Getting the SEO Fundamentals Right - #seopodcast 178

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of E-WebStyle. I am Charles Lewis, your internet marketing specialist. Thank you guys for tuning in. This is podcast number 177. Yes, that is, again, 174. Excuse me. That is 178. Let me repeat that. 178. The tip for podcast number 177 is make videos. Make sure to optimize those videos so they count. We want to make sure that, first off, if you have time to put it all together and you expect people to sit there and watch it, make sure the content is relevant, make sure it's useful, make sure it's great. And not only that, optimize that video and the page that it will be on so it will have a higher likelihood of being found. Exactly. And if you need more details than that brief summary, which was great, go back to podcast number 177, which this was not the beginning of, and get out. Remember, we are your friendly local neighborhood top position snatchers, where our mantra is, if you are in front of some sort of device or one small device, he has it today, you should. What should they do with that? Hashtag. You should tweet Facebook and G Plus it. Do it on all of them. Hashtag SEO podcast. Make sure you tag us in it, at E-WebStyle. That way we can link up with you, network, and do all of the social stuff we need to do. And there's a couple things that you can do for us, a couple small favors. You can do things like go to iTunes, if you have some good content at a podcast, write a review, actually create an account if you don't have one, and write a review. And then if you choose to, you can actually send us an email, podcast at e-webStyle.com. Let us know you wrote a review, and then we'll go ahead and give you a patoof punch in the face. Also, you can do us a small favor by going

to e-webStyle.com slash G Plus or Google Plus. And that will automatically forward you to our G Plus local page, write a review. Yeah, we've got a couple of people who have written reviews. Thanks, kudos to them. We actually will be reading one today. So that's great. And finally, in terms of all this housekeeping, we do have a referral program. If you're an SEO expert out there, you've got clients you don't want to deal with. Hopefully, they're not that bad. Maybe they're just in more competitive industries. There's a reason I don't want to deal with them. Yeah, yeah. If they don't pay their bills, don't send them. If they are in a challenging industry, send them to us. We have your help, and you can sustain some commission structures. That's great. Send us an email at podcast at e-webStyle.com to find out more details about it. Actually, I think we have a link at the bottom of our page where we can submit a request. Let's cover a quick review. Can you grab the printout, please? Let's grab a quick review. This is actually from our G Plus page. And thank you, Nicolas. And this says, the quality is excellent. It says, I contacted Chris regarding the problem I have on my site. He truly helped and responded to every email. He was only too happy to help, which is a reality show both Chuck and Chris do has helped me to no end. I always listen on my journey to or from work on iTunes. Every week, they discuss the latest engine optimization techniques. Great information. And I truly appreciate both taking the time to share their SEO knowledge. This is Love from Scotland. This is from Scotland, maybe. We know his name. We read about him last time. He wrote some reviews and read them last time. Can't remember his name off the top of my head. Here's a note. When you do G Plus, add your name to the review. This says a Google user, so he's logged in but isn't using his

G Plus account yet. Yeah, he's logged in. And this is on Facebook. It was a question. What's best SEO practice to use bold or strong tags or E, M, or I? Do engines prefer a particular tag and will one eventually be phased out? What set should I be using? This was it. One of you. Yeah, this was it. I covered that. Go listen to, go to YouTube, search design coding. That was one of my first SEOs where I covered all of the cement stuff. But to answer your question, to be honest, I think that had some importance, maybe some ego, using bold tags, emphasis, and things like that. But right now, I think it's kind of phasing out. But if you're going to do it, don't use bold. Please use strong. If you use bold as bold, then wrong. I actually quoted that in his response on Facebook. If you go to Facebook, my response, he sent it twice. But to the first one was exactly that. You need to listen to Chuck's rap. And then the italics tag is phasing out, too. Use emphasis. They both give the same look and feel. Graphic effect. Yeah. But italics won't be there pretty soon. All right. A little bit of news. As you guys may or may not have heard, Facebook has a graph search. It's come out. I typed SEO Houston, and we weren't on it. So I think it sucks. Yeah. So there was another company in town that does SEO. They haven't posted on their Facebook page in four months, and they have 1,200 fans. Also, that's why they show. I think that's why they show. So we have 350 or so fans, and we post every day and have a podcast that has around 7,000 downloads per week. So I wonder where they got their 1,200 fans. Yeah. Ain't no telling. India. I was going to say that. I thought it was written over my face. There is a Brazilian website. If you do not have a girlfriend and you want a

girlfriend, a Brazilian website will make a girlfriend Facebook page for you to be your girlfriend. Wow. Really? It's kind of like, well, he was going to be my blank step. We'll keep it moving. You know you are a nerd if you've hired a company to make you a Facebook girlfriend page. Wow. I thought this was hilarious. Google. Look at my girlfriend from Brazil. Google denies killing donkey. Donkey from Shrek? What? In Street View. Oh, I saw that. In Botswana. It looks like a donkey with a cloud of dust around it. So it looks like it has recently fallen. And as the Google Street View car is going by, I just thought the headline, Google denies killing I saw one of them last week going down Fondren. Uh-huh. Kim thought it was crazy. He has a car coming with a big camera on top. It is crazy. Yeah, it is. And you're like hanging out the window, Dave, and yeah. Get me. Get me. There you go. SEO rapper seen in Street View. Street View. I don't know where Street View came from. What else do we have? This is another. I just thought this was really technologically really cool. It's by Leap Motion. And you know these game consoles that just use cameras and watch you? They don't actually, you're not connected in any way. So this one has a 150 degree angle field of vision and can track your 10 fingers at 250 frames per second. That's just nuts. Yeah, so look at, you know. It's got like a real. You can do all. Yeah. You can see it. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty cool. It is pretty cool. And that ends the potatoes. It's time to get to the beat. Hopefully Gino. I wonder if Gino still listens. Gino, if you still listen every now and then, you should send us an email. And before we, let me hand that off, let me just say that you guys can stalk us, haunt us, harass us, corass us, I don't know what that is, facebook.com

slash eWebStyle, twitter.com slash eWebStyle, youtube.com slash eWebStyle, and you can just podcast at e-webStyle.com. All right, so I've got some content here. Are you getting your SEO fundamentals right? I pulled this from a search engine land, and I think it's a good way. It's still January, right, first month of the new year. A lot of people are revamping sites. Matter of fact, our new clients, that's been the focus, and so we have to make sure you get the fundamentals right. So we'll talk about this. Then I got a quick Twitter question we'll answer from at HelpVid, and then we'll be done here. So I like this one because he kind of kept it top level. Like number one was retain your focus on revenue and profit. I think this is a must. A lot of times you'll get so focused on ranking and getting a good placement, and that you begin to work your content in that fashion. You begin to design your site in that fashion, and you lose focus of the original goal, which is to make money. And so, you know, keep that focus. Service your clients first, because that's how you make money. As long as the client's happier, then they pay. Service your clients first, search engine second, third, and then, you know, you'll continue to give a good experience to that Google user, and you'll get paid, and everyone's happy. I've made the statement that if what you want to do is brand and maybe build that brand for whatever, some sort of exit strategy in 10 years, we're probably not the right company right now for you. If you want to make money, we probably are the right company. Our focus is 10-year relationships based on the fact that we've grown your business. Yeah, we want you to, you know, we have this, this is, you know, in our kind of intro stations with clients. So what's your plan for the next 5 or 10 years? Because we want to see you grow. If you're a three-man shop,

hopefully in two years you'll be an eight-man, and three after that you'll be, you know, a 50-man shop. We'll be opening a new location or something like that due to online growth. And so that's our focus. Hopefully it's yours. Number two, beware, beware the loo- shiny new thing. Ooh, shiny. But I think what he's saying here is, you know, everything you put online is indexed, right? And so sometimes there are a lot of things that happen that you may want to blog about or content or comment about or post about, and you're not exactly sure if it's even valuable or not. So beware, watch it, maybe research it, see what you're doing before you dive in, and let your brand or yourself to it because it may not be the right thing to do. Number two, your SEO strategy is constantly changing. Yes. That's worth saying twice. Your SEO strategy is constantly changing. Meaning you can't do the same, we can't do the same as we were doing last January. Yeah. Right? That has changed. We all know in the year 2012 were, you know, tens of hundreds of algorithm changes. Yeah. Right? And so if you're still doing the same thing you were doing 12 months ago, six months ago, frankly, then you're probably dropping the ball and falling behind. So stay aware of what's changing and what's working. A lot of things change and people do things and it may not necessarily work. Yeah. We're trying to go to number four. Embrace the new, but keep what's working. You know, great content works. Yeah. Videos work. Links still work. The page still work. Yeah, on-page, they still work. CTAs, page layout, things like that, which I think we'll go into next. All that still work. So change, don't stop getting good content. Sharing content via different social avenues and things like that because it still works. Now you add to that with new things that may help. Number five, focus, focus. I like this one here because I think he's really talking to

our service providers at this point or maybe our local people, people who provide a local service. You have to focus. You know, and tie it into SEO. So keep your SEO focused. We use the kind of bathroom or plumbing example a lot. So if you're a plumber and you focus on water heaters, this page should be asked for water heater repair. You can't have it or do them remodeling, water repair, and faucet instant, you know, on the same page. So that's a focus. Google users, frankly, Google doesn't know what this page is really about. So give it some focus and that way your internet marketing could have a better result. Number six, are all your market eggs in an SEO basket? Hopefully. Right? SEO is what you need to do. It definitely has the best long-term effect and it helps for branding. But, you know, if you have the budget, you should be doing some pay-click, especially if it's a new product or a new service or maybe you're a new business. And so you have a new site and ranking with SEO is going to take some time, you know, five, six, seven, eight months. You should be doing PPC to compensate for that. I'm sure you're doing some social, you know, all marketing. If you have a big list, you should be sending out newsletters. Don't let SEO be your one tactic because it'll take too long and you'll probably not work for you in the short term. Number seven, information architecture isn't just cosmetic. This is great. How many times have you seen a site and a site looks good but it doesn't well? Yeah. Right? You can't find information anywhere. Anywhere. And that really sucks when you're looking for information. And you may, frankly, you may even have that information on your site. But if it's not laid out the right way and people can't find it or it's accessible to maybe a mobile device or things like that, then you're losing. So make sure that on the content and how

it's presented, not just how good your site looks. Architecture is as important for the experience, for the user experience, as it is for Google. For SEO, for Google. Yeah, you want to make sure that your content is being indexed in the correct way. You know, if you're top-heavy, right, with images and things like that, then that's just not a good experience for the user or for search. Number eight, better structure leads to more inbound links. I think this kind of complements number seven. You know, if people can log onto your site, find what they're looking for, and it helps them, then they're likely to link to you. So they can help somebody else. If they can't find what they're looking for due to your structure, then that's the link you can get. So you want to make sure that your information is proof and informative, and so they want to link to it and want to share it. If it took them too many clicks to get to it, they have a bad, like, impression by the time they get there. It can be the best content in the world, and some people won't link to it just because they just got this bad feeling about it. Number nine, really in search engines with the perfect bait. I think this kind of is targeted towards maybe those sites who provide event information that's constantly changing, right? So, you know, for sports even, when the Olympus here, the site that had the latest results at the fastest time with the most accurate information was bait for the search to display those results. And so if you're in sort of industry, whether it's athletics or maybe even health, when things are changing quite frequently, you want to make sure that your site has the most information, the most relevant information that people are, and that's kind of search bait. Number 10, get deep, powerful links. I think this is key because with the Penguin algorithm changes and things like that, you know, kind of low-end links don't

really have any value right now. And so the most value you can get from a link is if it's from a source, if it's a deep link, maybe for a page that has some great content, some big brand name site that links over to yours, then you have similar content on your site. You know, you want those kind of links that show value, that show trust, that Google will appreciate and rank you higher. Number 11, and we're just about, that's the last one, organize your content. I think that's key. A lot of times people go into SEO with ideas. We need to talk about this. We need to talk about that. And they crumble it all together, and then they blah, you know. They throw it up, literally throw it up onto some pages. On some pages, and there's no organization there. It's not done right. And so you want to take some time to organize it. Map it out first. Part of our process includes a site map during the whole design process. And that's where we know which pages we're going to optimize, what content is going to go on those pages, how many words are going to go on that page, what this page title will be, what we plan on linking to this page. All of that is done before we start building. And so that way, once the development process begins, we have a clear path of what we need to do. Content's organized, and it's a better experience for the person visiting our site. So that's it on that. That's a good article. I'll post it on Facebook so you guys can check it out. And hit us up. Tell me what you think about it. Quick question from at HelpVid. He hit us up on Twitter. He asked, can we do, is there a way to do semantic markup in YouTube videos? Great question. My first answer was, I don't really think so, because semantic markups require some HTML, and there isn't really a place to, that Google,

YouTube limits what HTML you can use. Right. And so I'm not sure how that worked in the video. Then I began doing some research. Search and watch that article, and I'll tweet to you where they talked about custom div tags that you could in that. And so after we're going through, so, you know, there's a div you can use when you embed it, right? Right. You can either div or you can frame it. And in that div, you can tag it. Semantic markup as video object, and I think you can give us some titles and things like that. And so I'll research it further, but I'll also send you that link so you can check it out. So it would happen not on YouTube. It would happen where you're embedding the YouTube video. Cool. Which may have some value. Absolutely. Because you want to drive traffic to that page. So definitely check it out. I'll send you that link so you can look at it. Very cool. You got some blank stare? Oh, got some blank stare. All right. There's one. Hold on. Head to the back for the other. All right. The first blank stare goes at Mateo, the fake girlfriend. Like, dude, we know that you knew, and it sucks that you didn't. I almost wish you would have won the Heisman just so we just cut him out, and then it would have really been crazy. What was the fake what? So the guy, he played, he, oh, I can't think of the team. I'm drawing a blank. I think it was Notre Dame. He played ball for them. Right. Trying to get the Heisman. Right. Has a fake girlfriend. Facebook girlfriend? Facebook girlfriend? Maybe in Brazil? And so, but apparently it was a trick. And this and that. And then she ended up dying, and like, it was a whole big hoopla, and then it turns out it was fake. Wow. And so, you know, the community was saying that he did that to try to gain sorrow and hopefully help

him win the Heisman. Or is it more likely that he had this fake girlfriend, and he realized that they might want to interview her, and so we should probably kill her before they try to interview her? But so then he, that's, things evolve. They're usually not planned that well. Yeah, at first he said he had visited her before, and they had that, like, on, captured on video. Then he came back and was like, I have never seen her. It was all digital. Yeah. The second blank stare goes to Lance. Dude. You either should have come out alone, or not said nothing at all. Just keep, keep, you know. I do the parallel, like, when your kids, and some of your kids may ask, you know, have you done really stings? And they may be very specific about a stupid thing. And as a parent, you are not obliged to answer exactly. And, and I don't think you should lie. I think I'm not going to answer that question. It's not real. We're talking about the behavior I expect from you. That's parenting. Lance, you're down the path. You haven't followed this story that much. I went with somebody yesterday, and they were saying, there's, like, it's still his word against murder, and there's 20 tests that actually passed. And so, that, isn't jail time? So maybe, I mean, because I think it was last year, you were the stand open, said you didn't. Wow. So to come, yeah, I don't, just, that's a good look. Maybe it's psyche. Or you could just, it could have been messing with, like, I have to be right with the people. If that's the case, then kudos. I, I respect, because I've been in that some too, and let me clear the air. But, um, in this case, I don't know. So are you admitting to doping? Is that, is that what you're saying? Say no, no. So the drug, all drugs. Yeah. Except for aspirin, and then there's the alcohol, because that's excellent every now and then. And

the caffeine, we really aren't going to know that. Except for clarity. Like, there's one thing. And Zertic, I'm telling you, clear as all. I don't know. You guys have just, uh, what, incurred the wrath of podcast number 178. We appreciate you. This is the most popular internet marketing and SEO, our SEO marketing cast on, I think I actually work. That view, all of you all, thank you guys for tuning in. Thank you guys, those that have, for liking our Facebook page, for tweeting back and forth with us. Um, thank you for everything that you do for us, sending us questions, giving us content. Uh, we really appreciate you guys. Uh, until the next podcast, my name's Chris Burris. Bye-bye for now. Bye-bye.