Engagement Factors for your SEO Plan - #SEOpodcast 258

The SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. And I'm Charles Lewis, your internet marketing specialist. Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our podcast. This is podcast number 258. You can see that on the screen right behind us. If you're watching. Because we are broadcasting live from Houston, Texas, from the eWebStyle office on Ustream. You can actually get us, we broadcast every Friday at- 12.15. 12.15. We're a little tardier today, I will bet. Yes. So, as always, there is a tip from our previous podcast and that tip is start your CTAs, that stands for Calls to Actions, with action verbs to change the mindset of the user. That sounds important. Yeah, changing the mindset, people don't understand how mental making an online transaction is. Right. It's all about that conversion. And so, when you start thinking about, let's say from a paid search perspective, when you start thinking about the ad people see, then they click, and then once they click, then they're on your site. You really want to start that process with that action word. So, if they see an ad, and that ad says, order today, right? And you click it, then mentally, you've already committed to, I'm going to probably order something once I get to this next page. Yeah. And now, if you've done everything else we've been preaching, and your continuity's there, the consistency's there, and they get to the landing page, and that landing page also says, order today. Right. Then that person is likely to order today. And so, yeah, if you can start your CTAs with some sort of action word, order, subscribe, download, whatever it is, do that. All right. So, please remember, we are your friendly local neighborhood Top Position Snatchers, where our mantra is, don't be a douche. Do not be a douche. It is not a good look for you. It's not a good look. Hey, we got a little bit of potatoes to get through, but just a teaser, what's coming up today?

Oh, man. So, we got some great content coming up later today. SEO 101, we're going back to the basic. Got 18 things you should be doing on your site, and so we're going to dive into those, and I think you guys will like it. 18. 18. We're going to talk about it. We don't have time for it. Let's get it done. If you're in a position to, please tweet now. And what you should tweet is, hashtag SEO Podcast. This is number 258. Be sure to tag us in it, at bestSEOPodcast, at eWebStyle. That way, we can follow you back and do all of our social networking stuff. If this is the first time you're listening to our podcast, you will get through the potatoes soon. Yeah. We want more new ones. We will get through the potatoes of our podcast and into the meat very shortly. If you've listened to this podcast before, we ask you to do us one of four favors. The first one is, please write us a review on our G Plus local page. Okay. We've made it incredibly easy to get to the G Plus local page. Simple, simple, simple. All you need to do is go to e-webstyle.com slash Google Plus. Or slash. Google. Plus. Or slash. G Plus. Or slash. G Plus. All of those will take you to our G Plus local page where there are three things we would ask you to do. And those are. First off, leave us a review. That's most important. Make sure it's five stars. Five stars. And after you leave that review, then put us in a circle and give us a plus one. We shall appreciate it. Next thing that you could do for us, three steps, go on to iTunes, create an account, write a review. If you choose to, send us an email, podcast at e-webstyle.com. And we'll read your review on air, good or bad, and you'll hear the bad today. Also, you can go to our Facebook page, facebook.com slash e-webstyle. There you'll find a

place to write a review. Please give us a five star review. I caught you with your drink and drink there, right? Yeah, caught me drinking. Next, you can go to our Stitcher page. So, this bad review that we got today is from Stitcher. Apparently, the Stitcher crowd is a little bit more persnickety than some of the others. So, we'll get to that shortly. In general, you can follow us, haunt us, stalk us, facebook.com slash e-webstyle, twitter.com slash e-webstyle, youtube.com slash e-webstyle, instagram.com slash e-webstyle. And you're going to find on our Instagram page a new picture of us just as we're about to start this podcast. This is pretty good. If you are a master PHP programmer or you are a master WordPress extraordinaire, we're looking for you. Go ahead and submit an audio resume, 713-510-7846. We do have a referral program, which we'll talk afterwards. I've got to delete that out of this segment. We have a free website analysis. Go to e-webstyle.com and you will find our free website analysis form. Fill that out and we'll get back to you. If you're really in a hurry, please reach out to us. We'll get right on top of that. We do not have any algo cats today. So, let's do news. I just thought this was interesting. So, two things about Microsoft and Skype. First, Microsoft is coming out with a web-based version of Skype. Yeah, I saw that. So, you no longer have to download the app. Pretty cool. Duh. I mean, come on. Google Hangouts have been doing it and there are plenty of other online software that allow you to do that. We are in the web generation. So, it's coming into beta. It's going to work across all devices. Pretty cool. I hope GoToMeeting is paying attention. Yeah. Yeah. They need to do the same thing. Yeah. Next is Microsoft has put a Skype commercial on their Facebook page. It was either yesterday or the day before. And they used MacBooks in the commercial. And so, the people were talking about,

is this the donning of the new Microsoft? Right? Because Skype is a Microsoft product that works on MacBooks. There's no reason not to show it on another device. I would show it on multiple devices. But you should have multiple devices. Well, I'd show it on all. You would have been on a Surface. I'd show it on like three services, a couple Macs, you know, an iPad, a couple tablets, you know, so that it's an agnostic piece of software. And if you sell stuff to other people, sell it to other people. I think other people know how usable Skype is. I would have taken advantage of the product placement and it would have been on a Surface, on a Windows phone, and any other Microsoft product that I had. That's just me. Yeah. Maybe they didn't work. That's just me. Oh, I don't remember. Did I say that out loud? All right. And finally, this is just cool. The Galaxy Note Edge. This is an awesome device. Right? So, have you heard about it? I've heard about it. Well, I had heard about it, but I hadn't seen it. I didn't know what it was, right? So, it's basically a phone. It's a Note with the curved... So, as it's going off the edge, it's got a curved display so you can see the side of it. While the phone's closed. Yeah. Think about if it's closed and the side is still lit up with different icons and notifications and things like that. Pretty smart. Yeah. Well, those Galaxy people are pretty smart. All right. Let's get into our reviews. This first one is a one-star review. That's the opposite of five-star if you're keeping track. This one is from no one in particular. Literally, that's their handle. And it says, These guys wish they were shock jocks. After at least 10 minutes of blabber with about 15 calls to action to leave them a good review and follow them everywhere, they finally got on with it. I'm trying to learn things for my business, not

be entertained by Howard Stern. Wow. Well, first off, thank you. We are entertaining. We know it. Thank you. The other reviews of people who like us actually do find us entertaining. So, thank you. And, you know, if you were to give us a chance and listen to this, we could make a suggestion. We actually have a lot of people who actually fast forward through the potatoes. The first 10 minutes. We're giving away free information. We will continue to have our potatoes. Yeah. So, thank you, Punch in the Face, to no one in particular. I know. Like, I don't know how to punch in the face to no one. Like a blind punch, maybe? Yeah. Yeah. Alright, next. This is actually the first review we've read on air from one of our customers. And it's on our G Plus Local page. So, I thought I would share this. This is from Susan Manning. She owns Manning Pool Service. Shout out to Susan. Yeah, Punch in the Face to her. Did you say shout out? Did I say that? I know. Punch in the Face to Susan. E-Webstyle designed our website in April 2013. The return on investment took only one month. That's for the whole year of the campaign. It was so successful, the site won a national award through Action Coach Best Marketing Campaign of 2013. I meet monthly with Charles Lewis to update the site. Our meetings plug me back into the creative part of my company. I get a renewed sense of what a great company we've built and how well E-Webstyle supports us. Thanks a million. Susan Manning, Manning Pool Service. Punch in the Face. Yeah, Punch in the Face to you, man. Susan is awesome. She's awesome. And she just did that after you had your meeting with her and she was like, how do I write a review for you? Mm-hmm. This is how. And finally, this is from Gula Chelten. I don't know if this has five stars. I don't even remember where I got this. It's from our

Facebook page, so it's five stars. Mm-hmm. Hey, guys, I love your podcast. I've listened to several more than, listened to several more than ones. Definitely do not stop. Oh, several of the more than one. Okay, I got it. Oh, yeah. I have a question you could answer perhaps. I have a blog, great content, 100% original. It's about healthy living. That's insane. However, there are some great recipes out there that would complement the site and help visitors to the site. I do not create those recipes. I have them on my site and it clearly credits the site where the recipes were taken from. Is that okay or should I never take anything from somebody else's site? Great question. Punch in the face, by the way. Punch in the face. Thanks for the five stars. Thanks for the question. Thanks for all of that. Oh, by the way, I don't think it's five stars. I think it was just a question. It was a post on her wall. After we answer the question, she's gonna give us a five star review. Five star review. So first off, great question. Thanks for submitting it. Yes, you should. If people post content, I think it's public information and therefore you can use it. I think you, but check their terms, right? Some sites will have listed clearly in their terms or privacy policy that the content on the site can't be copied or whatnot. Now, if that isn't there, then you did the right thing by taking that content and giving credit. I think the clear question is how did you give credit, right? Did you just say, hey, I got this from here? And if so, then that's not right. What you should do is first put that whole recipe in quotes indicating that it is a quote from somewhere else. Right. And then either before or after the recipe, list the link, list the site where you got it from that's linked to that site. If the particular chef or whoever wrote that recipe, mention them by

name. Yeah. And that's really good enough there. You've quoted it. You've linked to the site and mentioned that it came from there. Now, if you want to just make them happy, take that same chef and give him some personal sharing. Like maybe a link to his Twitter profile or a link to his bio page or something like that and then you should be fine. Google will appreciate it because now you've incorporated a site that's relevant to your site. You've linked out to another resource where they can get more information and that's just all around good SEO and good user experience. One thing you could to take it up one notch is also reach out to them and ask them if they'd like a particular link. Yeah. Reach out to them. So if they're doing a good SEO job, they may tell you, look, I like the generic link that you provided because keyword stuffing in your anchor text can be a problem. Mm-hmm. Or they may tell you, look, we have lots of inbound links that don't reference, you know, great healthy recipes. Link to me using this anchor text. So please make it great and healthy recipes, actually. Yeah. And you could also link to it in some of where you describe it, where you're saying, hey, here's a great healthy recipe and then link to that particular recipe with that anchor text. In the content. Yeah. So reach out to them and see what they want because they may not want that or they may want it, you know, to be changed. So great question, punch in the face to you. Yeah, great question. We actually don't even talk about that a little bit further in today's content, so. We have a little, I think it looks like you got a little bit of news. I got a couple news, man. So dig this. So Apple may be developing a search engine. Hmm. Somebody else needs to. I know, so. Because apparently Microsoft is throwing in the towel. They threw in, so Apple,

which really sucks if Apple does this because you realize Bing, for example, powers Siri. Oh, yeah, yeah. So, you know, if Apple does their own search, I'm pretty sure it will power Siri. And that'll just be less usability for Bing. But anyway, so they developed this web crawler and it's been crawling in indexing pages. Right, right. And so people are like, hey, what's up with Apple? This new Apple bot, right, crawling my pages and stuff. So, interesting. I thought this was cool, especially since this will be here before we know it. South by Southwest wants more control over downtown Austin. Oh, interesting. Interesting. Yeah, because they've contacted local government to slow down on how many permits they issue for like unofficial parties and events and things like that. Because it's becoming too crowded. There's a lot of free booths everywhere. They're claiming some safety issues. Yeah. But I think at the end of the day. It's a money making machine. It's all money, man. It's a money making machine. They want to guide people a certain way. And if you're not at our party because we're the only official party, then y'all need to leave. Wow. And I don't know. That's kind of... That's not... I get it, but I don't even get it. That's not the mindset of South by Southwest. Exactly. That's not the mindset of Austin. That's not the mindset of Austin, dude. Yeah. Come on, dude. It's South by Southwest and it's Austin. Yeah. Like, get off the gas. If anything, request more security, you know, and some things like that to help people go. But don't try to punish people for wanting to call. Do you really think you're losing that much money? Come on. Yeah. So, you know. Anyway. And then I got a couple of punches in the face. This punch in the face goes... Now, this is pretty interesting. Punch in the face to Capture Billing. They're at Capture underscore billing. So, they tweeted this last week. I'm watching the SEO rapper at hashtag bestseopodcast, at eWebstyle,

hashtag SEOpodcast257. Interesting thing. When they tweeted that, that triggered seven retweets and we got eight new follows. Oh, wow. So, punch in the face to you, Capture Billing. Boom. Appreciate that. Yeah. And that's what I got. That's my potatoes. Excellent. All right. So, that is the potatoes of our podcast. You have survived. Now, it's time for the meat. Yeah. So, let's get into the meat. Like I told you, we got 18 ways. So, I want to give a punch in the face to Alan. Alan Skrill over at Search Engine Journal posted this article. SEO 101, 18 search ranking and engagement factors that you can't ignore. SEO 101, 18 search rankings and engagement factors that you can't ignore. I thought it was a pretty cool article. Now, there's a lot of them. So, we're gonna blow it. We're gonna go through the 18 level. Get your mind ready. Get ready. And, Mr. Hunter, you might wanna take it off at triple speed. Yeah. I know, right? Like. We've got a listener that we know who's also a customer who listens to us on triple speed. Yeah. I call that Alvin and the Chipmunks mode. Yeah. But, so, dig this. The first one was pretty simple. Proper title tag optimization. Absolutely. Right? He was talking SEO 101. So, I think the cool thing about this one, he says, stick with titles that make sense and only use your target keyword if it can be used naturally. I think that's the key here. Long gone are those days of just stuffing your titles with keywords. It don't really make sense. I'll add this to it. Keep your title under 55 characters. If you exceed 55 characters, then the title that you create will not be the title that's shown. Google will truncate it. They will reword it to make it fit what they think the user wants to see. But, 90, 95% of the time, if you keep it under 55 characters, then the title you create will be the title that shows. Number two. He says, descriptions.

He's talking meta descriptions. Descriptions should be optimized for click throughs. What does he mean by that? He goes on to say, descriptions hold zero value in terms of ranking, but they hold a lot of weight when it comes to CTR. I don't know about zero value in terms of ranking. We call it CVO. But I totally agree with the, in regards to the CTR. That description is the first time you have an opportunity to begin pitching your client. And so, I would say this about meta descriptions. Not only should it be focused on the user, but make it unique. Make it, make it, don't post a generic kind of meta description that you're using across multiple pages. Each meta description should be unique to that individual page. Number three. He says, SEO friendly URL structure. Duh. Yeah. And literally, I wrote duh. Google. Because that's just what you have to do. Nobody wants to see dot com slash Google. One nine four nine four exclamation dollar sign. Yeah. Fight the power dot HTML. You know, I want to see all that. They want to see, you know, and what. Just fight the power. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And, but what that does, what that does from a user end perspective is people look at those URLs. Yeah. And if people can see the URL that this page is going to, if I click, they have a higher likelihood of actually clicking because they know where the page is going. So, yeah, make sure you use an SEO friendly URL. Quick tip. Dashes not underscores. Dashes not underscores. Thank you, sir. Call that a pro tip. Number four. Headings and subheadings for readability. He goes on to say the majority of your website visitors are not going to read your content. They're going to quickly skim through it. And if you have never ending paragraphs without headings, then they aren't going to take away anything from their skim sessions. And he's absolutely right. Yeah. I, Chris, am a professional skimmer. Skimmer. Look, I've been so trained at

skimming that I mentally know when to stop and actually start reading. Yeah. Based on what I skim. Word. Exactly. Keyword. Oh, okay. This paragraph is not what I read. Skim again. Yeah. Right. And so, I'm great at skimming. I see you like the Terminator skimming. Irrelevant. Irrelevant. Not irrelevant. Exactly. And so, I'll say this. Be sure you have enough content to support subheadings. The problems a lot of people have is they come up, they understand the value. That's your value in headings. H1s, H2s, and so on. Right. And so, they flood their page with these, but then under each heading, it's like two sentences. That's spammy. That's spammy. You need to have enough content to support all those headings. Number five. Wow. He says, expand beyond just text posts. And I agree. So, like, every page has text on there. So, if all you have is text, man, repurpose it. You need a supporting image, add some video, maybe a poll, video, audio, an embed, infographic, a chart, something, a download with a white paper, a PDF. Help your content. Don't just post text content because while it's readable and it's probably optimized well and you probably did a great job writing it, no one's going to read it without any supporting data. Number six, avoid keyword stuffing. He says, any low quality, so he's talking about keyword stuffing on specific pages. Okay. Right. On your site. He's talking about content, right? Avoid any, he says, any low quality content can trigger a penalty no matter how long it's been, so take the necessary steps to clean it up. Your old stuff, yeah. Yeah. If you're doing something since 2010 and you've been doing two posts a month for the past four years, then you probably have a ton of posts, right? If those posts from two years ago are spammy, loaded with keywords, and not written well. At the time, well SEO'd. Yeah, at the time, yeah. Then 2010, that was probably the right thing to do. In 2014, not so much. Go clean

it up. Unfortunately, those old articles can penalize you. Go and clean those up. Definitely. And I added this, when writing that content, write in first person. This is my pro tip. Write in first person. It's a little bit more relatable. I, we, us, you, instead of the them, they, because that kind of puts somebody off. At distance. Yeah. And so write in first person and use a conversational writing style. You know, we had a client, a prospective client. I was looking at his density. He had a density of 8.6%. I was like, ooh, yeah. Too much, dude. It was no wonder you're not ranking at all. At all. Like, not even a little bit. No title tag also. I mean, it was just bad. Just bad. So ironic. I was like, I don't think anyone's done SEO because there's no title tag. I mean, I said, it's clear to me no one's done SEO because there's no title tag. And then I got to the 8%. I was like, I take that back. Somebody's done SEO. They've just done a really bad job. Didn't do it right. Definitely. Number seven. Use an image at the top of blog post. He goes on to say, you should always include an image in each post because it adds SEO value and it grabs the attention of the reader. And I agree. Cosign. Cosign that. Now putting it at the top of the blog post, I see the value in that. I can see how people would see the image and want to do that. But can I give you a pro tip and play devil's advocate? Yes. Learn this. Shout out to my guy David and the guys and the great folks over at the internet marketing party in Austin. Man, they brought SEO rapper out there. I went and did a deal. And anyway, the pro tip from that was instead of putting images at the top of the post, place images on the fold. On the fold. On the fold. Not under it. Not above

it. Not under it. On the fold. So that way when somebody's looking at your site, let's say on a desktop, all they see is the top half of your image. What does that force them to do? Scroll out. Scroll. And now all of a sudden they scroll down and below that you maybe have a video, you have some other engaging content. More subheadings. More subheadings. And so now this person has not skimmed. This person purposely scrolled because they needed to see the rest of the image and more importantly, now they're engaging. Now they're looking at the rest of your content, the things that you have in the sidebar or the footer that people hardly ever see. All right, that's enough. You're giving too much of the pro tip. Too much pro tip. I don't know that you should have given that one away. Well, look. That was for a no-name guy who... Yeah. There we go. Yeah. That was for him. To no one in particular. No one in particular. Exactly. By the way, it's actually a great name, especially if you're going to leave a bad review. That's why it's not a great name to me. I feel like, you know, man up. I want to know who you are. Yeah. Anyway, number eight, write for your visitor, not Google. He says, if your visitor doesn't connect with your company through the content on your website, then your conversion number is going to be small. I totally agree. If people don't understand what you're writing about, it's not relevant to them. It's clearly too much words in there. The density's too high, then it doesn't read well and they're not going to convert. They're not going to share. They're going to bounce. I added this. Address the pain. When you're talking content, if you provide a service, address the pain. Address the emotion that your service helps for that client. Right. And maybe if you're purchasing a product or something like that, then highlight the fab, the feature, the advantage, the benefit of that

product in the content. And that way your content is more engaging. Yep. Number nine. Halfway through. Include external links to authority sources. This is key. Oh, yeah. Linking the high-quality websites that are relevant and trusted is a good way to signal the search engine that your content is also high quality. Yeah. And so what you want to do is, so similar to the question. Right. Right. But she asked about linking out. If you got those recipes from high-quality sites, it's in your best interest to link out. Yep. And give that credit. So this used to be not an SEO characteristic. So we used to not want to link out because we wanted the links used to end at that one spot. And that doesn't even make sense from a really good user experience. Exactly. Because if you ever reach the end of the internet, it is by definition a bad page. Yeah. You're stuck. You're stuck. Exactly. So that's what the value of that outbound linking is. Man, you want to share the link love. Right? At the end of the day, they provide good content. They're relevant to your industry. They're not an immediate competitor. Link over. Yeah. And nine times out of ten, they're probably doing SEO. And so when you link, they'll know. And you may get a reciprocal link. You may get a comment. You may get a social share or something like that. So link love literally links love. Dig that. Pro tip. Link to other posts that allow comments. Here's another pro tip. Right. There's three pro tips today. Link to other sites that allow comments. Right? And in those comments, post a good comment relevant to that article and link back to your site. Yeah. Number ten, interlink blog content. This provides great SEO benefit and keeps your visitors exploring your content. This is what he's talking about. Interlink blog content. Yeah. So if you got the previous combination, you know, you've been writing articles for the past four years. Some of those articles may be relevant to

each other over time. Link them together. Go back and research it and link them together. Yeah. In the content somewhere. That's how the internet doesn't come to an end. Yeah. Because you have links and people can keep going. Yeah. This is great for SEO. Great for usability. And more importantly, it's great for, fourth pro tip, this is great for increasing page views on low view pages. So maybe you have a page that's getting tons of visits, tons of traffic, and you have another page that has really great information but it's not getting views. Put a link over there and then see how that page grows. And if it's great information, it'll start to generate its own inbound links. Exactly. Number 11. Target long tail keywords. Don't focus on search volume. And he gives an example here about some attorneys, right? So attorneys focusing on search volume so they're optimizing for a lawyer or a law firm which just is not smart at all. It's too competitive. It's too broad, too competitive. It's not valuable because it's, you know, what kind of law firm. Instead, go after an extremely targeted long tail phrase like, I don't know, Austin, Texas, personal injury lawyer. A lot more qualified, a lot more targeted, and you'll likely rank faster for that than trying to optimize the lawyer. Not likely. You will. Number 12. Have a social presence and make it easy to find. I like this shot right here. I know Google wants everyone to believe that Google Plus is alive and well, but can you honestly name anyone outside of SEO and marketing that uses Google Plus? I'll wait. I thought of three. I can think of three people. But they only using it because I use it. And so. Wow. Yeah, I know. It's marketing. It's marketing. Yeah, exactly. So he says he personally wants his clients to focus on two winners, Facebook and Twitter. I'll say use whatever social network is best for your business. Yeah. Right? If you're in corporate and accounting and things like that,

then your best bet will probably not be Facebook, but probably LinkedIn. Yeah. Right? Maybe if you're a photo blogger or whatever, then you better be on Instagram. Right? That sort of deal. Just find whatever social network works for you. But like he did say, make sure it's easy to find. It's accessible from your site. People won't have to struggle to be social with you. Number 13, publish frequent content. Yeah. He says, first, it signals to the search engine that your website is a reliable source. And second, it gives website visitors something new to engage with every time they visit. Yeah. Especially if you have repeat visitors or people who come back and repeat buyers and things like that, you need to be publishing content frequently, weekly, bi-weekly, or whatever. Daily, maybe. Daily, depending on your industry. Yeah. Or how often you can come up with relevant and legit content. Anybody can come up with content, but you may not want to read that content. Yeah. So make sure it's good content and give yourself a schedule and post frequently. You have to. That schedule's probably the big, that's a pro tip. Yeah, that's a pro tip. Schedule it. Yeah, if you want to be generating content, schedule when you're going to generate that content and publish it. Yeah, schedule when you're going to research it, when you're going to write it, and when you're going to post it. And probably, another pro tip, do three at a time. Yes. And then do them, you know, schedule them. Yeah. Absolutely right. Yeah. Pro tips to that. Hold on. Number 14. He says, consider explainer videos. You see, I did the four and it just kind of said, team. Yeah. Number 14. Consider explainer videos. Sometimes it's hard to get your message across in text and sales copy. He's absolutely right. Especially if you have one of those easy chip repair, you know, sort of situations where a video really explains it. Right, right. But I'll say don't limit yourself to video. Because sometimes you may, you

know, infographic could do well. Dude. And it could actually do it faster than watching a video. Yeah. Or just, or maybe you want to display steps, kind of like we did for... Steps. Man, I just matrix white room, went to a blank space. Used car, junk car dealer. Right. Anyway, we built this site. I can't think of the client name, but we created steps on this page. IQ Autobots? IQ Autobots. Yes. Thank you, sir. We created steps on this page to tell you how the process went. And so, rather than show you a video or give you a whole bunch of pictures, step one, step two, step three. Do step one. Do step two. Do step three. And somehow people follow steps. Yeah. It's amazing how that happens. Well, it's good to know you only have three steps. Right? Exactly. Then that's probably the conversion part of it. The fact that they can see, oh, I can be done with this pretty quickly. I'll do it. Let's get started. Yeah. Number 15, he says, focus on quality over quantity. $199 SEO just doesn't exist. He goes on to say, I'm sorry, but you aren't going to get quality SEO for a few hundred dollars a month. I agree. Yeah. I mean, when we look at our process, everything from on-page stuff to off-page stuff to content. Social newsletter. Social news. I mean, we could be anywhere from $750 on up to $3,000 per month, just really depending on what you need and what it's going to take to make your campaign successful. Yeah. So, yeah. It's all about quality. I can't state that enough. It's all about quality. Yeah. Number 16, encourage comments. He says, ending every blog post that you publish with a question is a great way to encourage comments and interaction with your readers. And it is, you know, what do you think about this? Or leave your comments below. I've been seeing that more and more these days. Maybe they have jailed this person or whatever the comment is. Yeah. Exactly.

So, do that. If you can incentivize people to use comments, that's even better. Because those comments, especially when it's rolling, it's a long page of comments, that UGC, haven't heard that term in a while, user generated content. Yeah. It's still extremely valuable. Like, Google understands, wow, a lot of people are commenting and responding to this. This article must be informative. It must be engaging. It must be relevant. And so, you want to encourage those. Now, I'll say this. Maybe you're posting good content and people just aren't leaving comments. Try Facebook developers. Use their comment plugin. Yeah. And so, what that does is literally put a Facebook comment post below your article. Yeah. And now people can interact on Facebook with your post. They're more likely to comment because there's something familiar. And they're probably signed in. They're probably signed in. So, they don't see their picture already and it's like, oh, yeah, let me leave. Great article. Yeah. And then they'll share it. So, try that. You shouldn't have gone to jail. Exactly. Number 17, avoid republished content. And what he's talking about here is content, let's say, I won't necessarily say avoid it. I think it depends on the industry. So, like, let's say you're- And the content. Yeah. Let's say you're in e-commerce. Right. And you have a distributor. And so, their product descriptions are republished across everybody who sells the same product. Right. That's what he's talking about. Avoid republished content. I think if you credit your sources and your brand is strong enough, you can do it. I think if you're a new site and you're trying to grow, then take some time and rewrite that content. And rework 80% of it. Rework 80% of it to make it yours. And that's the best route to go. And last one. Number 18. He says, build a sitemap, connect GWT, that's Google Webmaster Tools, and analytics. And I wrote a big duh next to that one. An XML sitemap improves the visibility of your website, so there's no reason you shouldn't have

one. He goes on to say, Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools give you access to data that you really should be looking at on a regular basis. Always update your sitemap. You update pages. You create new blog posts. You add new images, new videos, or whatever. Update your sitemap. Resubmit. And the reason you want to link up with GWT is so that way you can just get the latest information about your site. Any messages Google has given you, they'll give you some tips on what you can do to better optimize it. Maybe they're struggling to index your pages and you're having URL errors. Maybe you have a manual spam penalty. Anything like that, Google Webmaster Tools is where you find that information out at. And so if you haven't set it up, then you just don't know. And check your analytics. Analytics are extremely important, not only for how your site is doing, but for how your other marketing is doing. We got a client, she does wedding receptions in venues, right? And so she spent a campaign with a publication called WeddingWire.com. And luckily for us, using analytics, I was able to say, hey, not only did Google Analytics, Google organic search bring, you know, 300 visits and 40 of them converted into goals. WeddingWire sent 40 people and eight of them converted into goals. So depending on the cost, continue to do that. Depending on the cost, continue to do it. And as her agency, you know, it's my job to look at the analytics and tell her that. And so I want to encourage you guys, if you don't have analytics set up, shame on you. It's free, go set it up, go look at it, and make sure that your marketing is working. Yeah, and then after you set up that free analytics, review it. Yeah, then look at it. You've got to review it. So, man, that was. Schedule. Schedule time to review it. I mean, literally. So, man, punch in the face to you, Alan. Alan Skrill, man. SEO 101.

18 search rankings and engagement factors you can't ignore. Great article. I hope you guys liked our pro tips. That's what it is. Excellent. So, do you have any what or. No word of the day. All right. Well, cool. Man. So, this has been our podcast. If you are looking to grow your business with the latest, simplest marketing tool on the planet. I'm referring to the internet. Call eWebStyle for increased revenue in your business. 713-592-6724. If you have a referral who does SEO, you send them to us. They pay their bill. We will pay you. This was filmed live at 5999 West 34th Street, Suite 106, Houston, Texas. We are the most popular internet marketing podcast. That is because of you all. Y'all. Thank you all so much for tuning in. Until the night's podcast, my name is Chris Burr. Until the night's podcast. Bye-bye for now. Slightly raised up eyebrow, high brow. Headed my way. She's gonna...