2013 SEO Year End Review Part One - #seopodcast 218

Welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. I'm Charles Lewis, an internet marketing specialist. Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our podcast. This is podcast number 218. 218. 218 and represents the first of our 2013 year in review. I didn't know that. This has been a long year. This is where the top position snatches with a mantra of... Don't be a douche. ...tell you everything that happened in 2013. As always, we talk from our previous podcast, there was a tip, and that tip was, or is, because it will continue to be the same tip, YouTube has over 1 billion unique visitors per month and reaches the coveted 13 to 34-year-old better than any other medium. Yeah, any other medium, including cable TV and other social media sites. So, if your target demographic is that coveted, you know, what was it, 18 to 34 years old, YouTube is where you want to do that. So, invest in some AdWords display marketing for YouTube, right? Take advantage of those. Create those videos. Create those banners. But more importantly, target them on the videos that's likely to reach the people who you're trying to get and show your ads there. The cost per click is a little bit cheaper, and especially if you tie it into, like, some remarketing campaign, because you can do that. So, definitely take advantage of YouTube marketing when you're trying to reach that certain demographic, these Gen Xers, because apparently we're on YouTube. Yep. A lot of us. All the time. And I say us, because I mean you. If you can, tweet now. And what you should tweet is you should tweet hashtag SEOpodcast. This is number 218. Be sure to tag us in it at eWebStyle. That way we can link up and follow you back and do all of our social stuff. And if you want other ways to follow us, there are many of them. There are quite a few out there. Facebook.com slash eWebStyle. YouTube.com slash eWebStyle.

Twitter.com slash eWebStyle. And you can send us an email, podcast at e-webStyle.com. You can do us three favors. Three favors. Three favors. We're only asking for three favors. Really, it's one favor times three, so it's even easier than three separate favors. We're cubed. Cubed. That's still one. One times three cubed. And the way you do this is you can write us a review. No, no, that's three. One times three is three. Oh, no. One cubed times three. One cubed times one cubed is one times three is three. So we got it. So it's one cubed times three. We got it. This is not a math podcast, if you did not notice. The things that you can do is you can write us a review, and you can write them in three places. We make one of them really easy. Actually, they're all kind of easy. We make one really easy because it's the one we prefer most. And that's if you could go to our G Plus local page and write a review. The easiest way to get to our G Plus local page is to go to e-webstyle.com slash G Plus or slash G Plus or slash Google Plus or slash Google Plus. There are four ways to get to the exact same page. Actually, I think there's like five other ways also. So those are easy. Google Plus or either the symbol or write it out, and that'll forward you to our G Plus local page. Once you get there, we know you have a Google account. We know you have a G Plus account. You may need to activate it, which is like one or two clicks. Write us a review. Yeah. Give us a review. Put us in a circle. Give us a plus one. Yeah. I'm always focused on the review. You're like Mr. Social. I mean, we're here. It's like literally three clicks. The next thing that you could do for us, it has only three steps. You go onto iTunes. You create an account. You write a review.

If you choose to, send us an email, podcast at e-webstyle.com. We will give you a punch in the face. Speaking of face, on Facebook, there are two places that you can write a review. When you land on our page, again, facebook.com slash e-webstyle. Right there on the right, I think it's three sections down, there's a little review place. You can click that five star and type in a quick little message. Or we have a review tab right on the top. Click that. Actually write a review. And that's next to the same location where they can leave discussions, right? If you have any questions for this podcast or anything like that you want us to address, that's a great place to leave it at. Mental note, check the discussions tab. Remember, we do have a referral program. And if you have an SEO account that you send our direction and they pay their bills, we'll take care of them, give them great SEO service. We will give you compensation. And finally, we have the segment, the Algorithm Cataclysm. Yeah, so there's not really a title for this Algorithm Cataclysm, but I thought it was worth mentioning here. So remember back when authorship first came out, Matt Cutts said that they eventually will start reducing the amount of authorship usage, rich media usage. And that's happened. Google has put in the 15, so what they're saying is 15% of all authorship setups are not being shown. So avatars aren't being shown in the search results and things like that. I saw that the other day in a search, yeah. And what they're doing is trying to promote basically more usage on Google+. And so the people whose avatar does show up is because they're likely posting more on Google+. They're sharing more images. They may have more plus ones. They have more circles. They have a bigger influence on Google+, and therefore their authorship shows more. So the difference, I thought, you know, we have to constantly check in a browser where we are logged in and

one where we're not logged in. Yeah, that's interesting. So in this particular one, as a client of ours, when I did a search for his key phrase, he was the first listing. Woo-hoo, of course, top position, snatchers. Yep. And he didn't have his image next to him, his Google authorship image. And when I went to our browser where I wasn't logged in, I think I may have even been logged in as some other client or something, his image showed up there. So I don't know what the decision-making process, the algorithm decision-making process is, and there is clearly a decision-making process going on. Right there that's determining when and when not to show the authorship avatar. And the point of us bringing it up as an algorithm cataclysm is that we actually want to make sure that you guys are being active on G+. Yeah. Right? If you're active on G+, you're more likely to get your images to show. Exactly. And then your click rate goes up. All right. So I've got a couple of reviews. Actually, we've got four reviews. I'm going to save them for next time because it's kind of the slow season, so maybe we won't get one, and that'll prevent me from having to do a tear tattoo. Tattoo over the Christmas break. Because, you know, the tattoo parlors are really busy over the Christmas break. Everybody wants a Santa on their face. Exactly. Speaking of Santa, this review is from Christopher Kurtz. Like Kris Kringle. Close. Not really, but kind of. Yeah. And here it goes. This was on our G+, local page. So, Christopher, first off, great name. Second off, thanks for writing the review. Third, thanks for being a podcast listener. And it says, this is the only SEO. All cap. Only SEO podcast I've come across that is both informative and entertaining. I must deal with paid search every day. But I love to learn about SEO because the two are so closely connected in inbound marketing. Yes, they are. Yep. I'm catching up on all

the episodes now. It really helps my morning commute to go much faster. So far, I've learned that you really need to learn to use your heading and spend time sculpting your awesome body. Pun intended. Use your head and sculpt. I should have read this before I got on the air. Use your heading and. Okay. So, the heading is the title heading. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. I got it. And sculpt. Sculpting your awesome body. The body text. Body text. Yeah. I knew where he was going with it. I like it. All right. That's good. Put your face. I dig it. And he gave us a put-tooth. So, we have to return the favor. Boom. And we've got a couple stars on here. I don't know what that is. All right. So, the next one that we got was from Facebook. And this is from Melissa Meehan Baldwin. Thank you. Patuf to you. And she says, business development director at Home Care Suites. Started listening to you guys a few weeks ago and I'm hooked. I love to learn with a smile on my face. Thanks for the info about how many episodes to go back to listen to. I've been backtracking, but I was wondering how far back it would be safe to go, given how frequently the rules in the industry change. Great. Keep it up. First off, punch in the face. Thanks for tuning in. I'm glad we're helping. I like the comment. Learning with a smile. Yeah. That's kind of awesome. Yeah. I mean, we're on number 218 right now. We're about to go into the year review. So, this is actually a pretty good podcast to listen to to determine what you may want to go back and review. But a safe number, I would say at least the past. I'd say number one. Number one. And the reason is because, I mean, we do talk about. Skip number 180, though. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Skip number 180. And write us a positive review about how much our audio has improved. Well, how

it went downhill and then improved eventually. The reason is because most of the content back that time, you know, we're always giving anecdotal stories, so the stories will be different. And most of the stuff that you did back then, it's about 10%, maybe, just doesn't apply. And if it doesn't apply, it's more like it doesn't exist anymore. And I'm trying to think of an example. We may have talked about when you hovered over a SERP and the image of the web page came up. Yeah, that was an algorithm change called, it was landing page something or another. Yeah, that's not active anymore. There are a lot of things that are, okay. So most of them that aren't relevant will be really clear. Like, there's at no point where we say you should keyword stuff your title tag and that's no longer applicable, right? The things we're telling you to do in all of our podcasts, if that service or nuance still exists, are still relevant. Somewhat, right? Because, like, maybe podcasts one through a hundred, we could have very well been telling you that all links should include keyword anchor text and things of that nature. And that's not the case right now. And I think at that time, we probably didn't make the distinction of all versus, we were just saying, if you're making them, bring them in. And now, because you're listening, again, if you listen through it, you'll see the progression of, you know, what I wouldn't recommend you do is listen to the first 20 podcasts and don't listen to anything else, right? But listening from one all the way up to here will really give you a real good breadth of knowledge about search engine optimization and the evolution of it, which can be very useful. Because it may give you ideas about where it's going and it really will enforce what we continually say, which is if you're providing a good experience to the Google user, then you're going to do well. This has always been the constant, I

think. Yep. Absolutely. So, those are those two reviews. We'll get to the other two next time. And now we are doing, oh, I got a little bit of news. Just, we'll blow through this because, you know, if you've listened to our year in review podcast before, first, punch in the face for listening for so long. I know for him to hear another year. Yep. And second, you know that this is going to go fast once we get kicking. All right. So, Google is kicking out, Google Chrome is kicking out toolbars, right? And they're saying they need to be, to have a narrow and easy to understand single focus in order to stay. So, it's interesting. My first thought was to like SEM Rush, what's going to, not SEM, SEO Quake, what's going to happen to those? I think that's just, it's got enough of a narrow focus and so that's cool. Right. And then they're, and I like it because it gives me a bigger browsing window, right? I don't have this bar taking up space. Yeah. And then they're going with the pop-ups. For example, we use the, what do you want to call it, plug-in, for the coding. And it gives me an icon that I can click and I get a huge window with all sorts of options. Yep. And I prefer that than having the toolbar, so. Yeah, I agree. I think that's a great decision. In fact, it was cool. The article had an image of a browser with. The CSS toolbar. The CSS toolbar. It had an image of a graphic which, of a browser with like 20 toolbars. Yeah, my mother-in-law. Really? It was like. I was like, dude, you don't even play. Well, I know this is because my kids be over there playing games on the computer. Right, yeah. So, she got a thousand. Game toolbars, yeah. Wonder why her browser's going, you know, slow. Oh, I'm sorry. I've got to explain to you. It's my kids. That's why your browser's going so slow. Next piece

of news. Microsoft swears that Bing is not a money pit. So, the implication is if Bing were a money pit, you know, eventually they would shut it down. I actually hope that never happens. I'm a real big believer in competition. I'm really kind of disenfranchised or about the fact that Bing seems to be just trying to copy. Most of what Google's doing. And layout. So, layout has a high impact on people's utilization of a search engine. You know, so that does have some impact. But really, the search results, they're just, you know, Google's better. Every time I'm at a client's computer and they have Bing and I need to Google something, you know, I Google it real quick in that address bar. It pulls up Bing. I read the first two and I'm like, these are not relevant. I type in Google. I do the search again and I get relevant stuff on the first two. So, but they are saying it's not a money pit. Spain fined Google $1.23 million for privacy violations. Spain said that Google unlawfully collects and processes personal information. Spain apparently a little more protective about people's information than we are here. I mean, but can you be sued over that? I mean, because Google has. In Spain, you can't. Even if you made it public that you are collecting this information? Spain fines Google $1.23 million. I mean, yes. That's kind of like China can kick out Google. Well, I don't see if it'll go through. Right. No, it did. Like they, it's a court case it went through. That was the fine at the end of the game. Yeah. So, they're, they're just different. Spaniards are just different. Well, so maybe in Spain, like maybe you don't have a not provided issue. Yeah. Everyone's not provided. Yeah. You don't get to see any information. And finally, this was interesting because we've had some big credit card hacks recently. And people have gotten, I don't know, a couple million credit cards from Target. That was the one that they

mentioned. And he said, you know, credit card hacks continue and they're going to continue to continue until we get. That means keep happening. Yeah. For those of you who don't know how to do recursion. All right. And the point that they made was our credit card technology is from the 1950s. I don't know if you knew this. You've probably always seen this diners club card. Mm-hmm. Right. That was the first credit card. I did a little bit of research today. And that was the concept came up in 1950s. And that's the exact same thing we're using today. I mean, it's a little more automated, et cetera. But until we get that to a newer time period where there's actually a chip in the cards, it's encoded, and then our PIN decodes that information. Even then, they're still going to get hacked. I think that's why we're transitioning to more of a device. Google Wallet and things of that nature where I don't have to pull a card out. Yep. I don't have to swipe. Absolutely. All right. So, that is the potatoes of our podcast. Time to get into the meat. And the meat of this particular podcast is us going through the first six months of 2013, what we covered, and some brief notes that really stand out for us. So, I'm going to kick it. You want to kick it off? Mm-hmm. Go ahead. I'll kick it off. Podcast number 176. We did this one in January 28th. The prior podcasts in this year were, you know, the wrap-up of 2012. It says, Getting Penalized by Panda is the main title. It says, Join us as we talk about starting fresh this new, the algorithm updates and reviews. So, we talked about algorithm updates and reviews. Giving websites, other websites, compelling reasons to link back to us. So, that's kind of link bait is what that's called. What do you do to write an article for another website so that they'll come to you? How do you kind of address those, make those

happen? And what happens when you get a kick in the shin and penalized by the Panda algorithm change? Yeah. That was definitely content related. You know, if you had duped content and you were article spinning and participating in those kind of practices, you got kicked in the shin when Google Panda came. You got the panda, the punch in the eye, black eye. No, it was the panda. It was a black eye by panda. You got pooped on. You got pooped on by panda. Yeah. Which results in a black eye. Okay. I don't know how that works. Podcast number 177, what was that, February 4th? And that was videos on how they affect SEO. And a few of the things we talked about on that one was really, you know, how to revamp your old content. We had a 11-point checklist that talked about things of, you know, coming up with different headers, rewriting your content and things like that. Checking the content quality of your videos, right? Making sure your videos actually have decent content. Making sure that the content is valuable and relevant and that people want to watch. And lastly, how to correct the keyword placement in your videos can affect the SEO, right? Making sure you have those keywords in the title, in the tags, in the transcription of your SEO. Yeah. And remember that Google does translate your videos. So it knows what you're saying in your videos. So you should, as on your content and in your title, you should have your keywords early on in the video. Podcast number 178, around February 11th, that was, we talked about search engine. And we continued a little bit more to talk about search engine video optimization techniques, really getting SEO fundamentals right. So that's probably a good podcast to go listen to if you're kind of new to it. And website, how website architecture can affect your search engine rankings. So, you know, if you've got a good structure. Nav at the top, yeah. And if your nav is all images,

that's a problem. So go back and listen to that podcast for that information. Yeah, on number, podcast 179, I think it was February 18th, we talked about maintaining your ad campaign. And, you know, these were talking about paid stuff, right? Although focusing your SEO strategy to revolve on more than one keyword was also discussed, right? So you don't want to optimize for one specific phrase, bathroom remodeling, Houston. You want to optimize for remodeling a bathroom, bathroom remodel, and so on. And the same thing with an ad campaign, make sure you have multiple versions of the same phrase in there. Maintaining a PPC campaign on a budget. We talked about different ways you can do that. You know, you may want to restrict the amount of time it's shown, maybe limit your budget, set up a hard daily budget, and stick with it, right? And that's how you really maintain it, a PPC campaign on a budget. Cool. Podcast number 180 was March 1st. Various quirks of SEO that you may not have been aware of. So we did continue to talk a little bit about PPC. We said make sure to include negative keywords in your campaign to get the most bang for your buck. Free, DIY, those kind of should be automatic negatives. Absolutely. Various quirks of SEO that you may not have been aware of. So we had somebody who, one of our clients sent a note the other day, their old website used to have an indication of, based on the IP, what city you're in. And he wrote to us and said, hey, I'm sure that that has a positive SEO value. And it doesn't. Yeah. I mean, from an SEO perspective, you want that information to be the same. Same address, same name, same phone number. It's actually confusing to the, well, and it's confusing from this context. Every time Google, almost every time Google indexes your site, they're indexing from whatever, California, right? So every time Google indexes its IPs in California, so it assumes that that unique component,

that unique plug-in is saying California, not any other state. So absolutely not a good, you know, that's kind of a quarter. From a conversion perspective, yeah, it probably helps. Absolutely. People who visit the site, they see local contact information. They'll have a higher likelihood to convert, but from a natural ranking SEO perspective, not the best thing to do. Podcast number 181, I think that was March 8th, treating social media like you treat your content. And some of the things we talked about was like, you know, using dashes and not underscores. And these are more SEO-related things. And I think the key here, a good time to say this, is that most of these will always relate to SEO in some shape, form, or fashion. The second one was treating social media like you treat your content, right? Meaning your content needs to be refreshed. It needs to be updated. It needs to be relevant. And the same thing with social media. You need to post frequently. And when you post, make sure that it's accurate and good information. And lastly, knowing your audience, right? Know who you're talking to, how they respond, what voice you need to speak to them in. And that way you can increase your engagement. Absolutely. Podcast number 182, different methods to make your mobile site more effective. A little note, when you're using social media, we know you need to make content. And often, just content on your website, you don't make as much as content for social media. So I would encourage you to, as much content as you're making for social media, make it for your website. So that was a note on 181. On 182, make sure when you're doing social media that you're promoting content on your website, that you're driving people back to your website, or you're driving them to either sign up for something, or whatever it may be, make sure that you actually have a solid CTA and a strategy in place. We've got some quick tips about mobile SEO. We've had some

recent good discussions about, what is it, when they shrink, responsive design. That's how much I like it. And making your mobile site more effective. So check out 182. 182 for mobile, for those who are asking. Number 183, first page ranking strategies. We kind of finished up some of our mobile talk from that previous week, and we talked about really making mobile navigation easier, right? So if you're on a mobile device, it's not a desktop. And so people on a mobile device are really looking to convert, either call or go to directions, right, if you're a local place. And so you want to make that kind of stuff visible, easily accessible in the navigation for a mobile device. Other things we talked about in 183 was some strategies to help getting your page ranked on the first page. So check out 183 for that. I mean, I'm not sure what strategies we talked about, but most likely they were the usage of rich media, having original content. I mean, kind of typical things that you need to do, focusing on a niche, things like that. And lastly, using the news to boost your site. And Google is doing a lot with news feeds and the sort of ranking they give them. And so if you're in the industry, right, that relies on constant information being updated and new, then news is a good way to do that. Yeah, absolutely. All right, podcast number 184, specialized link building. This one says, you know, we started taking advantage of different SERP types. Yeah. So real quick, SERP type could be what we call Google 7-pack, A through G. It could be an organic listing. It could be a paid listing. It could be a listing that has site links. And how do you take advantage of each of those because they're different and should be handled differently? There's also video. All right. Specialized link building. And we talked from a niche business basis. What do you, how do you go about building inbound links for a niche business?

And that was podcast number 184. Yeah, 185. SEO and CVO for your e-commerce site. And so really e-commerce sites are some of the hardest sites to optimize because you normally face duplicate content issues and things like that just based off the way an e-commerce site is built. And so one of the, some of the things we talked about was improving your e-commerce SEO, making sure that when you, when your site is built, that certain things are put in place. Like product names are H1s, things like that, that, you know, all of the links have the correct titles because they're going to be duplicated on each page. So if you fix it right in the coding, then it'll fix it right throughout the entire site. And some of your e-commerce SEO stuff, search engine visitor optimization, will be things like, you know, making your buy now buttons prominent, making access to the store where people can see what's in their cart prominent. Prominent refund and shipping and contact information are easily accessed and viewable because those are the type of things that encourage people to purchase when they're on the e-commerce site. Absolutely. Podcast number 186, connecting content to your customers. By the way, I love that title, connecting content to your customers. We talk about e-commerce websites and guest checkout options. So a little bit of a continuation of the previous podcast. Remember when you're checking out or when they're in the checkout process, that's a great time to engage them socially. Definitely. They're already committed. Especially, I'm going to cut you off, but especially if you can, if your cart allows you to, let's say, tie in social activity with the promotion or discount, like like us on Facebook and get an extra percentage off or share this on whatever and get free shipping on your next order. Things like that have a huge impact and they work. Connecting your content to your customers. So this is talking about, you know, you really need to understand who your customers are. You need to understand

where they're interacting. If they hang out on Facebook, then you need to be on Facebook and connecting your content to Facebook. If they're industrial and they're on LinkedIn, you need to be connecting, you need to be active on LinkedIn and connecting that content to LinkedIn and writing content for them. I think some of this was you got to be careful on focusing content that may really feed the Google engine but doesn't service your customers very well. And we talked about why sometimes your content can fail to mesh well with your website. And again, that's like, oh, I want to go after this target keyword because, you know, one of my customers mentioned it and you didn't kind of pull back the 50,000 foot view and say, you know what, that's actually not really relevant to many of my customers. So you end up putting an article up there that just doesn't make sense. Well, not just that. Maybe you have a more corporate, more industrial type focused site, but all of your content is in first person and is warm and fuzzy. And it's not really, it doesn't mesh well with your site. Absolutely. So your readers are confused. Yep. Yeah, and that was podcast 186. Number 187, SEO survival tips. And I like this one, why it's important to engage your audience with stories. This is key for SEO because one of the factors in SEO is like time on site and stories tend to make people read your content. People agree with stories. They identify with stories. They can relate to stories. And so stories not only. Stories gets past the sales filter. Exactly. And they create time on site. People feel like they know a little bit more about you. And more importantly, they're more open. So use stories to tell your products, you know, about your product, whatever it is. Then we went on to cover the SEO survival tips. And this was likely in the midst of some pandemic penguin changes and people were talking survival. And so I think

at this point. Literally survival. Literally survival, yeah. Make sure your content's clean, right? If you got a site for the dupe content, fix it. If your coding's bad, fix it, right? More importantly, submit the Webmaster Tools so you can be told what you need to do to survive because they'll give you that message. You know, it just reminded me that, you know, we do talk about it and it is very true that if you're providing a good experience to the Google user, you would do well. And it does have a caveat, right? And it probably has more than one, but one just popped out in my mind right now, is dupe content, you know, because you just copy from a manufacturer's product page and you stick it on your page, is actually a decent Google experience, right? Well, and that's what Matt Cus was just saying. I watched a video a few, about an hour before we started the podcast and Matt Cus was saying that, that he understands that over 30% of the content on the internet is duplicate content. Right. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. That's not necessarily bad, yeah. He said it becomes bad when you begin duplicating someone else's custom content and using it as your own without the proper citations and links back. That's when it's a problem. Yeah. But when you're, you know, if it's a basketball game, if a thousand people report on it, it's going to be the same score. Right. It's going to be the same story, regardless. And so ESPN, you know, NBC, Yahoo, they all have dupe content, right? So I get it. Yeah, and in that case, it's still a good experience. And if you rewrite it, it's a good experience and it's not duplicate content. All right. Podcast 188, creating content that converts customers. And this says, EO landing pages and how they should convert. I don't know what EO stands for. We'll have to get our editor and figure out what that is on podcast number 188. SEVO. SEVO,

maybe. Landing pages. Yeah. SEVO landing pages and how they convert. Maybe SEO. There it is. It's probably SEO landing pages and how they convert. So we have a thing called SEVO, search engine visitor optimization. What do you do with the visitor after they arrive from the search engine? However you get them there. And really, we might need to revamp that because they could arrive from social. They could arrive from social. They could arrive from a flyer or a billboard or whatever. Well, the whole concept of it is really conversion optimization. Yeah, absolutely. We were focusing on search engines because that's our core. But it's really conversion optimization. Wherever they come from, what do they do once they get to your site? Exactly. Creating content that converts customers. So we talk about, I'm sure we talked about USPs. We talk about CTAs. And I just added one, convincing a business to use us or something. I've got some terminology because- Is that the CBN something or another? Yes. Okay. Yeah, because it's not just a USP, right? Unique selling proposition. It's not just a CTA, right? I can have a great CTA. Hey, do this and sign up. I can have a unique seller proposition. I've been doing it for 50 years and we've been number one for the last. Well, see, I don't think that's a unique necessarily. So unique could be we do it in overalls. Well, what I was going to say, been doing it 50 years and been number one for 50 years. So that's a credibility of the business and unique, right? And so they're really intertwined. I just think there are times where your USP doesn't convince people to do business. Well, that's the difference. So BBB. Often BBB convinces people to do business with you, but it's not a unique selling proposition. Because everybody has BBB. Anybody could be BBB, right? So I think we should add one to our USP, CTA, and whatever I've got it. And we'll have that solid for next year. Yeah, BBB, Angie's List,

badges, and all of that kind of stuff would fall under that category. And I think it's credibility of business, right? Those are credibility builders. Yep, absolutely. So we've got a unique set of propositions. CTAs. Credibility builders. Yep. All right, I can dig it. And then this one is the one you mentioned just a moment ago, having the right voice when you're addressing your audience. That's paramount. I don't understand how you've got to talk to your people. And that was 188. I mean, to give you a good example real quick, you don't hear, if you go, you know, I'm in the hip-hop. You go to MTV or whatever, and they're showing a series of hip-hop videos like DJ Sway or somebody like that. He's not being nice. He's talking urban. He's talking like a rapper. Right, right, right. Because that's the audience. Right. And so same thing with your business. Right. If you tend to deal with males over the age of 50 and you do, you know, construction or whatever it is, then that should be your voice. Right. Talking the language that they can understand. Yeah. Don't let your SEO company or your writer write it based on their line of thinking. Right. They need to make sure they're in connection with the company's image. Pay attention to the voice. Absolutely. Number 189, things that you should stop doing with your websites. And then we talked about Google's big algorithm change in 2013. That would have been the Panda and Penguin. So some of those things would be stop using dupe content, which we talked about. Stop using the meta keywords would have been another one. Yeah. Because Google announced that they're not ranking that. Some other things would have been if you were doing, I think the guest blogging was big at that time. And they kind of reduced some algorithm changes affecting that. And so those are some things you should stop doing. Some other basics we could add would be don't stop keyword stuffing if you're doing that. You know, stop

coming up with thin content pages. You got a page of content and there's like, you know, less than 100 words on there and no images, then you don't need to create that page. You need to merge it with something else or go back to the drawing board because those type of pages can hurt you. Oh, the last one was a proper capture sense. And this is kind of big. I'm glad I didn't skip over that. Make sure your capture is right. Right? Make sure that it makes sense. Sometimes I think people lose conversions because they can't figure the capture out. And we just did an article. We just read a statistic. It was something like each additional field that you add, and it includes capture, drops off like 15% of conversions. And so, you know, be mindful if you're adding something. Make sure the capture works. You know, we got some feedback from a client. I don't know what to do here. And I go, wow, our bad. That's fixed the next day. And what we like to do, I don't know if you check out some of our websites. We actually, for the most part, people aren't, you know, robots aren't coming to ours and figuring it out. And so we have just a fixed image. And the only potential risk we run is if a person comes to it, reads the image, types it into the robot, and then the robot continues. And at that point, we would change it. And if we had to, we'd go dynamic. But it's kind of a cool way to brand when you're capturing. The other thing you can do, if you guys aren't aware of it, there's a thing called a honeypot. And you can use a honeypot to protect your form. So go ahead and Google honeypot and check that out. So podcast number 190, cleaning up your website. We talked about original images versus stock images. Yes. Right, and stock images, really, they're old, boring, like people usually have seen them. Noticeable. Right. And

there's just value in being unique. So spend a little bit of extra. At a minimum, maybe do a collage with some other stock photos or trim a different, you know, trim the lower left-hand corner because no, you know, so that you don't really know where it's coming from. Itterative. Just make sure you're not, and we're going to speak from experience. Just make sure that you don't take an image that is copyrighted and try and take a section of that image and use it because we had a client a long time ago who did that and actually got a bill. Yeah. It was a pretty hefty bill. We talked about cleaning up your website. I'm sure that's carrying on from the first one. Yeah, that's, you know, making sure that you're giving a unique experience to them and also cleaning up the code. You know, are you using old stuff? Frankly, are you on WordPress? We see pops of traffic when we switch to WordPress. Thank you, WordPress. And then Google's upcoming e-commerce algorithm update. That's when Google was actually turning off their free service, which I think you can still have some free, but they also have paid in there. So, you know, if you want top placement, you've got to be paid. Talking about the Google base and the Google merchant center. And so, yeah, you really have to set that up in AdWords now. It's paid. Local search strategy tips. That was podcast number 191. We're talking local search strategy tips. And some of those were like the importance of the like and the plus one button. And this comes from cleaning up your website. That like and plus one buttons are extremely important. On all the sites we've been putting out lately that I can think of, at least the last 15 or 20, they've all, we've always included the embedded Facebook likes and Google plus features. Why? Because it's that important to give people the option to like your site or the plus one you without leaving your site. Because we

all know if you click the link and you end up on Facebook, you probably will like me. Yep. But you'll be stuck. Yep. You won't be back to my site. You're going to be stuck on Facebook scrolling. And then I'll never get to conversions. 20 minutes later. Yeah. And so we instead include them on the site. Yep. Local search strategy tips. Some of those were making sure you have the right NAP information. Your name, address, and phone should be consistent across the board. From your Google plus profile to your website to your YUP profile to your city search to your Yahoo local, Bing local, the name, address, and phone should be consistent across the board. And that will have a huge upswing in regards to your local search traffic. And lastly, managing your online reputation with some things we've covered in that. Google alerts is one of my favorite things to do. Make sure you, at the very least, you have alerts set up for your name personally, your company name, and the service you provide. And so that way you can constantly get updates about what's going on. And if they happen to mention you, then that's a great time for you to respond accordingly. Absolutely. Podcast number 192, what to watch out for on self-hosted websites. So we had a couple clients. I mean, WordPress had a hard year of it. Yeah, they got it. They were getting massive. Brute force. It was brute force attacks to try and capture, to get into WordPress. If you have admin as your login for WordPress, change it today. Change it now. Put this podcast on pause and go change it now or just put it on another window, hopefully you've got. But change it. What else did we talk about? We talked about, well, we actually really continued that discussion because it was such an important discussion. There are ways to actually secure the login so that it counts how many times you log in. And if it logs in, if somebody tries to log

in too much, you block them. You block their IP address. And we put that in and actually had some clients who had to call us and say, hey, I'm blocked. Well, I'd rather have you blocked than have to deal with the fact that some people got in and had some challenges. Yeah, you should remember your username and password. Yep. You wouldn't be blocked. And these are self-hosted situations. So in a self-hosted situation, I know one of the things that I do like about HostGator is they automatically upload, update the WordPress. Now, I'm a little leery about it because if we've done anything custom, you've got to monitor that. One thing that you can say, though, is that you're up to date. And you really do need to keep your WordPress installations up to date. Up to date. And that was podcast number 192. Yeah, so 193, we talked about AdWords advice. And the first thing was WordPress plug-ins. And we were likely promoting our replace and refer plug-in. Yep. So if you're doing AdWords, right, it's sometimes after the click. So they've clicked on your paid ad and out on your site. And if you have a goal set up for, let's say, a quote form being filled out, then great. You can track that. But if they called and you're not tracking the phone call, then you really don't know how you got that conversion. So one of the things we did was create a plug-in, works with WordPress, and it's based on the refer. If they come from AdWords, show this phone number. If they come from Facebook, show this phone number. And it shows the phone number for the duration of their visit on your site. And so even if they visit multiple pages, the phone number that they see is always that dedicated phone number. And so that way you can see which keywords, which set of keywords worked for a particular ad, right? Second one was AdWords advice and proper practices for constantly managing and updating it. I think it's

all about timing. Set yourself a schedule. Understand that, you know, certain things you need to look for in every account. Like, is it spending right? Check your negatives. Check the types of clicks you're getting. That sort of deal. Is your budget running out too quickly? Those sort of deals. Are you targeting the correct area? Are you using negatives? These are kind of basics that as long as you're doing right, then you can effectively manage your AdWords campaign. Excellent. Podcast number 194, things to include in website audits. So we talked about using AdWords to increase branding and ROI. So here's a situation. AdWords, as you should know, covers also display networks. So you can display banners for branding purposes. We tend to recommend that if you're going to do a massive launch of something online, like an app or something, that you choose a region. You choose a region like Houston or Chicago or New York or L.A. And you spend your budget there so that your billboards are supporting your print media, are supporting your radio ads, are supporting your search campaign, and showing your banner ads. And also make sure that you're using remarketing because that's just an incredibly powerful tool. Things to include in a website audit. So there's a lot of things to include. I mean, it covers the basics. So if you're in a situation, you've had your website for a while and you don't know where you're at, you should probably go listen to podcast number 194. And then we gave you some tools and tips on checking external backlinks. Yeah. Open Site Explorer is one that comes to mind. There are plenty of others. But you did, well, Webmaster Tools now, frankly, they'll give you the latest list of all your backlinks. And that's the best place to check on who's linking to you because those are the ones that Google recognizes. Plus, if you've been flagged for a manual action, it will tell you there. It will tell you that. Definitely. And lastly, which I think this is

July, July 29th, keeping track of site metrics. This is podcast number 195. And maintaining your sitemap for the Googlebot. You need to make sure that your sitemap and not only that but your robots file and everything is in place and configured correctly. So that way the Googlebot and other bots can index your site the correct way. What you don't want to happen is they can't find your pages or your sitemap sending them to pages that don't exist or something like that. Then that's a problem, right? And which will ultimately affect your site metrics. And then we talked about some tips for landing pages, right? Landing pages should, we're under the belief that landing pages should always give the ability to convert. There should be some sort of action on that page. The content on that page should be optimized, whether this is a paid landing page or an organic landing page because an optimized page just is better. It's cheaper if it's PPC. It's cheaper, yeah. Your quality score will eventually decrease. So make sure you do that with your landing pages. And then lastly, writing for the user, not the search, which kind of goes back to what we've always said. As long as the user is having a good experience. And if you're writing for that user, like we said earlier, in the right voice, using the right tone, that sort of deal, then that user will have a good experience and return your search results will rank better. But when you begin writing for the search, the user doesn't have a good experience. Google recognizes that. And things like Panda don't help you rank well because of that. So there's two things, right? Writing for user, writing for the search. You've got to have both of them in consideration. You should write for the user and keep the search in mind. You shouldn't write for the search and keep the user in mind. Again, that's worth repeating. You should write for the user and keep the search in mind. The other thing

on landing page, what we mean by landing page is every page. Every page. Every page should be a landing page, all right? If you optimize hours and painstakingly design your front page, and if you're doing SEO properly, you're probably getting some traffic that's not landing on your front page. Make sure those are landing pages. Make them convert. Make sure they have the CTA, the USP, and the COB, credibility of the business. Got it. Now I remember it. All right. I think that's it. There may be another one. All right. So that is a half of 2013 in review. It's actually a little more than half. So we'll get the rest of it covered in the next podcast. Do we have any blank stare? Nope. Just a Merry Christmas. Yeah. Merry Christmas to everyone. Punch in the face to all of our podcast listeners. Punch in the face. Special punch in the face to David Hunter. Appreciate the fruit, man. We've been eating it all morning. Thank you for tuning in. You're a great client. We really appreciate it. Yeah. I really appreciate that. And a really big punch in the face to Santa Claus. Yeah. Hey, good. I got one laugh. Mr. Chris Kringle. All right. Thank you for tuning in to our podcast. Tune in next time for 2013 Year in Review Part 2. Until then, my name is Chris Burris. So bye-bye for now. Slightly raised up eyebrow, high brow. Headed my way. Cross.