Top 30 Most Popular Businesses in the Czech Republic

Based strictly on page views, these are the top 30 all-time most popular businesses in the Czech Republic on Nelso:

1. Libor Šula - The Salon
2. Galleria Moda Outlet Shopping Mall
3. Sweet Paradise
4. Cinema City Metropole Zličín
5. Darling Cabaret
6. Hard Rock Cafe Prague
7. Rieker Obuv
8. K5 Relax Club
9. Směnárna
10. Cabaret Atlas
11. Cinema City Palác Flóra
12. Outlet Airport Praha
13. Burger King
14. One Love Tattoo shop
15. Soukromá Klinika GHC Praha
16. Nuselská Poliklinika
17. Restaurace Zvonařka
18. Fakultní nemocnice v Motole (FN Motol)
19. Olšanka Hotel
20. Sahara Cafe
21. Night club Extasy
22. Pivnice U Zlatého Tygra
23. Bloody Blue Tattoo
24. Letňany Lagoon
25. Sportcentrum YMCA
26. Aries - Tattoo & Piercing
27. Hotel Intercontinental Praha
28. Tesco
29. Fashion Arena Outlet
30. Sokol Praha - Královské Vinohrady

5 Rules for Businesses Using Twitter

Over the past few months, Nelso has been researching the ways that businesses are using Twitter, and we've compiled a list of over 5000 businesses on Twitter (this list was prepared by hand, so we've verified that these are all real businesses).

After looking at thousands of Twitter business accounts, it became apparent that many businesses are not using the service efficiently, and so we've put together a short list of rules you should follow if you are running a business and are on Twitter. If you run a small or medium-sized business (SMB), and you're not already on Twitter, see Rule #1.

Rule 1: If you don't have a Twitter account already, get one

With the possible exception of email, Twitter is the easiest to use communication and promotion tool for businesses. It takes only a few minutes to set up an account, and once you have set up your account, you never need to visit Twitter.com ever again, if you don't want to.

Set up text message (SMS) capabilty for your account under "Settings->Devices" and then all you have to do is send a text message to 40404 to update your status on Twitter (an update is also often called a "tweet"). Of course, we'd recommend logging in to the website (or using one of the many Twitter desktop or mobile clients) to track replies and see who's following your account, but you can effectively promote your business on Twitter using nothing more than text messages.

Rule 2: Make sure your profile is complete

We're surprised that we even have to include this as one of the rules, but we were amazed at the number of business accounts we found on Twitter that, while active, lacked even basic information about the business. It's not uncommon to find a business account (like this account for the Strongbox Lounge) that don't list a location, website, or any other details about the business. It took us a while to figure out "STRONGBOXLounge" was the account for the Strongbox Lounge in Philadelphia.

Name: Include the full name of your business. This doesn't need to be the same as your username on Twitter.

Location: Be sure to provide a location, and be as specific as possible. Most commonly, we see a location like "New York City", but why not include your full address in the "Location" field (I'm assuming your business is not in a secret lair below Manhattan)? If I ran the applestoresoho account, I'd update the location to 103 Prince Street, SoHo, New York, 10012. No need to make your customers work harder to find your business.

Web: If you have a website for your business, include it here (remember to include the "http://" part). Again, this seems obvious, but we found many business accounts where the business had a website, but for some reason didn't include it on their Twitter profile.

Bio: Take a few seconds and tell us a bit about your business. You only get 160 characters, so this isn't an essay question. If you have a telephone number, think about including it in your "Bio".

Rule 3: Stay on Topic

Although Twitter tends to be rather informal, try to keep your updates related to your business. It's fine to throw in the odd off-topic update (e.g. "Go Mets!"), but those kind of updates should be infrequent. Twitter users will be following your account to find out about your business, so if you want to tweet more often about personal stuff, open a separate Twitter account.

Rule 4: Provide context in your updates

You can't assume that a user that follows your account is following all the other users that follow your account. Thus, they normally will not have seen the original tweet that you might be replying to. Instead of sending a tweet like "@jdeneut Yes, it's tonight!", give some context to your reply by sending a tweet like "@jdeneut Yes, the 2-for-1 seafood special is tonight!". Twitter users that follow your account will see your updates mixed in with updates from everyone else they follow, so including as much context as possible in every tweet will make it much easier for potential customers to understand what you're saying.

Rule 5: Update your Twitter account regularly

As we said in Rule #1, updating your Twitter account is easy, so remember to update regularly. During our research, we found many accounts that hadn't been updated in months. Other users following your account will often stop following if you don't update regularly, and even worse might assume that you are no longer in business if they don't see any activity on your account for an extended period. Get in the habit of updating your Twitter account at least twice a week, and ideally once a day.

However, don't update your account too often. Flooding your followers with too many updates is a sure way to lose followers.

Extra Credit

If you follow the rules above, you'll be well on your way to promoting your business effectively on Twitter. Of course, there's much more to using Twitter than just following these rules. You'll get even more out of Twitter if you monitor @replies to your account, and if you follow some other users rather than just having them follow you. You might also want to follow other businesses in your area, or businesses in your field in other cities to see what they're up to (you might be able to find some of them in Nelso's Twitter Directory).

If you are a business on Twitter, but Nelso hasn't found you yet, send us a tweet and we'll include you.

Garbage In, Garbage Out: Why Scraping Doesn't Work for Local Search

As we've mentioned before, there are three main (non-exclusive) ways to collect data for local search: 1) license a database from a third party, 2) collect it yourself (I'll include user generated content under this category), or most commonly, 3) use a web scraper to get data from other sites.

We've tried scraping ourselves in the past (yes, it's perfectly legal), and initially populated our New York listings this way. However, the quality of the data from scraping is so poor that this has actually created more work for us than collecting the data ourselves, as we now have to go through these listings by hand and remove all the junk from our database (incorrect data, businesses that closed years ago, businesses that never existed, etc.).

A case in point: Angeno's Pizza in Maple Grove, MN (my local pizza place while growing up) closed years ago. We marked it as closed, but Google still shows it as open, as does Yahoo Local. If you can't trust the two largest sites on the internet, who can you trust?

The problems with incorrect data become clear if you take a look at a search for the address of the Pink Floyd Cafe in Prague.

At some point, someone at some local search or travel site entered the address of Pink Floyd Cafe incorrectly as Americká 18 (it's actually 16), and other sites either copied this data manually, or (more likely) by way of a web scraper. This error then propagated through the internet, and now there are just as many references to the incorrect address as there are to the correct address. Anyone looking at the Google search results for "Pink Floyd Cafe" in Prague might reasonably conclude that Nelso has the wrong address. Even a sophisticated web scraper would have trouble contending with this kind of contradictory data.

We even fell into the same trap ourselves, and almost changed the address to #18 (our manual data entry process shows us references to the same place on other sites). However, if you look at the photo (click through for a very high-resolution version), it's clear that the address is Americká 16, not Americká 18.

The lesson we take away from this is that it's best to collect our own data, and ideally to back up that data with a photograph of the business. This of course doesn't mean that our data is always correct, or that we don't occasionally show closed businesses as still open. But because we show the date of the photos to all users of the site, we can with certainty say that Kolkovna was open for business on July 8, 2009, and at the address we display on the site.

Nelso.com crawl stats. How fast is fast enough?

Below we've included a screenshot of the crawl stats for Nelso.com, taken from the webmaster interface at Google. As you can see, the page load times for Nelso.com have improved steadily over the last 90 days, and now average a little under 700 milliseconds.

It's also obvious from the graphs that page load time has a direct effect on how many pages the GoogleBot crawls per day (and thus how many pages from Nelso.com end up in the Google index). That leads to a question, and maybe a reader can comment on this post with the answer. Is 684 milliseconds a good page load time, or just average? What do other large sites see in their GoogleBot crawl stats? Will the relationship between GoogleBot crawl speed and page load time hold true if we decrease page load time another 50% (i.e. will the GoogleBot double the number of pages it crawls per day on Nelso.com)?

OK, maybe that's three questions. But you get the idea.

Back from New York

I've just returned from New York, where Nelso has started its coverage of Manhattan. We are still processing photos from the trip, but we already have a good guide to bars and restaurants in SoHo up on the site.

There is no such thing as bad publicity

Just came across an article from early March about Yelp in the NY Times: "The Review Site Yelp Draws Some Outcries of Its Own". The article is not completely negative, but it does quote a number of business owners and Yelp reviewers that feel they have been wronged by Yelp.

This is not the first article of this type that I've come across. It seems every six months I read some article about Yelp and the controversy surrounding its five million business reviews (e.g. "Online review policy has local business owners Yelping mad").

But there's no such thing as bad publicity, especially for a content web site that is free for users. Yelp's traffic has more than doubled over the last year. I'd be quite happy to have a long article in the New York Times gently chiding Nelso while touting its rapid growth and high-quality business listings.

Local search growing faster than overall web search

According to a recent study by comScore of internet usage patterns, local search grew much more quickly last year than the overall search market, with searches for local businesses and services growing 58% in 2008, compared to growth of 21% for overall search traffic.

The following quote from the report is encouraging for sites like Nelso:

75 percent of the top 100 keywords searched on Internet Yellow Pages sites were non-branded, indicating that a majority of consumers have not decided on a specific company or product brand when they begin their search.

What this means is that most users are not searching for a specific business or brand (e.g. Louis Vuitton), but for a general category like "luggage". This is a big positive for sites like Nelso that can offer good category listings, but have difficulty competing for traffic from searches for brand names.

The value of listings in multiple languages

Nelso concentrates on two "niches" in the local search market: high quality data collected by our own staff, and offering listings in many languages.

We recently ran the stats for who is looking at our business listings, and in what language they are using Nelso.

Traffic to Czech business listings by language of user

In one of our most popular markets, the Czech Republic, less than 50% of page views are from locals (i.e. in Czech). Almost a quarter of page views are in English, and the remaining 30% are made up of many languages, including Danish, German, and Russian. Thus, our listings in the Czech Republic would be worth less than half as much if we didn't support so many languages.

We suspected that the Czech Republic might be an exceptional case. Prague is a very popular tourist destination, and so one would expect that many users looking for businesses would not be locals.

Traffic to Danish business listings by language of user

But our stats for our Danish business listings suggest otherwise. Denmark does get its share of tourists, but we expected almost all our local search traffic to be from Danes (i.e. in Danish). However, Danish-language traffic to our Danish business listings makes up only slightly more than half of all traffic, with English, Czech, and German making up more than 25% of all traffic to DK business listings.

We're headed to New York in May, 2009 to start photographing businesses in Manhattan for the Nelso sites. Is it possible that more than 50% of the traffic to these new listings will be in languages other then English?

Is China a bigger internet market than the U.S.?

Earlier today, we accomplished a long-term goal with the launch of Nelso in Chinese at Nelso.cn. According to numerous articles published in the last year, China's internet population is nearly equal to that of the U.S., or already larger. No matter when the cross-over point occurs, it is clear that both India and China will far surpass the the U.S. in internet users over the next decade. Thus, we're excited to have launched beta versions of Nelso in Chinese for China, and in Hindi for India (many people in India also use the internet in English, of course).

प्राहा, चेक गणराज्य

We're working on a Hindi version of Nelso. With approximately 600 million speakers of the language, there must be people using Hindi to search Google for information about Prague or Copenhagen.