Ramblings of a Serial Entrepreneur

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.

We’ll see soon enough. My boss’s new MacBook Air wouldn’t support his 30″ Dell 3007WFP so I got a hand-me-down (in addition to a newer and faster MacBook Pro). Here’s my new setup:

I’ll be testing it out for the next couple of weeks to see if it does in fact increase productivity. Still, it surely can’t hinder productivity and is cool so I like it either way.

Update: Scratch that. We’ve got too much to do so I’m taking it with me. It’ll go back next week. Seems I’m getting a new one anyway. Sometimes stuff really works out and this is definitely one of them :)

My MacBook Pro has a tiny issue with the keyboard. The caps-lock and shift keys on the left side stopped working a few months ago, and since I work mainly plugged into a keyboard and mouse it wasn’t that big of a deal for me. Still, it needs to be fixed so I thought it would be best to send it off for repair when I’m going to be out of the office.

I’m heading to Orlando for 8 days on business - we’re setting up and manning a trade show booth for the McDonald’s Worldwide owner’s convention. While I’m there, I won’t be working on client projects because we’ll be in the booth answering questions, etc… so I don’t need the laptop to actually produce anything.

Still, I’ve never been away from my laptop/computer for an extended period of time. For 8 days, starting tomorrow, I will only have my iPhone. I’ll be checking email and communicating with clients, posting to Twitter, and reading my RSS feeds.

I’ll post an update when I get back… this should be an interesting experiment.

Parents, please let this be a lesson to keep your guns locked up, unloaded, and away from children.

This just makes me sick. I know this family is suffering right now, but someone should be in jail for leaving the gun where a 3-year-old could get to it:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,347249,00.html

I’m looking for podcasts about business, photography, web development, e-commerce or productivity.

Currently, I listen to or watch the following:

• Wine Library TV
• Ask a Ninja
• Chase Jarvis Photography

I used to listen to a lot of podcasts, but haven’t found any that I really like recently. I’d love to get some suggestions.