Cleaning Up Your Website - #seopodcast 190

Welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burst, owner of eWebStyle. I am Charles Lewis, your internet marketing specialist. Specialist! We are sponsored today by Shock Top, even though Shock Top doesn't know it and doesn't actually sponsor us. And probably doesn't care. Yep. Thank you for this wonderful, citrusy-tasting, you know, Friday evening beverage. Yeah. You are listening to and possibly watching, probably not though because we're way off schedule, the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes. Yes. That is because of you, all you all. Thank you. We'll keep this brief. You can do us a favor if you get any value out of this podcast. You know what? If the sound quality has just gotten any better, do us this favor. Do us this favor. Go on to iTunes, write a review, and that's it. Create an account. You've got to create an account and then write a review. Yeah. I'm going to blame it on the Shock Top. And we're celebrating a couple contracts signed this week, so we're very happy about that. That's why we're also busy and finally getting to our podcast now. So do that. If you write a review, go ahead and send us an email, podcast at e-wolfstyle.com. And let us know. We will give you a punch in the face. P-tiff. P-tiff. As always, there is a tip from our previous podcast, and that tip is, better to use original images instead of stock images. If that is not an option, make modifications to the stock images. Yeah, definitely. Anytime you're designing a website and you're putting something out there, frankly, whether it's a website, whether it's a brochure, whether it's any sort of print advertising or media or web-related, if possible, use original imagery. People see stock photos. They recognize stock photos. And you don't want to be that person that has the same customer service chick on your site, and she's on everybody else's site. Everybody else's site. Like, she's got a whole bunch of jobs or not. So, yeah.

You know who we're talking about. Use some original photos. They know who we're talking about. Yeah. They've seen her. And if you're going to use the stock ones, then edit them. You know, we use stock photos, but we'll change the background. So, maybe zoom in on a section. Zoom in something. Add text. Reverse it. Add a filter. Like, you can manipulate them. So, do that. Make it stand out a little bit. Definitely. That's a great tip. That tip was from podcast number 189. This is podcast number 190. Remember, we are your friendly local neighborhood top position snatchers. Where our mantra is. Don't be a deuce. It's not a good look. If you can, please tweet now. Oh, and Chuck will tell you what to tweet. We're going to tweet hashtag SEO podcast. This is number 190. Be sure to tag us in it at eWebStyle. Matter of fact, tag us at best SEO podcast as well. And that way we can link up with you and let you know what's going on and stay connected socially. Excellent. Another way, in addition to the Facebook, I mean, to the iTunes thing we just discussed, writing a review, you can actually write a review on our G Plus local page. It is incredibly challenging to find if I were to give you all the numbers, digits, and dashes. So, I'm not going to give you any of that. I'm just going to tell you go to e-webstyle.com slash G Plus. And slash G Plus. And slash Google Plus. And slash Google Plus. Each one of those will forward you to our G Plus local page where you could write a review. Now, it does require that you have a Gmail account. And if you're following us on SEO, you probably have Google Analytics. And if you have Google Analytics, you have a G Plus account. You just may not realize it. One other thing. Remember, we have a referral program. Actually, we just got a call not too long ago. If you have an SEO customer that

you're struggling with or you just do web design and development and want to stay focused on what you're good at, send those clients over to us. I'm going to turn off the binging. And binging. Turned mine off already. Smart. Smarter than me. So, just send those clients over to us. We have a referral program so that you can get remunerated for that referral. That's a lot of that stuff. Hey, in the news. This is huge. I got a Galaxy S3. Yeah, my Galaxy S2 died. GS2 was stuck on welcome. Yeah. Not even welcome. It was just... You know, by the time I got to the shop, only the blue light came on. Like, when I was leaving to go to the shop and for half of the day yesterday, it was stuck on Galaxy S2 and just wouldn't go any further. And then when I left the office to go to the shop, yeah, it was already on the blue light. Anyway, I'm happy. It's cool. Good device. I've been... It was sooner than I wanted. I was still hoping that the S4 would come out, actually come out, and the price would drop another 50 bucks, and that didn't happen. In the news, Google buys Wavy. W-A-V-I-I. Did you know what Wavy was? I've heard of Wavy. Not exactly sure what they do. Not Google Wave, because that never made it. Yeah. Wavy. Wavy was a kind of news agglomerating service, I think similar to like a, what am I trying to do, Flipboard? Okay. Google Flipboard. Which, Flipboard is on Android. It's actually pretty good. I enjoy it. It's one of my favorite apps. And so Google bought them. They closed down their RSS feature and then turned, purchased Wavy. It's kind of interesting. iPhones may be delayed by fingerprints. What's your first thought on that? Yeah. Repeat that? I'm trying to absorb it. The iPhones may be delayed because of fingerprints. No. I mean, somebody wasn't wearing gloves when they put the screens on? That's my first thought, too, right? It's like

there's one person who tried to... All his job is to put screens on. And he tried to jump out the window the other day, but the damn net caught him. And he forgot his thumb fell off. He got stuck in the net. They're so cheap, they don't have more gloves. Anyway, what it is is that this is the rumor. We don't know this for a fact. This is the rumor that Apple is going to be able to check your fingerprint and use that as a sign-in kind of feature. By the way, it needs to get a lot better. Even the Galaxy S2 had a face recognition, so it would recognize your face and then it would turn on instead of having to do a slide or whatever. And it was just too slow. I'm like, I'm just not going to do that. Lighting wasn't right. And you're in a club, like it's just not going to come on. How many times do you need to use somebody else's phone, though? What do you mean? Well, like, for example, if my wife gave me a phone to do this, then I don't have her fingerprint. Yeah. You're just... Yeah, I think the phrase is S-O-L. Cut your phone first. Yeah. Okay. And Amazon is apparently coming out with a set-top box for your TV. Amazon TV. We always wanted to watch that when we were kids. Yeah. Good luck with that, Amazon. Yeah. No one else has done it well, so... Except for U-verse and Comcast. That's kind of... Well, and we could get Comcast out of that. Well, I use Comcast. I remember they did it well. And then they screwed it up with this new version. That's why we switched over to U-verse. All right. So we do have a listener question. This is from Greg Took, who is a longtime listener. Patif Grit. What's up, man? Patif, thank you for being a longtime listener. It says, I listened to your podcast and you guys reviewed my site, bestbloodymaryrecipe.com. He had the bacon, remember

the bacon, bloody mirrors? Yeah. Still need to travel to that. You need to try that, yeah. That sounds delicious right now. I have other sites. The one I'm referring to here is tonsillectomerecovery.com. Tail wagging dog. I think Google real-time search suggestion. So that's when you're typing in something and Google's making suggestions for you. Google Instant. It's called Google Instant. Is influencing search behavior. So tonsillectomy recovery versus tonsillectomy recovery time. So in AdWords, the keyword tool says that, and actually also SEO book, both indicate that tonsillectomy recovery has about 7.5 times more search volume than tonsillectomy recovery time. He currently ranks number one and number two for both of those phrases. And in the last 30 days, 262 people found him for one of the terms. It doesn't even really matter. And 252 found him for tonsillectomy recovery time. So if they're 7.5 times search volume, and you have position one and two for both of them, you would assume they're 7.5 times the traffic. Comments? Kind sir. I'm not sure. I think that there isn't that big of a difference between the search queries, where you add time or not add time. My personal gut feeling says I would prefer to get more listings for a time. It's a longer phrase, usually indicates a more qualified search. And so I'd be willing to, you know, place my eggs in that basket. However, you rank well for both of them. I think that the 7.5 number is a little skewed to me, which is why I don't place all my eggs in Google AdWords tool, because it's just a little suspect, I think. We see wonky things like this every now and then. We see, you know, really good placement not getting, you know, the kind of traffic. They'll say that 80% of clicks happen on the first three, and we own, own, quote, unquote, the first two, and we're not getting the traffic volume that the AdWord tool is saying. Yeah, I would definitely, you know, 30 days isn't really a lot of time either,

you know, especially when you consider seasons and things like that that change. So I would let some more time go, maybe a good 90 days, especially since it's natural. It's not like it's a paid search. So I would let some time go by and really look at the data, see what your bounce is. That's what you could do. Look at some of the other information, from which terms generate the most conversions, right? It's not about traffic at this point because the traffic is kind of similar. Does recovery time generate a higher conversion or more time on site or a lower bounce rate than without the word time? You know, I would look at that sort of data because it's probably a little bit more important than the 7.5% because that number is skewed. Yep. Greg, hopefully that works for me, man. Send me a follow-up email. I'd like some more information on it. You know, I'm pretty sure you tested several key phrases, and those are just the two you told us. Yeah, you probably are testing Bloody Mary bacon as we speak. You're probably the only one on the first page. If you're not, then I'm a little surprised. Yeah. But you know what? We really appreciate our listeners sending in these types of questions because they really make us think, make our viewers, allow our viewers to think. And, you know. They force me to go research it. Like, we're not just going to let it hang. We're going to look up some information and, you know, try to help you solve this issue. Very cool. Patuf, Greg Took, and I think we're done with our potatoes. Sorry, Greg, you were just potatoes. Potatoes with Bloody Mary. Yeah, with Bloody Mary with bacon. Yeah, that's almost as good as the meat. You know, bacon is kind of meat. Yeah, kind of. We stretch it that way. Kind of, huh? Yeah. Bacon could be a dessert. Like, bacon fits in all the food groups. So, I was at SEO Moss today. We're SEO Moss

users. Found a pretty good article dusting the website for spring. This was really interesting to me because we've been spring cleaning at home. Throwing away stuff. Getting rid of stuff. And so, I was like. Getting some new furniture. Getting new furniture. Got my TV hung up. Ready for the Floyd Mayweather fight coming up. Who's he fighting? He's fighting Guerrero. Guerrero? The other guy. Oh. A big ticket guy. Yeah, yeah. He's fighting that guy. And so, anyway. I got the article. And it was pretty cool. Some of the things I didn't really like. But some of it, I think we could definitely implement. And you guys should as well. Especially since this is, I won't call it a new year. We're already almost at the end of April. But the first quarter has passed. And if you haven't tweaked your site or made any changes. If everything on your site is the same as it was in 2012. Then you're likely to get pooped on by a penguin pretty soon. Or a black eye. Or a black eye by a panda. So, take some of these changes. Number one. On-site dusting. We'll call this Arthur Ship. Right? Arthur Ship. He goes on to say. Arthur Ship is an extremely important action item. Let me tell you why Arthur Ship is so important. There's like three key reasons. Right? At least. Well, one of the main reasons is that it increases your conversions. Right? When you have a Google 7-pack or 10-pack even. And one of those listings actually has an avatar next to it. Then you're more prone to, at the very least, not overlook it. And at least scan that title, which will lead to that click. Yeah. When you don't have that avatar, then people just tend to overlook it. So, definitely set up your Arthur Ship. It's a conversion tactic. It's also key in regards to Google's algorithm and them understanding and recognizing that you are, this is original content. You are the author of this content. And so, that kind of helps

them. Right? They don't have to run all of the bots and everything that it takes to figure out, is this content duplicate? Who's the original author? Where did it come from? When you have your Arthur Ship set up, you kind of remove that problem and put yourself up front as the original author. And therefore, your Arthur rank goes up a little bit higher. So, definitely set up Arthur Ship if you haven't done that yet. Let me drop this in on you. You must be using Google Plus to do that. If you're not using Google Plus, then kicking the shin to you, get on the board. And if you are using Google Plus, write us a review. Write us a review. Thank you. Speaking of Google Plus, your Plus One button, which is number two, make sure your site has this Plus One button. It is extremely important, not for, I won't say not for social usability yet because Google Plus hasn't really been adopted by the masses per se. And so, you won't, you know, you're not going to have the same interaction on G Plus that you have on Facebook. Right. Right. But, from an SEO perspective, that Plus One is a vote. And if the people happen to Plus One it and you have authorship set up, then that Plus One gives credit to your site and to you as an author. Yeah. And so, when you begin to publish on other sites because you have authorship set up, those same pluses count towards your authorship. Yep. That's extremely important. Credibility. Yes, sir. And so, it's extremely important to set up that authorship and have Plus One buttons on the sites that you are author on. Number three, set up a Pinterest button. This, I think, is kind of based on service, right? If you are a, you know, what's our ongoing example? If you're a plumber, you're probably not on Pinterest. Like, what are you pinning? You know what I'm saying? And, by the way, whatever you're pinning, stop. Exactly. And so,

yeah, because nobody's looking at how to set up a backflow drain. Or, look at this mess. No, thank you. No, that's all right. No, that's all right. Exactly. I don't want to see a bad backflow drain. I don't want to see that at all. And so, yeah. But I think if you're in an industry that's photo heavy, that's maybe e-commerce related, where you're selling products and you have different pictures of those products being in use or something like that, then definitely get on Pinterest. And, more importantly, similar to the plus one button, give people the pin it button. That way they can pin it directly from the browser, add that to their board, share it on your board, and you can begin gaining some traction that way. Metadata. I like this one here because the metadata is still important, you know. And when I say metadata, I'm really referring to the title and description. The keywords, use them because you have a feel for it, but, you know, it's not that valuable. But the metadata is. Like, make sure your descriptions are up to date. Make sure that your titles are up to date. Make sure you have a different description for each page. And since we are believers in WordPress here and users of WordPress, I would take it a step further and say make sure the plugin that you're using effectively manages metadata. Because, you know, you don't really want to use the kind of default WordPress SEO deal because then you'll have to go into your editor and manually add these kind of tags and then you're forced to have the same description on every page and that sort of situation. But install a plugin. I recommend Yoast or SEO Ultimate. Those are the two we kind of use. And they both give you the option to really tailor your meta descriptions for each page from a dashboard view, which makes it extremely easy. Obviously, OpenGraph is the next one, which is right in line because OpenGraph is something you should have.

And Yoast, the Yoast plugin makes the OpenGraph setup work extremely well. You know, you guys are probably like, I don't quite understand OpenGraph. Help explain it. So what happens is with the Yoast OpenGraph plugin, the SEO plugin in Yoast that can control OpenGraph, there you go, that allows you to display a different title and a different description to different providers based on whatever you set. For example, we could have Shock Top, right, on our site. But then on Facebook, we may want this same page to have a different title and a different description. So that way, you know how it is. If you copy a link and you paste it in Facebook and then you get a title, description, and an image. So with Yoast plugin, using OpenGraph, you can change that. So if we paste this same link in Facebook, it'll give us a different title and a different description. If we paste this same link somewhere else that we have to identify, it'll give us a different title and a different description. And it's SEO friendly and that's not Black Hat. And so take advantage of that, especially if you're like doing some content marketing and things like that and you really want to test how this same page of content works on different platforms. It's a great way to do that. Site speed. How fast is your site load? Could it be faster? Most likely, yes. Yeah. Unless it's hosted by Google. I'm just saying that they can take a snapshot of the entire internet. Yeah. That's just crazy. That's worth saying again. They can take a snapshot of the entire internet. Yeah. Catch us like this. But anyway, get your site speed up. Like if your site's loading slow, if people have to click and wait, then it's not a good look. At the very least, they should click and the page title should show up. Yeah. You know, if your little wheel's still turning, then something on your site is either making your site load slow or you may have

some sort of server issue. So check your hosting out. Check your site out. But do whatever you can to make sure your site loads up fast. One thing, especially with WordPress sites, you need to be careful about having a lot of different plugins. Because each plugin has to load and causes a load on the server. So you want to be careful of that. Some of the articles that I've been reading are talking about paying for an actual plugin that incorporates, you know, right now I'm using these five plugins because one does a title tag, one does a meta tag, whatever it may be. Maybe pay for the one plugin that actually does all of those because it takes less overhead to load that one plugin. So definitely monitor your plugins. And then, of course, there's other things like images. You know, don't go directly from your digital camera or your phone to your website. Optimize that image first. Yeah. You know, do things like that to make your site load up fast. That's always our biggest fear in turning WordPress credentials over to a client. It's like, yeah, you can do, you can upload whatever. You can do whatever you want. You can make changes. And they literally pull it off of their phone and upload it. And they're like, hey, my site's super slow. Yeah. That's because you've got like a 2.5 meg picture that loads up. And it's a thumbnail on the bottom right corner. Yeah, just because you shrunk it down don't mean it's still not 2.5 meg. So definitely monitor your site speed. This is a good one here. Broken links. Check for those. You should, especially if you're in a position where you're doing a lot of blogging and you're link building and you've got a content-heavy site and you've got a huge content marketing plan going on and so you're constantly publishing and sharing and doing things like that, then your opportunity for broken links increases dramatically. So monitor that. We use a tool called Zeno. Run a Zeno

report. Zeno will break down your whole site, tell you what links are fixed, which links are broken, and more importantly, show you those broken links so you can go fix them. So monitor your site for broken links. We make it a habit before we launch a site to just go through every page. Click here, click there, click anything, and just make sure it works. Zeno. X-E-N-U. Yeah. Zeno with an X. And a U. And a U. So, yeah, make sure you don't have any broken links for two reasons. One, because that's just a poor user experience. But more importantly, broken links are a symbol of a bad site. Google knows those links are broken, and, you know, you don't want to lose rankings because you went from, you know, static to permalinks, and you had some hard-coded URL that you forgot to change. Yeah. You know, that's usually how broken links tend to happen. I don't know if this is in there. Make sure you've got a good custom 404 page, too. Definitely. Don't send the generic, this page can't be found. Send, oh, you know, the oops or snap, the page you tried to get to can't be found. Click here to go to our home page and, you know, at least say it's been reported to the webmaster. Definitely. But don't just leave me in the blank. Or worse, yeah, with a page that's not even on your site, it's just default page can't be displayed. Yeah. That would suck. Index status. Make sure you've been indexed. Check your robots file. Check your webmaster tools. Make sure that they're not having any problems, you know, going through and crawling your site and finding all your information. User experience. This is key. People need to know, people need to have a good experience on your site. If people are visiting your website and they're struggling to find products, struggling to find contact information, well, be surprised if they stayed that long. But you don't want people to come to your site and have to

struggle and not have a good experience. You want people to quickly find what they're looking for, make that purchase, make that call, submit that form, whatever it is. Give people the best user experience possible because that will, in turn, increase your time on site, increase your user activity, increase your likelihood of them linking to you because they enjoyed their experience. And so user experience could have been, like, closer to number one. But definitely make sure you spend some time on that. So let's talk about some off-page stuff. Be social. And he put author rank here. I think this kind of goes along with what I was saying earlier about the authorship. Author tag, yeah. Yeah, if you're on other sites and these other sites have G Plus stuff set up, plus one knows, right? Comment on those. Engage in that conversation with other people using that same author title because that's all track. Google knows how active you are on other sites. Ask this particular author, especially on similar content. So if you're writing about, you know, beer, it makes sense for you to go and be a guest post on a site that focused on hops or focused on barley and things like that because those are very instrumental to your product. And so take advantage of that and do the same thing with, you know, Twitter, Facebook, and things like that. Be social. Link back to your site. The last one here was guest post, which that's what I was just talking about. So, you know, at the end of the day, when you're, you know, refreshing your site, you want to make sure everything is done. Set up your authorship, right? That's kind of new. Make sure you want to have that done. Refresh your content, which is what wasn't listed on this page, on this list of things to do. Read your About Us page. I guarantee it's probably out of date. Update the rest of the information. Fix your broken links. And now doing all of this, you may discover

that you just might need a redesign. And if that's the case, then get started on it. Because if you think you do, then you probably do. Yeah. So that's what we have today. If you think you do, you needed it six months ago. Exactly. Yeah. So that's it for that. Cool. We had some algo cloud. Yeah, we got a little algo. We got a little algo. This is the section that has now been moved to the end of the podcast for this particular podcast, number 190. It is the algorithm cataclysm. That special effect is amazing. Yeah. All right. What do we got? So, unfortunately, I don't have a title of this algorithm. We don't know when it will go into place. But we do know that Matt Cutts put out a statement that Google is working on a new algorithm change that is going to target low-quality merchants, specifically e-commerce sites. So if you have an e-com site and, I don't know, you have some bad reviews, it's probably a great indicator they'll be looking at. Or let's say your time on site is low or things like that. They're not seeing conversions because they can track all that, whether you have analytics or not, then you may very well get dinged by whatever this algorithm is going to be called. So if you have an e-com site, fix it. Make sure that your process works. Make sure your product sells and that it ships fine and that your reviews are good. So that way you can be listed as a quality merchant and not one of these kind of low-impact merchants and lose your ranking. I will say what bothers me some about that is I'm afraid Google is going to transition to big brands. Yeah. Right? And so, you know, all of the small mom-and-pops who have a good site, who have a decent product. How did Zappos get where they are? Right? They weren't a big brand when they started. Exactly. I mean, that's the fact of every new brand that gets

big. So, yeah. Yeah. So I'm afraid to live. The little mom-and-pops will be out of there and our listing will be filled up with Overstock and Amazon probably and, you know, Google Shopping, of course, and things like that. And so it kind of sucks, but... A little concerning. Yeah. It is what it is. You have to step up. That was our algorithm cataclysm. Have we done the special thing twice before? No. Okay. That was a new one because we moved it to the end. I thought it was worth doing twice. Do we have any blank stare? Do we? I don't think so. No? No blank stare? Mm-mm. All right. I just can't think of it. Yeah. There's lots of things to blank stare about. That's usually true. All right. You have been listening to the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes, also SEO podcast on iTunes. That is because of all of y'all. Thank you so much for tuning in. And again, go ahead and write us a review on iTunes. Oh, by the way, we didn't talk about the new tear tattoo. I saw you. Yeah. Putting on that tattoo because we didn't get any reviews. Come on. Either do it on iTunes or do it on G+, or, you know, throw it on Facebook. That'll keep a tattoo off my face. Mm-hmm. That's good. Continuity there. All right. This has been the episode number 190. That's a good number. We probably should have had... That's why we're having the shock top. That's what we're going to do in the next 10 episodes. 200. We got to, like... Yeah. Do it outside. No, it'll be too hot in Houston. Oh, man. Yeah. Episode 200. Yeah. It'll be inside. Yeah. Maybe in a car. Maybe at Twin Peaks. Ooh. Yeah. That could work. Or just... We'll pick some other random location. Thank you, guys. Again, you guys can follow us. Facebook.com slash... E-Wip Style. Twitter.com slash... E-Wip Style. YouTube.com slash... E-Wip Style. And you can send us an email. Podcast at... E-Wip Style.com. Thank

you for tuning in. This is a popular podcast because of you. We thank you. Until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burris. And I'm Charles Lewis. Bye-bye for now. Slightly raised up eyebrow high. Headed my way. Cool as mountain.