2012 SEO Year in Review - Part 1 - #seopodcast 174

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. I am Charles Lewis, your Internet Marketing Specialist. Must be the end of the world. My head's just about to get chopped off on the image there. It's all right. End of the world. You guys are watching the final podcast ever. Because apparently, according to the Mayan calendar, today is the last day in existence. Kind of funny, we've actually scheduled this to be the first of a two-part series. We figure we're just going to leave the world hanging. Yeah. Remember, we are your friendly local neighborhood top position, Snatchers. Yes. Where our mantra is... Don't be a deuce. If you can, tweet now. If you have the inclination, if you want to, even if you don't want to, just grab some sort of device and tweet. And what you should tweet is... Hashtag SEO Podcast. This is 173. Four. 174. This is 174. Make sure you tag us in it, at eWebStyle. Excellent. As always, we have a tip from our previous podcast. And that tip was, try to use compute... Compute... Complete URLs. Slowly, the world is deteriorating. Try to use complete URLs while being social. Yeah, you definitely want to make sure when you're tweeting or Facebooking or sharing links to your website, make sure that if you can, a lot of times you can, but if you can, use the complete URL, eWebStyle.com slash SEO podcast, rather than the bitLY URL shortener. Because using the complete URL should pass more than they do. Yep. Absolutely. Let's get over to the right page. Let's see. Remember, what you could do for us as a favor is you could go to our G Plus account and you could write us a review. Actually, there's two ways you... There's a number of ways you could write reviews. One that we like is G Plus. To get to our G Plus account, you need only go to e-webstyle.com slash G Plus and slash G Plus and Google Plus

and Google Plus. That's all four of them. That's all four of them. We got them covered. Go there. That'll actually redirect you to our G Plus local page. Write us a review. We'll really appreciate that. That will give you a little punch in the face on air. The other thing you could do is you could go to iTunes. Three steps. Go to iTunes. Create an account. Write a review. If you choose to, you could actually send us an email, podcast at... E-webstyle.com And let us know that you wrote us a review. Let us know that you wrote us a review and we'll give you a punch in the face. If there's any doubt, a ptf is a good thing. Yeah, ptf is a good, a punch in the face. It sounds bad, but it's really a good deal. You know, oh, we have an email from an Australian who apparently... Still... In Australia, they're already into the new day, so they're all gone. But we'll get to that email in the next otherly world. Because it has a really good point at the end of it about steel toad kicking the throat. Oh, that one. We'll get back to that. We do have... You notice there are no tear tattoos. I was proud of it. Yeah. Tears. Yeah, because that would have definitely just... It's not good for the Christmas photos. First review. SEO Happy Time, Good Time. This is by Craig Kiesling. Yeah, we had a guy, Chris Kiesling, working with us for a while. I thought maybe he had done an alias or whatever. He's out of Pennsylvania. And his five-star review... Five stars. Five stars. We even better. You guys rock. I've been listening for a while now and finally got to writing a review. You can't do it via the iTunes site anymore. I didn't even know you could. You have to actually go into the iTunes app. Craig says, I've been involved with SEO specifically and online marketing in general since the day when websites were black text on gray

background and the blink tag was the hottest thing around. Wow. That's back front page early. Yeah. Overture pre-Google. That was make change, upload, and see the effect on your search result immediately. You can see my stuff at csknet.net. And it continues. And in recent years, I've been trying out various podcasts, both for the content and for study, because he co-hosts a Haya Martial Arts podcast. Haya. Haya. That would be just fun. Haya, SEO. What are the number of injuries? Chop on the kneecap. And he's been constantly disappointed by the lack of quality content out there in regards to SEO. So, may backyard maestros pimping auto-link submissions and other previous under-the-radar black hat methods. Wow. However, after listening to a couple of episodes of your show, I clickety-clacked that all-hallowed subscribe button faster than an SEO spam message. Hits the spam cot database. Oh, that was sweet. I'm going to put that in the song. I'm taking that piece. You guys have a rapport that the listener can feel, a sense of humor that keeps me in stitches, and the quality content I've been looking for. Keep rocking it, e-web style. That's cool. Yeah. A punch in the face with a ninja-er throat-chopping. Hi-ya. There you go. The throat-chopping. Yeah. Very appreciated. For the both of ya. That's awesome. Greg, I'd do a punch in the face, although your podcast makes me a little uncomfortable. I might end up on the floor dead. Hi-ya. What's it called? It's called the Hi-ya. Hi-ya Martial Arts Podcast. We're going to have to go check that out. Mm-hmm. Cool. Next one is by Don Bennett P.E. No doubt, best SEO podcast. Five stars. Five stars. I am a DIY. Do it yourself. Do it yourself. Do it yourself or have been learning, implementing SEO for about nine months. I have listened to many podcasts during, but now download only you. If I had an SEO budget, I would hire e-web style. If you had an SEO budget, we would work for you. Punch in the face, Don. And the

last one, Sarah Donathan, best SEO and internet marketing podcast. Five stars. Three, five stars. Yeah. Love your podcast. Going back through all the episodes. Personally, I'm fine with your voice quality. Punch in the face to you for awesome content and putting it in an easy-to-understand manner. Thanks, I would love to see. Things, I would love to see. Ways to get SEO clients. He sent, she sent this to us in Facebook. Since I'm a brand new SEO business, but I have a ton of passion and knowledge, but wanting to get over that first stepping stone. Really, I would start... Work on the business first. Because what you don't want to do is get SEO clients and can't service them. Yeah. And so make sure you establish the right processes, the right tools, and everything in place first. And then, you know, with any business, go after friends and family first. Yep. And then go from there. Yeah. And, you know, focus on referrals. Any client you currently have, have that referral conversation with them. Hey, do you know anybody else who could, you know, benefit from my service? And then, you know, we run, okay, we obviously have our podcast, that's a great boon for us. PPC, we run PPC. We've got good search engine placement in the Houston area, some of the best. And... A lot of networking, a lot of referrals. Frankly, we used to use the cobbler shoes excuse for not being on the first page. And I'll tell you, I'm so proud when somebody asks, hey, so, in fact, last night, 6 o'clock, I'm in a meeting, the guy's like, so how do I know you're going to get me on the first page for bariatric surgeon? I said, well, Google, SEO podcast, that's a national term, first position, SEO Houston, online marketing Houston, website marketing Houston, internet marketing Houston, PPC Houston, pay-per-click Houston, and a myriad of others, and we're the only company that's on the first page for all of those terms. I feel so good that I can say

that, gives us a lot of confidence in bidding against other companies. So make sure, work on your own SEO placement. That would be paramount. It continues. Also, you said your sites did not get affected by Penguin. Awesome. Kudos to you. Yeah, we avoided the Penguin Smackdown. Thanks so much for the awesome podcast to white guy named Chris and the never forgotten Charles, the SEO rapper. Sarah from Scarlet SEO dot info. You know, Sarah, quick point about that last statement. I think the reason we didn't get affected by a Penguin Smackdown was because we had been creating new content for clients, but more importantly, the linking we did, we kind of- It was legit. Yeah, it was legit linking and it was diversified. It was diversified linking. We didn't use a lot of exact match to anchor text and things like that. When Matt first put that out there, you know, that EMDs and things like that may not be the best route to go, we started changing. I'm glad you brought up EMDs because we had a little discussion this morning that I thought was worth presenting. In a previous podcast, somebody on Facebook or Twitter pointed out that an exact match domain, how can Google penalize an exact match domain? For instance, if somebody's searching for eWebStyle, we are an exact match domain for that. We shouldn't be penalized. And kind of thinking about this, we continue to think about the questions you guys ask us. It really dawned on me that eWebStyle, Google knows the company name, so if the domain is different than the company name, Google knows that and can penalize you for that. So you do need to be leery about exact match domain names. It also kind of speaks to, it's more important than ever that your company name actually be keyword rich. Yeah, I think that's it. If your company name has, is your exact match keywords, then... You can't get penalized for that. Yeah. Makes perfect sense. Just a quick little bit of news. I want to

point out this. I'm going to add this shortly. Remember, we do have a referral program. Most of our listeners are SEO experts. You can actually refer your clients to us. Continue to get a bit of news. Google Maps is apparently going to be soon to be back on iOS. It's already there, isn't it? I don't know. Yeah, it's already there. That happened the other day. Matter of fact, they had, oh my God, it was a stupid number, like 500 million downloads of it when they released. Yeah. Yeah. I can see that. Almost mandatory. Facebook is testing a fee for out-of-networking messaging. I don't know if you saw this. That was my blank stare. Yeah, we can go ahead. There's another huge blank stare, though. Like, really, Facebook? You're going to charge to... To message somebody... Who you're not friends with. Yeah. Well, currently, you can message them, but it ends up in their out-box or their other-box. Yeah. To have it move from their other-box to their in-box, cost you a buck. Yeah. Yeah. This, I thought was interesting. I wouldn't buy it for a dollar. Yeah, me either. You know what I'm saying? Like... Get to your other-box. That's not a good look. Yeah. That's not a good move. I know they need to monetize and, you know, but that's not... So what's the number one video on YouTube of all time right now? Of all time? Yep. Gangnam Style, probably? Gangnam Style. Yeah. One billion views. First video to top one billion views. Wow. And what is the commentary of about our society that the most important video is Gangnam Style? It's a great song. Good dance. But it's a song and a dance. Yeah. Yeah. And then I had that note about exactly the last conversation. Kim said something the other day, and ever since she said it, every time I hear that song, I think about it. She said, but it sounds like they're saying open condom style. Open condom style. Yeah. Oh, my God. Every time I hear it, open

condom style, I'm like, wow. Nah, that's what I hear now. Yeah. Because she's playing at that, not just playing at you and everybody else who's going to hear this. All of our listeners now, when they hear Gangnam Style, are going to be like, open condom style. All right. So this is the second to the last podcast of the year. So we're going to do our pseudo infamous 2012 SEO year in review. This is where we're going to go through all of our old podcasts, look through our notes, and kind of quickly, and this is going to be lightning fast, rapid fire, watch out, duck, because we might kick you in the shins accidentally in the forehead kind of thing. Catching ninja chop you in the throat. Yep. Hi-ya! Yeah, hi-ya chop in the throat. So we're going to go back and forth. I think Charles is going to start with Podcast 132. That was the first podcast we did of 2012. Podcast 132. Let's see. We discussed Google Plus Epic. See, we also discussed being logged into your Google account. Nope. We're going up. Yeah, because it's under there. There you go. Hmm. Oh, you set me up. I thought, because I read it at my desk. It's not the same one. It doesn't sound right. We discussed recent entertaining cartoons. No, 10 myths, internet marketing, and that's the content. We're getting organized right here on the air. Yeah, that's what I said. 10 SEO myths. Yep. Sorry about that. Let's proceed. We'll go to the next one. We'll be rapid-fire shortly. All right. Podcast number 133. Titles, Do Twitter Followers Affect Your SEO? We talked about, this is just a bit of news, the Electronic Privacy Information Center. This is, we also discussed Google in general, SEO. We discussed the effect of being logged into your Google account and how that affects your personal SERP results. As you know, if you're logged into your Google account, you can drastically get clients who call all the time and say, I'm on the first page for

my search term, my narrow keyword search term. And we say, so are you logged into your Google account? And they are. So, yeah. I don't realize that's why you're on the first page. That's why you're up on the first page. Yeah. Podcast 134. By the way, let me just interject. If you want to fix that right in the URL, you go to the end of the URL, put the ampersand, PWS equals zero, and that'll take away the historical effect. Essentially log you out. Kind of. Yeah. Yeah. Or open up a new browser. Yeah. Totally different browser that you don't log in on. Yeah. So, above the fold SEO, that was podcast 134. And we really discussed, I think that was around the time of the algorithm change. And it was talking about the things you do above the fold when people scroll, ads and things like that. You want to make sure that your most important information is above the fold of your website. Absolutely. Podcast number 135, minor panda refresh. We discussed a minor, not a major, Google Panda refresh. And, you know, Google periodically refreshes their indexes. All the time. Yeah. Regularly. And then they'll adjust the algorithm of how they index, and then they'll adjust the algorithm of how they actually display SERPs. We talk about the linchpin of SEO. We always say this. In real estate, it's location, location, location. In SEO, it is... Keywords, keywords, keywords. We also outlined some success we had with one of our clients. So, that was kind of a very personal podcast. That was podcast number 135. Podcast number 136, we talked about a lot of international SEO. SEO, we had questions from Australia. And one of the questions talked about doing SEO in different languages. Talked about characteristics of the writer, things like that. We also talked about sightings. So, the two things to point out from there would be, if you're doing SEO in different languages, we talked about maybe having those languages in a different folder in comparison to using a translator.

And so, I think it really depends on how many languages you're targeting, how accurate does it really need to be. And then, in regards to the sightings, you know, if you rank well for your domain name, then Google is likely to give you the six-pack of a sighting. So, rank well. Rank well. Yeah, optimize those pages. Podcast number 137, switching domain names and what's called site credibility. We talk about SEO strategies related to if you need to switch your domain name, you know, 301 redirects, what to make sure you do right, what to make sure that you don't do wrong, pitfalls to avoid, because you don't want to lose your position. We also discuss credibility, expertise, trustworthiness, and how those impact your SEO. Duplicate content and anchor text. That was podcast 138. And I remember talking about this one, too, because we talk about duplicate content frequently. But we discussed how the impact it could have on your site and how to avoid it. And so, one of the things we talked about here was what to do with anchor text, like on your blog. And so, when you relate duplicate content to anchor text, you want to make sure that the anchor text you're using in that link is keyword rich, but you want to make sure that you're not using that same duplicate content on different places. If it's on your blog or if it's on your site, you want to make sure that the text itself is not duplicate. Number 139, HTML5 Yahoo directory and SEO. Of course, directories are really powerful. There's DMOS and Yahoo directory. We discussed HTML and its potential impact on SEO. Switching off of Flash, we just won't design. I can see one or two situations where we might put a little Flash component on a webpage. Frankly, Edge came out two weeks ago and we finished our first HTML5 animation with Edge. That's Dreamweaver. That's Adobe Edge. We finished it on the Friday after it came out on Tuesday. We finished that first project on a

Friday. We also discussed negative keywords and how those properly done can positively impact your pay-per-click campaigns. DIY PPC. That was podcast 140. And we talked about the pitfalls of do-it-yourself PPC. Real quick, if you don't know what you're doing and you can lose a lot of money, you can waste a lot of money trying to do it yourself. Most people don't have an unlimited budget to kind of try things. And so be careful doing it yourself. If you're going to do it yourself, research it first. There's all kind of resources out there. There's all kind of videos and help tutorials from AdWords, actually. So take advantage of those before you try PPC yourself. If not, contact an agency. And remember that SEO now more than ever, because of two changes, I think one changed this year and one changed the year before, where Google is giving more and more importance to the relevance of the landing page. Yeah. So you've got to do good SEO on your landing page to make sure it's relevant. It does two things. It gives you better placement for less money. Yeah, yeah. It increases your quality score. If your landing page is optimized for that ad group, all the phrases that you're targeting, yeah, the quality score goes up. CPC goes down. And it's just a good deal. Podcast number 141, Keyword Research and Social Media Marketing. Again, keywords, keywords, keywords so important. How can you do keyword research? What kind of keyword research tools are out there for you to take advantage of to make sure that you're actually targeting the right keywords and making that process a little bit easier on you? I'll tell you, one of our biggest keyword research for SEO tools, pay-per-click. Just straight up. Because we can make guesses about what people are searching for in order to arrive at a particular website or for a particular service or product. When we run a PPC campaign, we don't guess. Yeah, we know. This is what's working. And it goes one step farther. These

keywords brought them to the site maybe at an equal ratio, right? And one of them closes business, the other one doesn't. Guess what we focus on from an SEO perspective? Yeah, we optimize before we're closing the business. Yeah, absolutely. That was podcast number 141. Number 142 was Pinterest, Tumblr, and Instagram. This episode was discussing these social platforms that are focused on pictures. It had to be sometime in May, which was likely before... Who purchased Instagram? Before... I don't remember. Oh, I'm drawing a blank. Facebook. Before Facebook purchased Instagram. Oh, yeah. That was... Yeah. So, it's interesting. I'm curious to know what people are using now. Tumblr, I really wasn't that big of a fan of. It was more of a blogging kind of picture-sharing platform. Pinterest, I tried to use it when it first came out, and now I just pin that maybe. Maybe. Instagram is still pretty cool. I'm using it a lot more overly, so go Instagram. Podcast number 143 discussed an incredibly important subject, Google Places Optimization. Now, Google Places has become Google Plus Local. It used to be Google Places, Google Local Places, Google Pages, Plus Local, whatever. Now, it's Google. Local Places. Are you going to use that in your app, too? I don't know. So, Google Plus Local is now what you want to focus on. It's paramount for your organic placement. Remember, Google has blended Google Local Places listings and the organic results together. So, a website that has great organic components and a solid Google Plus Local page, including reviews, is going to place really well in the SERPs. Yeah, definitely. 144. Yeah, 144. Producing great content for SEO. We discussed producing great content for SEO. And so, one of the things, and I think I mentioned this earlier, is to, if it's in the budget, or if you had the resources for it, get that content written by someone who can write great content that's not only friendly for the search engines, but really targets the user. We want to try to include CTAs and things

like that. Don't want to over-optimize, but make sure that your content reads well, and that is good for SEO. You know, we're really going through this a lot faster than I thought we were going to. Yeah, we have about, what, 12 more? Yeah. All right. SEO, podcast number 145, SEO for e-commerce websites. There's really the primary thing to remember when it comes to e-commerce websites is, it's okay, you're probably copying content from the manufacturer. I just said it's okay. What I really mean is, it's not okay to just copy that content and paste it onto your website. That is duplicate content that will get relegated to the supplemental, and rarely, in fact, in this particular instance, never show up. So you need to rework that content. Because you'll never outrank the manufacturer, because they're using the same content. They're the original provider that content, and even though you may be selling it at a wholesale price or something like that, you're not going to outrank them using that same content. Now, you could just copy it and use a PPC campaign and never expect any good SEO results. That's okay if PPC is the route you want to go. Remember, 75% of clicks happen in the organic area, so it's probably not the best strategy. Podcast number 146 was bad SEO versus good SEO, and we talked about this in regards to e-commerce. This probably carried on from the previous week. And so, again, in regards to SEO and e-commerce, some of the things you have to take into consideration is what works with SEO. And luckily, e-commerce has some of those features, like video works great for SEO, content works great, list items, links. And all of those things are things you also need to properly promote a product. So if it's an e-commerce site, it's good to have a video demonstration of that product, a description that you probably rewrote from the manufacturer about that product, links to maybe other resources describing that product. Those work for SEO, and they also help close

deals with e-commerce. Excellent. Podcast number 147, that's what we're on, right? Yeah. Real estate and negative SEO. So real estate is a particularly challenging SEO industry to do SEO for. So we discussed the nuances of that. We actually, it was probably about the time frame, maybe it was literally that we did an interview specifically talking about real estate. We also talk about how you can use pay-per-click to guide your results, so I just mentioned that, and negative SEO, and our kind of summation is people are concerned about, let's say you've got a competitor who goes out and goes on to a bunch of porn sites and links those porn sites to your site, and that could have a negative impact. And what we realize is, because it would be so easy for a competitor to do that, Google actually has to exclude that from their algorithm. And what they end up doing is taking weak or non-valuable and non-related websites, throws those into a category so that if they link to you, they have zero value. Not negative value, just zero value. Yeah, they recognize they're there, but they don't have any... Positive impact. Yeah. Yeah. Penguin and Google image search. This was podcast 148. We discussed a couple of things. One, we talked about Penguin, and this had to be, yep, this is around June, so that's around the time the first Penguin update came. It targeted links and link forms and things like that, so it was made pretty clear to, if spam linking is part of your SEO strategy, then stop it, because it's not going to be effective anymore. We also talked about Google image search. They did an update, and I think that was cool. I think that's when they released the option where you can drag an image, like from a folder on your desktop, into your Google search bar, as long as you have the images tab selected, and Google will display all images it finds that look like the one you did. A great example of where

to use that, we actually used some clip art to create a website for one of our clients. It became clear that one of the pieces of clip art was going to be pretty instrumental. I mean, it was going to look like the figurehead of the website, so we dragged that image into Google, and it was used on about 10,000 websites, half Chinese, half whatever, and so we realized that we needed to change that look, because people would see it everywhere. We didn't want that to become the face of not only our client's website, but the face of every other website, and end up having that was associated. Podcast number 149 was Google Algo Changes. Now, this is a really, yeah, this is a really, really exciting podcast, because this is where Chuck announced and released his latest SEO rap, internet marketing rap. It is the latest one. I think so, yeah. And what is it, what's that called? What is it, what is it? Google Algo Changes. Yeah, that was the name of it. It was a rap I did, where I discussed the top 20 algorithm changes that Google had made, everything from Panda to Penguin, to Top Heavy, to all of them. So, Ziploc, Farmer, yeah, that was cool. So, we came up with the name Ziploc. We like that so much better than Freshness. Another important thing, go check out that video, because Charles did a great job, Chuck. Charles did a great job of having, like, this juxtaposition. I did a great job. I was trying to do it. Okay, he did a cool job, right? We'll go with that, of juxtaposing a teacher and a student in the process of understanding Algo Changes. So, it was really cool. By the way, that looks cool on the video. You had to do the matric hands. No, that wasn't it. That was the octopus hands. Backlinks and link sculpting. Sorry, bad audio. This was number 150. Yeah. Okay, so, now, in this case, just a note, because I remember this, the bad

audio wasn't the quality. It was the fact that it got chopped. Well, it was quality. It wasn't the quality of the actual sound. Yeah, it got processed. It was all choppy. And, yeah, the audio was bad because of that. Yeah, we talked about backlinks and link sculpting, though. Link sculpting is one of the things that can really help your SEO if done right. It's really, well, the main core about it is the organization of your links. So, if you have a navigation home about those services, products, or whatnot, and then you have a sub-nav that really goes into your services, bathroom repair, kitchen repair, living room repair, whatever. Those should really be targeted first because they're your primary keywords, they're the first links that's on the page, and, therefore, they have the most impact. And, so, you want the search engine spider to index those first, and that's kind of link sculpting. Excellent. The next podcast is podcast number 151, and this is the last one we're going to cover today. This is linking link profiles and Groupon. We asked a really interesting question. Should Groupon be your internet marketing plan? Hmm. We haven't talked about Groupon in a while, but the answer was it depends on your business. If you're a new business and you have the capital to really take up front, then maybe, if you need foot traffic, Groupon will drive foot traffic to your restaurant. And from your pocket. Yeah. Seems like it works better for restaurants or people who have retail products. Right. Not really for service providers, but maybe. And we also discussed linking to your Google profile, a how-to guide. I don't, seems a little early for discussing author, but it's just making sure that you're, what we had already realized is that there was going to be a lot of value in your Google profile and making sure that you, your website and your Google profile are connected together. So, that was podcast number 151 that we discussed. That is the last part of our 2012 SEO

Year in Review Part 1. Part 2 will be next week. And we've actually gotten way caught up on posting our podcast. So, now our podcast, now the news in our podcast is actually relevant, which is good. Remember, you guys can stalk us, haunt us, follow us, cheer us on. You can always do that, facebook.com slash e-withstyle, twitter.com slash e-withstyle, youtube.com slash e-withstyle, and email us, podcast at e-withstyle.com. All right. Until the next podcast, you guys have a Merry Christmas, because that's between now and the next podcast. And we'll see you next time. Again, my name is Chris Burris. And I'm Charles Lewis. And bye-bye for now.