The man responsible for worldwide sensations such as The Phantom Of The Opera, Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Cats will be holding nationwide auditions where professionals and amateurs are welcome to enter. The prize will be the lead role in new arena tour production of Jesus Christ Superstar.

Lloyd Webber’s four previous talent searches have produced household names in the world of musical theatre. Former victors have won lead roles in West End productions of  The Sound Of Music, Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Oliver! and The Wizard Of Oz.

The West End heavyweight commented: “Presenting a new, 2012 version of Jesus Christ Superstar for arenas is truly exciting. Some of the best performances of this show have been in rock venues and I’m thrilled to see the show return to its roots. ITV is providing the perfect platform for us to find a new, British Superstar.”

Information concerning the application process can be found on the ITV website. Announcements regarding the judging panel and an air date are yet to be made.

Phantom is touring the UK in 2012/13.

Personally I think that Trey Parker, Matt Stone and Robert Lopez have produced a masterpiece and only regret that I will have to survive on just the sountrack for another year!

From this set of circumstances I formed the idea that seatchoice.com was somehow toxic in that whatever I did the overall traffic on that site never seemed to recover, indeed, any new traffic delivered to this site was pretty soon leached away somewhere else. And so, eventually, I came to the conculsion that I was flogging a dead horse (domain) and would never win. Questions asked on the Google Webmaster Forum got answers basically denying that such a thing as toxic domains might exist but I could see no other explanation.

And so I decided, after discussion with interested parties, to ditch the seatchoice.om domain and revert to uktw.co.uk which we have been running since the mid-1990s, which seems to have a great reputation and has been almost impossible to “damage”! A couple of late nights later I had a new clean design up on UKTW (moving it from a “slower than 70%” to a “faster than 68%” site!) and put in place the 301 redirects and edits to kick all the traffic from seatchoice.com to uktw.co.uk

Within a couple of days the loss of traffic on seatchoice.com was major (as expected) but the growth in traffic for uktw was even better – in other words not only did I move the traffic successfully but I picked up some new people en route! Checking some key phrases on several search engines we dropped from the SERPs for SeatChoice where we had been on pages 5 to 10 and arrived, immediately, on page 2 for UKTW … from nowhere! Now that’s impressive. Its only been 4 days or so and yet traffic is up, sales are up and, if this were to continue, the road to recovery would be visible at last! In fact, we’re already better placed for our important search phrases using UKTW than we ever achieved with SeatChoice in months of trying.

This was a hard decision but I think the right one. We are not dropping the SeatChoice brand, just making it a “service” within the UKTW listings – which is actually where it started a few years ago … perhaps we should have stuck with it that way from day 1 … live and learn.

The journey is not over yet, and we’re still deep in the woods .. but at least now I have found a small path …

Yes, those who have followed stuff here will realise that this was part of post-Panda tidying up rather than, necessarily, making things more user friendly None the less, this is what we did.

The immediate effect of the first move was, of course, Arts Archive traffic dropped to 0 and UKTW traffic climbed a bit. Befor ethe next change we let things stabilise.

The effect of the second change was that UKTW traffic immediately fell by 75% … however, despite the 301 redirect, the rise in traffic on SeatChoice was far less (that is to say, not all the people who didn’t end up on UKTW did end up on SeatChoice!) …

What has been even more interesting is that, since then, the uplift on SeatChoice has fallen away again and the drop on UKTW has started to recover …. this is not particularly logical but it is what is happening – in fact, traffic on UKTW has doubled since the change and is still climbing.

This all led me to decide to have a look around. I started at utrs.list-team.com, a small Theatre Website Chart loisting a couple of dozen UK theatre websites and their traffic. I noticed a few strange things

1. NewsOnStage.co.uk, which I also run, has shown improving traffic .. this is odd as it is unashamedly a simple RSS aggregator, i.e. there is not one single piece of original content on the site!

2. London Theatre Database traffic has started to grow again despite the fact that it says there is currently NOTHING on in London!

This second point got me to thinking about things and I did a Google search for [london theatre database] .. the results were

1. The London Theatre Database .. great

2. The British Theatre Guide mentioning London Theatre Database as at last someone has started a theatre version of iMDB well, guess what, The London Theatre Database has 5,500 archived shows, UKTW has 94,000 .. this page was last updated 2009

3.  The Theatre Trust .. lovely site

4.  The London Theatre Database trying to raise money on-line .. this appeal closed a year ago and didn’t reach its target

Then a mixture of useful sites … including one which claimed to be the largest collection of on-line performing arts info in the world (mostly Broadway and London) but it lists fewer venues in the whole world than we list in the UK and has but a fraction of our content.

So, what do I take from this? Basically two lessons …

1) I have done a really bad job over the years of promoting our archive

2) It seems that whatever I do the reputation of UKTW will recover and tat of SeatChoice will not

So… I must ponder these facts further …

So, what have I been doing about it?

Well, I decided that we were potentially approaching the end game so there was no point in holding back. This time I have gone for a wholesale 301 redirection of UKTW what’s on listings to SeatChoice. Some may think this foolish as UKTW had seen a slow decline where SeatChoice had hit a brick wall, perhaps I should have made the call to move everything the other way? We shall see. I needed to remove the last vestiges of duplication within my own stable so that’s the call I made … from now, UKTW is responsible for the archive and for theatre users (notices, links, etc) and SeatChoice is the What’s On and ticketing service.

The move didn’t go as we ll as I expected in some ways. I was always told that 301 carried all the “link juice” with it so I expected a decline in UKTW to be matched by a growth in SeatChoice .. I got the decline but precious little of the growth. So back to the forum with one further plea for help .. this time I was picked up by someone really helpful, someone who, it would seem, is fairly local and actually cared whether I got it right or not … very, very helpful in that he undid a few misconceptions for me and pointed to some reasonably obvious issues that I couldn’t spot … when you work 8 hours a day on the same site you sometimes fail to see the obvious!

Basically though, I am coming to see that there’s a toolkit that you can use to get just some of the basics right, or at least help you to understand things that might be getting in the way. For me this has come down to

• http://gtmetrix.com .. make sure that your website delivers quickly as its an important part of user satisfaction
• http://www.copyscape.com .. are you copying someone else? is someone copying you? Do you simply have the same content as other people? Well worth checking …
• http://validator.w3.org … can Google make sense of your html
• Zenu – a link checking tool – no point in sending Google broken links
• Webmaster tools … check and recheck the error reports in here and make sure you fix them .. if google is reporting errors then its not getting the information you think it is!
• Google Analytics … make sure a drop in traffic is not caused by keyword shifts .. for us it can be, an important show ends and so does searching for it … check also where your traffic comes from but very importantly, how long it stays, whether it returns and how much it looks at!
• Webmaster Forum .. read, read and read some more, compare the advice to your own situation and see if it applies (be honest!), ask direct, simple questions yourself and take note of the replies
• AdSense .. if you use it check that it really is earning you, remove any Adsense blocks that are not worth it and remember, as AdSense gets better at delivering targetted customers you will lose more and more traffic
• Google .. sounds daft but search for your site and see how it looks on the result page … is it a “more desirable click” than any other result? Does your title and description draw the user in and encourage them to click? If you appear in the results and no one clicks on you Google will mark you down, if you appear in the results and people love to click on you then Google will mark you up … user behaviour is a part of the Google Machinery

Finally, make some changes, fix what’s wrong BUT don’t tinker for the sake of it … Google takes time to notice changes and also only runs the Panda every now and then (4-6 week cycle?) so don’t expect a change to work overnight – the only thing that will work overnight is a sudden influx of traffic because you got such a great piece of content that people started linking to you … the first article I put up about The River Line (with Charlie and Lydia Rose Bewley) got picked up by the Bewley fans – traffic went through the roof in a couple of hours and stayed high for days … it fell off, of course, and few (if any) of the fans bought tickets, but the links and retweets will be good for me longer term.

And rest …. be patient, if you perpetually tinker you will have no idea what it was that fixed your problem .. and if you do have a clue what worked you can then make it part of ongoing site philosophy … but remember, the days of stability are probably gone, you will need to keep an eye on this in the future

October 14th saw another run of Panda, as far as anyone can tell, and there’s a lot of screaming and running around like headless chickens happening of the Webmaster Forum … seems like it hit a number of people hard

Like us

Yep, after a few months of slow growth we were kicked in the teeth … dropped 35% on one site overnight, dropped probably 50% across all sites … not sure how much longer I can keep this up

Michael Gambon
The RADA trained Irish actor was dubbed “the great Gambon” by fellow actor Ralph Richardson at an early stage of his career. Known to millions today for his role as professor Dumbledore in the Harry Potter saga (a role in which he replaced the late Richard Harris), Gambon has been one of the consistently outstanding stars of the stage from the 1970’s onwards.

Judi Dench
One of the greatest if not the greatest female star of the stage ever Dame Judi Dench has been acting since 1957 and is still going strong today. She became a household name to millions throughout the UK for her long running role in the television sitcom As Time Goes By and her performances as M in recent James Bond films. Despite her work outside the theatre, Dench has maintained a rich career within the theatre with roles ranging from Shakespeare to cutting edge contemporary thrillers.

John Gielgud
One of a very few actors in history to have won an Oscar, Olivier, Emmy, Tony and BAFTA awards, Gielgud was a true acting genius. His career spanned for the majority of the 20th century and he has had an extremely important influence on the world of acting. Famed for his beautiful speaking voice and outstanding performances from a young age, Gielgud was one of a kind.

Alec Guinness
Known to many modern film fans as Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars trilogy, Alec Guinness was already one of the greatest living actors by that stage of his career. He is very affectionately remembered by millions for both his film and stage roles as he brought a touch of sophistication and class to every role he played.

Marlon Brando
Brando exploded into the public consciousness with his animalistic portrayal as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. His use of “method acting” in this role revolutionised the world of acting both within the theatre and film. He is famed for his role as Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather for which he won an Oscar but his outstanding contribution to the theatre will never be forgotten.

Kenneth Branagh
The Northern Irish born actor has had an outstanding career within the theatre and he is still only in his early 50s. He achieved huge acclaim as a young star of the stage and became a protégé in Shakespearean performances throughout the 1980’s and 90s. He continues to perform on stage and screen today and his performances are continuing to get better with age.

Daniel Day-Lewis
One of the most intense actors of all time, Daniel Day-Lewis widely regarded as one of the greatest actors alive today. He is infamous for the extreme lengths he goes to in preparation for his roles and his determination to stay in character even off the stage or set. When playing the role of Hamlet he had an emotional breakdown live on stage as he had a vision that he was talking to the ghost of his father and he has not appeared on stage since.

Despite huge competition from Hollywood and the world of the cinema the theatre is still going strong today and there is an abundance of great shows and premier actors for audiences to enjoy. You can find discount theatre tickets easily online and theatre tickets in London which will allow you to be entertained by one of the world’s truly great art forms.

What’s your list?

With the run-up to the 2012 Olympics, the Metropolitan Police are concentrating on ticket fraud, both on-line and through more traditional routes (the street tout) but more needs to be done to make sure that users do not fall foul of the sophisticated scams out there.

To this end, STAR, the Society of Ticket Agents and Retailers, has launched a new kitemark to replace their old logo (see our previous BLOG entry to compare old and new) in order to give users confidence that they are buying from a safe supplier and will actually get the tickets that they pay for!

“It is the show of strength that the entertainment ticketing industry has been waiting for,” said Jonathan Brown, Secretary of STAR. “Ticket fraud is an industry-wide problem and we needed an industry-wide solution to tackle it head on.”  The kitemark is supported by major entertainment organisations such as the Concert Promoters Association, the National Arenas Association and The Society of London Theatre.

SeatChoice is operated by Dynamic Listing Ltd, an Affiliate member of STAR and we have always made it clear on our site when we are using STAR or non-STAR suppliers, including giving advice on safe use of the ticket reseller market – buy tickets safely through SteaChoice.

In fairness, I’d say that Panda is not currently an issue for us, but in making the Panda smile we have (a) lost our position for certain keywords and (b) made our site convert fewer visitors!

So, now for the next round of tuning aimed at doing these two things

1) regain the ground lost for certain important key phrases

2) improve our conversion rate

Whilst not bring back the Panda frown. Tricky one, made even trickier when you consider that our updates, Google’s scan and the Panda runs all happen asynchronously … and we have monthly and annual changes in traffic anyway. This means that seeing if something has worked is a near impossible thing .. it used to be a little easier s the world stayed roughly the same for long enough to see things stabilise, now this no longer seems to be true.

The shock today was to lose our position in Google for “dirty dancing tickets” and “tickets for dirty dancing” where we have always (for a few years) been in the top half of the first page, not even the Panda upset that. Today, all of a sudden, we are not in the first 10 PAGES of results! This fact was made even more curious when I noticed that in Yahoo we went from nowhere to number 7 and in Bing we went from nowhere to number 1!