Different Ways Social Factors Can Affect Your Site's SEO - #seopodcast 173

My name is Chris Burris with E-WebStyle. I am the owner of that said aforementioned company. Yes, my name is Charles Lewis, your Internet Marketing Specialist. You guys are tuning in to the most popular Internet Marketing Podcast on iTunes. That is because of y'all, all y'all out there. You're listening to Podcast number 173. As always, we have a tip from our previous podcast. That tip is, if you are B2C, business to consumer, especially if you are a brick-and-mortar business, begin the mobile aspects of your Internet Marketing campaign sooner rather than later. You want to make sure that if indeed your goal of being a B2C brick-and-mortar business is to drive foot traffic, then you want to take advantage of a mobile strategy in regards to Internet Marketing to help bring foot traffic, that is, into your store. So whether it's social, for example, you should really focus heavily on mobile usage with that, whether it's Foursquare or Facebook check-ins and things like that. Take advantage of using mobile to increase your foot traffic. Excellent. Remember, we are your friendly, local, neighborhood top position snatchers, where our mantra is, Don't be a deuce. If you can, if it's possible, if you have the technology and the know-how, please tweet right now. I don't have my phone. You feel naked? Oh, man. Hold on to that one? Yeah, I don't even want to touch that one. It's the hashtag, it's the old podcast. Make sure you tag us in it, at eWebStyle. This is number 173, and make sure you tag us in it so we can network in and we can kick it. Excellent. We've got, actually, I got a couple good calls from podcast listeners this week, some lengthy calls, some really good information exchanged, and really one of them wasn't aware that we have a referral program, and I wish I could say that surprised me because our referral program marketing was stellar. We now have a referral marketing, a referral program page where you can sign up for our referral program. We know most

of our listeners are SEO experts out there, web developers, web designers, you know, maybe social media experts, and if you get a project that is not in your area of expertise. Kind of scope of what you do. Yeah. So you need a little bit more sturdiness, a little bit more backbone, a little bit more foundation to maybe provide for that client, then send them this way. We can help you, and there's actually a referral program commission in it for you. So get rid of all the headache and still maintain the cash. If you get something good out of this podcast, we ask you to do one of two or two of two or possibly three things. We're going to stop there. We're going to say one of three things. At least one of three things. How about that? Go to our G-plus page, and the way you get to our G-plus page is to go to e-webstyle.com slash G-plus And e-webstyle.com slash G-plus And Google Plus Okay, yeah. Yeah, we ain't got to that one yet. And Google Plus. Yeah. Any form of G-plus, Google Plus, after the slash, after our domain, we'll get you to our G-plus page. That's the easiest way to get there. And while you're there... Leave us a review. Yeah, leave us a review. Also, get onto iTunes. It's a couple, three simple steps. Go onto iTunes, create an iTunes account if you don't have one, and write a review. When you write that review, go ahead and send us an email. You can email us at podcast at e-webstyle.com And let us know. You submitted a review. We'll give you a punch in the face, also known as a... We got the Australian question with the steel-toed boots we got to address. Oh, man. You printed that one? I didn't, unfortunately. We'll address that next time. And we need to kind of correct somebody on the SEO podcast vernacular. Ouch. Just think about it. Yeah. I almost tempted to get you. We'll do that one next time. Yeah. And

remember, you can stalk us, track us, follow us, haunt us, scare us, spook us, whatever, us. Pay us. Pay us. Throw that in there. Facebook.com slash... e-webstyle. Twitter.com slash... e-webstyle. YouTube.com slash... e-webstyle. And, again, you can email us, podcast at... e-webstyle.com. A little bit of news, as always. Google has dropped their free version of their Google apps. It's funny because the article was just... The details about the pricing was just totally wrong in the article. It said, you know, if you have less than 10 users, you're $50 per year, which is actually not true. You're $50 per year per user. It's a big difference because it's, you know, 10 times different. And we were discussing, is this a good idea from Google? Is this a bad idea? And, you know, we know it's going to increase revenue. It's going to increase revenue maybe up front, right? A lot of up front revenue. New sign-ups. People who go to Google apps immediately have to pay. But I think long-term, it may not be the best decision because long-term, having all of those free users who are people using Google. Champions. Right? They're champions for that. Yeah, I was a long-time apps user. Still am. Mine is still free. And, frankly, I still have 20 people that I can go and add, right? Early adopter. Yeah, we both... e-webstyle has 50 free accounts, too. And we're grandfathered in, so that's great. And so I think, but if it was never free, then I think you lose people like us who recommend Google apps to other people, who use it consistently, who, frankly, was probably part of the reason I'm an Android user. Because if I wasn't using Google apps, then, you know, maybe iPhone or something like that would have been more feasible for me. So, you know, I'm not sure if making it a paid product all the way is the best route to go. I think they should have dropped it down to five or even three users, you know. Yeah, maybe two or three

free users you need more than... So you can get those one-off champions. You know, there's a ton of one-company web design people who are in a position to recommend the product. Make sure that they can use it for free. Because as inexpensive as it really is, ultimately, if there's a free way to get it, for instance, if you go to godaddy.com, you get a host to host with them, your email's included. Like, it's an unlimited email. So that's just how that works. This was interesting. Rubicon is a game manufacturer, and they were all up in arms and posted this just horrible, lengthy, bad blog about Microsoft because they were on the Microsoft app program, app center, kind of like Google Play, kind of like Apple apps. And they made $83 their first week. $83. This is a major games manufacturer. They spent like $20,000 to port their software into this environment, and they were getting little or no support from Microsoft. And they posted this blog post about how horrible the experience was, how they'll never design for Microsoft again. And the last part of the article was, and subsequent to this, they have retracted that blog article, and they are working with Microsoft. You know what? That's a tip of the hat to Microsoft. You totally screwed it up, and you went back and made it right. That's probably one of those articles where, you know, they've already written it and composed it and almost it published. But Microsoft took action, so we'll just publish it anyway. Yeah. Yeah. Let's see. Here's a... This was interesting. AMD. AMD, so that's the chip manufacturer, they back out of a pre-existing silicon wafer order. So, of course, chips are made on silicon wafers, and they had a standing order with their supplier or a future order of $500 million worth of silicon wafers. They had to back that down to $115 million. Yeah, one-fifth. Close to one-fifth. Yeah, 20%. Yeah. To get out of that contract, it cost them $320 million. How much was the original

agreement? $500 million. Y'all said it just went on a head and... Well, they ended up saving $65 million by pulling that back. Right? They don't have... Of course, they don't have whatever, $400 million worth of inventory or raw product, but ostensibly, they're not going to need it. Well, hopefully not. And apparently, they've been losing money and having these fiscal write-offs because they've got such huge inventory or things like this contract on the books and the negative impact that it has. You know what? I did news before reviews, so... Wow, that actually... Now we're going to do reviews after news. Yeah, there you go. There were two from the previous time. We'll cover those real quick. Trevor Feller. The title of his review... Trevor Feller. Best internet marketing podcast. Five stars. Been listening... Five stars. One, two, three, four, five. Been listening for about three months. Started on the first episode. Am at about 76 or so now. Great info and fun to listen to. Highly recommend my only two complaints. Mic quality. Hopefully, that's gotten a lot better now. And he said the volume of voices is way too low unless we laugh, which we try to do as often as possible. Could have fixed it by now. Definitely a problem at the episodes I'm at. So, hopefully, Mr. Feller... Yeah, it was a problem. Now, what's interesting is we got a tweet this week from... Oh, my God. I can't think of the guy's name. But he asked if we had changed our mics because he said the audio quality went down as of the last two episodes. And so, I saw that tweet this morning. And so, I replied to him and thought that was kind of strange because we have changed. We're using the lapels again. But we've been getting reviews. Yeah. Everybody said it's been working well. So, this is podcast number 173. Send us an email. Your comments. Is it better? Is it good? What improvements could we make on the audio? We are not audio engineers, nor do we

employ one. Yeah. Trevor, thank you for tuning in. Appreciate your support. You got a long way to go. What he says is on 76? Yeah. Yeah. So... A hundred... Close to a hundred more. That's crazy. Yeah. That's awesomely crazy. Here's the next one. This is by... You can always be... Demon iTunes. Hey, I got it. Demon iTunes. SEO podcast is entertaining and informative. Five stars. Hi, guys. I love the show. You are always providing new and great info as well as entertaining. I especially love the algorithm cataclysm section. That term just cracks me up. We had a debate about that. We've had better debates. It still was a debate. If you want to email, you can get me at danny at dannymullen.net. Yeah. We'll send him an email. Say, thank you. Appreciate it, man. Punch in the face to you, Danny. And this one was very recent. Punch in the face. You guys are great. Five stars. Five stars. This is from Edward Tilbury. Why listen to irritating political podcasts or music when you do something productive and listen... When you can do something productive and listen to the number one SEO podcast on Google? Okay. Well, I actually haven't read... I haven't read this one yet. No, that's... Actually, we are. I Googled SEO podcasts today. Google's done an algorithm change. We didn't do a cataclysm because they didn't post it. We didn't find anything about it. But we saw some position changes just this morning, actually. Currently, I use my favorite shopping cart, Magento, and run WordPress to copy fresh content to the main pages. I would love to hear an automotive episode of SEO techniques since it's a little trickier than just SEO optimization for ground effects. It has many variations for just one car, such as BMW ground effects, BMW 3 Series ground effects, BMW E46 ground effects. Interesting. I'm looking to improve my ranking for carbon fiber hoods on my website, carbonfiberhoods.com, and for ground effects, body kits on groundeffects.com. Punch in the face from Las Vegas. Thanks for the

great podcast. First, well, first, thank you for listening to our great podcast. Thank you for tuning in. Punch in the face to you. Now, a couple things about this. It's interesting. First thing, I think you're doing something pretty cool. Be careful with your EMDs, your exact match domain names. Hopefully, you have good content, good products, and so that won't become that much of a factor. And I would do dashes. Yep. Right? So, you know, carbon fiber hoods should be carbon-fiber-hoods. Groundeffects.com should be ground-effects.com. And you might want to put automotive anyway. Automotive ground effects. Because Google's sophisticated enough that in some general terms, this isn't going to get you on the first page. And in general terms, they know that a BMW is an auto. Yeah, so it may. So I think that's going to have some positive effect. The other interesting thing about that is we have a client, right? Who sells vehicle parts on a Magento cart with a WordPress blog. Yep. Yeah, we're just wrapping that up. I thought that was interesting. It would be interesting to know why you chose Magento. How did you end up there? We know our client chose it for the ease of his program. Yeah, the robust it had. And this is after Cart 66 and Shop and Foxy Cart. We tried several different things. 3D. No, we didn't try 3D. He was using 3D. That was the one he was using. We tried, like, a different cart, too. And so we ended up at Magento. So, yeah, tell us why you used it. All right, that's it. That's it. Well, I got a Twitter shout-out. All right. I'll holler at a Twitter punch in the face to Adriana Langston, listener. Thank you for your support. So she hit us on Twitter. She asked a question about Google Earth attack. And so what she did was she did a guest post on Real SEO. And it's actually a pretty good post. You get it. As a matter of fact, I'll repost it on our Facebook page.

It's about using closed captioning on YouTube videos to help increase e-commerce conversions. Right. Very niche, very focused screenshots, long posts. Good job on that. But her question was the author tag setup isn't working right. So, Adriana, we went and did some research, and I looked at it. Yes, you do have. First, before we get started, I think it's worth mentioning the debate that we had first because somebody else may have this debate. I was arguing that the email address, the URL of the email address, so, you know, podcast at e-webstyle, the e-webstyle had to be the same as the place we were posting on. As I was saying that, I kind of realized that doesn't make any sense. Yes, and also Charles pointed out that he's got relative author tag working on sites that don't even have emails. So, it's not necessary that the domain for which you want your image, your relative author tag system to work, it doesn't have to be the same domain name as your email. Yeah, it doesn't have to be the same domain-based email that you're using. But, I think some of the things that are key, and you almost hit them, matter of fact, you did everything right, but the code you used in the tag itself was incorrect. So, the way the author tag works is you have your local, your Google Plus page, and on the About Us section on that page, you have a section where you can put what website you contribute to. Matter of fact, it's called Contributor Section. And in that section... And by the way, this has to be your Google Plus personal page. Yeah, it has to be your personal page. Because you are the author, the company is not the author. Exactly. This won't work on a Google Plus company profile page. It only works on your personal page. In that Contributor Section, include a link to the site that you're contributing post to. So, Adriana, she did that. And then, on the post itself, usually in the bio

of the author, you want your name to be a link back to your Google Plus page. And you did that. The issue was, inside that link, your relative tag, instead of going relative, real equals author, you went real equals me. And I think that's where the problem was. I think if you change that to author and resubmit it, then once it gets re-indexed, I think your author tag image should show. It looked like you also tried to do that with a section just under it, which had relative equals, what was it, something dash author. It said data hyphen real equals author. And so, I had never seen that one before, actually. So, the data dash might be, you know, either one or the other, and I would fix one at a time and go from there. And the problem is probably in the platform that that site was built on. Yeah, I'm a little surprised that real SEO, it should have relative author tag working somewhere. And it probably is. But my assumption is that... She submitted that section of it, yeah. For the bio. Yeah. And that's why I did it that way. So, yeah, check the bio link inside that post and change that to real equals author. Get rid of the data hyphen, get rid of the real equals me, and you should be good to go. And I wouldn't do both, though. Just, I don't know what Google's going to think if you have two relative author tags. Yeah, I would only use one. I would only use one. And, you know, try one, then try the other. Another thing that worked for me, and we'll keep it moving, is on that post, I used my full name, Charles Lewis, as the anchor text to the link to my Google local page. I mean, to my Google Plus page. So, keep that in mind, too. Yeah, it's a great question. It's interesting because it's significantly harder than it sounds to get relative authors. Oh, I gotta have a contributor and I

link back? Okay. That sounds easy. It does sound easy. Easy. Okay. All right. Let's get... Did you have one more? Boy, I just had some other news that I found I thought was pretty cool. We were talking about Google Plus right now, bring it up right now. So, Google announced they had 500 million profiles. Wow. And there's interesting stats about those. 235 million have used at least one feature, like plus one on a page. Right. Right? 235 million visit plus.google.com at least once a month. Right. So, what does all that say? I think that's saying that the usage of Google Plus is growing. And it's gonna continue. And it's gonna continue to grow. More and more people are using it. So, if you haven't adopted it and included it in your mobile internet marketing strategy, in your marketing strategy period, then you should. So, with that, we'll get into the meat. So, we're talking social, right? Seems like a great caveat, right? Yeah. In the social. So, I came across this article on SEO Moss today, written by Jason Demers, your guide to social signals for SEO. And I thought this one was pretty cool because we were having this debate a few weeks ago about, you know, how much influence does social really have in regards to Google ranking your sites? And more importantly, is it going to eventually have more influence than linking? And so, I think the article does a good job. Jason does a good job of explaining how Google is recognizing social signals and some of the things you can do in regards to improving your social to help with your SEO. And so, first question is, how and why do social signals improve rankings? I like his first word here. This is a highly debatable answer. And it has to be because Google hasn't officially released any metrics that show what social signal is giving what value. But we do know from just experience and testing some of these things. I wouldn't present it to you guys if I

didn't think it was somewhat accurate. So, number one, the number of people that like your brand on Facebook. I think that's a huge social signal indicator. Let's be realistic. This is just what makes sense. Yeah. Right? If you've got a ton of likes on your Facebook page. On your brand page. Then Google is going to give more credibility to the URL that's associated with that Facebook page. The number of Facebook shares. Yeah. Right? How often does your brand post content and that content gets shared? Interesting note. One of our competitors in the city of Houston has like 1,200 Facebook fans. Right? We get 7,000 downloads of our podcast per week. We're at like 340 or something on our Facebook fans. Which by the way, go fan our podcast. Yeah, yeah. Go like us. Go like us. He's got a 100 and I'll just leave it at that. It's interesting. It's interesting. Like I don't... That's why Matt Cutts did come back and say that it... Don't write the epitaph for linking yet. Right? It's not dead and it probably won't be anytime soon. But this is just an indicator that social has some influence. Number of Twitter followers, but I like this one. Number of tweets mentioning your brand name and or including a link to your website. And we talked about this briefly before. One of the things that people should try to get in the habit of it, if you're tweeting with the sole purpose of sharing links, stay away from URL shorteners if possible. Sometimes it's a long blog post with a keyword rich title and so you have to shorten that URL just for the sake of preserving characters. But if you can, just go with the link directly to your site. That way the more retweets you get, it will actually be a real link to your site and not some shortened URL. So those were on page, I'm sorry, those were factors, yeah. On social page factors. The direct factors. That's what I meant to say. Some of the

indirect impact comes from increased inbound links, right? People retweeting and sharing your stuff. Increased positive reviews, Google Local, Yelp, et cetera. Take this time to say that Yelp is a social site. You can create a profile there. You can add reviews and do things like that. Share the reviews. And follow other people who give reviews. Yeah. Exactly. So look at it as that. A decreased bounce rate. And this kind of goes back and forth but usually if the user is familiar with you socially, meaning they interact with you on Facebook or Twitter, they've pushed your page already, they read your blog posts. Then if they go to your site, they're likely to spend more time. They're likely to have a higher average time on site and a lower bounce rate because they're familiar with you already. And that usually means better content. Now in our case, we totally agree to that and believe that. We just also believe that a high bounce rate can't be a good deal. We're one of the few companies, I don't, I've never heard it before. Yeah. We believe that like a 100% bounce rate can be perfect for the right business. Yeah. If your business is, if you make most of your conversions by people picking up the phone and calling, then if they search for your business and find you on the first page, click your link, and the CTA is powerful enough to make them pick up the phone and call you without them doing anything else, and then they bounce, then that's a great bounce because you've got to lead. To chain. Exactly. We deserve, when that happens, we deserve a punch in the face. Yeah, definitely. So decrease bounce rate, okay, so I was just talking about that. So one of the other things he talks about on here is some of the future, the future of social signals and how it will help SEO. And so, you know, three things here, the world is becoming more social. I like how he put this, today's

kids are tomorrow's consumers. They're raised communicating on Facebook, Twitter, and G+. I think this is absolutely true. And so, you know, by the time these kids and teens become, you know, generation, whatever they'll be called, you know, they'll be our consumers. Ooh, that's not good. Yeah. Yeah. What, Z? I guess. They'll be our consumers. They'll be our managers, business owners, and they communicate socially. I communicate socially. I think we communicate socially. And so if you haven't adopted it, you should. Reason number two, people are more likely to trust the website recommended personally by their friends than by a search engine. Social has always been the new word of mouth. That won't change. Lastly, websites with a strong social presence have better conversion rates and brand loyalty. I totally agree. If I'm used to dealing with a familiar brand and they deal with me socially, then yeah, I'll likely spend more at that store. Or I'll likely, my purchasing decision will be a lot easier just because of the brand recognition. The fact that I know I can go to their fan page for support. The fact that I know if I tweet them, I'll get responded to. So definitely take advantage of the social signals. Now, some of the things you can do, how can you take advantage of this, right? So there's some on-site deals and some off-page deals you could do, and we'll wrap this up. On-site deals, include share buttons, right? Recommend us, tweet us, dig it, read it, things like that. Two share buttons on your site, especially if your content is, the whole purpose of that content is to go viral or to get shared. Make it easy. Make it easy to be shared. Definitely. And give instruction, right? Don't just put the F there. Yeah. Put, you know, like us on Facebook, share this information on Facebook, whatever it may be. Give some direction, because people tend to follow directions, so give them directions. And then, not just that. I like the way some sites do it, like Search

Engine Journal, for example. Once you, they'll have a long blog post, but you won't even see the action until you've actually read the blog post. So once you get all the way to the bottom, once you scroll down a certain level, then the CTA pops up. Hey, share this on Facebook, or do this with it, or do that with it. Which is a great time to do it, because I've sat there and read the entire post. So take advantage of the share buttons. Also include connect buttons. Like a page on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter. Plus one us on Google, you know, which is a huge ... I take the time to separate the two. There's a difference between sharing and connecting. A lot of people say, you know, they'll call us and say, oh, I need to put Facebook on my website. Well, what does that really mean? Right. Share a particular blog post on Facebook, or a like us on Facebook, or you're running a contest. You know, so really think about how you want to implement that, and then do it. And lastly, on-site elements could also include a blog. That's just the easiest way to keep fresh content on your site. Some off-site elements. Make sure you have a Facebook page, a Twitter page, too. And of course, Google Plus, those are kind of the main ones you should have. And specifically Google Plus local. Yeah, especially Google Plus local. When you say Google Plus, I mean all of it. A personal page for yourself, a local page for the business, and then the business's ... Plus page. Business Plus page. Right. Make sure you have all of those. And basically sign up for those, register them, set up your blog. I like how you closed it. Social is that important, where if you don't have anyone internally to manage it, hire someone. Yeah. And then he goes on to say, if that's not in the budget, get a college intern. They'll be glad to do it, and they're probably great

on social media. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we certainly have some good experience with that. So that was your guide to social signals for SEO, and I'll post that on our Facebook page. That'll be on our Facebook page, which is Facebook.com slash ... E-Web style. Do we have any blank stares? No blank stares. No blank stares. You know, Nick's taking pictures of blank stares and posting. I've got to work ... You've got a good smirk, a good smirk on your blank stare. I'm going to have to work on that, because I just look like ... Blank? Blank. Yeah. It's amazing. Blank stare actually has to have a little more than blank. It's hard to be blank. Blank stare actually,的人cies like ... I don't know, you make it seem so easy. I don't know, you make it seem so easy. Did I just fall into that? Yes, you did. Yes, you did. Yes, you did. Wow. That was an easy one. All right. You have been listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. That is because of you. You, and- UM, you- You right there. You over there. We do get 7,000 downloads a week. We have been downloaded in 76 different countries. Thank you guys so much for me ... Thank you for making that happen. We really appreciate it. This has been podcast number 173. 173? 173, yeah. Actually, as we were wrapping up there, I was thinking about, wow, what is it going to take to get to 1,000, right? And where is that going to be? And it's pretty cool. Yeah, so we got the end of the year wrap up coming soon. It either starts next week or the week after, yeah. It's usually a two-podcast issue of the year, 2012 year in review. We wrap up everything. We blow through everything, give a tip from every podcast, basically. Yeah, it's very high-paced, extremely fast, very fun. Yeah, so it's very simple. And I think that's it. Until the very next podcast, which will be 174, my name is Chris Burris.

And I'm Charles Lewis. Bye-bye for now.