55 Tips for SEO - #seopodcast 125

Hi, and welcome to the SEO podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I don't even celebrate anymore. I just knock it out of the park every time. You got it now. You got it now. You are listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. I am Charles Lucio, Internet Marketing Specialist. We are really excited to be doing our show today. You know what? I forgot last paper. You know what? Let me step into my office, and I will get our last sheet of paper for our last tip. Yeah, we are the most popular Internet marketing podcast on iTunes, and that's because of you. You right there, you right there, and the rest of y'all who are watching and listening. We really appreciate you tuning in. Thank you for tuning in, and I'm going to keep doing this and stalling until Chris gets back because I'm pretty good at what I do. Here we go. So our tip from our last podcast was make sure your PPC manager slash team has SEO expertise. Yes, yes. It's never been more important than now for your PPC management team to have SEO expertise. Go back and listen to the last podcast, which was 124, to figure out why that is true. Exactly, because, I mean, basically, Google is now ranking the quality of your landing pages. So if you're doing PPC, then chances are you're creating landing pages. Well, Google wants that landing page basically to be optimized. And so whoever is managing your PPC definitely needs to know how to optimize that page. Yeah, so go back. Well, I guess now they don't have to listen. Yeah, they'll listen. They'll listen anyway. Anyway, hey, we got a great review. Do not forget, we are your friendly local neighborhood top position snatchers, where our mantra is Don't be a douche. Don't be a douche. You've got to go back and listen to some of our podcasts. In fact, let's get right into this. I'm excited. No tear. I don't need

a tear tattoo. That must be an iTunes review. It's an iTunes review. Yeah. The title is Great Info Real Guys. Lots of Fun. Bill Mack 444. It's actually Bill McKenna. He goes, I did not get it at first, but kept listening. I'll be honest, sometimes we don't get it. Yeah. You've got to keep listening, too. Yeah. These guys are having a lot of fun teaching and sharing with people ideas and concepts that they have honed in the trenches. This is not theory. It's not a hobby. This is what they do. Not only do they share their tips and secrets, but they also offer people free website evaluations from an SEO standpoint. Awesome. Great. All you've got to do is go to our website, site e-webstyle.com. On the right, there's a form. What's that form? Free website. Website. No. Analysis. I was going to say analysis. Free website analysis form. Fill that out. Submit it. I'll get it. Chris will get it. We'll personally evaluate your website. Let you know what's wrong with it, what's right with it, what you can't improve. And we do it free. It's time to write off. It's all free. It's part of our other podcast, our Unknown Secrets of SIVO Website Analysis. SIVO stands for Search Engine Visitor Optimization. Bill continues saying, when I said I did not get it at first, I mean some of the inside jokes. But after a short time listening, you catch up quick. Good. We like to thank our audience as quick. One of the things I really like is when they really are stumped with something, they will admit it and look into it further rather than making up a lame answer. Well, at least that's how it feels to him. Yeah, you're right. Yeah. I don't know. I'm not going to tell you something wrong. I've got a big thank you to give to the audience after we finish this review. I love the blank stares. You have to tune in to see what that is. But if you have any interest

in SEO and want to learn from professionals while having a few laughs, then look no farther than this place. Bill McKenna will share a website after some more work. So, he's like, yeah, I don't know where to get it. Man, Bill, appreciate the review. I really do punch in the face to you for that. Boom. Send us a link, podcast at e-webstyle.com. Send us a link to your site. We'll be glad to do an analysis and show you some link love. Unlike a lot of other venues, we actually want you to get distracted right now. Wherever you're watching or listening to this, hopefully you're at a computer or you've got your phone, pull it out, and tweet that you're listening to SEOpodcast125. What's the hashtag? Hashtag is the SEOpodcast125. Hashtag SEOpodcast125. I can change that. The big thank you that I want to give you guys is, you know, it's really your questions that cause us to have to research and do a little bit more work. And frankly, without this podcast and without you guys submitting those questions, you know, we would probably stay, you know, right on the edge of being able to do a good job and not really having an expansive knowledge of SEO. It's the fact that you guys push us that really push us to expand our own knowledge. So, man, big punch in the face to every single one of our listeners, which is apparently about 2,500 to 4,000 downloads per week. So, yeah, keep it up. Thank you guys so much. I already mentioned the tweet, right? So they should be tweeting right now that they're listening. And tag us in it, at eWebStyle. Yep. Since Chris didn't tell y'all how y'all can stalk us. Oh, yeah. There is a way or two or three that you can stalk us. One of them is facebook.com. Slash eWebStyle. Another one is twitter.com. Slash eWebStyle. You also have youtube.com. Slash eWebStyle. Slash eWebStyle. And then there's an email, podcast at e-webstyle.com. I got you. You paused there. No, that

was a big pause on purpose. That fooled you. There's the dramatic pregnant pause. All right. A little bit of news. Larry Page vows, I love this word, automagical results with Google+. Yeah, I saw that. Automagical. Like, that's just a wonderful word in general. I'm not sure what that word means. Yeah, I'm not either. It sounds just great. He says, 100 new features have been added in the first 90 days of Google+. There are 40 million users on Google+, in the first 90 days. And the automagical, it says it's going to take into account your experiences and what you do on your Google+, account and who you interact with, to judge what results that you're probably going to want to see. Interesting. I think that's pretty cool. Can I get on the soapbox for a minute? Just for a minute? Yeah, absolutely. All right. So check this out, Larry Page. Since you're probably using Google Alerts, this will be transcripted. So hopefully you'll see the transcript and get an email and then get this next statement I'm about to say. Google+, I really would appreciate the, if you guys could be a little bit more efficient in making Google+, work with Google Apps accounts. With your other Google products. Yes. I mean, is that really too much to ask? I mean, really? Yeah. I mean, because what makes it worse is that I have a Google+, account with a Google Apps account. And I can't use it. I used to use it. Now I can't. Well, I can't sometimes. Like, it just depends if you, the random day that you remember the order or that the order works where... Yeah, I have to log into it a certain way. Like, I can't log into my email on Google Apps and then try to go to Plus. Right. And it won't work. I have to log into Google. Right. Then, instead of activating the Gmail account that it keeps trying to force me to do, which I don't want because I'm already... my app is a Google

account. Right, right. Go to a new tab and go to G Plus. And it works. And then it works. So there is actually some weird workaround. In Firefox. In Firefox. Not in Chrome. And so, yeah, y'all making it real hard to use G Plus, man. Real talk. So, I like to see the new features. I like to do a Hangout. So, come on, man. Yeah. We can't do it unless you open that up. And frankly, really what they're going to need to do is have the ability to transfer Google Plus accounts. Because if you're at a company and you set up your first Google Plus account on that company email and you leave that company, there should be some methodology where you can take that G Plus account with you. With you, yeah. And that's probably what they're wrestling with. Because there's a lot of nightmare, I think, nightmare scenarios that can occur. Oh, you got it. Okay. True. I thought I was going to have to go back in my office. And that can take forever. That's an awesome name. So, I'll punch you in the face to do it again. Yeah. Thanks, Bill. That was a great review. Okay. So, we got an article here that's interesting. It's an old article, like three years, three and a half years ago, April 08, from Search Engine Journal. Guy Richard wrote it. And it looks like it's a ton of tips, 55 different tips for SEO. So, the reason we had this article today is we kind of want to breeze through these, if we can. Probably won't complete the entire list. But, curious to see what has changed in our industry from three years ago. Three years. So, how much of a difference has three years made? Because we do get comments in our reviews about how, you know, we're up to date, we're talking social, we're talking things that, you know, we're talking G+. Well, if you're listening to a podcast that ended, I don't know, three years ago, because there are a

few, they weren't talking about G+. Yeah, they weren't talking G+. Facebook wasn't even that heavy. Now, it's part of every conversation. Let's see. If you absolutely must use JavaScript drop-down menus, image maps, or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow. First off, he used spiders. Yes. Yes. And we all know that they're actually called monsters. Yeah. Rawr. And they make a noise. So, when your website gets hit, you hear this little rawr, and the Google monster has crawled, spidered your... Why has rawr become the definitive sound for monsters? That's a ball. Like, one day, it was like, yeah, Google monster. And he was like, rawr. He's like, yeah, I did hear that. But basically, I almost disagree with this now. I think it doesn't apply. Yeah, most JavaScript down menus, especially drop-downs, are very SEO-friendly. They can be easily indexable. And they rank well. So, now Flash, on the other hand... Although, and I think in our last podcast, we mentioned it, we found a site that's all Flash, that's on the first page of Google. It's a really obtuse search term, but, you know, yeah, whatever. It's on the first page. So, that's... Number two, content is king. So, be sure to have good, well-written, and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or key phrase. Check. Yeah, that's still true. Three, if content is king, then links are queen. Build a network of quality backlinks, losing your keyword phrase as the link. Remember, if there is no good logical reason for that site to link to you, you don't want the link. Yeah. Check. Yeah. Well, and, you know, I always like to make this point, because people say content is king. There is something that is actually more important than the king. Keywords, keywords, keywords. Keywords, keywords, keywords. So, we'll see if he mentions that in any one of these 55 points. Yeah. Well, I mean, even there, he said, you know, well-written and unique content that focuses on your

primary keyword or key phrase. Yeah. Number three was, oh, number four. Don't be obsessed with page rank. Page rank. It's your rapper fans. Yeah. Shout out to y'all. It is just one itsy-bitsy part of the ranking algorithm. A site with a little PR can actually outrank one with a higher PR. Well, and, you know, Google's even pulled, since that article's actually pulled PR, they don't, I think they only update it every six months or something, and they're claiming that there's less emphasis on it, so, yeah. Yeah, I think they're shifting more to trust rank and things of that nature. Let's see. Be sure you have unique keyword focus title tag on every page of your site, and if you must have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a major brand name that is a household name, your business will, your business name will probably get few searches. Yeah. Title tags, I mean, that's cut and drive, that's what it is. Main keyword, and especially on the homepage, put your primary one that your company is focusing on. Sell pages, then title those appropriately. And, yeah, if you don't have to put your company name, then don't. If you find it, if it's that necessary, too, then, yes, put it at the end after a hyphen or a, what's that called, a bar? Uh, uh, uh, yeah, the straight up and down bar? I was going to say a shark pin. Yeah, the shark pin, yeah. Uh, some sort of, um, rack, a pipe. A pipe? It's called a pipe. Really? It actually is. I never knew what that was called. Yeah. I'm called it to the bar. Because, I think that comes from Unix. You use that symbol to actually pipe stuff into, like, uh, after that, you would put a text file. So, you would put that straight up and down symbol, and then the name of the text file, and so, if it had results, it would stick them in there. With pipe, hmm?

Sound of a suspect. I'm going to call it a bar. All right, so, uh, I think we just, we just broke Bill's trust, where, uh, he says it doesn't look like we make up some stupid thing. No. I think it is called pipe. Okay, uh, let's see here. Number six, fresh content can improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines. I think even more important now, uh, you know, after Panda, it's fresh new content that, that gives a lot more, has a lot more value. Yeah. Uh, than, than it did. So, yeah, that one actually went up. Mm-hmm. And, and I'll, to add to that, I would say, um, spread that content out. So, for example, if you update a, uh, a page on your site, um, you should probably tweet about it, Facebook it, and share it on Dig and all these other social sites because, uh, Google's ranking, you know, that, that's coming into effect now. They, they're looking at how many times this content has been shared to, to, to, to determine where it should be ranked at on the page. Well, and the other thing is, if you, maybe you have a content writer that you use and they're part-time or something and they crank out, like, 20 articles, don't post 20 articles in a day, um, you know, stretch, stretch them out over a week. 20 articles, yeah, that would take, yeah, a month or three months. A couple months. So. A month a week. Yeah. Uh, number eight. Number seven. Be sure, be sure links to your site and within your site, use your key phrase. In other words, if your target is blue widgets, they're linked to blue widgets instead of click here. He actually said blue widgets? I wonder if he's a podcast listener. He didn't say one-on-one widgets. He didn't say one-on-one widgets. He said blue widgets. Yeah. That's, yeah. Focus on search phrases, not single

keywords, and put your location in your text. Our Palm Springs store, not our store, to help you get found in local searches. Even more important, with Google focusing on, on local. So now when you search from a particular region, uh, Google can identify that IP address is where you're at, and, and adds that into the relevancy depending on the search term. So if the search term is like viscosity, there's no need for, uh, any localization. If the search term is, you know, plumber, then people are obviously looking for, typically looking for something that's, uh, regionalized. Local. Definitely. Um, don't design your website without considering SEO. Make sure your web designer understands your expectations for organic SEO. Doing a retrofit on your shiny new flash-based site after it is built won't cut it. Spiders can call ticks, not flash or images. We, we build them from the, from the ground up. So our focus, and in fact, uh, we tend not to do just websites anymore. When we do just a website, we really kind of, uh, we do less effort on the SEO side. So when we know somebody's going to do SEO, then we really pull back and do a lot more effort to make sure that that website's designed. It's got a page for every major keyword set, really, if you will. And, um, and, and that, that, that the navigation incorporates the, the general premises of SEO. So it makes sense that you may have a web designer who hasn't done that. Um, one, because it's not their expertise, so they may not even know what they need to be doing. And two, if you're not going to do SEO, it's a lot of effort that really isn't going to be valuable. You can, you can throw up great content, and if you're not working on anything else, you're probably not going to, you're not going to show on the search engines. So, you know, why should your designer spend another five hours, you know, making things exactly the way they should

be, if you were to do SEO, if you're not going to do SEO. Yeah, yeah, pay them. Yeah. And, and by the way, do SEO. Yeah, exactly. A website is, we say a website is an expense. Internet marketing, including SEO, is an investment. Definitely. With an ROI, if it's done right. Definitely. Number 10, use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, alt tags, and even your domain name. Okay, that sounds like number 8. Number 11, check for, um, canonicalization issues, www and non-www domain names. Decide what you want to use, and 301 redirect the other to it. In other words, if the domain name is www.domain.com as your preference, then http code and slash slash domain.com should point to the www version. With a 301 redirect. Yeah. And that's easy to do with an HTC access. The reason you do that is because Google sees those as individual pages. Yeah, no due content. It's potential to have, well, and link juice, right, is the other issue. It's potential to have, um, three pages that represent your homepage. www.domain, uh, domain.com, and then domain.com slash index, HTML, and then www.domain.com slash index.html. Google sees all of those pages, their different URLs, as different pages. So, if you've got inbound links to the first one, inbound links to the second one, and inbound links to the other two, um, really you're spreading your link juice. It's spreading your link juice kind of thing. Yeah. And if you do a 301 redirect, Google will say, hey, that homepage actually has a lot more link juice than, uh, the four ones. It actually is this one, and all links should go to that one. Yeah. Yeah, make perfect sense. Um, check your link, check the link to your homepage throughout your site. Is index, HTML, appended to your domain name? If so, you're splitting your links. Yeah. Okay. Ditch the index, or default, or home, or whatever it is, and link back to your domain name. I'll co-sign it at, um, index is okay if you redirect them

to it, but I would just ditch it, and just make .com, and stop there, be the homepage. Yep. And by the way, I don't know if you know this. It's better to include the slash, and marginally better, because the slash, actually, if the slash isn't there, so you do, you know, ewebstyle.com, when you send that to the server, it actually has to come back and say, did you mean slash, and then it goes back and says, yes. .com, slash. Yeah, there's another hit, uh, server hit that occurs if you leave off the slash, and when you add the slash, it doesn't do that second server hit. So would that mean adding the slash increases page load, huh? It should, marginally it should, yeah. Let's see. Number 13, frames, flash, and ajax all share a common problem. You can't link to a single page. It's either all or nothing. Don't use frames at all, and use flash and ajax sparingly for best SEO results. Yeah, flash and ajax are, you really want to use those on forms, and, um, and, and, and actual software. So not your website, not the marketing aspect of your website, uh, but the software that you, you know, maybe you've got. You know, we're working on a couple components for SEO tools, and those tools may be done in ajax, because it's not, it doesn't make sense to have those as multiple pages that have the opportunity to draw traffic. Like, it makes sense to have it all on one page. We'll probably get to this first page. Okay. Um, let's see here. Number 14, your URL file extension doesn't matter. You can use .html, .htm, .asp, .php, et cetera, and it won't make a difference as far as your SEO is concerned. Um, I'll co-sign it there. Yeah, I think there was a time where it did matter, where Google was a little apprehensive about parsing a .asp page, or, or dynamically, what it knew was a dynamically created page. Because it knew it could be, uh, dynamically created, and

you could get into infinite loops. Uh, so it just figured out a way to make sure that that doesn't happen, and then it's, it's no longer fearful of the, uh, dynamically created webpages. I like this one. Number 15, you got a new website you want spidered? Submitting through Google's regular submission form can take weeks. The quickest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site. Yep. I totally co-sign that. Um, sites that have, especially if you get a link from a site that has a, a higher PR, uh, site that refreshes their content, uh, frequently, and it's relevant, uh, especially to your industry, um, yeah, you're more likely to get your site indexed by Google a lot faster than, than going through webmaster tools and, and submitting it. Yep. Uh, last one for today. Um, if your site content doesn't change often, your site needs a blog, because search spiders like fresh text. Blog at least three times a week with good, fresh content to feed those little crawlers. Three times a week is a bit much, especially if you're a plumber or, you know, um, some other service-based industry that's really looking to blog just for the sake of having fresh content. Um, I think once a week is good, um, maybe even twice a month, you know, but what I would add to that is not only blog about it, but, um, like I said earlier, spread that content out. Facebook. Facebook, you tweet it, put that content in a newsletter. Yep. You know, and then push it out there. And that way you can build links back to your site, spread the content out, and then, um, and then keep it fresh. Just, just to make the point, I may end up breaking our podcast, because our podcast, we transcribe it, put it on our blog, and I typically break it up into three sections with three kind of keyword-rich titles, and, uh, and I usually just post them, post all of those on

Monday. Um, we can break that up into three sections, and that will have value. We're even learning from ourselves. Yeah, we'll do it, and then tell you how it works. See how, how different it is. Um, excellent. That's all good stuff. So, we've got, so just, uh, just to wrap that up, um, Yeah, that was one through? One through 16, and that was Richard Burkhart, uh, Search Engine Journal, 2008. Uh, so that's kind of cool to kind of go in retroactively and see, uh, what's changed. And, um, cool, cool. We'll get to the rest of that in the next podcast. Yeah. So, oh, yeah. Blank Stair. I saw you, you did the head tilt there. Yeah, that was pretty cool. So, check it out. Blank Stair at RIM. Research in motion. RIM. Yeah, RIM. RIM and NIM. Yeah, research in motion, man. Blackberry. Like, really? They shut down. I take that back. They didn't shut down. They, what happens is, I read the article in New York Times. They had a, a core switch from their main networking data center. Right. They crashed. Right. And so, New York Times compared it to the Lucille Ball scene where they was trying to wrap up the jumpsuit. Yeah. And so, all of a sudden, they lost five continents. Five continents. Five continents. Five out of seven. Yeah. So, Europe went down first. And, and why, all of a sudden, data kept coming in. People texting, surfing, doing what they do on the Blackberries. And, all of a sudden, the whole infrastructure shut down. Wow. Yeah. And it took them, like, two days. Wow. So, it sucks for you, Blackberry. Especially, already losing market share. I thought, you know, I was thinking that there's, like, one engineer who was, like, tweaking some crazy. Like, man, I can probably speed this up by .0001% if I just put in this line of code. Ooh. And then he's taking a lunch. Because I know a guy who actually works on Cisco routers. And if you, in, in, in, in, in

Cisco routers, you actually, like, you apply something, but it doesn't save it. So, when you reboot, it comes back up with the old settings. So, he'll apply something, take down a network, reboot it, and leave. What happened? No, it's fine now. Oh, because he's rebooting. When he comes back, it's back to the old settings. And, like, no, I'm at lunch. We're doing, ah, everything's good. Wow. Yeah. Somebody. Oh, it makes it worse. It makes it worse. They don't want to issue out any financial. Projections or impact, potentially. Well, to customers. People are asking, what sort of payback can we get? Oh, yeah. Due to the lack of service. Yeah. Yeah. So, they're dodging that question. It's like a day. Yeah, man. Two days. With all their subscribers, that's a ton of money. Yeah. In terms of what they're raking in, it's nothing, because it's only two out of 30 days. But, wow. Yeah. Yeah, man. Month-free, man. At least a free something. You know, a lot of, and we were talking about this, most people use the RIM device for, what is the technology? Oh, BBM. BBM, which is BlackBerry Mobile Messaging, I guess. That's two M's. BlackBerry Messenger. Didn't you say BBM? Oh, BBM. Okay. I'm like, double-letter dyslexic. I don't even know how that works. Yeah, it's the same way. As I was saying, it's like, where's the berry? Shouldn't it be two B's? Why is it two M's? Anyway, a lot of people in Latin America and here in the States actually communicate through that BBM service, so they were out of touch. I know Nick here in the office, he wasn't able to get photos of his new baby over to the family, so they were all, no, that was the baby. You have been listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. That is because of you, big punch in the face to you. We really appreciate you. On so many levels. Do not forget, right now, we're wrapping up the podcast. Just tweet. I just finished listening to...

Hashtag SEO podcast 125. Yeah, 125. Wow, we're getting up there. It could probably be a new one. I think I want to include E-Web in the hashtag somehow. Okay, cool. Yeah, we could do E-Web SEO 125 or something like that? It's kind of long. We'll work it out. You are the Twitter expert. He's the one who has Chuck. I'm the one who has E-Web style. All right. Thank you guys for listening. Until the next podcast, bye-bye for now.