up to 65 sales per month, assuming you sell every day of the month at the same rate. So you have to make at least £12,3 on each individual sale to break even.
In other words: when you have a very good site with extreme high conversion rates and Google has a high Click Trough Rates, then you might break even if you make £12.3 gross profit after you have packages and send the products.
When you use more realistic numbers the results even worse. If you have a CTR of 1% and a conversion of 2% (% which are common in ecommerce) then you end up with 0.6 sales a day, or 17 sales a month. You must have a profit of £47 per sale…. I don’t want to be negative but a profit of £12-47 only to break even is for most etailers a bridge too far.
So please please do your calcs before you say yes to traders like this.
Peter
February 3, 2008 at 4:57 pm · Filed under Glaxstar, Venture capital, entrepreneurship
I must say, I’m proud….very proud.
Since a bit more then 4 months I’m working my but of for one of the greatest startups in this new era in the web and now we have launched fully and completely: Welcome Glubble to the world. Glubble redefines several categories and therefor creates a new pie on the web: classic INSEAD case stuff and very very exiting to be involved in! Try it and comment!
January 15, 2008 at 9:47 am · Filed under Venture capital, entrepreneurship
Walking around in the world of internet entrepreneurship you’ll begin to see things in the current web world that look like 1999/2000 (aburd valuation of some firms and everybody runnig after the same deals).
The only big difference is that people who are now in this space have:
- Seen the last bubble (most of us)
- Were involved in a company that crashed (stressful and fun)
- Were involved in a company that did not crash (great but seldom)
- or were saying I told you so (dads)
And that means that we entrepreneurs as the VC’s are more careful and scrutinized, and that will mean that the base will be more solid, hence no bubble… I like to believe that. Anyway, some people take doomthinking to a more creative level: Check this: this is hilarious:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6IQ_FOCE6I[/youtube]
July 29, 2007 at 2:55 am · Filed under INSEAD, Pic-a-day, Venture capital, entrepreneurship
At INSEAD we know that about 30% of the INSEAD grads will end up in entrepreneurship (a few years after they earned back their study loan at McKinsey or an Investment bank) while some claim that only 10% of the population have the character traits of an entrepreneur. Often in class therefor we asked ourselves: “Are you a born entrepreneur or can you become one?” Personally I think that entrepreneurship in the true sense asks for a very skillful manager who is familiar with HR, finance, management, product development, marketing and the works but the bottom line is IMHO: do you have enough risk loving genes in your body? Can you put all you eggs in one basket and start running knowing that everybody around you will declare you insane? The skill set you need but the mentality you just cannot learn: Entrepreneurial minds are born (nature) and the most successful ones will be very skilled as well (nurture)
Here is an entrepreneur test, try it and go for it!
July 9, 2007 at 12:33 pm · Filed under Travel, Venture capital, entrepreneurship
Travelling around the world in, mostly poor countries, you see a lot of small businesses. Lots of opportunity to invest, one would say….
Everywhere you look you see people doing things. Everybody has its little business, selling stuff, renting out stuff, massaging etc. But is this true entrepreneurship? Well it is and it is not.
It is because this is the most pure from of trading. People develop a skill and work hard to get by and maybe save some money or build assets.
But if you look really close…it is not entrepreneurship, it is a job; not really what investors are looking for: Most of these small ventures would not know what to do with an investment, there are no plans excepts getting by and build some assets for the children. Very strange indeed as I was in awe of the entrepreneurship in Thailand, India and South Africa, to conclude that these ventures are more like jobs then real ventures.
It is driven out of a lack of a good functioning labor market instead of a internal drive to create companies and ventures and invest in them. You can spot that the visionary entrepreneurial drive is not really there by the fact that most business owners do not see new possibilities to expand their business; they would often see an investment as a reason to work less instead of growing their operations. So when would I call it “visionary” entrepreneurship then?
Well there has to be a plan, there has to be a need for investment and investment will potentially bring growth. On top of that an entrepreneur in the investable form must be able to walk away from his venture: there has to be an alternative…
I know: shocking 
words from an entrepreneur. But do you have a better way to define investable entrepreneurship in our society
May 29, 2007 at 2:40 am · Filed under Pic-a-day
Every where in Holland you will read in manuals or on signs “U kunt…” and then it explains what you can or cannot do there. And then you get a girlfriend which is South African and native English and she starts laughing all the time and telling me the Dutch are rude…
Maybe for the sake of International and interracial relationships we should write “U mag…”
February 12, 2007 at 3:57 am · Filed under Daily unimportant sh*t, INSEAD, Pic-a-day
I know I know. I promised that he should work on it but he!, just no time.
I just returned from my trip to Amsterdam and Dublin: Great fun. Dublin is the town I’m going to live in for the next few months/years, who would have thought that? Singapore was my dream but every dream ends somehow and this one will end in a thunder storm in Dublin! But the positives: I can do some random Kitesurfing!
January 30, 2007 at 9:37 pm · Filed under INSEAD
But OK, I’ll try to post a few things regarding the things I did the last 2 months. Next to graduating from INSEAD….
If you want to know what I’m doing now: I ‘m developing a survey for INSEAD to do some research about growth ventures… uhm no, I’m not becoming an academic 
here is the survey in case you have nothing to do: INSEAD Entrepreneurship Survey
More news will follow soon, cheers,
Peter
November 13, 2006 at 1:25 am · Filed under Pic-a-day
Well body surfing is cool and it depends which wave you get how cool it is after you’ve done it. This wave was OK, the next one however wanted to let me feel what it’s like to be in a tumbledryer or something!
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