Watch-movies.net is without doubt the leader in online movies. The Alexa ranking for the site is in the top 300 and according to Compete, the site is getting around one million visitors per day. Why is the site doing so well? Because of good search optimisation.
In my opinion Watch-Movies.net is a very well optimised site, and whoever created it must be a genius. It is easy to see why the site dominates its niche so well, it is by no means a looker but it is incredibly easy to use.
The Rating System
One of the many things that sets it apart from the competition is the rating system in place. I am not too sure weather the site is using Drupal, Wordpress or something else, but it is fantastic. Users can view ratings for or rate any of the following:
- The movies
- The copies of the movies
- The comments on the movies (well, you can report them if they are bad anyway)
It sounds simple, but no other online movie site that I have seen offers ratings for all of these different things, I would imagine that they really do help the users a lot.
One Page For Each Movie
Another major thing that sets this site apart is the fact that there is only ever one page for a movie. Again this sounds simple, but if you look at all of the competition, many have multiple pages for each movie. Finding the right movie is often a nightmare. With Watch-Movies.net you have all of the copies for each movie on a single page, and then of course you have the ratings, so the users know which is going to be the best copy to visit.
Searching The Site
Searching for the movie you are looking for could not be simpler - if you know what you want type it into the search box and it will bring it up. If you do not know what you are looking for, you can browse movies by any of the following:
- Release date
- Movie type
- Best ratings in new release
Also, featured movies are shown throughout the site, and when you are browsing individual movie pages related movies are shown on the right hand side.
The User Comments
Finally the comments are managed incredibly well for a site of that size, there are no swear words and the users seem to be surprisingly friendly.
The site does do well on Google, if you search for watch before or after many of the movie titles you will see the site coming up. However a website of this quality deserves to be ranked far higher. If you search for a movie title on its own, the site will not usually make the top few pages. If I were Google, this is what I would have the top 5 looking like for movie titles. Like Michael Gray I believe that the official movie site should be ranked no.1.
- Official movie site
- IMDB listing
- Wikipedia I suppose
- Somewhere to buy it, Amazon or something
- Watch-movies.net page
Movie fans would probably never have to venture outside of the top 5 results. Instead you have review after review, with the odd place where you can buy it for more money than Amazon, or whatever whoever is at #4 is charging.
Never the less, the Watch-movies.net site is a brilliant piece of work and I would imagine that using the site is absolute bliss. I am sure that sooner or later the site will start getting the credit it deserves. I challenge anyone to find me a movie fan who wouldn’t want this site to come up in the top 5 - MPAA employees don’t count.
Watch-Movies.net includes everything you need for watching a movie, including different versions and copies, on one single dedicated page for that movie. And then of course you have user ratings, so you can instantly see weather or not the film is any good and which is going to be the best copy to visit.
Posted in SEO News By David Eaves, a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
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June 11th, 2008
I have just started to put in place a directory of UK web designers and yesterday I got my 1st request for a listing:
“Hi there,
Please can you put my design company into your Directory for Yorkshire. We are a newly established business but have a successful record so far! Our website is being built at the moment (funny how you can design everyone else’s website and never find time for your own!).
Our address:
Unit 4 Amber Business Centre, Rawmarsh road, Rotherham, S60 1RU.
Kind Regards,
Candice Link
Managing Director
JEWEL Cre@tive Ltd”
Her last name is link, how awesome is that for link requests? I was so impressed with her last name, I told her she could have a listing immediately, even though I have not properly launched the dir yet.
Candice’s website, Jewel Creative will be online soon.
Posted in Link Building News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
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June 10th, 2008
Over the last week or so there has been a lot of discussion about the Yahoo Directory. 1st Loren Baker over at Search Engine Journal made the following post:
Yahoo Directory Lost Its PageRank : Penalty or Not?
Then Barry covered it and talked about Matt Cutts response:
Yahoo Directory Has No PageRank
And this morning I have just found the following one over at Webmaster World:
Yahoo Directory Gray barred?
All of the internal links in the directory are in a right mess, upper and lower case URLs are confused and there are these weird sub-domains coming into the equation in places. Also some people have said this is not new, but the links on the homepage to the main categories are done via a 302 redirect.
Many of the deeper categories do not seem to have any version indexed in Google. If things do not change, for some sites there could be little, if any real SEO benefit in being listed in there.
Without much SEO benefit, you really would have to question weather or not it is worth the $299.
Posted in Link Building News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
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June 9th, 2008
Image Credit: google bot
So it’s been nearly two weeks since I re-launched this site and Google has still yet to pick the two new services pages. About a year or so ago the Googlebot would have picked those pages up in a couple of days easily.
The blog is getting crawled fine and I am sure that this post will be indexed within a couple of hours of me posting. It just seems to be regular web-pages that are getting neglected by Google. This could possibly be because the Googlebot is paying too much attention to blogs etc. in my opinion.
It is not just this site’s regular web-pages that do not get crawled as fast any more. I work on many websites and generally Google does not seem to be picking stuff up as fast.
Posted in Search Engine News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
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June 7th, 2008
Image Credit: energy transfer
If you have really good content that you want to get thousands of visitors to, then this guide should come in useful.
With social media optimisation (SMO), it helps an awful lot if you either know the right people or are active in the places where you are looking to target. Once you do or are it is fairly easy. Here are a few tips to help you get the most out of your good content and your SMO campaign, for once you find your feet:
Forget Digg: I know it has been said many times, but it is even more true then ever now. For nine out of ten sites Digg is a big waste of time and getting any kind of e-commerce site on the homepage is virtually impossible. The only people who look in the upcoming section are the digg staff and fellow marketers. Spend 30 seconds getting your free link and then move on.
Planning is Everything: Make a list of all of the social media websites you are going to submit your content to and then work out roughly how long you think it is going to take for your content to go popular on each site. For example with Reddit you can be fairly sure that if your content is going to go popular, it will do within and hour or two. With Mixx it will normally take a good 6 hours and with Stumbleupon you just can’t tell, so you leave that out of the equation.
Once you have done this you need to choose a time for when you are going to plan to have all of your submissions go popular. You might say to yourself, I want all of my submissions to be going popular 7 hours from now at 11.00pm. Then you add the time you need to submit next to each social media site on your list.
Go to work and do everything as planned. If you have submitted to all of the major social sites and if all of the elements are in the equation, then when the time comes you should be able to make it into the top 10 on popurls and you should be getting a load of traffic from JimmyR.com. I have had over 3,000 uniques from popurls.com and I have had over 2,500 uniques from JimmyR.com. If you make it into the top 10 on popurls you have won and you will generally receive over 50,000 unique visitors in a short space of time and lots of trackbacks.
Comment Management: Once you have started to go popular on some of the social media sites you can make your content go a lot further by dealing with negative comments. There are lots of different ways to do this and trying to talk to the negative commenter(s) isn’t always the best one, here are a few ideas:
- Have all of your friends down vote the negative comments heavily
- Take the mick out of the negative commenter(s) or their comments
- If they have a good point, you might want to think about possibly changing your content
With good planning you can consistently get content to go popular on the social media sites, generate buzz and generate trackbacks.
Posted in Social Media News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
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June 5th, 2008
