Adding Detail and Expanding on Content - Internet Marketing Podcast Number 197

Hi, and welcome to the SEO podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. I am Charles Lewis, your internet marketing specialist. At eWebStyle. At eWebStyle. Did you notice I almost messed it up there? I almost messed up that beginning. Remember, we are your... I thought it was a little different. Yeah, I paused in some odd spot because I was about to say something else. Remember, we are your friendly local neighborhood top position snatchers, where our mantra is... Don't be a douche. Don't be a douche. The douchiness is not good. This is podcast number 197. Our tip from podcast number 196 is make sure the images on your site serve a purpose other than simply filling in space. Yeah, a lot of times when designing a site, and I can speak to this because I'm actually in this process now, when populating content, you get to a spot where you have a ton of verbiage and you really need images to kind of help guide that. Make sure those images that you use have a purpose, that it's not just a space filler, that it's not just there just because. Make sure that image is either a CTA, make sure maybe it visually communicates what that content is about, but the image should definitely have some purpose more than just being a space filler. Absolutely, and that's not that difficult to do, just get out there. Speaking of that image, make sure you tag it and title it and optimize it as well. And preferably it should be... Dropping that on there. Original. Definitely. Preferably. It should be an original image. If you are in a position to, if you can, go ahead and tweet now. What should they tweet, Mr. Chuck? Today's tweet is hashtag SEOpodcast. This is number 197. Let me see if y'all can see my tweet. Be sure to tag us in it, at eWebStyle. And then that way we can follow you. We can link up and do all of our social stuff. So, you

can do us two favors. If you get any value out of this podcast, if you appreciate that we've improved the audio, there's two things that you can do for us. One of them takes three steps. The first one is go on to iTunes, write a review, after you create an account. So, let's do that again. Go on to iTunes, create an account, write a review. There you go. If you choose to, please send us an email, podcast at e-webstyle.com. By the way, if you're in some other country, make sure you send us an email, because in iTunes, in order to see your review, I actually have to set my iTunes to a particular country, obviously the country that you are in, so I can see your reviews. So, there may be reviews out there in some places that we don't get as much traffic from, that I don't visit, because I just assume, statistically, we're not going to get a review there. If you're in that country, that country, that actually, It might not be the U.S. Let's see, so 76, we've been downloading in 76 countries, so if you're in one of the, I don't know, we'll say 68 countries that I don't check regularly, go ahead and make sure you send us an email. The other thing that you could do is you could write us a G Plus Local review. Yes. As you know, G Plus Local URLs are incredibly long, annoying, and frustrating, and Google, come on, get your act together, make them simpler. Yeah, well, give us vanity URLs. We're waiting on them. What we've done for you is we've made it easy for you to get to our G Plus Local page so that you can write us a review. All you need to do is go to e-webstyle.com slash... Google Plus or slash G Plus, and you can use the plus spelled out or the plus symbol, however you want to do it. Either way, it'll take you to our Google Plus page. Leave us a review, and

plus warn us while you're there, too. We have some good reviews today. We'll get to those in just a second. We do have a referral program. If you have an SEO client that you don't want to handle and you still want to get paid, send them our direction. As long as they're paid. No send us no bad bills. Yeah. They don't pay their bill. You can keep them. We'll just keep it that simple. All right, here are some of our reviews. This one is, thank you, G Plus Local. Well, Rene, Grosskreutz. I know I butchered that. Grosskreutz. Grosskreutz. Grosskreutz. It just looks like it's supposed to be a ski at the end. Yeah. Quality, excellent. I cannot say enough about these guys. I listen to their show as often as I possibly can. I am a web developer, and everything that I have learned about SEO has somehow stemmed from them. That's awesome. Yeah, it's awesome. I am not a pro-SEO person, but I am sure learning enough to be dangerous. Thank you, guys, Rene. Rene. I'm in the face to you, Rene. I'm glad to see that you made it known that you're an SEO person or that you're a developer. Yeah. Because a lot of times I'm not sure who's listening. Like, are we getting mostly developers or web designers or SEO people or whatnot? Figure our audience is probably a combination of all. But kudos to you. I'm glad we're helping you, Rene. And hit us up. Let us know what you're working on. How is it working out? What tip have you used recently that really shows you some positive results? That had an impact. All right. I can check that as read so that we don't duplicate ourselves. We're going to read one more review. This is from Hugo Castanajara. That's a Portuguese name. A fantastic podcast about SEO. This is a must-hear for everyone interested in SEO. I'm a huge fan. Download religiously every single podcast and listen while commuting. It is true that sound quality is far from

perfect. But I've learned so much. Practical tips, insightful articles, new tools, et cetera. All of this for free, freedom, and in a funny way. Please continue. You do a great job and you deserve all. We've got all the work you put behind this. All the success we get into it from the work we put behind it. And he goes, abracco. In Portugal. De Portugal. So, hey, that's one of our Portuguese listeners. Woo-hoo. Love that. What's his name? Hugo? Hugo. Punch in the face to you. Man, thank you for tuning in. We really appreciate it. I don't know the Brazilian translation of punch in the face. Yeah. All right. Which I want to know. Yeah. This year, it's jujitsu and it hurts. Yeah. It's not a good look. Yeah. I'm tapping out right now, right? Just don't even throw that first punch. I'm out. Here's a, remember Gary Miller, the one who used to have the sign. It was like, look at me, look at me. Was there on the show? So, he's got a question for us. What's better for SEO purposes? To have new content posted to your website regularly or to post articles to other social blog sites with links coming back to your main page? How do the search engines vary on this? So, great question, Gary. And I think depending on your strategy or how much content you have or your access to available content. And quality of content that you have on your site. My recommendation is going to be both. There are benefits to both. In regards to having that content on your site, personally, that's our preference. I think there's more value. If you write a, let's say, 400-word great blog post that you spend a lot of time finding, you know, content and images and video and all of the things that support a good post, if it's related to your industry, post it on your site. Now, what you may want to do after you've done that is remix it and then maybe post a portion

of it on some guest blog with a link to yours for more information where they could read your entire article about it. But any time you have great original content, post it on your site. It's definitely trying to get traffic to your site because the content on your site, I believe, has more value than the link from the guest post coming to your site. And your ultimate goal, I would say this, if you think the article is good enough to be link bait, go ahead and make sure you post that on yours. If it's less of a link bait article, then you make that debate. Maybe you want to put it on a guest post or something like that. Because you would hate to post a guest post to somewhere else and then it goes extremely viral, right? Which is still kind of cool because you have a link to your site in it, but wouldn't it be awesome if it went viral on your site? Yep. All right, next question. So this is a little bit long and this is less of a question. It's just kind of cool. Here we go. I stumbled across a podcast recently. I've been listening to all the old podcasts. Just wanted to first say, nice job. It's informative. I like that. Unlike some other internet marketing podcasts, it deals with specifics that are actionable for small business owners and people are getting started in SEO. Now, I hope you take this criticism in stride as the only reason I'm telling you this is because I think it'll help you guys. However, your company's website is ugly. Ugly. It reminds me of this. We need to actually post that on Facebook. It's a Homer Simpson's website. It was hilarious. Now, I know you guys focus on SEO and design isn't necessarily as crucial. However, if I was searching SEO Houston, the other people that rank for that term have better looking websites. We make that point all the time to our clients. And as a consumer, I'd feel

more confident to do business with your competitors if I was just searching cold from Google. Hope you don't mind the tough love. Just really trying to help Brett. My response was, OMG, that is awesome because the link, the Homer Simpson webpage was awesome and actually had some resemblance. Seriously, thanks for the critique. You are right. It is ugly. We are in the process of rebranding. I already have logo and we'll be following shortly with app focused on the podcast. You will get a punch in the face next podcast number 197. That's it. That's today. Thanks for being a fan and caring enough to give us a website analysis. And he wrote back, ha ha, glad you didn't take it the wrong way. Good to hear you're redesigning. I think it'll help. And he'll be writing an iTunes review soon. I checked this morning, Brett. Kicking the shins. It's not there. Yeah. Appreciate you, Brett. I really do appreciate the feedback. But it is something we've known and known for quite a while, to be honest. It's a process. We first started with the logo. That's been done. Then we had to design our app. That's in progress. And I went in the process of redesigning that site that you're talking about. And so we're debating on posting mock-ups. Probably won't. But just know that the new e-website is coming soon. And I'll definitely be reaching out to you once we launch it so you can review it. And I'm curious to get your thoughts after we launch the new one. Yeah, we need an upgraded positive review. How old is that one? The current one. Because it was old when I came. Yeah, the current one was the one that you, when you first started with us, you expedited to get live. Yeah. Yeah. It was a decent at the time. Yeah, that was five years ago, four years ago. Time to redo the website. All right. And then here's, this is a little long. It has some questions in it. So I want to

get this. Starts off. This is from Don Bennett. I wrote a five-star iTunes review on December 18th. Punch in the face for that. Mr. Don, your podcast has been a big help to this neophyte. Probably the best tip was to verify your... Neophyte. Did I say fit? You said fight. Yeah, neophyte. Yeah. To verify your NAP, and that's capital N, capital A, capital P, on large lists in order to rank well on Google Local, a place where I was having trouble. What I found was not a NAP problem, but that my listing with yellow pages pointed at my old domain name, fixed that, and started ranking well right away. First off, great. I'm glad we helped. Did you find the problem? Second off, what's NAP? NAP is what we do right after lunch, usually. I don't know what NAP stands for. If we mention it in our podcast... We probably mentioned it for something else. Once you re-educate us, we'll add it to our glossary so we never forget it. Yeah, like which podcast were you listening to? So, he continues. This leads me to some advice that I invite you to comment upon. Choose to take a beating rather than change your domain name. What a terrible idea that was. Okay? So, I would... Choose to take a beating. Rather than change your domain name. What's funny is we just discussed this in our interview on the content marketing podcast where Rachel Parker was talking about she had a client who had hired some unscrupulous link builders. At the time, they were doing it according to Google's guidelines and now they're no longer... Remember, Google's guidelines aren't... Well, they change and there aren't necessarily... Those are current guidelines. They're not necessarily best practices. For instance, buying links just doesn't make sense to be a best practice. And, you know, getting cheesy links. Anyway, so we just discussed that and our conclusion was, in his case, when he dropped his ranking, his unscrupulous link builders decided to double down, do it twice as many. And

so, he just gave up that domain. Anyway, so I came across a tip for keyword densifying. Sounds better than stuffing. Create a file structure that contains keyword-rich folder names. For instance, I saw that you use SEO Houston as a directory name on your own site. That path is referenced often. Does this technique still work? It works a lot less than it used to. So, I think it is still relevant and it's not as impactful as before. So, better content, better inbound links will do better and some updates to your content. One final thing. For all of my article reading and podcast listening, it took me forever to learn that Google does not read the keyword meta tag. I would do competitive analysis on competitors and look at their HTML and he's like, Why are these noobs ranking on the first page? They don't even have keyword meta tags. Because it doesn't matter. Google doesn't care. Now, they probably didn't do well in Bing. A last thing. I am being a douche if I take a small secret pleasure in clicking on a competitor's AdWords. That's a question. Yes. I tried to resist the dark side. Tell me you two haven't done that. Well, we can't tell you that we haven't done that. Yeah, because I have. Yeah. I mean, we do internet marketing. So, unfortunately, I click on paid ads all the time. But I'm looking at competitors, you know, landing pages, designs. I'm looking at things of that nature. I'm looking at the URL strings. FedEx. And so, you know, those things come into play. I want to address something else you said up here. Yeah. In regards to the sub-directory, it does work well in a sense that SEO Houston becomes part of our URL. So, you end up on a, you know, ewebster.com slash SEO Houston slash whatever. And so, in that case, it does get our extra keyword in the URL. But Chris is absolutely correct. Luckily, when we've made those changes, Google's algorithm changes hadn't happened in 2012. And so,

we were able to take advantage of that and rank. If we did those practices now, I'm not sure we'd get that same result. Yeah. It's more about content, which is what some of the things we'll talk about, you know, today. It's more about your content, the URL structure and, you know, different domain names. I think you talked about, you know, canning a domain name or whatnot. That's all. It's not as important as it used to be. Now, I think I would say this. If you're really going after the number one position, it still has a lot of value. It has a ton of value for that. The domain name, SEOHouston.com, has consistently outperformed us on SEOHouston.com. But you know why? The only reason that works is if that exact match domain name happens to be the real name of your company. If your company is something else and you're using an exact match domain name, then there's no value there whatsoever. Yeah. But if your name happens to be that, then you're in a good place. Well, I do have a little bit of news. I think we're running a little long. And that was some good content. Great questions, by the way. We really appreciate it. Send us more questions. Yeah, let's talk about that for a second. If you guys want to get us questions or interact with us, you can go to facebook.com slash eWebStyle. Twitter.com slash eWebStyle. YouTube.com slash eWebStyle. Or you can email us, podcast at e-webStyle.com. Let's see, real quickly, you mentioned BlackBerry. They had a bad quarter. It's not really going good. You asked me what I thought was going to happen with BlackBerry earlier. I think somebody like either probably Samsung or somebody like that is going to buy them and come out with the whole brand of phone exclusive for corporations and do something that way. Because that's still their market. And so, I think other than that, they're going to fold. And Android's done a much better job with security, coming out with things to

be secure with. I think Apple has done the same thing. So, really, that clutch that they have on that niche market is going away. I know that they're strong in Latin America because they've got like a BlackBerry chat feature, which is free. BBM is huge. Yeah. And that's going away because WhatsApp is... Gtalks. Hangouts. All of them are taking that over. Although, I don't know if BBM uses bandwidth. Right? So, what your bandwidth issues. Not that it uses much bandwidth. It doesn't almost nothing. And certainly, it doesn't count against you if you're on a Wi-Fi connection. I saw an ad for the Galaxy S4 Active. That's kind of cool. You can splash water on it and sand and all that. That's cool. They have like five different versions. Yeah. Remember last podcast, we mentioned that people are worried that they're going to get confused about too many options for the GS4. I tended to disagree. Now, you didn't know this. And it's amazing I knew something about sports that you didn't. That's just bizarre. I'm going to talk that up to just being out of pocket. Victor Aladipo was seen at the NBA draft wearing Google glasses. And I loved what the article said. The article said, yeah, I think Google just gave the glasses to the NBA and said, please put these on someone who doesn't look like a nincompoop. I just love that word anyway. Probably. Nincompoop. And this is cool. Microsoft and their latest software is actually supporting 3D printing. I think that's cool. I've always wanted to get one of the 3D printers. I just don't know what I would make. And it would be just a waste of time and money. Yeah. So if it's not big enough for you to print anything fathead, then. Well, it's not just fathead. It's 3D, right? So you can actually make like, you could make a, I don't know, a model of this office. You could make a model of your ideal cell phone. The phone is going to print that way. It

prints a 3D device, a thing, not device, thing. Yeah. It would be fun, right? Like your mind goes crazy. And then you're like, and then I start thinking, well, what would I actually do with that? And I'm like. Exactly. The only thing I could think of is posters that look somewhat 3D. Yeah. Interesting. All right. So that is the potatoes of our podcast. We've exceeded our Geno time limit. Now let's get to the meat. So I was at one of my favorite sites, Search Engine Journal. Came across an article, 10 SEO Industry Trends, What to Look For in 2013 and 2014. You know, one of those titles that kind of caught my attention. Like, okay, some things I should be aware of. What's happening? What's going to happen? What do I think is happening? And so he lists a few, and we'll breeze through these. Because some of them I disagreed with, and some I thought were actually okay. Number one, content continues to be important, but requires more depth and more detail. Duh. Well, yeah, you can't continue to put out bland content or just content just for the sake of posting content. This content must have value. It must serve a purpose. It must answer some questions like who needs it, how can they benefit from it, and why should they use it? If your content doesn't address those issues and really solve a particular pain, then your content serves no purpose. So it's going to be extremely important, but even more importantly, this content must have value. Number two, different kinds of content help you get traction. I totally agree. Repurpose your content will be my recommendation. You write a good blog post, turn around and maybe transcribe it and do it in video. Or turn it into an infographic or do something like that. And that way you can have the same content that's been proven used in different sources to get more traction. Number three, author authority matters. Duh. Check out Podcast 195. We talked about authorship. And, yeah, Google

is liking the results. Matt Cutts put out a video that said they were pleased with the results from the authorship tag they've been testing and looking forward to doing all sorts of other things with it. So authorship is extremely important. Make sure you have that set up. Number four, links remain critical, but the bar for quality keeps going up. That is totally true. No longer the days that you can just build links and get some sort of value from them. You know, even if you get these links from sites that maybe have a high PR, it doesn't matter. These links have to come from sites that are quality. They have to come from sites that are relative to what you do. And they have to be credible sites. And that way you can receive some value for those links. Because if they're not, then you're not going to get any value for them. Number five, diversifying link text is ongoing. Duh. You know, that was an algorithm update. Talked about exact match anchor text. Link text has to change. It has to diversify. But that way you don't be spamming people with keyword-based, keyword stuff, links, and things like that. Great design matters. It does. I don't care what people say. Why are you going to say that? Because, you know, we say it all the time. We have a business owner. He has an ugly site, but it's generating leads, and he's going to be happy with his ugly site. And so I will say that great design matters because it does. Google is interested in great design. We want to make sure that when users visit your site that they feel comfortable, that they can navigate easily, that they can find what they're looking for, and you accomplish that with great design. So, yes, it does matter. Well, I think the purpose of that example is to show it's not the end-all, be-all. So choosing the company that can make the greatest aesthetic website is not as valuable as choosing a company who

can make a good website that actually converts visitors into business. Number seven, guest posting comes under increasing scrutiny, and it does, which is another reason why to address Gary, I think it was. It was Don. Don, yeah. Why you may want to keep those posts on your site because guest posting, you know, 2012 had a huge explosion. Everybody was guest posting and sharing links. The problem is people were repurposing content, and so guest posting is not that valuable no more. There's too many sites offering it, and a lot of guest posting used to be a feature, right? You know, you have a set of authors who contribute faithfully, and then you sprinkle in a guest post from some huge author from another publication. But now if I'm guest posting and he's guest posting and you're guest posting and everybody's guest posting, then the site really has no solid foundation. And so, you know, keep your guest posting to a minimum. Number eight, social continues to exert a powerful influence. Duh. Duh. Catch up. You know, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, G+. They're leading the pack right now. Vine, you know, they had a birthday and death date in the same year. Nah. Yeah. It's tough out there. Nah, nah, nah, nah. Exactly. Number nine, mobile performance and compatibility matter. Duh. Mobile, you know, what was it? Two out of every ten searches happen on a mobile device. So, mobile is extremely important. If you make sure your site, you have an app, if you require that much mobile activity, at the very least, make sure you have a mobile version of your site. Maybe experiment with some responsive design, if necessary. But make sure that you definitely keep mobile in your strategy. And we'd recommend an actual mobile design as opposed to a responsive design. Responsive design, definitely. And that's not at least number ten. SEO is less tactics and more strategy. And I totally concur. As a person who does SEO daily, it's definitely more strategy. At first, it used to be tactics, right? Yeah. Write

your content. Do your on-page. Build links. Do this. Do that. Now it's more strategy, right? What purpose do I need this content to serve? What type of people am I looking to get here? When they get here, what do I want them to do? And what do I want them to do after that? And then I have to build my site, design the site, and create this content that accomplishes that goal. And so it's not about just doing some things and getting a position. It's about doing those things, getting the position, and then making sure my strategy is in place to get the results we want. So, yeah, it's more about strategy. Yeah. And overall strategy, right? Yeah. Because, you know, Charles just mentioned that social is important. So what's your social strategy? Do you got a newsletter that's going out? Do you repurpose the content that goes out in your newsletter? The overall... Yeah, are you blogging? Are you syncing your blog up in sync with your Twitter post and your Facebook post? And is it all being tied into your newsletter? I mean, that sort of deal. Are you doing videos? What are you doing with those videos? How are you linking those videos through your social accounts and through your actual website? All of that. One big picture. Yeah, it's definitely more about strategy now than it is tactics. Frankly, that goes for PPC as well, especially with all of the AdWords changes. We'll talk about that another time. So that was our content for today. Cool. Any blank stare? Oh, yeah, I got some blank stare. Okay. And I usually don't. This blank stare goes... I got two of them. One goes to my guy, Hernandez, for the Patriots. Like, dude, I was just cheering for you. No. Good luck with that. And the second one goes to... What happened with him? He's facing a double murder. Oh, jeez. Yeah. I mean, like, literally weeks after the Super Bowl. Like, I don't... I know y'all lost. You know what I'm saying?

I hope it wasn't that bad. Yeah. Wow. And number two, Paula Deen. Yeah. Good luck with that. You know. Now, just... She's getting harangued for something she said like 30 years ago, right? Yeah. It's really, really bad. And I disagree, frankly. I feel like it was 30 years ago. And... I was telling you, I used to tell horrible jokes a long time ago. I just literally, at the time, didn't know better. And, you know... And I grew up in a pretty progressive household. So, you know, it's kind of weird that I didn't know better. And so, like, 30 years ago, I mean, my opinions and what's acceptable and what wasn't... What seemed to be acceptable then and what clearly isn't acceptable now have totally changed, right? So, it's been 30 years. I kind of doubt that that was the only time she ever said that. I mean, I think that's disingenuous, right? But, so, I think if I were her, I would be saying more like, you know what? That was my thought process now. And I was wrong. And my thought process now is... And her PR person. Because there's a lame video. The apology video. The apology video felt like a slap in the face. I was like, really? Like, I've taken some physics classes and some... Not physics. Some psychiatric classes and I know body language. Yeah. Like, the video is really, really bad, Father. And so, yeah, you'd have been better off going a different route. Because it was 30 years ago. Right. You know, I disagree with how everybody's dropping her. Target, QVC, Food Network. Everybody's like, peace be gone. You know what? You should drop her 30 years ago. Yeah. Right? Exactly. But it's now... I mean, ironically, all these people will probably pick her up in three years. Again. Right? So, how stupid is that? That you're dropping her today for something that was 30 years ago and you'll probably pick her up. I mean, that happens all the time. People, you know, get thrown under the bus

and... Wasn't that Bob Costa or something? Well, the Wiener guy. Right? Yeah. He's leading in New York Post. Yeah. Same guy who two years ago was like... Don't touch him. Yeah. Just mother the earth. Untouchable. Yeah. So, you know. So, all right. Well, you have been tuning in to the most popular internet marketing and SEO podcast on iTunes. This is podcast number 197. Until the very next podcast, my name is Chris Burris. Charles Lewis. Bye-bye for now.