UK Fans: Which one is it?

I’m jumping out of the business and marketing bag for just a moment to talk about sports and something that has been frosting my ass for awhile. Since I live in Kentucky, I hear this garbage all the time about Tubby Smith and wanted to share some facts to question both sides of UK fans’ arguments about their former coach. Here’s an e-mail I sent to one of the local radio sports talk show hosts (Lachlan McLean) in hopes that he shares this on the air.
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First off, let me state for the record that I’m a HUGE Louisville fan and loathe the Cayuts. With that said, I’m worn out by the UK contingent whining about Tubby Smith not being able to recruit and/or coach. Which one is it? Far be it from me to defend a former UK guy, but here are a couple of arguments to consider.

If somebody says he can’t recruit, how did he produce 9 NBA players in 10 years? We’re talking NBA—not NBDL, overseas, or any minor league pro basketball. In six plus years of Rick being here at UofL, we have ONE player in the NBA (Francisco Garcia). Here’s Tubby’s list of NBA players for good measure so no one can question the number:

1. Tayshawn Prince
2. Keith Bogans
3. Gerald Fitch
4. Erik Daniels
5. Chuck Hayes
6. Kelenna Azubuike
7. Rajon Rondo
8. Randolph Morris
9. Jamaal Magloire

Of that bunch, the most heralded players were Rondo and Morris—the rest were not super sought after. So that begs the question—is it recruiting or coaching? One could easily argue, with 9 NBA players in 10 years, it was not recruiting.

If it’s coaching, how did Tubby guide them to 1 NCAA title, 3 Elite 8 and 2 Sweet 16 appearances? He never lost a first round game at UK. In the span Tubby was coach at UK, he won 76.0% of his games. The all-time percentage for UK Basketball is (drum-roll please) . . . 76.3%! Compare his winning percentage at UK to that of (mouse face) Mike Kryzewski’s at Duke (77.8%), and he’s not that far off (1.8%). If Kryzewski is considered one of the best college coaches, where does that leave Tubby? What that means, with all things being equal, Kryzewski would win a whopping one extra game in every 55 played based on those numbers. You don’t have to be a genius to realize that’s not very significant.

Let’s compare Tubby’s winning percentage to other coaches in UK’s history:

• Rupp won 82.2% of his games at UK (which equates to winning 1 more game in every 16 than Tubby)
  
• Joe B Hall–74.8%
  
• Eddie Sutton—69.2%
  
• Rick Pitino—81.9% (which equates to winning 1 more game in every 17)
  

So looking objectively at UK basketball historically illustrates the point that Tubby’s performance was very much in line with the tradition at UK. This notion that Tubby “underperformed” emphasizes how unrealistic UK fans truly are. When placing these facts into their proper context (remember: it’s a UofL fan analyzing them objectively), it makes you wonder what is in UK fans’ cool-aid to make them believe they deserve so much more. Look at the numbers before making the argument that Tubby can’t recruit or coach, and it’s pretty clear neither of those are valid points.

The reason for sending this e-mail and asking these questions is I am sick and tired of hearing UK fans whine, belly-ache, and complain about how terrible things were under Tubby. Ok, the style wasn’t the most enjoyable, but who cares? You won games at an extremely similar clip to what you have all-time so quit whining already!

It’s not my nature to contribute to anything UK related, but the facts tell a far different story than UK fans would like everyone to believe, and it’s time for them to own up to those facts.

How I Took a Brand New Site to a Top 10 Organic Google Ranking in Less than One Week

With nearly 150 million domain name websites registered (source: NetCraft) and a phenomenon known as the Google Sandbox, where new sites are placed into a moratorium of sorts until they have proven to be legitimate sites, getting a new site to quickly appear within search engine results is an enormous challenge all webmasters and site owners face when launching a new site. According to Nielsen Netratings, there were approximately 8 billion search queries performed in the month of October 2007 which means search engines are a popular tool to discover websites. Based on the total US population of 303.5 million (US Census), that equates to 26 searches for every single person in the US in October alone.

Leading organic search engine optimization firms suggest that it can take anywhere from three to six months to achieve a top 30 ranking in the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN dependent on the competitive online search landscape. Additional statistics from NetCraft indicate there have been over 40 million new sites in 2007 so the search ranking challenge is becoming greater and greater each month.

Recently, I developed a new site (http://radio.smbconsultinginc.com) dedicated to my marketing internet radio show as a sub-domain off of our main company site (http://smbconsultinginc.com). The site went live on Sunday, December 2, 2007 and was indexed by Google and Yahoo within five days. Furthermore, the site ranked within the top 20 search results for “marketing radio show” according to Google (#9) and Yahoo (#16) on December 7, 2007. Taking into consideration the number of competing pages within Google (5.48 million) and Yahoo (112 million) for that particular phrase, this is an accomplishment that many webmasters and site owners would like to duplicate so let’s take a look at how it was achieved.

• Special attention was paid to the title and description tags for each page of the site with the main page getting the lion’s share of keyword focus. The keyword tag wasn’t even utilized for this site as a test to verify its dwindling importance to search engines.

• A link to the new site was placed on our main established website homepage which gets indexed regularly by all crawler based search engines.

• Placing strategic comments on very popular and heavily linked to blogs improved the odds of the site being indexed and created a little awareness.

• Signing up for a directory submission service that submitted the site to nearly 500 online directories for around $100 saved tremendous time. This ploy was implemented to speed up the indexing process while also creating permanent links back to the site which focus on targeted keyword phrases.

• A sitemap was created next and submitted directly to Google in order to improve the odds of getting more pages indexed once their crawler discovered the new site through one of the strategically placed links from any number of sites targeted in the first few steps.

• Since the site’s true purpose is to focus attention on the great guests featured on the show, an e-mail was sent to each guest to alert them of the site and encourage them to promote their own individual page in any way they deemed appropriate.

• The content generated for the site will lend itself well to naturally attracting links as time goes on which will further improve the site’s rankings for various keyword phrases.

Now that the site ranks well for a few keyword phrases within the search engines’ organic rankings, show popularity and guest awareness will increase which help all parties involved better attract their desired target audience which is one of the key values of organic search engine optimization.

The next time you produce a new website and want to improve the odds of your site getting indexed quickly, follow the steps outlined above and hopefully your site will rank well in the process.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Roger Bauer is founder and CEO of SMB Consulting, Inc., a nationally recognized sales and marketing consulting firm specializing in revenue growth programs, search engine optimization and strategic initiatives. To learn more, point your browser to http://smbconsultinginc.com or e-mail info@smbconsultinginc.com

New Radio Show Website

Over the weekend, I cranked out a new site dedicated to the radio show. On the site, you can get background information on each guest including scoping out what they look like, download a podcast of the show, ask questions, or provide feedback.

I hope you’ll check it out as that will become the main avenue for the radio show moving forward. Here’s a link: Sales and Marketing Radio Show or http://radio.smbconsultinginc.com.

As always, let me know what you think.