9 Bad SEO Habits to Leave in 2017 by Mindy Weinstein #402

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebResults. My name is Matt Bertram, your PPC specialist and your 2018 expert. We had WebResults Rebels. It rebels. Results Rebels. All right. So it is 2018. We are your results rebels, and it's time to do our first podcast of the year. A punch in the face to Manny and Mark for tuning in. This is podcast number 402. As always, we have a tip. We do have a new... Fireworks. Fireworks. 402. Happy New Year. Okay. Sorry, guys. Yeah. As always, we do have a tip from our previous podcast, and that tip is... The tip is spend as much time organizing your content strategy as promoting and creating it. Yeah. So we all, I mean, we've talked a number of times in our podcast about how important it is to organize and create your content, excuse me, to promote and promote your content. Organizing it is just as important. It's really that overall strategy that guides everything in terms of promoting your content. So make sure you spend enough time organizing it. I mean, the preparation, right? Going into it is your strategy of what you're putting together is the most important things. It's you've got to understand what you're trying to achieve to put that plan forward to build it. Absolutely. Subscribe, follow. Boom! All right. So let's get to our content. Excuse us if we're a little bit, you know, disorganized. We haven't done a podcast in a week and a half. I want to talk about this review we got. We did, in fact, get a review. Fantastic. This is from Jonas Henriksen. And it is, of course, five stars. It's like a great show. Always getting value from listening. Thanks. Keep up the good work. Greetings from Denmark. I love it. That's cool. Denmark. That's good. I should know some phrases. What's hello in Denmark? I should know that. Yeah, okay. But I don't know it either. I actually don't. Actually, I have some

friends living in Denmark. Right now? Yeah, that moved back. Right. Are you secretly having them submit five-star reviews from me? Let's see. So if you enjoy the, so if this is the first time listening to the podcast, howdy. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you for joining us. If you have listened to this podcast before, then you know what we're not going to skip this time. Oh. So we run a contest, and it happens each and every week. And this actually was two weeks. And we're going to start running some new contests on social media. Very soon, right? So check that out. We're looking for a lot of engagement. I think that we're not going to have a problem hitting our target. The way it works is if we get 10 shikos, what's a shiko? A share, a like, or a follow. If we get 10 shikos and a review, then we skip, actually, we move this section to tell you how to leave us a review to the end. And also, like, how to connect with us to the end. In this case, we got the review. We did not get the 10 shikos. Come on! We have, although, made it very easy for you to leave us a review. All we want you to do is leave us a review at Yelp, and we've made it easy to get to our Yelp profile by going to eWebResults.com slash, Yelp. Yelp. It's not challenging. Or Google+. I would like some Google+. Some more Google+. Reviews? Yeah, because Google+, if you like it and you're signed in, they'll actually show up in some of the ads. Oh, okay. Yeah, because we've seen that before. So, if you could also leave us a review, just go to eWebResults.com slash G+. That will take you to, really, the page is like, leave a review now. Yeah, and almost everybody's signed into Google. I know if you don't have a Yelp account, you've got to log in and all that. So, Google+, if you

can't leave us a Yelp review. Please do. And we will say, like, if you're a Yelp reviewer, you review regularly, you know the value of Yelp reviews, and so, yes, please do us that solid and put that there. Now, the other thing that we need is shikos, and the way you get shikos is you share, like, or follow on our profiles on these platforms. You can get there by going to Facebook.com slash, They've got to tell people, though. Probably everybody's already followed. Okay, well, tell people to follow. Yeah, tell people. Tell people to follow. Because you are assuming you have already followed us. Yes, that's why. That's why we're not getting them. So, you need to help spread the word. So, don't just follow us. Share the word. Share it. Share it. And what you could share in an email or a tweet or whatever, Yes. And we need to talk about tweets here in just a second is you could go to Facebook.com slash, EWebResults. Instagram.com slash, EWebResults. Twitter.com slash, EWebResults. LinkedIn.com slash company slash, EWebResults. And then finally, EWebResults.com slash, EWebResults. No, yeah. YouTube. I know. That one's tricky. That guy's tricky. I always get the YouTube one. It always gets me. Yeah. So, please go ahead and go out there and share those. See, I saw that and I was like, that's what it is. That guy didn't really point. You didn't really point. Yeah. I was pointing. Look. Like Instagram. You're like, we've already done that one. EWebResults. That's where we're at. Hey, if you do have some sort of electronic advice, I want to talk about the article we're going to cover today. By the way, you're listening to this. You need to make sure that you are connected to us next week. Yes. Next week. Next week is what? 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, the 12th. The 12th. I think that's right. Yes. On the 12th, we are actually going to be interviewing on this podcast, his name is Loren Baker. Yes.

You might have heard of him. He was one of the founders of Search Engine Journal. He's actually referenced in the article that we're covering today. What a coinkity. It is amazing how that works. But what we would like you to do discussing this article, this article is actually by Mindy Weinstein, Nine Bad SEO Habits to Leave in 2018. Man, I don't know about you, but I saw a lot of posts on Facebook that were like, I'm just ready to leave 2017 behind. And I'm like, yeah, there's lots of things in 2017 I'm glad to leave behind. And I feel like we left them solidly in June. And so I'm happy. The last half was really exciting for us. But here's nine bad. Did we have like the biggest week? Week in company history. In company history? Right before, yeah. Right before the new year. Just cares. Yeah. So it's pretty exciting. So Mindy Weinstein, if you're in a position to go ahead and tweet, tweet Mindy Weinstein. That's W-E-I-N-S-T-E-I-N. And also include hashtag SEO podcast. Tag us in it, at bestSEOPodcast, at eWebResults. You can mention that this is podcast number 402. Yeah. Two. Two. Two. Two. I feel like we should have been one back. Then this would have been the first one. One of the new year. The new year. Now you're confusing people. So if you like this podcast, enjoy what we offer. You probably will like our five online marketing mistakes that can tank your business. And of course, how to avoid them. All you need to do is go to eWebResults.com slash SEO tip. Give us your email. We'll get you that PDF file. It's amazing. And we're going to add a new one very shortly by the new y'all. All right. So I have only one piece of news. I just thought this was interesting. Internet Association. So this is like a lobbying group for like the big ones like Facebook and Google, et cetera. They file a lawsuit against the FCC for repealing the net neutrality. We're glad

that that was happening. Can somebody check Facebook and see if we're still there? I think we're still there. I don't know. We'll make sure. Manny, can you confirm we're still there? I'll say from a news standpoint, all my news. Well, I did read five books. Yeah. Okay. Only five. I read five books over the break. He's just a proliferant. He comes in like, good night, Matt. And he comes in the next day. I read like four books. Yeah. That does happen. But all the news that I've been following lately is Bitcoin. Yeah. So I don't have any internet news, but Bitcoin. Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, hashtag university, all of that. But the five books were internet marketing books because no one's written a Bitcoin book that I know. Well, we do have a client who's Bitcoin from university. Yes. We're going to. Yeah. So, yeah. We've got some. They just did a profit plan with us. A problems to profit plan. By the way, we didn't mention this. If you're interested in a website analysis for your business, and then ultimately that will lead you into what we call our from problems to profit plan. It wasn't a deep dive, but people didn't like it. We got some market feedback. It's still hard. I'm starting to call it a profit plan. So we do the profit plan. It's great. It's this great strategy session. We fix problems for it. We give you actionable step. And then that moves into you becoming a client with us. So we have actually a Bitcoin university that we're going to be moving into a full client. So I'm excited about that. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. So just if you want that website analysis, go to eWebResults.com and click the free website analysis, and that'll kind of stick you down that path. You'll get great information along the whole way. We're actually getting testimonials like at each step. And each step, they're like, that was awesome. That was great. It was like a coaching session, et cetera. And the first step in

that is free. So take advantage of that. And then the next step is phone on and off. Well, we say it's a $1,500 value just because we could, you know. Well, it's actually, you know, risk-free. Yeah. Because if you buy any monthly service, we apply it to that. And it's a great surprise for people because they feel like there's so much value. And then they get a discount when they start. It's awesome. So it's worth a lot. Absolutely. Yeah. All right. Let's jump into this article again by Mindy Weinstein. Nine bad SEO habits to leave in 2017. She said that these are just SEO tactics that just plain don't work and worse can get your website penalized. So you don't want to do them. Number one is creating one page for each keyword variation. Yes, you used to do this. Yes, we've done this in the past when it was the right way to... I did. ...when it was the right strategy. I did do this. Yes. We've done this hundreds of times, possibly thousands of times. We do not do it anymore, right? In fact, Barry Schwartz, right, of Search Engine Land fame, Rusty Brick fame, he actually talked about the Google Maccabees updates and addressed this particular issue about keyword variation. So you want to go check an article about him. He said he looked at a lot of people submitting pages to him, and one common issue was related to local landing pages, city name service A, and then city name service B, and what a challenge that was. Mostly, remember, we talk about providing a good experience to the Google user, and it's just not that good of an experience. What kind of content are you going to put on a page that's just SEO Houston, and a page that's just SEO PPC, and a page that's just SEO, I mean, Houston PPC, and then, you know... I mean, when I did it for all 48 states, it was tough with duplicate content. Yeah. A lot of dupe content. Really, what

he says, and this is the highlight point of this, Mindy says, you need to have content that is valuable to your users. Remember, as long as you're providing a great experience to the Google user, Google will look favorably upon you. Number two is aggressive... Did you have anything to add? No, I feel like that's true. Yeah, that's true. That's true. We got the check of approval from the results of Rebel. Aggressive link building. So, wait a minute. It's interesting, because we use the phrase aggressive link building, but you've got to be careful with what aggressive link building means to you, right? It's just bad links. Like, get good links, do good outreach, and you'll be fine. So, it's not just that. When she's talking about aggressive link building, she's talking about, oh, I don't know, go on to Fiverr and buy 5,000 links, right? So, if you were to imagine a curve, if you're watching this, there's a straight line of where your links are, and then it goes straight up 5,000, and then goes across continually straight. It's not looking organic on the back end. It's not looking organic. Google can see that, and it's like, yeah, this step curve is not real, so we're just going to disregard all of them. But also, the links are usually not related to the category, and so, you know, you've got to be careful doing that kind of stuff. You just follow what Google wants you to do. Yep. They're the police. Yep. And so, yep. Yep. They're the keepers and the police and all of it. But the very important point Mindy is making is links are a public endorsement that reflect that a website has valuable information. Links are valuable. There is no doubt about it. We say it's about 45% of your ranking factor, so you definitely want to make sure that you're doing linking. Ranks help you build authority. You want that expert advisor status. I mean, that's really what you're trying to achieve. And she says, problems occur when these links

are gathered in an unnatural way. Make sure that your link strategy is more about marketing and user focused. And this is interesting. Search Engine Journal founder, Lauren Baker. Woo! Why does that sound familiar? Oh, wait. We're going to be interviewing him next week. He gave some great link strategy ideas in his December 2017 Search Engine Journal Think Tank webinar, and he's got a link to that. So if you just Google nine bad SEO habits, go under number two at the end. You can find a link to Lauren Baker's article that's referenced there. And Lauren, we look forward to chatting with you in seven days. Well, under seven days, because it'll be on time. Number three is adding marginal content for SEO purposes. You're always like, okay, we need a page for all these 500 phrases. This also goes back to when you're having one page for kind of each keyword permutation. And so what do you end up doing? You probably had thin content on those pages, or it was all duplicate. Did we get dinged for thin content before? Well, not back then. No. We did not. So it was thin content. It was incredibly thin. It may have been three words. The three words in the keyword phrase. There's no question that you need content, but it's still a problem if you're only making marginal content. It's also added to a website for the purposes of improving SEO. You've just got to get the content right. So one of the things that I just kind of want to throw in here, it's somewhat related, but when you're doing AdWords, what works in AdWords works really good when you're trying to do SEO. So the better you can learn AdWords, the better you're going to do SEO. And really, there's a lot of areas where this fits in, but I mean, I can just tell you that I had a point. And then the police walked in. Josh walked in. And I was like, hmm. It's got to be good, right? Marginal content is

a problem. Oh, so ad groups. Okay. So when you're using like semantic learning or something like that, the ad group that, think about it not at the keyword level, right, for the page, but at the ad group level, right? So it's kind of a theme or a concept that you're trying to hit, if that makes sense. Yep. So that's... Perfect. That's good. We're still lost our feed. Oh, we've got a comment from Joshua, and he's referencing the article, so good. If you're on our Facebook page, you'll be able to find that in this Facebook feed. It's just your phone. Content has to be considered high quality, especially when compared to the competition. Think of it in terms of that, right? So it's one of the things that we do when a new client comes to us. We look at what is the profile, their profile, and then what is the profile of the competition? What do we have to beat? Don't try to reinvent the wheel. Yep. Yeah. All right, number four, not fixing or identifying harmful technical problems. I would add a caveat to it. It's not sufficient to identify them. You need to fix them, right? She says, after doing countless technical SEO audits, I can confidently tell you that most websites have some type of issue that hurts their search performance. Absolutely. Our search engine department talks about potholes and craters that are problematic in terms of technical issues. She lists a couple of them that are big ones. We've actually talked about this in recent podcasts. Improper redirects. It's a 302, 301. How many redirects do you have? Slow page load time. Mobile errors. Duplicate content. You can talk about that. But unintentional blocked pages, she references an article. There's a great search and journal article with more insights. It's called, The Most Common Technical SEO Mistakes and How Severe Are They? Wait, we talked about that like two podcasts ago. So you don't even have to go back and reference that article. Just listen to our podcast. I would just

say, use Search Console. Okay? You need to use Search Console. Google's giving you the map of how you can fix your stuff and they're going to like it. And just do what they want. I mean, it's just... Very cool. I'm very passive. Just do what they want. Do what they want to do. Just do what they want you to do. All right. Number five. And again, this is nine bad SEO habits to leave back in 2017. Forgetting to optimize images. What? Yeah. SEO professionals, we need to take every opportunity to show up in search results, including optimizing for images, right? So imagine having on Google's first page, you've got an image. Well, that's an image search, but you've got also videos. You want videos on that first page. You've got to optimize each piece of content. There's a ton of websites out there that you can just drop the image in and it'll optimize it for you. There's downloads, everything. So this is one of the things that not a lot of people do. Yeah. And that will give you that edge. And it's actually easy. You really just need to focus on the file name and the alt attribute and the title. I would focus on the title as well. She doesn't mention that. She says, instead of an image file name like xyz123.jpg, don't consider use the description of it, such as organic-coffee-beans.jpg. I like that. Coffee's good. I'm good with coffee. I could use a cup of coffee right now. All right. Number six. Linking excessively between your websites. So Mindy mentioned that she had overheard some conversations or maybe this was in a forum where they're like, oh yeah, you need to make sure you cross-link your websites a lot. Well, not a lot, but a little. You do need to cross-link them. Absolutely. And it's important. So I can give you a good example. I read an article. Man, this was probably two years ago, but relevant to this, where there was a marketing company that on every one of

their clients' pages at the bottom had, you know, marketing done by eWebResults, and it was linking back to the eWebResults page. And it was on every one of the pages of their clients. Just one. Yeah. Do it on the homepage. So what they did is they kind of recognized that this is probably not good, and I don't even know how they identified it at that time, just for kind of keying in onto some information that was released by Google. And then they went in and just had the one link on the homepage that was active and back and all the rest, referenced them, but did not link to them, and their rankings actually shot up. So I'm going to read between the lines here on number six, and I think that there is more to this conversation, and I think they're talking about PBNs, okay? So I think that if this was at an SEO workshop, okay? It would expand into virtual private networks. Yeah. Well, like, I mean... The context, yeah. We have a couple blogs. Just a few. There's a few blogs. Just a few blogs. And we'd like to talk like them. But not on every page. All right, so yeah, just be judicious with the links that you have between, if you've got multiple websites. Number seven, trying to trick Google versus playing by the rules. If you're implementing techniques that are getting your websites ranked while flying under Google's radar, just know that that's not going to work for long. She gave the specific examples, you know, AMP pages, right? Nice feature on mobile. And that a lot of people, what they were doing was gaming the system. They'd give like one AMP page, and then that would immediately take people to their full website. So it's a gaming system, right? And in fact, I don't know, it was three or four podcasts ago. So we read a piece that, or at least I think I read it while we were talking, while I was doing my research for the

podcast, that Google's kind of identifying if the second, if all second pages, right, off of the AMP page are not AMP pages, it's not really an AMP site. So it's going to not penalize it, but not give it the AMP value that it might have been passed. That's good technology. Yeah. AMP is good technology. Absolutely. Absolutely. All right. Number eight, focusing on keyword rankings as the main measure of success. We could not agree with her more, right? Like, so it's great. We want to do it. Like, we celebrate when we get first page placement. We've got clients who are in the knowledge graph. We celebrate that. That's cool. That's awesome. And when we call our clients on a monthly basis, because we do talk to our clients at least on a monthly basis, we are not just talking about keyword ranking. We're talking about, hello, Mr. or Mrs. Client. Did you get clients? Because that's the real measure, right? Absolutely. And sometimes we've got to help them with strategies on how do I parse out, is this a web or an internet marketing client versus if this is whatever, a billboard or a walk-in or whatever you want to call it. We spend a lot of time understanding that because we want them to know that their dollars are going, at first, are in good hands, are going to the right place and are delivering value to their business. That's what we do with each of our clients. So one of the things that I just find interesting is I just finished another book. It's a Perry Marshall book. Was that since we started the podcast? Not since we started the podcast, but I read it this past week. And it's a Perry Marshall book on Facebook advertising, a new edition. And so essentially at the back of it, it was talking about watching your stack, like what you're going to do with your money. And it was talking about actually if you're looking at a business, whether you're looking at a P&L or whatever,

and you look at where their leads are coming from, if 100% of them are coming from Google, there could be some risk there. There's a lot of risk there. And so it was talking about breaking it up, Facebook, SEO, PPC, like how are you getting your clients and getting them from one source or one strategy? And then Google changes the rules and you get hit. The business could be gone overnight. Collapses. Yeah. And so it was interesting of kind of where you're getting your leads from and what you're looking at in Google Analytics. You really want a healthy mix. And so that was just kind of something I thought was really interesting. And all these tricks as they stop working, you've got to make sure that your business is not just your one trick pony kind of thing. Yeah, that you go to the next one. And in that situation, I would even put, you know, Google Organic, if Google Organic is driving 100% of your business, you need to fold in paid, right? Because those are really like, it's foreseeable that organic could disappear because of some algorithm change and you're in violation of something not intentionally and boom, you drop off the map. But it's unlikely that PPC is or they're going to change their PPC policy. That could drop off the map and you come in. So the police just walked in and reminded us that, yes, we do celebrate first page placement. If you're looking at this online, and you should be, here we have Joshua, right? So we recently partnered with Joshua. He is the best SEO guy in Houston. So here he has four, no, three of the top five positions on a search for Houston SEO. Yes, we printed it out. We hung it on his desk and we celebrate it. And then we come back and we look at the bottom line and we give him a hard time. We tried to give him a hard time. We just can't. Yeah. Because it actually does turn into

dollars. Yeah. So, you know, you want to be focused on also what types of traffic are coming in, what are the conversions, and we just couldn't do more. It's about the conversions. Yes. And then finally, number nine. Again, this is nine bad SEO habits to leave back in 2017. This one, we would argue, is one of the most valuable. Practicing SEO as if nothing ever changes. Um, you should leave that in the past and you should listen to our podcast. Subscribe, follow, listen, share it, all of that good stuff. Yes. Um, failing to stay up to date on best practices, algorithm changes, and webmaster guidelines is detrimental to your SEO mistake. I believe that's a drop the mic. I like it. A failure situation. Um, yeah, it's, it's really important to stay up to date. Uh, that's one of the reasons we do this podcast is not just to give value to you. That's a, that's a great bonus, but it makes us stay on top. I mean, I'm reading about four or five articles, like parsing 12, reading four, and then choosing one that we cover in the podcast. He doesn't work. He doesn't work. I'm just kidding. Not during the day. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. We get very little work done during the day. We're talking up a storm, brainstorming, talking with clients, meeting with clients. Um, we're going to have to get a new location soon. We got meetings going on in every room. It's, uh, insane. It's awesome. Yeah, it is awesome. All right. So that is the article. Mindy Weinstein. Thank you. Make sure you, uh, uh, tweet to her and it's at Mindy Weinstein.com. Um, and that's Mindy Weinstein is spelled W E I N S T E I N. Just like phonetically. And then make sure you also tag at best SEO podcast so she knows that we covered our article and maybe she'll listen to this and realize that we're actually going to interview Lauren and then, you know, she'll tune in and then, yeah, then she'll

share, share like the Facebook messages and the emails about this next podcast. We're going to be doing some promotion going into this next week. So please, uh, if you listen to this, please share. We think it's going to be a great podcast, uh, looking at predictions for 2018. He's going to be on the screen, right? Right here, right here behind us. So, uh, pretty excited about that. All right. So, um, if you like this podcast, we kind of covered this, tell three friends. If you're interested in growing your business with the largest, simplest marketing tool on the planet, the internet, go ahead and call eWebResults for increased revenue in your business. 713-592-6724. Or, uh, if you have a referral, right? That's somebody who's interested in any aspect of internet marketing. We need like an A to Z from website design, which is really kind of where it starts. It doesn't have to. It could start with just Facebook marketing, but website design, Facebook marketing, all social media marketing, AdWords, um, sniper ads, wormhole ads. Yes, they exist. Bear trap. Bear trap ads. I'm trying to figure out how we can create fly trap ads. I think it's the bear trap. And then when the bear trap like collapses on them, uh, then there, it's like a fly trap. But then they go through the wormhole first. And then they're back. Yeah. Uh, some pretty amazing stuff. If you want any of those, you know, somebody who wants some of those, send them our direction. They pay their bill. We pay you. Or I'm thinking this year, like we maybe pick a charity, charity of your choice, or we pick a certain charity and Hey, if, if, if you send a referral, we'll donate to a charity. I, yeah, I, I really, uh, it's been on my heart. So that's something. I like that. Yeah. That's a good idea. Yeah. Um, and maybe we can even split, split it off into both, right. Or make it and make it an option to you. Um, if you

would like a transcript, wait, or video or audio of this podcast, you can get it at ewebresults.com. Uh, I just want to say our transcriptionists, if you have been listening to these podcasts at some point I was making, she won't put those in the transcript. What? I know. I was really disappointed. Did you reach out to her? Yeah. We were talking about it. And she goes, by the way, I'm not putting any of those in there. And I was like, whammo. Wham. She does other work for us. She's amazing. Vicki, punch in the face to you, Vicki. Uh, you do some amazing stuff for us. Um, we are filmed live here at 5999 West 34th Street, Suite 106, Houston, Texas, 77092. Don't ask me why I'm confused by that. Uh, we are the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes, on in the known universe because of you. Stitcher. Thank you so very much. We haven't got a Stitcher review and I think it's that, that review. It's so difficult. You can't leave a review on Stitcher anymore. I don't understand it. Um, and, uh, and we just, we appreciate you. We're glad you guys tune in. We're glad you're getting value out of this podcast. Um, thank you. And we're looking forward to an amazing 2018. Uh, I mean, already we got Lauren Baker on deck. Um, we got a number of other people coming. Josh has hooked us up with a couple other people to get on this podcast. We're excited. Like this is just going to be a great year. So thank you guys until the next podcast. My name is Chris Burris. My name is Matt Bertram. Bye bye for now. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye.

Bye bye. Bye bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye bye. Bye bye bye. Bye bye bye. Bye bye bye. Bye bye bye. Bye bye bye. Bye bye bye bye. Bye bye bye bye bye.