Google goals for Search Engine Optimization - Unknown Secrets of SEO E-Webstyle Number 41

Hi, and welcome to the Unknown Secrets of SEO Podcast. Hi, welcome back. Thanks for joining us for another fun-filled edition of our Unknown Secrets of SEO Podcast. We are the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes, and I have researched to prove it. That's right. We're the best. We're Superman. Yes. So we're glad you tuned in. If you guys are just listening to our podcast, remember, normally you can catch our podcast live video on Fridays at 9.15 a.m. Central Standard Time. Except it's snowing today, so the city of Houston just freaked out. You will actually notice we're in front of the window today. And the reason we're in front of the window is because we wanted to actually show you that, yes, it does snow in Houston. A little bit. We kind of dusted off the car, so you might not be able to see it. But, yeah, it snowed in Houston. Feels like Times Square out here. Look at this. Look at all the traffic here. Oh, wow. Oh, yeah. All right. Oh, man, they just love us here. They're out there with eWebStyle signs. That's awesome. Yes, it does snow here in Houston, and we have, like, groupie fans out there. As female groupie fans. Yeah, we'll work on that next time. Again, in order to find us and watch us at 9.15 on Friday mornings, all you need to do is go to eWebStyle.com slash the Ustream. And slash Twitter. Oh, yes. And also, if you go to eWebStyle.com slash Facebook, you can get to our Facebook page. And then the Twitter link is easy enough. I just said, you know what? To get to our Twitter page, Twitter.com slash eWebStyle, where eWebStyle does not have a dash in it. That's all the ways that you can become a groupie. We love our groupies. If you've been listening to our podcast, you certainly know that we enter our emails and we get answers great, unbelievably intelligent. Well, okay, at least good answers. I was willing to make it with it. I was like,

all right, unbelievably intelligent answers. I'm all for that. So send us your emails. And where did they send the emails, Paul? They can send them to podcast at e-webStyle.com. Excellent. And that actually gets dropped to a number of people on our staff. And we'll trash. And we know that. And next. The other thing, if you're watching, we know you're finding value. And if you're listening, we know you're finding value in this podcast. And we know that you're the type of person who would go to iTunes, create an account, and write a nice review about us. So please do that. We actually have four reviews. We need five reviews on iTunes in order for them to make an average. So like right now, it's like too few reviews to make an average. For those of you watching, you just saw me spit as I was talking. I saw it. So it just says, you know, too few of reviews in order to make an average. If you guys give us that one more review, we'll be in good shape. And then it'll, you know, say, hey, I think it's five, we're at four stars, four and a half stars. In order to be the most popular website on iTunes, in my personal estimation, and I'm sure Paul will agree. Well, he seems very viable today. You've got to have at least a four and a half star rating. And you have to be publishing your podcast on a regular basis. That's us. Every week. The most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. That's right. Thank you guys for listening. Now, we want to touch, as we usually do, on two things. One, what we did last time. And two, just some recent current events. This is one of the current events. It's snowing. That's right. Look at that snow coming down. This sucks, man. That's crazy. This really does suck. You know, we had that conversation. You actually, the last time I was in snow, I moved to Houston from Dayton, Ohio. And we had lots of

snow. And I was still in high school. So, snow was like snow days and, you know, days off and you get to go play. You lived and worked in snow. And so, you don't really remember the snow day being on there. No, there was no. And there was no snow day at my job. It was hard as hell to get to work day. Yeah. It was like, you still need to be here at the same time, and then drive 40 miles of snow. It sucked. Yeah. God. Well, it is snowing here. In the last news, we talked, actually, we ended up talking about Google Analytic Goals. Remember, they upped the amount of goals that you can have from 4 to 20. And I was just reading another article today. There's some new information, nice information. Did I print that out? No, I just wrote it down here. There are intelligence. You've got it. There are intelligence, analytics, intelligence. We might not get to that today, because we still have a lot to talk about on goals. But the intelligence is really interesting. If you're interested in that and you're listening to the podcast, this is podcast number 41. If you're really interested in just the intelligence, go to the next podcast, which is 42, and we'll certainly be talking about it by then, unless we get interrupted by some interview or some other amazing piece of information. News for the day. News for the day. News for the day. We had some news. I tried to find some technology-related news. I know, wacky, stupid news. So it actually relates to what we talk about. There's one thing I found. I thought this was very cool. Today, December 4th, the FIFA group selections came out for the World Cup in 2010, and Sony will be airing the 25 games of the World Cup in 3D. So if you live in Rome, Berlin, Paris, Rio, Mexico City, Sydney, or London, or your name as Paul Hanson, you will be able to see the World Cup in three

dimensions, which I think is pretty cool. That is pretty cool. Wow. One other thing that's in the news, Windows 7. We haven't talked about 7. We haven't talked about 7. Windows released a new operating system called Windows 7. And I assume they released it, one, because of Snow Leopard came out from Apple, and two, to fix all the problems with Vista. Yeah. And apparently there's a big glitch that if you have Windows 7, your screen will go black at some point during some certain circumstances. But Microsoft says it's not their fault. So just keep that in mind. As a matter of fact, it's Mac's fault. I mean, I'm just saying. You know what I'm saying? I'm just saying. Everybody's seen those commercials. So it's Mac's fault. That's right. That little Mac cool guy has gotten into, he actually morphed like a matrix into the other guy, and he's messing it all up. So if somebody out there is using 7, send us an email. Let us know how it is. I have not used it. I'm not really sure how it works or anything. So let me know. I'd like to know. Well, and the first thing you talked about was 3D. I actually have some cool, interesting news with 3D. The reason we're doing our Ustream live video feed at 3 o'clock Central Standard Time today is we actually had an appointment. My wife and I are pregnant. Oh, that's right. Oh, that's right. So we had an appointment. Thank you. Thank you. We're having twins. So you can clap again there. All right. And another one for the side one. And so we got to see the babies on the ultrasound. Okay. And that's always amazing. And they have this 3D. Don't say they do the 3D. They do the 3D. I didn't know that was even possible. We saw a 3D. And, you know, there's a difference between how men approach, you know, pregnancies and babies and everything and how women. And so we actually were in the doctor's office and we

got all these, they have screens all over the place. And she's looking at her screen over here and I'm looking at my screen over here and she goes, look, so cute. And I was like, did you even look at something different? Because 3D babies in the womb are freaking ugly. I don't care if it's mine or yours or anybody's. It's not an attractive little thing there. I'm gay then looking. Yeah. That's probably only about that. Yeah. I'm like, are those eye sockets? What the hell is it? How big is it like that? Yeah. We'll say it like that. Okay. Yeah. We'll go with that. So, all right. The information that we're talking about a little bit, if you missed it, make sure you go back and catch it. We're talking about Google Analytic Goals. And there are 10 must-track goals. And remember, we already had a little conflict. The guy who wrote the must-track goal. Oh, yeah. He's like, yeah, I'm not sure you should be tracking this. And then I pulled back because he was actually right. There are good reasons to actually track it. So, I think we covered everything here that's been highlighted. Some of these make sense. You definitely want to track when people do a newsletter subscription. You want to track catalog requests. You want to track new account openings. And there's some other good stuff. So, like feed, tracking feed subscriptions. Like an RSS feed? Like a podcast. Like a podcast. That would be a great example, right? And, in fact, this is kind of related to the next one, but we'll get into that. So, if the only way that they can subscribe to whatever your RSS feed is, is from your own website, then there are actual tools so that you don't just send them to that RSS feed. You actually, you know, when they click the subscribe button, it's a goal that Google tracks. And so, now Google knows that somebody's subscribed to your feed. And, of course, with all the other tools that come in

Google Analytics, you can actually track how they came into your website. You know, did they come from your pay-per-click campaign, maybe a print media campaign, whatever, TV, somehow, if you're sending them to a specific page, then you can actually track them through your website, down the funnel, and to the point where they've actually subscribed to your feed. The challenge, or one of the challenges, is that in our case, like in this podcast, if you're listening to our podcast from iTunes, you didn't actually subscribe to our feed from us. You just subscribed to a particular file. That file, we can track, right? That's not a big deal. And it makes me think that I'm actually not tracking it, so I should. All right, time out. Got to go track this. Now, what you can't do, though, is when you're on iTunes and you click a particular MP3 file, that file, we are actually hosting that file somewhere else. And even when we're hosting it with us, that MP3 file, Google, we can't put a Google Analytics tracking on an MP3 file. So this is, if you go back and listen to one of our previous podcasts, and so we're kind of reiterating this, there is what we consider a flaw with Google Analytics. And that flaw is that MP3 files, if people click them from somewhere else, not outside of your control, which clearly iTunes is in a very real sense outside of our control, then you can't track it. If you take special precautions and you do extra things, then you can't track it. What we've done, and we find this highly valuable and I highly recommend it, we've moved our podcast to Podomatic.com. In fact, two days ago, we were on the first page of Podomatic.com because we were a mover and shaker. We were the top six movers and shakers of all podcasts worldwide. Yes. So not only on the second were we the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes, we were also on the first page, one of the top five movers

and shakers on Podomatic. That's because we are a moving and a shaking kind of company. Yeah. For you guys watching the video, you're loving it. You want some more of that, don't you? You like it. You like it. Keep tuning. 9.15 on Fridays. Central Standard Time. Move it over there, and then we have some other challenges. But once it's over there, then we can actually track the downloads. On our own server, what we were doing is actually tracking it with some devices, some analytic software that actually is run, unlike Google, it's actually run on the software and reads the log files. And then you're able to track specific MP3 downloads. What we learned from that is that there was an Asian, this is interesting information, there was an Asian search engine spider that was visiting each one of our podcasts three times a day, and that became significant bandwidth, which is one of the reasons we moved off. And it skewed our numbers. It skewed our numbers, yeah. We thought we had, you know, hundreds. An extra hundred downloads a month. Yeah. It turned out to be a little frustrating, but we did two things. First, we blocked that particular news feed, I mean, crawler, spider, because we don't really need to be on any Asian. We're happy with Russian, right? We decided we had to go back and listen to a previous podcast. Because we love to be on Russian. Oh, we can't say that. We can't say that. Because people listen in the Philippines. The Philippines. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Well, so we feel we're more targeted towards an English-speaking market. And Russian. I think that's German. I don't even know any Russian. Yeah. All right, man. It's getting ugly. So, we didn't really need to be on the Asian. We didn't need that spider coming to our website. And wasting our traffic and everything. So, we used our robot text file and we stopped them. That's a good way to control where any actually search engine robot goes. So, go back

and listen to our robot text file podcast if we have one. Yeah, that was probably like podcasting. 1.5. Yeah, okay. Pretty early on. So, you know what? Just go back and listen to them all. And if we didn't do enough, bless you, if we didn't do enough in-depth information on robot text file, let us know and we'll be happy to do that. Yeah, we'll do one. All right. So, what do we have next? Next, we have track file downloads. So, we kind of just touched on that. Why would we want to track file downloads? Okay. Let's say we had a special file. Let's say we had an e-book. Okay. It was a file. You had an e-book that you wanted to promote to people that you are free. Hey, download my free e-book. Or you wanted to... This is... I'm just saying... Yeah, you're good. It'd be a great place to figure out how many people are downloading this. Is there any valuable information in it? Am I selling or... It didn't have to be an e-book. You know, here, download my special offer. Download my coupon. There you go. Download my coupon. Yep. And your coupon could be a file, a PDF file. Yeah. So, you know, you definitely want to set goals for that. And as long... Again, unlike podcasts, and as long as you are in control of how they get to that particular file, then you're actually able to... What you do is you create a URL that includes a Google piece of information that then allows them to download the file. And that way, Google servers are able to recognize, hey, somebody's downloading that particular file. That's a good example because you may have people subscribe and get a PDF. So, there may be, you know, how many people actually subscribe and get to the page where they can download the PDF and then don't download it, right? So, that's really good goal setting. So, hey, I know that 20 people got to this page and only nine of them

downloaded the file. Maybe my link to the file is too small or it's obscured or, you know, I can't see it or I made some change to my website. And for whatever reason, they can't, you know, those people can't find that information. So, those are the kinds of things where you really like, you know, things that make you go, hmm. Wow, man, I haven't heard that song in forever. Some people are like, what are they talking about? There was a song back in the day called Things That Make You Go, hmm. It had a little more rhythm to it. It was a lot more entertaining than listening to us actually do that song. That's bad. So, next year, we have leads. And this, again, I just want to say this article comes from webanalyticsworld.net. So, he says leads. So, we're like, what kind of leads should we be tracked? So, I really am going to have to read here. All right. Well, let's read it. Let's read it more. Because it says, perhaps my second favorite, if you're selling online or making a living from online world, you simply have to track and improve on your lead tracking. I usually track out my site to track free website health check reports and working with the goal funnel. So, bang. There you go. A free website. Oh, and we got another one. Lois. You're in Houston. Really? So, yes. Yes. Somebody in Houston. Yes. That's the first time we got someone that called us from Houston. From A's town. Yeah. From A's town. I think that's awesome. A lead, a great. Okay. That's what you just said. You're a small business owner. You know, you're in sales then. And if you're in sales, you need to always track your leads. And someone that comes to you and says, hey, give me a free website analysis is a potential lead. Or, help, download my e-book. Yep. That could be a potential lead that you could market to, send some information to, call, hey, do you need our

products and services? So, I think that's an awesome idea. So, you could track your goal. And if that's your goal, you know, again, those are good things to track because maybe in a particular week time period, which Google Analytics makes it really easy to look at goals on a week-by-week basis, maybe you're getting 5, 10 goals a week and then all of a sudden they drop off. Again, maybe your web designer messed up the page or, you know, whatever it may be, you know, keeping track of these goals really are the, you know, the key functionality of your website and you want to keep track of them so that if something were to accidentally work, you know, happenstance made it break, then you're tracking it so it's easy for you to fix it pretty quickly. And that, just to, not to be a dead horse, but you've got, I mean, when someone contacts you, that's a lead for whatever, you know, for a free e-book, website analysis, I want a catalog, I want, you know, a blue one on widget. I mean, that's someone that you could market to. So they, and if they contact you through your website, well, obviously they contact you through your website, you now have a name, a telephone number, an address, and you can use that for other things. Hey, you know, I'll put them on the Christmas card list, send them special offers, discounts, whatever. Absolutely. So if people go to your website and they're actually taking time to filling out, filling out a form or doing something to contact you, you know, you got to hold on to that. Are you done? I'm done picking this, my dead horse. All right. The next one is, give me a hard time. Some more kids. Leads are good. Are you saying leads are good? Leads are good. Okay. The next one is track sales. And, you know, this almost goes without saying that. I have to tell you that. I really have to tell you to track sales. So,

you know, say I don't really know. I don't really know why. Why would I want to track a sale? Excuse me. Do you know how many people? Bless you. No. Oh, man. I'm just allergic to awesomeness today. Why would you want to track your sales? I thought it was unbelievable intelligence. I mean, why don't you want to track your sales? You always want to find out where are your sales coming from? Who are, I mean, are they coming from a particular country, region, city, or state? Do they come at a particular time of day? You know, is lunchtime really big for your business, a particular season? You always want to track that. Do they come from one customer who refers a lot of other customers to you? You always want to track that because then that can open up another avenue. If now your customers are always coming from Germany, then let's start marketing today. Maybe you should do some ads in German. No, why isn't your website in German? Yeah. There you go. I mean, you know what? I always get nervous saying languages and countries and other, let's speak German. Yeah, let's speak German. Because in some countries, it's like, I think I said once, and this is bad, like, do y'all speak Amsterdam? Oh, my God. And I feel so stupid. He's like, no, idiot. Okay. No, it's damage. So that's one example. You can track that lead. It comes through much, by the way. Okay. If you're getting one client that's referring all of their friends and family to you, now you can market to that person. So tracking your leads, it helps, tracking your sales will help you open up. Well, and let's say you're spreading your efforts. Let's say you're doing, like, Germany, Belgium, France, Portugal, and England, right? And you're spending equal dollars and effort on each of those countries, and you're not tracking your sales. And then one day you decide, hey, let's just see what happens. I'll track my sales. And you realize that all of

your sales comes from France and Belgium. Well, guess what? Guess where you need to cut your spending? And guess where you need to start spending more? It's kind of a no-brainer once you have that information. And this doesn't just track, okay, I got a sale. This actually tracks, I got a sale for $1,000, or I got a sale for $10, or whatever it may be. So it really helps you to narrow in and focus on those things that are bringing the most value to your business. And even in analytics, you can track it further to, like, okay, well, this keyword, this country tends to bring this much business. And that's going very, very deep into it. And once you're getting that deep, I'd probably say you want to contact an SEO company just because there's so many, unless you have, you know. Unless that's your job at the company. If that's the only thing you do. And if you're a business owner, you know, you should be focused on a lot of other things. And if it is your job, you call me anyway, and I will tell you. That'll work. I'm a win-win situation kind of guy. We can all win. There's plenty of room in the web. As long as I win most. All for it. As long as I'm losing less. We can all win. And the last one here, and this is actually listed as a bonus, track website user reviews. Right? So, in this case, there's a whole lot of things that that could mean, right? One of them, it could be just responses on a blog. Another thing, it could be actually reviews people write about your products and or services if there's a way to do that. And if there isn't a way to do that, you probably want to make a way to do that. Because, you know, anytime your website is partially, at least partially supported by user-generated content, then you're, you know, what's king? Content. Content is king. And so, if you're not having to

produce it yourself, that's just, you know, a little bit of effort that you don't have to make. Or it's just a way that your effort is multiplied. And you always want to do that anytime you can. And then, just not to mention, like, hey, hell, you got people coming to your website and they like what you have enough to actually make a comment on it. You know, that's pretty big. You should always drive it. That's, and again, always talk to that person, market to them if you want or whatever. All right. For those of you out there watching or looking at our video, I'm now holding up a map. Yes. That's a map. What is this map? What are we looking at? So, all the little dashes on here, all the little marks, if you can see that, all of those represent where people are listening to our podcast. So, you can see that. Yeah, look at this. Look at this. South America. South America. How about that? That's Brazil. I'm going to go ahead and say that's real. That's because you've been there. That's right. And they're saying, come back. And they speak Brazilian. Yes. We got a little bit of Colombia. It looks like Costa Rica is listening. Because we got some Costa Rica. That's right. That's right. Look at Australia. They're all over the place. Middle East. Look at that. That's been a lot, actually. That's been a lot. We tracked him down. He's number one on here, actually. He likes it. He wants his website. And he's got lots of time. Actually, you know, they do want their websites off the bus because I read this. Another piece of technology news. Al-Qaeda, they have 200 websites. In English. To promote their message in English. Wow. I saw that. Wow. I certainly hope that. I think our message is illegal on most ISPs, isn't it? I'd probably say. I hope that there's no one over there listening that's like, I'm kidding. Yeah. They found us out. He's like, oh, buy that dude.

All right. Look at that. I mean, this is awesome. We're doing really great. Thank you guys so much for listening. This is going to kind of wind down our podcast. I like this because I am a coder by practice. Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live. I like that. And that is our podcast number 41. Again, we love your emails. Send your emails to podcast at e-webstyle.com. Visit our website at e-webstyle.com. Give us a call at 713-592-6724. That is our podcast number 41. Thank you for listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. That's right. Until next time, I'm Chris Burris. I'm Paul Nancey. Bye-bye for now.