‘web 2.0’ category

In search of lost Zopa

Posted by Ed at 7:34 pm

 

Imagine, if you will, that you'd never heard of Zopa. A horrible though, I know. But fear not: chances are we would be brought back together by the wonders that are Internet search engines. Zopa has managed to gain a foothold on the prestigious "first page of Google results" for quite a few queries:

• "lend money" 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 8th and 9th
• "borrow money" 1st (just above the UK government)
• "lending" - 1st and 2nd
• "social lending" - 1st, 2nd, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, ...
• "p2p loans" - 1st and 2nd!
• "lend my money" - 1st and 2nd
• "great returns" - 1st and 2nd
• "borrowing" - 4th (just below Wikipedia)
• "safe and simple borrowing" - 1st and 2nd
• "peace of mind loan" - 1st
• "how is APR calculated" - 6th (behind BBC)
• "no banks" - 1st and 9th

...not to mention:

• "zopa" - 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, ...

And I'm sure there are plenty more interesting ones out there to find.

And this is quite surprising to us. We did take search into account when we last redesigned the site, but we didn't try to game Google, or do anything aggressive.

All we actually did was: use clean HTML, have clear human-readable URLs, feed Google & Yahoo sitemaps, and make sure to use the right metadata for each page. This is all basic stuff that makes your site easy to parse. It was actually mostly done to help the blind rather than Google.

We archived this using a small in-house templating system that assembles each page from content files.

Use Clean HTML

HTML is designed so that the code only marks out the semantics of the page.

⟨ol⟩ ⟨-Start an ordered list   ⟨li⟩Item One⟨/li⟩   ⟨li⟩Item Two⟨/li⟩ ⟨/ol⟩

The user's browser then adds the numbering and indentation to that list. The designer can add external rules through a system called CSS, but the browser decides for itself how to best fit the content to the user's device. Clean HTML will work well on mobile phones, speech readers, and dozen of devices the original author never planned for.

Dirty HTML looks like this. ⟨br /⟩⟨br /⟩ ⟨font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="0"⟩ ©2003-2007 MySpace. All Rights Reserved. ⟨/font⟩ ⟨script type="text/javascript"⟩ ⟨/script⟩ ⟨img src="http://nb.myspace.com/isf.gif" /⟩

This one doesn't actually matter too much with search engines as they're scanning for text. It does matter a lot for selling to older people with poor eyesight, there's more business there than you might think.

Clean URLs

If you look your address bar as you move around our site, you'll see links like http://www.zopa.com/zopaweb/public/lending/what-people-are-saying.html These 'pretty' URLs are easier to remember and type. They're also used by search engines to work out what a page is likely to be about.

Sitemaps

Both Google and Yahoo have online tools that let you submit content directly to them. This is a great way to make use that your legal small print, and other important but seldom linked to content, gets indexed properly. The easiest way is to catalogue the URLs on your site into a single XML file and point Google at it. Yahoo does exactly the same thing, but with a different format. For more details see . You can also submit RSS news feeds to Google which leads to much faster indexing, as the spider can just pull one file to read all the new content.

Metadata

HTML defines specific areas where you can tell a search engine directly what your page is. The ones we use are the title and keywords. Out templating system lets us set these directly on each page to make sure they're indexed under the right words.

 

But the main reason Zopa ranks so highly is you. Over the years, Zopa has accumulated 646 natural links from blogs, newspapers, homepages, Italian comedians... you name it! These links represent the trust and interest of the internet.

(And they've probably helped us jump over a dozen other sites that were splurging £££ on link farms and consultants!)

Posted in General, Press, blogs, web 2.0 | 4 Comments »

Mixing it up in Vegas (baby)

Posted by Dave at 9:43 am

Zopa has been working with Microsoft for a few months now - looking at ways in which we can use some of their new Windows Live services to provide useful tools for our members. As a result of this, they were kind enough to invite me over to Las Vegas the other week to take part in the Mix 07 conference they were hosting. They describe Mix as being "A 72 hour conversation" - and with a great mix of developers, designers and the odd business person (like me) it was a great few days - with some very interesting Keynote speakers and content. Zopa's little moment of fame came when I talked about Zopa and demoed a new service we're hoping to roll out very shortly (We've done our bit - Microsoft need to finish theirs!) - you can see the video below. The idea is to use your Windows Live contact list (or your Hotmail, or MSN Messenger contacts - they're all the same thing) in the Zopa 'Tell a friend' scheme - so you don't have to type in everyones email addresses again and again. To do this, we're using a new service from Microsoft that allows third parties like Zopa to access and amend users contacts (With their permission of course) - and we're one of the first companies in the world to be doing this. I also talk a little in the video about future plans for creating 'friends and family' networks within Zopa - using additional Microsoft services that they're planning on releasing over the next 12 months - but the 'Tell a friend' piece should be live very soon. I'd be interested to hear what you think about the new tool - and also what else you think we could be doing with Microsoft.

Posted in New stuff, Technology, mix07, web 2.0 | 5 Comments »

Wobble 2.0?

Posted by Dave at 6:45 pm

A couple of weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to be invited to pontificate in front of a crowd of techie types on the subject of whether or not we're in another dot com bubble. The event was the inaugural Chinwag Live and was held in the basement of the Slug and Lettuce in deepest Soho. Rather alarmingly, the event was recorded, and you can download the podcasts that resulted from iTunes, or directly from Chinwag themselves. You can get the whole kit 'n' caboodle here (80 minutes), listen just to me ramble on here (12 minutes), or just the Q&A session here (33 minutes). The Q&A was the bit where we had to think on our feet a little - that of course is my excuse for any stupid things I may have said :) There was quite a lot of coverage on the (in the?) blogosphere, you can read a few pieces here, here, here and there, and the consensus seemed to be that there wasn't in fact another bubble - and that we're all being much more sensible this time around. We'll see. In the meantime, here's a picture of yours truly holding forth... ...and you can see the whole set here.

Posted in web 2.0 | 1 Comment »

Top websites of 2006

Posted by Dave at 5:46 pm

Well - everyone else seems to be making lists at this time of year, and I'm not one to let a perfectly good bandwagon go past un jumped upon, so.... I just wanted to bring a few websites together that we've enjoyed using this year that are nothing whatsoever to do with Zopa - just fun, interesting or useful sites. For music fans, check out Pandora and Last.fm - 2 different approaches to the problem of finding new music, and both very cool. For the Londoner, a couple of essential sites for navigating around the big smoke. Firstly, the Transport for London Journey Planner - an incredibly detailed way of getting from A to B. Secondly, if you're interested in getting about, and saving the world, check out WalkIt who will tell you exactly how much carbon you're saving by walking to the pub instead of taking a cab! For anyone trying hard to get organised, BackPack (for individuals) and Basecamp (for teams) are two fantastic products both from 37 Signals, who are also responsible for the very cool Camp Fire. A theme of 2006 has been 'user generated content', and one of the standard bearers continues to be Threadless - where an ongoing design competition produces some of the coolest t-shirts on the planet. In a similar vein is a company called Spreadshirt where anyone can create a shop (Including Zopa!) and create a range of branded products - go on, buy a Zopa mug! Finally, for anyone trying to keep up to date in this crazy web 2.0 world, there are only 2 places worth reading. TechCrunch is a blog edited by Michael Arrington that has become the must read guide to everything new in Silicon Valley and beyond. Meanwhile, Techmeme has taken a different approach - an automatically updated page that brings together countless news sources to present a continually updated guide to the web world. Phew. That's enough for now - hope you find something useful in there and have a wonderful Christmas and New Year. The Zopa blog will be back in January! Cheers Dave

Posted in Non Zopa, web 2.0 | 1 Comment »

Zopa = Top UK Web 2.0 App

Posted by Dave at 4:35 pm

While the arguements rage about what exactly is meant by Web 2.0, Richard MacManus over at Read / Write Web has kindly listed Zopa as Top UK Web 2.0 App - we are there, but you have to go right to the end to see us (Downside of having a name beginning with 'Z' I guess.) The original source for the article comes from JigsawUK - a web site that tracks UK startups, so thanks to Colin Donald there as well. It's interesting that we're in the category of 'Second time around entrepreneurs' - I guess that's because of Richard's previous experience at Egg, but James and myself were definitely start up virgins when we left Egg to create Zopa :)

Posted in Sales and marketing, blogs, web 2.0 | 4 Comments »