How to increase your search engine traffic by 25% - Unknown Secrets of SEO E-Webstyle Number 49

Hi, and welcome to the Unknown Secrets of SEO Podcast. This is podcast number 49. My name is Chris Burris. I am owner of eWebStyle. Paul Hanson, my counterpart, is not here, so this may be a very quick podcast, or maybe it'll go a little bit long. Who knows? So, as always, we want to start off with a couple of pieces of information. We want to start off with news, and we want to start off with what we did last time. Actually, this podcast is going to be about continuation of what we did last time, and we were talking about choosing the right CMS platform. Now, I know I kept referring to CMS as content management software or solution. It's actually system, so hopefully somebody can cut me some slack on that. There are a number of content management solutions out there, open source. There's also paid versions that you can use, Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, and Mambo. So, now, WordPress is typically associated with a blog, but it's hardy enough of a system that you can certainly use it as your content management solution. So, we're going to continue with that. We've got a couple more points on that. I want to let you know, you are listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes, and you can stalk us. In fact, we want you to stalk us. You can stalk us by following us on Twitter. To find us on Twitter, just go to twitter.com slash eWebStyle. There's no dash in that one. Or, you can find our Facebook page and become a fan. In order to do that, all you need to do is go to e-webStyle.com slash Facebook. The URL for Facebook is just incredibly too long and bizarre. I wouldn't want to give it off over the air. So, that makes it much easier. It takes you directly to our Facebook fan page. I'd also like to thank everybody out there in Ustream land. You can actually watch our podcast live on Fridays at 9.15 in the morning, Central Standard Time.

We're running a little bit late today. I was hoping Paul would be able to make it. He's not here. Let's see. Did I get them all? You can also find our videos on YouTube. We're continually adding our videos after we've added them to the system. We're continually putting them up on YouTube. And so, I promised you last time that I was going to give you the YouTube link. I will get it to you the next time. I'm sure you can just go on to YouTube and type in eWebStyle and you will find us. Remember, we've quoted or coined the phrase, SEVO, Search Engine Visitor Optimization. You're listening to the most popular podcast on iTunes. Now, a little bit of news. I went in and looked in some tech news and there's some interesting stuff I'd like to make some comments on. Windows Phone 7. So, I'm a big Windows Phone fan. And they said they're going to change the whole phone and they're going to use the actually operating system of the phone. And they're going to use Silverlight or XNA. And it's interesting that I read this article today because we're in the process inside of eWebStyle. We're in the process of changing from using .asp, which is old Microsoft technology, and starting to use Joomla. Get on over here. I'm starting to use Joomla, which is a content management solution. Excuse me. Content management system. I just corrected myself on that. I don't even know what's going on. So, it's interesting that they talk about that. One of the main reasons we're switching from .asp actually to Joomla or actually .php is because Microsoft at one point changed from .asp to what's called .asp.net. But it's actually a pretty radical change. It's a radical change from the perception of how you edit and work with different pages, dynamically created pages. And we found that we weren't very comfortable in that environment. And we didn't really want to use it. So, we stayed with .asp classic. Well, now Microsoft no longer supports .asp classic.

They only support .asp net or .asp.net. And so, we're like, okay, you know what? We could now learn .asp.net, but the challenge would be that we eventually, Microsoft's going to come out with something new. I don't know, like Silverlight or XNA that just stops everything you did before and moves off into a new direction. And we didn't want to face that again. So, .php is an open source programming platform. It's going to continually change, and it's never going to be this one stopgap, okay, you've got to totally re-understand how you do everything in .php. So, we don't have to worry about that. So, that's why we switched over to .php. And Joomla is a .php interface. So, it's interesting. Google's just redoing it all over. Who knows? Maybe next time we may need to learn Silverlight or XNA. Apple iPad hit stores April 3rd. I think we kind of mentioned briefly Apple iPads before. Paul, what do you think of it? Oh, he'll be right here. When we mentioned iPads before, it's funny because there's a quote from Jobs which says that the netbooks do nothing as well as, you're probably looking for some of this, they do nothing as well as a laptop, and that's it. Basically, he's made an iPad. It's kind of a laptop, except not a complete laptop. It's a rich man's toy. It is. It is. So, if you've got $700, send us one. Send us one. Because I'd like to play with it, and I can virtually guarantee I will never buy one. I can just virtually guarantee that. Google Buzz came out recently, and Google Buzz is, you know, I don't know if they even thought of it in terms of being a Facebook killer or whatever. Ironically, I just read an article, it's actually sending a lot of people back to their Facebook accounts because it reminds them, oh, I haven't been doing anything on Facebook, and Google Buzz isn't as good, so they're going back to Facebook. The other thing, which is actually pretty interesting, and

there's probably a lot of people out there, did you know Viacom is suing Google? For what? It's been underway for a while, and they're suing them because Viacom has all this content, and they're saying that Google allowed all of their copyrighted material to be displayed. I think the number was like some 8 million times it's been viewed on YouTube, because Google owns YouTube. And Google's claiming that, well, we're just an ISP, and as an ISP, we're exempt from copyright infringement issues. So, that case is starting to come to a head. So, that's where we're at. That's the news. That's what's up. Podcast number 49. All right. Oh, we got another review. We did. Yeah. From Diego? San D'Angelo. Not close enough. You know what? We're having twins. My wife's from Panama, right? And somebody made the point, and it's one boy and one girl, and somebody made the point, and that's what I'm doing now. Anytime somebody asks their name, it's like Diego and Dora. That's what's up. Middle name, Explorer. Explorer. Anyway, San D'Angelo said, you cats make search engine optimization fun. Thanks for the info. I didn't. You know, I've got to be honest. It was never, I wasn't, the thought of making SEO fun. I don't, did that enter your mind when we started this? You know, we do try to make it fun, educational, and yet entertaining. But, you know, talking about code and search engine optimization, it's not, oh, man, it's not like we're talking about the last episode of, you know, Desperate Housewives. Do you want to talk about that? I'm talking about Eva. Eva. Yeah. Yeah, so we're, I mean, we're happy, yes, we certainly like to bring some levity into everything, everything we do here at the office, everything. So, thanks, San D'Angelo. That's a, that's a pretty awesome accolade. We, we accept all accolades. Remember, you can contact us. That was actually, and we really appreciate that. When you go to iTunes, you create an account, and you actually type out a review of, of our

podcast. Man, we really appreciate that. In fact, San D'Angelo, send us an, send us your website link and how we can give you, you know, a little bit of link love, you can send that to podcast at e-webstyle.com. We really appreciate it. When you go create an iTunes account, put up a review, make contact with us, let us know you did it, and we'll give you some link love, because we really appreciate it. And right now, man, we've got 11 just clicks where people can, like, select a star. Oh, ratings. Ratings, and then, I don't know, six, seven reviews. That's what's up, man. That is what's up. Thank you very much. You guys are really coming through in the last couple months on hooking us up with reviews. I think we have officially reached the Gino time limit. All right. Into the meat and potatoes. Do you have anything, what I was going to do is continue with our, um. Yeah, we'll go with that, and I'll give some shout outs to a couple guys, a couple people that sent me emails over the past week and some good questions, and actually, I'm going to say this one now. Now, Darren Bowie, at DarrenBowie.eu, D-A-R-R-E-N-B-O-O-Y.eu. Darren sent me an email, uh, and he brought up something that I was like, oh, man, we got it, we'll talk about this next week. Uh, but he was like, hey, man, you guys, thanks for all your help, Paul. You guys, you and Chris have been really, uh, very informative. But he had a question, and some of you, I know some of you are probably going to be like, what is this that he's talking about? What do you guys think of Microsoft SEO service? And I was like, wow, I didn't know Microsoft had an SEO service. Me either. So I was like, wow, Darren, thanks. We're going to talk about this. So, Darren, appreciate it, boss. We're going to talk about this next week. Because I know a lot of people are like, what is

Microsoft SEO service? Because I was not being introduced to it until Darren sent me this email a couple days ago. So, thanks, Darren. Do you have a chance to do any research on it yet? Or we're going to, no, not yet. That was yesterday. He also sent another thing that I really enjoyed. It may be even in that one where he's talking about, uh, yeah, blue one-armed widgets. We told you from the very beginning of our Search Engine Optimization podcast, search engine optimization is easy. It's not hard. There's nothing particularly challenging about it except for how much time you have to spend on it, which is why you should hire a company like eWebStyle. In fact, you can call us right now if you want, 713-592-6724. It's not rocket science. If you go to Google and you type in blue one-armed widget, boom, you'll find us. It's a boring page. It's just text. But it has most of the components that you want and a very uncompetitive keyword. Boom, you're on the first page. It's not a problem. So, and that goes back to what we were talking about, I think, two podcasts ago where we were saying, which would be podcast 47, where we were saying things like, you know, we were comparing short tail keywords and long tail keywords, you know, that would be considered, blue one-armed widgets is certainly considered a long tail keyword because in the sense of how many people are searching for it, apparently it's just Darren, it's, you know, so there's not that much competition for it. So go after those long tail keywords and go back and listen to podcast 47 because that was actually some really good information. All right, so you've got another shout out, but let me get, we'll get, we'll hop right into this. The next thing, so again, this is a list of when you're choosing a CMS from an SEO perspective, again, CMS is content management system. From an SEO perspective, what are the things that you should keep, take, keep

into consideration? And this is posted by Rand Fish on SEOmoz, on the SEOmoz blog. One of the things that he talks about, number seven, we did one through six last time, number seven is pagination controls. Wow, that sounds really good. I have no idea what that is. Yeah. So pagination controls, and some of this is some pretty interesting stuff about a typical content management system, and or a blog even. When you post a new blog or some new content, well, actually, this more applies to blogs. When you post a new blog, it actually typically, on the first page of the blog, that post goes on the top, right? And then all of your posts get bumped down, and there's at some point where the posts at the bottom start going on to the next page. So Google can come, and they can see that particular page, and then you post something else, and Google comes back, and it's almost all duplicate content, except now content that was on there last time is on the next page this time, and it's kind of duplicate content. We believe that Google has written algorithms to handle that, but you can see how that could be a challenge to a search engine crawler. I almost said monster. The search engine monster, that sounds like, rawr. Oh, man. So he's talking about how you want to be able to control that. You want to be able to have meta, no index tags, and what those are, or are tags, so that you may be pointing to a certain place, and when you're pointing to that place, you just want to make sure that it has a no follow tag or no index, so that the search engine ignores it. He also makes a point, and these are actually kind of two sub-articles that I got into the details of, of that you may have this tendency to all of these pages on your blog, or all of these pages in your website may be focused on, I don't know, let's

say plumbing, right? Well, now you've got all these pages that are focused on plumbing, and in your mind you're thinking, wow, Google's going to know that my website is about plumbing, right? But Google doesn't work in terms of websites in general. They work in terms of pages. So if you've got all these pages that are about plumbing, then Google has to make a decision about which one is the most relevant, which one is the most relevant. And if you don't make it easy for Google to figure that out, then you can bump into challenges. So, you know, what is recommended is that you may make one page that's just like, I don't know, you know, plumbing related to toilets, and plumbing related to sinks, and plumbing related to bathtubs. And all of those point to one particular page. This is actually a pretty good visual, huh? All of these point to one particular page, which is, you know, the anchor text is plumbing. And so then you're telling Google, okay, yes, I've got lots of information. And it's all pointing here, so if you're looking for plumbing information, go here. So those are kind of things that you want to be doing in general. I kind of got off the particular CMS subject here. But you do want to have a CMS system that enables you to do that. And really any standard CMS system is going to enable you. That's really about how you're going to logically organize your information. So that is pagination controls. One thing that was mentioned is when SEO Moz redid their website, I think it was back in 07, and they took care of these kind of pagination issues and duplicate, potential duplicate content issues on their archive, they saw a 25% increase in traffic. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. So that's a great number. You know, spend the time to, depending on what kind of website you are. Again, if you've got a five-page website that's on products, just make sure everything there is done right. If you're a

blog, then you want to make sure that you're doing things right there. Because, again, you may be diluting your content if, you know, maybe you comment on self-help and so you've got weight loss and smoking, but you've got 50 pages on weight loss and there's no individual target where you're telling, hey, Google, this is exactly what you need to be looking at when you come to my website looking for weight loss. So, I think, did we beat the dead horse on that? I think we kicked that horse dead and continues the game. I have been known to do that on occasion. The next one is 301 redirect functionality. We've talked about this. This has got to be way back in, like, podcast 35 or something, where we're talking about the 301 redirect. And what this is, is a great example is, if you go to a website and you type in, I don't know, let's just say ewebstyle.com, and I'm going to call us out because we're probably not really following through on this. But if you go to ewebstyle.com, a particular page will come up. And then probably, if you go to e-webstyle.com slash index.asp, that exact same web page will come up. So, this is the potential for duplicate content. More importantly, with related to links, somebody outside of ewebstyle may link to the index.asp page, and some other people may link to the non-index or just the e-webstyle.com page. And now, Google sees those as different pages, so instead of getting two links to one page, we're getting one link to each of two pages. And so, that's obviously diluting our Google link juice. And there is a guy, I said something, I had a conversation over email yesterday with a guy that had that exact issue. His name is Chris Weisner of Weisner Educational, W-I-E-S, Weiser, W-I-E-S-E-R, educational.com. That website needs some work. Yeah, we talked with him. I talked to him about that because he had a redirect going on that was actually too long, complicated story. But Chris, that

is actually for you. So, that was just for you. All right, good. And so, now the 301, what it will do is you'll say, on index, there's two ways to do it. On index.asp, or what you can do is you want to be able to control it so that if they don't go to index.asp, that the e-webstyle.com page does a 301 redirect to the index.asp. 301 tells Google, this page is permanently over here. So, give the link juice to the final target. So, now, even though the link from the outside website is e-webstyle.com, we're telling Google 301 over to index.asp, and the other link is in there, and now we got two, and we're accumulating link juice like no tomorrow, which sounds odd. So, the next thing on this list is XML and RSS pinging. Ping. Ping. Sounds... Man, I know how to ping. You actually showed me how to ping. Well, it's similar. So, this is good. What it does is when I post new content on my website, the content management solution should have potentially an automated system that I... Well, it should have an automated system that I may or may not have on, and that system should inform other, you know, the Google bots and Yahoo bots and Bing bots or whatever or bing-hoo, and it should inform them that I just put up new content. Because what you don't want to happen is for somebody else, before the crawlers or monsters crawl your website, somebody else grabs your content, puts it out there, and they tell Google or Yahoo, look, I have information. And Google and Yahoo go there and go, oh, these guys just published something. And then eventually they get to your website and go, oh, these guys just copied something. So, the pinging is just a way to say, look, I got new content on my page, you guys should come check it out as soon as possible, and don't use those, you know, whatever, those hackers who are stealing my information. Did we ever deal with

that lady who was copying our... Pola Pola? Yeah. No. No, we need to follow up on that, because it just sounds like fun. Yeah, if someone was borrowing our content and blaming it on someone else, we caught them. And she's probably still doing it, too. Even though I called her, I was like, hey, come on, man, don't steal my content. We worked hard at that. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Nothing. Next one is image handling and alt tags. You know what an alt tag is. Alt tag, finally. All right, when you click over, I mean, you hover your mouse over an image, or even, I think hyperlinks can have alt tags, kind of. The text that pops, it doesn't even always pop up. For those of you who are not watching, I just nodded yes. Sometimes the text will pop up and explain what this image is, but it doesn't always pop up. I think it either depends on your browser or the site itself. But it tells the search engine, hey, this is what this image is about, because now that you all listen to 48, 49 podcasts, you know that Google does not read images. And it's saying that images in a CMS navigational element should preferably use the CSS image replacement, which is just another, which is how you can do the exact same thing with CSS, which is cascade style sheets, which is just a way of formatting. And we had a, remember when the SEO rapper was in and he said we should use CSS? And I was like, I'm not sure we should use CSS. Because tables were getting famous. And it finally, it took me, yeah, it took me a while to, well, it's not that they're getting phased out. It's that from an SEO perspective, what you're able to do is have a separate file that is CSS, right? Google doesn't care that you've got this paragraph on the right, this image on the left, this paragraph in the middle. All they care about is what they

see when they read your page, right? So a CSS, you could actually have useless, irrelevant content on the top of the HTML page. And then the CSS, the cascade style sheets, which controls the whole layout of the page, could actually display it lower in the page. So you could have, well, you could have useless content on the top of your HTML page as you view it in a browser, and then all your valuable keyword rich content lower. And in the actual HTML code, the valuable keyword rich content would show up first, as a Google monster would read it. Gotcha. And then all the junk could go on the bottom. And we've talked about keywords and the fact that keywords should be closer to the top, keyword relevance, keyword density, keyword prominence. So a CSS just does two things. It allows you to manipulate that. If you choose, it also gets all of the text related to tables out of the way. So the CSS is on another file, and then your HTML file is just the content that you really want Google to see. And so that really, it's a much better way from an SEO perspective to do things. So, and look, the very next thing is CSS exceptions. Yeah. So. What's a CSS exception? I'm going to read that right now. Oh, so this is what it is. So one thing about content management systems is that you've got, there's a lot of ways when you're working with a particular webpage, you may have a section over on the right about news. And that news section is part of the content management system. It's a separate area. Your client or you can go in and edit that area and update the news. We just finished a website that does this, which is why I'm saying it. Now, in the content management solution, in the template, it may define what is going to happen in that little news section. Is the text going to be big or small, underlined, not underlined, linked, not linked,

whatever, all of those nuances. Well, if you want to do something different, there should be an easy way to override that. Okay. And that's what that's saying. You should have an easy way to override kind of the standard Cascade style sheets or the standard styling of that particular template in that content management system. Wow. That was, I don't know. You know, we're getting really. Wake up. All I got to say now is. All of you wake up. How about that, San D'Angelo? Are we still fun? Wake up, guys. There's your fun now. All right. Hey, we're on the last one, though. So, this is good. Static caching option. You know what? I don't even need this piece of paper. I actually know what that is. Static caching is, you got a guess? Static caching. Where the cache stays the same? It's kind of. That's good. So, what it is is, you know, all of these content management systems are very dynamic. They pull information from different places. They're checking what language. They're checking all of this stuff out and then presenting the information to the user, right? Well, all of that checking is CPU intensive. So, if this option is saying, okay, now that I've got everything the way I want it, you know, let's cache the pages. So, I'm not going to change them so we can cache them. And so, instead of having to go and recalculate all of the nuances of the page and how it's going to look, it does it once, stores a cached version of that page, and then that's what it displays. And that happens much quicker. So, if you're on a high, high traffic website, it's an absolute must, without question. You can obviously get away with it. Also, depending on your hosting solution, if you're on a server with thousands of websites, then this is going to be an issue. And simply by caching it, you may save yourself the headache and actually continue to be able to use that cheaper solution. Or, again, you could

call us and we'll just take care of you the right way. And that's what's up. Before we go, I want to shout out to a couple people that sent emails. Todd Bryson at CoastalClc.com. Coastal Children's Learning Center out in California, Costa Mesa, possibly. He sent a website analysis request a couple weeks ago. I got back with him, and then he sent me an email. I was like, hey, we're going to talk. And he sent a thing that says, by the way, love the podcast. Thanks, Todd. I appreciate that. So, Todd, I'm actually going to give you a call a little later today to talk about where we had. We had talked about it over email, but by the time you actually listen to this, it will have been like a week later. So, I called you. Unless he's watching. There you go. So, I called you, Todd. And Troy Cesar with DriverTrainingAssociates.com submitted an analysis. A request from his website of SEO because he's doing some SEO. And I spoke with him yesterday a little bit. So, and actually, Troy, we're going to talk again today, which will be a week after you listen to this. And then the last one, this is my main man. I've had a chance to talk with Garen a couple times over instant messenger and email. Garen at DeadDogDesign.net. D-E-A-D-D-O-G-D-E-S-I-G-N.net. Garen is actually kind of doing something similar to what we're doing on the, excuse me, Garen is doing something like what we're doing on the podcast. We just put out this information for free. Just want to help people. So, Garen had some first-hand experience with online scams. So, he built a website to help protect us, you guys, everyone. So, I want everyone to go check out this website. It is report-online-scams.com. He had, you know, he had an experience with a company. And he's like, hey, man, I'm just putting this out there for other people that have been ripped off and to try to protect people. So, you know, you got some time, go take

a look at his website because there are a lot of SEO scams out there. There's a lot of just scams in general out there. And I think we actually did a podcast a long time ago about how to convince a website client that's been, an SEO client that's already been screwed by an SEO company, how to convince them that you're legit. So, there is a lot of scams out there that are going around, not just with SEO. And Garen took the time to create a website and catalog all of these scams that have been out there. And you can actually submit a new scam. You can submit a new scam. I looked at it. I thought it was very cool. And he's just, like you said, Garen is just doing this for free, not charging us. No, you don't pay. It's just to protect himself and other people. So, everyone take a look at report-online-scams.com. And if you just put in, type, if you Google report-online-scams.com with spaces in between each word, he'll actually come up on that page. You can find them that way. If you can't find the dash on your keyboard. There you go. So, Garen, there you go, man. That was just for you. Thanks for what you're doing, boss. Yeah, we love what you're doing. All right, that is the end of podcast number 49. You are or were listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. And until next time, I'm Chris Burris. And this is Paul Hanson. Bye-bye for now.