Do twitter followers affect your SEO - #seopodcast 133

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. Yeah, you did get it right. That was the whole title this time. I nailed it. You are watching the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. That is because of you and you over there. We're the most popular podcast on iTunes because you guys watch us and because you guys follow us. You can follow us at Facebook.com. Slash eWebStyle. Twitter.com slash eWebStyle. YouTube.com slash eWebStyle. And podcast at e-WebStyle.com. I caught you the first few times on that. As always, in our podcast, we give you a tip from our previous podcast. Our tip was, don't believe all the SEOs. Look to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Podcast. I had an extra podcast in there. I can't even write it. I can't even write it properly. All right. We also cover a little bit of news. I thought this was pretty interesting. By the way, if you're near some sort of electronic device and you can actually tweet Facebook something, you need to tweet or Facebook this podcast right now. Hashtag. Yeah. Go to Twitter, hashtag SEO Podcast 133. Tag us at eWebStyle. That way we can come back, punch you in the face, and give you some link love. Hey, by the way, this podcast today is sponsored by Kicking Lizard. Kicking Lizard Salsa. Shout out to Kicking Lizard Salsa. They hit us up a couple podcasts ago. They were watching this. Matter of fact, they submitted an iTunes review. Right. And then we gave them a punch in the face. We kind of joked, man, send us some salsa. And they did. Look at that. They sent us the salsa. So we're going to try it out because I said we would. And I'll be honest, I usually eat the red salsa. Right. We're going to do the green. Hint. Hint. Yeah. Send us a red one. But we're going to try it out. I already tried it out. They're both good. I think I favor the creamy salsa just a little

bit better. Don't get to Kicking Lizard. Kicking Lizard. Wow. Awesome. Here. Here's that punch in the face. Remember, we are your friendly local neighborhood top position snatchers where our mantra is do not be a douche. Little bit of news. As always, EPIC, if you guys don't know what EPIC stands for, I didn't. Electronic Privacy Information Center is talking to the FTC about Google and the fact that Google is incorporating their Google Plus into their search results. Even Danny Sullivan jumped on this bandwagon. And apparently, in some situations, because I did a test, if you Google Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg's unused Google Plus account will show up. And it was like, okay, that's not relevant. And Danny Sullivan is saying, well, why are you even bothering showing this? This isn't relevant for that kind of search. And my point is, they're advertising one of their own products. They can do it. Like, relax about it. It doesn't make sense that everybody's all, you know, got the... I think, frankly, what they're doing is putting Twitter and Facebook and these other networks in a position to have to agree. Or have to advertise. Because, I mean, Twitter is probably not advertising on Google right now. And Facebook's probably not, well, probably never will advertise on Google. So, you're right. This puts them in a position where maybe they need to be doing advertising because, at the end of the day, Google's out there advertising their competitive product on the most popular search engine on the planet. So, I thought that was interesting. C.E.S. is going on this, in Vegas. Yeah. That's all my electronics. I would love to be there when... I want to go there one year. By the way, maybe Larry Williams is watching. He called just before the podcast. I told him to tune in. He's with VIP Moving Service. Larry will be getting back to you a little bit after this podcast. Dean Calhoun, long-time listener. Hopefully, we're going to see him at South by Southwest. He's always putting great information on our Facebook

page. And he had what I thought were like four nuggets of good information worth sharing. Three of them he combined. He says, these are mistakes that you can make when you're doing SEO. Ranking high for a keyword that has no traffic. Go back to the blue one-arm widget that you have mentioned. By the way, Google blue one-arm widget. We're all over the place. And you can find out why we talked about it. Really, at the end of the day, getting onto the first page of Google. Google is actually really easy. His number two. Ranking high for a business name that makes no sense for the business that you're in. And Dean readily admits in his market, he's a great example. He dominates the ranking for the term affigility. That also means somebody has to know affigility exists and be interested in their service before they even get there. Ranking high when you're logged into Gmail or another Google account. Yeah, recognize that you're logged in and so they're showing you the results that they feel were personal to you. Yeah, we get this regularly. My website's on the first page. What terms? Whatever. Company name. Air conditioning service Houston. And we say, okay, well, let me look that up myself here. I'm not seeing you. Oh, yeah, I'm right there. First position. Are you logged into your Google account? Yeah. Does that matter? Log out and do another test. Well, speaking of AC service, let me give a special punch in the face to Hartford Services. If you're in the Sugar Land area or Katy, Richmond, Missouri City, Fort Bend, anywhere, how about them get your AC done, your heating, electrical, plumbing, a pretty cool company. We'll meet with them later today. And one last thing. Here we go. Carefully crafting of the meta descriptions helps have some meaningful language in the site link snippets. So site link snippets is when you do a search, like in Dean Calhoun's case, for affigility, and his website obviously comes up in the first position, and it's got

all the different site links Google will show. In his case, I think it's six different site links. And the text that shows up under those site links is actually his meta description. And that's, again, we say that SEVO, Search Engine Visitor Optimization, starts at the search engine result page. The green one is good. Yeah, the green one is good. It's better than the other one. Yeah. So make sure that you're doing a good job on your meta descriptions. That's really your first opportunity to sell, sell, sell, sell. Sell, sell, sell. All right, so we pulled a couple articles. We were looking, well, Chris mentioned it earlier. He talked about the Search Plus Google incorporating Google Plus into the search results. And so when they did that, of course, Twitter began ranting. And as a matter of fact, this is a good time to go into my blank stare. It was short rants. It was short Twitter rants. Lots of them. Yeah, short rants, less than 140 characters, right? A lot of them. But basically, they were saying that, you know, usually breaking news happens on Twitter, which is true. And so the fastest way to get some new information is to follow people on Twitter. The problem with the Search Plus world that Google has implemented, the problem Twitter has with that, is that those results are omitting Twitter results. And so Google came back and said, well, last year. We were showing Twitter results. And you declined to give us that information. I guess that feed or whatever they used to display the latest results from Twitter. And so technically, you haven't been showing. And this change doesn't change that. You still won't show unless you, you know, give them what they need. Turn that back on or whatever. Yeah. So that sounds like a Yelp situation. Exactly. That's what I thought about. The same kind of Yelp situation where they asked to have their reviews removed. And then they're like, well, if we remove your reviews, you're going to just remove your entire

site. And they're like, oh, we don't want that. And then now Google has enough reviews, so they're just excluding Yelp reviews altogether. So you brought up Danny Sullivan earlier. Danny Sullivan had a chance to talk with some representatives from Google and Bing about social media and how social media affects the search. And so I got some of the questions he asked here. We'll go through a couple of these. One of the questions he asked them was, are regular search results affected by social media buzz? What do you think about that before I tell you what Google said? Well, I think it certainly has, it should have, fundamentally, it should have an impact. Google is pretty good at doing what they should do. And Bing is pretty good at following Google. So my guess is that it actually does have an impact. Yeah. Well, Google said, yes, it is used as a signal, especially for news. Bingo. Bingo. Bing also said, yes, it's a signal. Some wait is passed and regular results are affected. Second question, are social and real-time search results affected by buzz? Google says, heavily affected. Yeah. Bing also says, heavily affected. Authority metrics are used to determine hot posts. Right. So by hot posts, I think they mean posts that probably got shared frequently, that have a lot of comments, a lot of backlinks, and things like that. And especially, I think, when you get outside of the social buzz and you start ending up on blogs and articles, that's when that buzz really reaches a peak. And it's going to display promptly, I mean, prominently. See, are Twitter links taken into account, a.k.a. do they pass link juice? Google says, in some limited situations, the data is used. Bing says, the data is used the way it depends on how often a link is posted, the number of tweets and retweets, and the authority of the people that post it. Interesting concept here, because I kind of figured that, which is why I don't like shortened URLs. Right. Because I think

you lose some sort of link juice once, because the URL has changed. It's not your URL anymore. It's bit.ly or, you know, whatever you use. Frankly, when I post that I actually posted a new podcast, I actually created e-webstyle.com slash SEO podcast, because it was shorter than our real name, which is like SEO dash search engine dash dash, you know, whatever. Because I didn't want to use a shortener, and it's keyword rich, and so it goes right there, both in Twitter and in Facebook. So, yeah, I definitely agree with that. Let's see here, does the Twitter authority have an impact on the weight of the links that are shared? Yes. This is Google's answer. The weight depends on the authority of the person. The author authority is used in limited situations, and it's independent of page rank. Interesting. So, how popular that person is don't necessarily affect the page rank generated from that link. Interesting. Bing says, the author authority affects the link weight. I think that's an easier way to say what Google said. Last question. Does the Facebook authority have an impact on the weight of links that are shared? Similar to Twitter, the weight of each link depends on the authority of the profile. So, I guess the more followers you have, the more action you have, the more powerful that link is, which makes sense. It's like if I retweet a link to eWebstyle.com, it may not have as much value. If Denny Sullivan goes and retweets that link, then it's a lot more powerful, a lot more influence. So, pretty good article. We'll post the entire link on Facebook so you can review all of the questions. But, overall, I think it was pretty good and, for the most part, kind of confirmed what we thought in regards to social media and how that affects SEO. And, you know, it boils down to you should be doing social. Exactly. You know, there's a couple of reasons, and this is one of them, to support your SEO. We talk about that

regularly. Don't do social in lieu of SEO, depending on your market. I mean, there may be some situations where you don't need to focus on SEO as much. You should be focusing on Facebook, on Twitter, in some certain markets, more than SEO. And we really use it as a follow-up. If we feel like there's some campaign that isn't performing as well as we want, then we'll encourage the client to start doing social media. Exactly. We've got a social media package so that that can support that SEO effort. Exactly. I'm going to omit blank stare today for the simple time to say, Go Texans, good luck in Baltimore, and let's keep you pushing. Is that all we got today? No. A little short podcast? Short podcast. All right, cool. Uh-oh. He's coming here. Look at that. Try the light green one, man. The green one is phenomenal. Here's an on-the-spot review from Javier. Thumbs up. Thumbs up. Leaping, kicking lizard. Kicking lizard. Not leaping lizard. Kicking lizard. You got a thumbs up from Javier. One of the reasons you should be following us on Facebook. We are doing a $10 giveaway, gift card giveaway, so make sure that you like us on Facebook. You mentioned something earlier that I thought, I thought this might be an interesting question. What's the first time you remember Twitter and thinking that Twitter was going to be something significant? And I can tell you, for me, it was actually when Michael Jackson died, and we're watching VH1, and they were showing tweets of all the celebs, you know. I was like, wow, maybe this Twitter thing is going to do something. And back for me, it was, I signed up for Twitter when it was in beta. Yeah, you got Chuck. Like, his Twitter.com slash Chuck. That's above Chuck Norris. That's above Chuck Charles Schwab. Yeah. Yeah. Chuck Norris. Chuck E. Cheese. Chuck on NBA TV. Yeah, Charles Barkley. Chuck. Yeah. I get a whole bunch of tweets for all of them. Yeah. Name your price. You can have it.

Name your price. $1.50? No. I'm going to have to agree to it after you name it. You can name it. Let's agree to a price. So, yeah, go ahead. Hit us up on our Facebook page and let us know when, what was the first time you realized that Twitter was going to be pretty impactful. Again, if you're actually in front of an electronic device right now as you're listening to this, or you've got one in your pocket, go ahead and tweet that. Hashtag SEO Podcast 133. 133. All right, you have been listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. That is because of you. One way that you can help us, if you get good information out of this, other than following us on Facebook, is to actually go onto iTunes, create an account, and submit a review. And then after you submit the review, send us an email and let us know you submitted the review. We'll give you a punch in the face. Actually, Dean Calhoun just came back, and he upped our rating from four stars to five stars because we've been working on our audio quality. And he's just, you know, enamored with us. I'm going to punch in the face, Dean. Dean, you're always a good support. Until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burris. I'm Charles Lewis. Bye-bye for now.