YBO Interactive Blog

The most important thing you need to do when embedding youtube video on your site is disable the “realted content” that appears at the end of the video.

What can be more stupid than showing your customers who else has a video on this subject and help him go somewhere else?

All you need to do is add &rel=0 at the end of the URL and that’s it.

I have seen that on the bionase page. Before adding this parameter, at the end of the video all their competitors showed up to say HI. Now they are gone.

Youtube has some more parameters you can use when you embed videos. loop, rel, autoplay and showsearch look pretty useful to me.

Don’t you just love this letter?

I think that Anti Spam companies can learn a few things from this pattern. If you know someone from this industry (I don’t), send it over to him and let me know if it is worth anything.

Every now and then I bump into stupid mistakes that web developers do, and sometimes it really hurts to watch. Take a look at this URL: http://www.syrolight.com/web/8888/nsf/sbs.py?&_ID=12633&G=11813&did=5067&PF=1&SM3=12633&SM=11813?=EN&_UserReference=F2ADA3622DE0ABB14A3F44C7

What the hell is happening here? This URL should be ILLEGAL! The programmer of this URL should go to Jail for Internet abuse!!!

Here are the mistakes, one by one:

1. The URL has a parameter called  _UserReference. This param changes on every session.  This is very bad for Search Engines because every time they crawl the site they find a new URL for the same page. As you know, age matters and the older the better. On this site all pages will always be NEW! Not only that, since more than one page has the same content, this site has a severe duplicate content problem.

2. URL has no keywords - this is so basic, I can’t get it. This page is about a product called biostick. Wouldn’t that be useful to mention the word biostick in the URL?  When will those web developers understand that mydomain.com/red-car performs so much better than mydomain.com/?fdsafdsfdsa=43214&fdsafdsa=gfhdsjlgf&fdsdsaf=fdsasaf

3. URL is ugly! I know I’m not the average internet tourist,  but when I go to a website, I look at the URL. It usually helps me understand what is the page hirarcy and what is the page subject and sometimes it helps me get back to that page later. This URL can’t do that.

4. E-commerce shopper confidence - I don’t have a solid proof for that, but I think that shorter URLs sell more. There are hundreds of factors that build the Buyers trust level. We know for a fact that there are fonts that sell more than others. I don’t see a reason why URL length will not be part of this equation.

5. There were times that Search Engines couldn’t read more than 2 parameters.  Today Google has no problem with that any more, but other Search Engines might still hate ugly URLs.

6. It is really really ugly!

This is a message I have just seen when I went to ynet.co.il, the most popular website in Israel.

Isn’t it funny that such a popular site is exposed to vulnerabilities so easily?

In any case, IE users don’t get any warnings and so does Firefox. Chrome does something different, not sure exactly what but I guess in some way it is better than the others.

I was really excited to attend Afiilicon 2009 this week.

The conference was fascinating, full of great quality content presented by excellent speakers.

My favorite was Harlan Kilstein, which I’m going to hear again this Monday.

On this video, Harlan talks about adding video to web pages, and how important this is.

On this video, Harlan shows a successful campaign he made for a diet program “Mommy, the kids in school call me fat!”

And there is another example for a succesfull campain for a pill called RU21 that supposed to help you drink without getting drunk. (why is that fun?)



And here again is our good old PJ, I just took the first few minutes of his lecture. He was really good, although his English is not as good as Harlans

I bought a new HD video camera. I promise to get better quality next time I put videos on this blog…

One of the most frustrating steps I face when building a new website is looking for a great domain name. Since nearly every domain name you can think of is already taken, some creativity is needed here.

So here it is: I wrote a really super cool simple php script that searches for a free domain name that uses your keyword research file as an input.

This script get as input a csv files with your keywords, and checks for every keyword whether the the domain name built from these keywords with or without hyphens is free. The result of the script is your original csv file with 2 more columns containing the domain names found.

<?php
define(’KEYWORDS_FILE’,'keywords.csv’);
$f = @fopen(KEYWORDS_FILE, “r”);
while ($f && !feof($f))
{
    $line = trim( fgets($f, 4096));
    echo $line .”,” ;
    // find the first string in the line, that comes before the first comma
    if (preg_match(”/^([a-zA-Z0-9 ]+)/”, $line, $matches))
    {
        $keyword=$matches[1];
        // check if the domain name is available
        $domainName = str_replace(” “,”",$keyword) .”.com”;
        $ip=gethostbyname($domainName);
        if ($ip != $domainName)
        {
            echo “–,”;
        }
        else
        {
            echo $domainName .”,”;
        }
        // check if the domain name is available with hyphens
        $hyphensDomainName = str_replace(” “,”-”,$keyword) .”.com”;
        $ip=gethostbyname($hyphensDomainName);
        if ($ip != $hyphensDomainName)
        {
            echo “–,”;
        }
        else
        {
            echo $hyphensDomainName .”,”;
        }
    }
    echo “\n”;
}
fclose($f);
?>

I warmly recommend using this script, so that next time you buy a new domain name you can get your-keywords.comright away.

Notice that the script is based on gethostbyid() which checks if the domain exists and not if it is registered, so it is not 100% right.

Have you ever thought if it is really worth it to sell a product for 9.99 instead of a round 10.00?

The bottom line, as you already know is that any price that ends with .99 sell much more than round prices. The NY Times has an article about this question which says that products were sold better in 99 cents than when they were prices 79 cents!

One of the interesting proofs for this theory was provided by Professor Robert Schindler from the Rutgers University, NJ.

In a study at a women’s clothing retailer, he found that the one-penny difference between prices ending in .99 and .00 had “a considerable effect on sales,” according to his study, with items whose prices ended at .99 outselling those ending at .00.

So if you can’t decide what price to set, start with the pennies. 99 cents. no more no less.

If you are the kind of guy that likes old computers, take a look at the museum of old computers exhibition.

They have beautiful online virtual tour in the museum, that shows anything from ZX-81 to VeryOld Huge Floopy Disk Drives. Kind of boring for some, Fascinating for others..

Ladies and Gentlemen, Madams and Monsieurs:

I have officially became a Google Amabassador!

(applause)

Unfortunately although I’m an ambassador, I still can not get you a Visa to visit the GooglePlex, and I have nothing to do with Google’s foreign affairs…

However, there is one good thing you can get from my embassy: Google gave me a pack of 200 NIS vouchers for Google Adwords. So if you are new to Google Adwords, and thought about trying it, whether if you are a YBO Interactive customer, or not, I’ll be happy to get you one of those vouchers, just to try Google Adwords and see how powerfull this tool is.

This is how these vouchers look like:

Let me know if you need one.

How many times did you regret clicking ’send’ when writing a new email? How many times did you think “If only I could stop this email before it leaves this building….”.

When I read that Google has added this feature to gmail, I checked the date to make sure it’s not April 1st, and it’s not.  The next thing I did is installing it, and tried it myself. It works like a charm.

Google proved again and again throughout the years, that they are the most creative thinking company on this planet. They keep solving problems that were always there but nobody thought these problems can be solved. They take nothing for granted. Nothing is impossible. Google is THE proof that inventive thinking can make the difference.