My friends over at Sabotage Media have released a web service for their popular TrackThePack website. Read all about it and download sample PHP code at The E-Commerce Blog.
Do search engines even work?
5/1/2008 By Leave a Comment
This is more of a rant. As you probably know, I own large size shoe retailer 2BigFeet.com. I frequently check our rank in the major search engines for terms such as “large shoes”, “large size shoes”, “large men’s shoes”, etc.
Today after running my regular monthly report I followed it up by actually searching a few of the terms on Google and Yahoo! to see who was above us (we have first page rankings for almost every major term we track).
When I searched for “large mens shoes” on Yahoo! the #1 result is a search page on Target.com. It’s a dynamic search results page, which I have no problem with. The problem is that the actual search results have anything BUT large shoes.
The results? 3 watches, a belt, 2 pair of insoles and ONE pair of shoes, which is not available in large sizes (it’s only available in two sizes – small and large).
How did Target get a #1 rank for this term? There is no content on the search results that would lead me to believe they got it from keywords on the page. I can’t imagine there are actually backlinks to their search results with the anchor text “large mens shoes.”
I completely understand when one of our competitors gets ahead of us in search ranking… at least the customer is finding what they are looking for. But when completely random results are shown above our site for no apparent reason, I have to wonder why.
SXSW, My Review
3/13/2008 By 2 Comments
I’m back from Austin and while I definitely have enough catchup work to keep me busy, I thought I’d post a quick review since it was my first time at the conference.
First, I finally got to meet a lot of people in person that I’ve known for years… Patrick O’Keefe, Chrispian Burks, Jeremy Wright, Aaron Brazell, Stephan Segraves and more. It was great hanging out with you guys.
This was my first trip to Austin and my first SXSW conference. I had a great time, and wish I could have stayed for the whole week, but we stayed only for the Interactive portion. I learned one thing almost immediately — SXSW has two worlds — the panels and conference during the day and the parties and networking events at night. I’ll give a brief review of each.
The SXSW Conference and Expo
All of the panels and discussions were between 30 minutes and 1 hour long. It seemed like in many of the discussions we were really just getting started and it was over. In a way, this is good because it gets you thinking about a subject and asking yourself questions, and leaves you to finish on your own. Hopefully you go back with some unanswered questions and continue the discussion online and with colleagues back home.
The layout of the convention center made it difficult to get from one room to another. Several times we just could not physically make it to another panel in time because it required walking clear across the convention center (which was big).
The trade show itself was a bit smaller than I expected. Since it is an Interactive, Film and Music conference I expected to see a fairly large trade show, maybe divided into sections for each. The exhibitors had fairly small booths and were giving out schwag like t-shirts, pins, stickers, etc. I saw companies like O’Reilly, Opera, Mapquest, Google, and Yahoo. A few people I expected to see but didn’t: Mozilla/Firefox, Microsoft, Apple.
Overall it was very organized and the panels discussed interesting topics related to our industry. I learned a good bit and enjoyed bumping into interesting people on the show floor.
The Parties and Networking Events
I was fortunate to know a good number of people going to Austin for SXSW, many whom I have never met in person. Several of us got together Friday night to meet and have dinner, and had some discussions on industry topics and generally just hang out.
Every night after that it seems there was a party or networking event planned that seemed interesting. There were a few blog-specific events that I enjoyed in particular, including the Chitika/ProBlogger Beer Bus and the b5media Blog Network Camp. I learned a lot about blogging and met some great people.
I realized quickly that the sessions and panels are great but they just spark your creativity and get your wheels turning. It’s the Austin night life that really makes SXSW what it is. I had a great time at SXSW and can’t wait for next year.
Back from Vegas: An Update
3/3/2008 By Leave a Comment
We spent four days walking the show floor trying to find suppliers who made big shoes. I think we found a few. We had already known about several of these companies, but just had the chance to sit down and setup an account or talk to a rep. Here’s what we found:
- Crocs up to size 17.
- Men’s house slippers up to size 18.
- Dress shoes up to size 18.
- Casual shoes to size 17 and 18.
We also met a few manufacturers who were interested in doing some custom production for us up to size 20. That’s where the real promise is — we’d love to relaunch our own shoe brand (P. Bunyan Footwear) but after the attempts to manufacturer in Mexico both using a broker and by ourselves, we put those plans on hold. We could never get the factories to take our small quantities (by their standards) seriously.
We’ve got a LOT of new shoes coming in the next few months, and I’m excited about all the new brands and styles.
Viva Las Vegas
2/21/2008 By Leave a Comment
We’re on the way to the airport headed to Las Vegas for the WSA Shoe Show, the largest shoe show in the world. We’re looking for new brands to carry at 2BigFeet.com.
I’m hoping we find a few manufacturers that can supply us with:
- Dress shoes up to size 20
- Athletic shoes up to size 20
- Men’s slippers — hopefully to at least size 18
- Rubber steel-toe work boots
We’ve got a list of potential manufacturers to meet with, so it should be a busy show.
