Focusing on Old School SEO Basics - #seopodcast 172

Hi, and welcome to the KFEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. I am Charles Lewis, your Internet Marketing Specialist. We are just figuring out how to do this again since we missed last week. Last week was Thanksgiving holiday. Hopefully everyone out there who celebrates Thanksgiving had a great Thanksgiving. And if you don't, you should. Not because it's an American tradition, because it's the day off. It's the day off. I'm so tired of turkey, man. Oh, yeah. You see, there's turkey breakfast, turkey sandwich. But, you know, tonight, and we're finishing off the turkey we have, I'm doing turkey quesadillas. Ooh. That'll be it. I had turkey quesadillas Friday night or Saturday. I think Saturday night. The line at Taco Cabana was too long. All right. So, as usual, there is a tip from our previous podcast. This podcast is 172. Last podcast, 171. The tip is, despite all the algorithm changes, the old school basics are still what you should focus on first. Yeah. Definitely want to make sure you cover the basics. Titles, meta information, good content, cross-linking. Things like that that are still effective today, even with Google's algorithm changes. But just make sure that you're aware of those changes. So, you know, for example, if you're building links and doing cross-linking, which is some basics, be careful on how much exact match anchor text you use when doing that. Right? Sometimes you Google is looking at people's link profiles to see how they're building links. So, be cautious of that. Yeah. Please remember, we are your friendly local neighborhood top position, Snatchers, where our mantra is, don't be a deuce. If you are near some sort of electric device, phone, iPhone, Android phone, Windows phone, why, tweet now. And you should tweet hashtag SEO podcast. This is podcast 172. Make sure you tag us in it, at eWebStyle. And that way, we can link up with you, and we can kick it. Remember, we always appreciate if you go to our G Plus account and

write a review. The easy way to get there is to go to e-webstyle.com slash... G Plus. Which? Which G Plus? G Plus or G Plus. I like that. Or Google Plus or Google Plus. There we go. All right. So, let's cover a little bit of news first. First, I read an article today. This is interesting about social media. Retreating, retweeting, could, or retreating is what you should do from a libelous retweet. It made the point that if you were to retweet a libelous statement, that you could be subject to a libel suit. So, retweeting something that's not true. Yeah. Well, not true and damaging. Yeah. Right. So, you know, I don't even... Really? Yeah. Well, and one guy in the comments tried to argue that intent wasn't important, and you could argue that because you retweet so quickly, retweet so quickly... It's so easy to do. ...that you're not thinking about it. Just like a like. And then every... All of the other comments were like, that guy's a doofus. That's not the standard for libel. Wow. Given that Black Friday was actually last Friday, I thought this was pretty interesting. Have a little Black Friday news. There's a company called Backblaze. Look them up there. Backblaze? They're kind of like Carbonite. Okay. So, they do black backups, online backups, and what they did is they crowdsourced hard drive acquisition. So, Costco was having a $99 for a three terabyte external drive. They paid anybody who would buy one and send it to them, five bucks. Wow. So, for $105, they got a three terabyte drive. They're a company that's small enough. Wow. Awesome, isn't it? This is genius. It says it took them about two hours. They saw the ad, and they had a meeting, and like, okay, two hours later, they had the contest, and whatever. They allowed the first 300 people to do it or something. Wow. They're such a small company, they don't have access to the bulk buying, purchasing power that other companies have. Yeah, bigger corporations would. So, that's

how they keep their costs down. Three terabytes will go a long way, that's for sure. All right. Let's get to a little bit of user feedback. By the way, you can track us, follow us, stalk us, haunt us if you're a ghost. At, yeah, yeah, facebook.com slash e-withthou. And twitter.com slash e-withthou. And youtube.com slash e-withthou. And podcast at e-withthou.com. Did I get all of this? I did get all of that, and I'm good. Let's see. This is from, I don't, I think it's over from our Facebook. No. All right. So, let's start on the right spot. Yeah. Look at that wrong paper down. Here we go. Danny Mullen actually did write a review on our G Plus account. So, that means he went to e-webstyle.com slash. G Plus. Or Google Plus. And he said, quality, excellent. Love the show. You guys are informative and entertaining. So, Danny, thank you. Punch in the face to you, Danny. I think he also sent an e-mail. I don't have that anywhere. And he may have put a review on iTunes. This guy definitely put a review. He sent us an e-mail. He hit us up on Facebook. And he wrote a review. His name is Greg Took, T-O-O-K-E. Greg Tookie. Tookie. Tookie. Tookie. He said, hey, guys, this is in his e-mail. Hi, guys. Wanted to let you know that I submitted a review of your podcast on iTunes. God, it was scathing. Not. My name is Big Fat Bloody. If you feel inclined to punch me in the face, my website is bestbloodymaryrecipe.com. No, we're not going to do that. My old site got penguined. He got the penguin slapdown. Smackdown. You know what's interesting about that is he also sent me a Facebook friend request. And I denied it. Right. Before I saw that e-mail when it came in. Because, you know, I don't drink Bloody Marys. Right. And so Facebook came. I was like, man, who is this? And you know I don't like Bloody Marys. And so I didn't accept it. But I will

go back and accept it. And not accept it. Now that I know where it came from and what this is all about. He said he got penguined because in a moment of weakness he paid a guy on Fiverr. God, that sounds eavy. Now we have lathering and in a moment of weakness I paid a guy on Fiverr. God, that sounds eavy. Take care and keep kicking out the SEO jams. Great stuff. And I believe that's like... So what did he pay the guy on Fiverr to do? I'm assuming, well, penguin. If it's related to penguin. So whatever he did, yeah. Don't do that. Yeah. That was the worst $5 he ever spent. Although I was looking at Fiverr last night, we'll probably use some services out there to make videos. Right? You know, do something that you have control over, not that has control over you. Here is the... Which review? Oh, hey, this is just on... This is pretty much the same. Actually, he does have a question. So this was on Facebook. Same guy. Anyway, I manage SEO on a few sites. I wonder about the Google Webmaster Tools settings geographic target. One of my sites is geared to tax professionals in the U.S. Will adjusting the setting in Webmaster Tools help the site in U.S. searches? What does it really do? And this is the Google Webmaster Tools settings geographic target. That's a great question. That is a good question. I do know that setting your target in Webmaster Tools can help you distinguish where you want your site to be listed at. But I think in order to get that sort of local ranking you're looking for, it would be best to optimize for those phrases for that area. And I think using Webmaster Tools to fit that is part of that whole optimization effort. And just to keep going with the Gregory Tukey theme, this is the review on iTunes. Like a well-optimized website, this podcast is rich in quality content and light on advertising. It's updated constantly and answers

questions that SEO pros and small business owners have. I highly recommend it. Oh, yeah. They have style, too. No geekery. No geekery. I like that. That's what's up. We're the No Geekery Podcast. We've got to add that. Yeah. Pretty good. Yeah. No geekery. We'll just do one more review. This is Valuable Marketing Tips. By the way, both of these are five-star. This is from Jim Barker, 180. Guys, thanks for all the valuable marketing ideas. While your title leads to SEO, you provide much more than SEO education, which is excellent as well. Great work. Keep it up. Jim in Dallas, Fort Worth area. I appreciate that, Jim. Punch in the face for that. But what's cool about what he said is that he's absolutely right. You know, any well-put-together SEO plan is not only focused on the website and driving traffic. It ties into every other form of marketing that you're doing. And so that's why our podcast is SEO podcast. Excuse me. There's a lot more information than that. So I appreciate you noticing that. I like to paint the picture. You hire a company to make a great website, and they do. You hire another company to send lots of traffic to the website, and they do. And you are getting no business. Who do you fire? Contractually, they both are doing what they're supposed to do. And, you know, our answer is fire both. Find a company that does both. Really, a web designer can't be the best web designer possible unless they have that feedback. And they know that, okay, lots of traffic to this site converted. Lots of traffic to this other site didn't convert. What's the difference? Let me make sure that all my future sites that have relatively similar sales processes look like the first site, the one that actually closed business. And that is something that we do. And I know there's other companies out there I'm not aware of who they are. There just have to be. We can't be the only ones who have thought of

this particular process. It's a lot. You know, we have some, you know, Pop Lab does it, Top Spot, Chipple. Yeah. I mean, there's some companies out there here locally in Houston that do great work. So, yeah. Excellent. All right. That is the potatoes. Let's get into the meat. So, the meat, it's a diet serving today. It's not a lot of meat. But I thought the article was interesting mainly because of the stats that it pointed out. Numbers are always good. So, this one was called Five Tips to Marketing Success on Small Businesses. And this was, I got this from Search Engine Journal. And so, I thought it was pretty cool. And so, like, number one, he goes to say potential customers are spending more and more of their time online. We forgot our segment. The one that they mentioned that they like. Oh. Yeah. We're going to rewind. We're back to the potatoes. Sorry about that. That isn't even supposed to be after G+. What's this? Yeah. Now, for our famous and fun segment called the Algorithm Cataclysm. By the way, you've got to check out the video. You've got to watch that special effect. Yeah. It's like first Star Wars episode worthy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. But Cataclysm. So, another Panda refresh. Another Panda refresh number 22 happened last week. And they said it was supposed to affect 0.8% of searches. So, we'll see how that's going to work. Starting to feel a certain way about all these Panda refreshes. Right. I think, from what I'm noticing, all the reporting I look at, all of the numbers and stats, the only thing I see increasing is not provided phrases. With each update, it doesn't seem like it don't matter what the update is. If it's an EMD update or a top-heavy update or whatever it is, my percentage of not provided phrases just continues to go up. Well, and that's, remember, that's related to people being logged into a Google account and using it. So, I think it has less to do

with the algorithms and more to do with the fact that more and more people are using a G Google slash G plus account. Well, so, it's interesting you bring that up. So, which I debated on talking about today, and since we're here, I will. I just read an article that said, from Matt Cutts, where he was suggesting to people that if they were considering moving their site over to a HTTPS, a secure server, then they should. Right. And so, then the dude who wrote the article, I can't remember his name, but he went on to suggest that doing that could possibly let some of that keyword data that's being secured pass. Yeah, I don't think so. I was like, yeah, I don't know either because I'm pretty sure they won't. Yeah, it's not the fact that your site is not protected. It's the fact that they want to protect their user's information. Yeah. Yeah. So, and they want to protect it from everyone, including you, I think is at least my read on that. I could have been wrong once in the past when I thought I was wrong. I could have been wrong, but... So, what does that mean? That means you went wrong? Yeah. Exactly. So, I thought that meant... Alright, so, that was our regress back into the algorithm cataclysm, and now back to the meat or the meat. The diet meat. Yeah. So, five tips for marketing success on small business. So, the first one, he was saying that your potential customers are spending more of their time online. But check out the percentages. I thought it was pretty cool. Consumers spend 22% of their time on social networking sites. 21% searching, 20% reading content, 19% emailing, 13% viewing entertainment, and 5% shopping. I was like, yep, that sounds about right. Yeah. Whether on a mobile device or frankly on a laptop. Yeah. You know, a tablet. I could see myself, you know, 22%. So, you know, one out of five chances I might be on a social network. Right. That

sounds about right. Yeah. You know? And so, wow. I think the marketing takeaway here is if you offer a service that's mobile friendly, make sure you're taking advantage of all the different ways people are using their device. Yeah. You know, if people are emailing, then you should, you know, spend a lot of time emailing 19% of them, then you should probably be doing newsletters, things like that. If they're 22% on social networking, then you should be Facebooking and tweeting. So, number two, he says 85% search for local businesses online, yet 63% of small businesses don't have a website. Shame on you. Yeah. We were with a client just yesterday. Mm-hmm. And in fact, they're probably gonna forego a website and just get a G Plus local page. Just to hurry up and get there. Yeah. We'll eventually probably get a web. Let's see here. Number three, 86% of small businesses consider Facebook valuable. 75% think the same about YouTube and 60% on Twitter. This goes to show, this is a huge shift. These numbers weren't the same last year. Yeah. Last year it was in the 20s and 30s. Yeah, because businesses were, you know, businesses, especially industrial type businesses, tend to be just on LinkedIn, not on Facebook. Mm-hmm. Well, I think what businesses are realizing is that it's extremely cheap, right? Yeah. And now it's time consuming, so if you look at it in regards to an hourly cost of a salary or a wage or paying somebody that is not that cheap, right, internally. But all of the profiles are free usually. And usually what happens is it's some admin assistant, you know, on Twitter and Facebook. And if they're seeing ROI from it, then those numbers are going up. People are using, this is number four, people are using smartphones to make buying decisions while on the go. Here's the stats, 66% of smartphone users make purchasing decisions on a mobile. 38% do so at the store. And I like this one, 44% while in the aisle where the product is

sold. I've done that. Yeah. Oh, is that, man, maybe there's, is there a better one? Is there a QR code on this box? Yeah. I will scan it. You know, I will scan it. And so, yeah, go mobile. Like, if you're not transitioning to mobile and social, then local, frankly, solo, mo, then you should be. All of these stats support that. And let's see the last one here. Spending and spending on online advertising is growing. 19.5 billion will be spent on search, 15 billion on display, 4.2 billion on mobile. Wow. And 4.8 billion on social. That's a lot of ad dollars. Yeah. Anybody needs to manage it. So we're here. But if, I think the whole, the whole Just Letters article is if you're a business and you're the type of business that provides a service that's, that's brick and mortar, start tailoring your ads to mobile because people use mobile to, mobile can drive foot traffic and mobile can, mobile can, can, can increase conversions for people already in the store. They said 44% of people searching in the aisle. That's huge. Yep. That's huge. So. One, one note. If you're in that position of responsibility, start using the mobile device more. Yes. Because I tell you, I had a horrible experience. I can't remember what website I was looking on. I mean, and it was on a mobile device and all the stats were, I was looking for details of a product and they were all in sub sections that were hidden. So every time I went to like an, it was just a horrible experience. Yeah. And a lot of mobile experiences frankly aren't horrible. Yeah. Aren't that good. And they're trying to reduce information. I don't know if the perspective is a mobile page is supposed to have less information because the download rate is slower or what, what, what the decision-making process is going into. I, I almost always go to the full version of the website because the mobile version is so bad. I think there's a place for

it. Trim out, you know, on Amazon, there's tons of extra stuff and, you know, what else you should buy and they could just put the mobile version of a site should look exactly the same with all, all the crap. It shouldn't hide reviews and descriptions and all of this stuff because that's why I like Amazon. Yeah. Purchase influences. So be, just use it so that you know what you like and don't like. And then also interview people around you. Hey, who do you, you, you know somebody who's like a mobile guru. We've got one right here. And how does he use it? How does she use it? What, what does she like or hate about it? Does she go to the full version of the website? Why? Well, you know, I think, I think a lot of that happened because of the stronghold BlackBerry had on the market some years ago. Yeah. And so, you know, the kind of common practice was screen resolution small, only give them a little bit of information because there's most majority going to be ticks. Yeah. Don't make it image heavy. But now with, you know, big screens and, and faster access and, and more storage and, and speed and things like that. And you can zoom in and zoom out. You can, you know, if, if the information's there and you want to see it, zoom in. Mm-hmm. I think people need to change. Yeah. You know, and the full version should be available mobile friendly. Yep. Like it, I don't, I don't see a reason to, to not include certain pages unless those pages can't convert on a mobile device or something. So. Yeah. That would be our, our two or four cents on, on that subject. Okay. Um, do we have any blank stare news today? Oh, yes. Yes. I might have. I think I have two of them. Did we mention the, the Oprah tweet? I don't think we did. Uh-uh. So that, we'll, we'll, we'll include that one too. All right. All right. Hold

on. Yeah. That was a little long. Our photographer was falling asleep on the job. All right. Yeah. I can't hold that, that face for longer than seven seconds. I might melt. If I guess there's internal meltdown starts to occur. That's how blank it is. I had a, I had a visual of Roger Rabbit moving as a guy, man. Yeah. Oh, that's the Wicked Witch of the East or something. All right. So we'll do my blank stare news. So, uh, let me think what it is. Oh, so Surface, that's the Microsoft tablet, hired Oprah, uh, as a kind of spokesperson for the Surface. And she kindly applied. She, she tweeted. She said, uh, I love my new Surface tablet. And it followed, it was followed with, uh, sent from iPad. That's, that's blank stare. Yeah. Come on. Yeah. Yeah. Like we know you was lying. Somebody needs it. Yeah. I love my new Surface because it sits on my counter so beautifully. So, so my blank stare was, uh, at, um, at Apple. Frankly at Nokia. So remember they went through the whole deal with Google Maps and everything. And so they invested a lot of money. Fired somebody. Right. Um, Nokia came through. Supposed to have this robust, pretty good app. Mapping app. And it's supposed to work because like Yahoo was using it. Bing had used it. They loaded it up and it sucks. It sucks big time. So is this the second iteration? Wow. This is not even better than the Apple Maps that they had the first time. Whoa. Yeah. So, um, yeah, I'm an Android user. At least a Google Maps user. Like, like even if I, we've got, now we've, I think we've got one iPhone here in the office. Good device. Works great if you don't need maps. Yeah. Yeah. So. And how often do you use maps? Daily. Daily. I mean, well not daily, but at least twice a week. Yeah. You know, at least twice a week. Getting someplace, making sure I'm going the right direction. Yeah.

And so let's see, who's my other blank stare at? I'm forgetting. Yeah. I'm probably doing this. We can talk about maps. I've got a navigation in the car. We're calling the client yesterday. That was a bad experience. Yeah. We typed in, and my battery had died the previous weekend. So the navigation system uses sections of the country. And Texas is like G4 or O4. And it was in another one. So the first 10 iterations of the street name we typed in were only pulling up Pennsylvania. Yeah. And finally we figured that out. And then we couldn't get it until we literally got on the street and figured out what the map called that street. Then we were able to type in an address on that street. Yeah. So. Bad experience. Yeah. I still can't think of the other one. I know. And I'm trying hard to figure it out as soon as we close. All right. So you guys can do us a favor. You guys have made us the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes. We really appreciate that. If you're getting any value out of this podcast, any good tidbits, any good information, you could do a couple of things for us. One thing has three steps. Just go onto iTunes, create an account, and write a review. If you choose to, send us an email letting us know, just like Mr. Tuk-E did, Greg Tuk-E. Send us an email, let us know that you submitted a review, and we'll give you a little bit of link love, actually a punch in the face, which is a good thing. Yeah, it's a good thing. Dean Calhoun sent a cool thing on our Facebook page. Somebody, he said, obviously listens to our podcast, because I can't remember. Like, they punch people in the face until they learn not to do what they were doing. I don't know what it was. So go to our Facebook page. That's facebook.com slash eWebStyle. The other thing that you could do for us is you could write

a review on G+. We already mentioned that. Simple e-webStyle.com slash G+. And G+. Oh no, my bad, G+. There we go. Yeah. One is G+, and the other one is G+. Yeah. So smooth and relaxing. Just go there and write a review. Yeah. And then, of course, you guys can follow us on Twitter, twitter.com slash eWebStyle. And we've got YouTube videos, youtube.com slash eWebStyle. And we do broadcast live on Friday mornings, and that's at, the best way to get to that is to go to e-webStyle.com slash... SEO Podcast. All right. This has been another episode. In fact, episode 172 of the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes. We really appreciate you. Until the next podcast, remember, our year in review, 2012 year in review, which is usually a two-segment podcast. I think that means the same thing. Covered, probably. I just wanted to, we got G+, and we have G+. I wanted both versions. Okay. So, that's coming soon. That's where we review everything that's happened in 2012. Pretty quickly. It's a really good fire podcast. Lots of tips and stuff and good information. So, be prepared for that coming down the podcast. All right. Until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burns. So, we'll move. Bye-bye for now. Slightly raised up, eyebrow, eyebrow, head in my... Set me free. Oh, my... Oh, my... Oh, my... Oh, my... Oh, my... Oh, my... Oh, my... Oh, my... Oh, my... Oh, my... Oh, my... Oh, my... Oh, my... Oh, my... Oh, my...