How Usefull are Meta Tags, Convert Traffic with Calls to Action - Unknown Secrets of SEO E-Webstyle Number 15

Hi, welcome to the eWebStyle Secrets of SEO Podcast. Yes, thank you for joining us for another fun-filled edition of our SEO Podcast. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. And this is Paul Hanson, sales manager of eWebStyle. So we always have a theme, and today we're going to have... Should I say it? Yeah, go ahead and say it. A baby shaker podcast. Oh, we're going to get in trouble for that. Why are we shaking babies today? Well, apparently Apple had to apologize and retract the baby-shaking software that they had on their iPhone. So Apple decided to write a program to shake babies? No, actually there's another guy. Guy's name is... Oh, I can't remember his name off the top of my head. But this guy wrote the software, and the process for getting that software available to an iPhone is it's got to go through an approval process, because they don't want, you know, at the Apple store, they may not want, you know, pornography or something, games, or maybe they wouldn't want a baby-shaker game. That would be a good example. Someone has to review this software, I assume, to make sure it's okay, it's legitimate. And that it works, and that you really want their name on it. And so whoever is in charge of that particular process at Apple kind of dropped the ball. And just got fired. You know, we here, we're a smaller company, we may do it for publicity, that's great. Apple doesn't really need the baby-shaker publicity. So is it still up? I'm sure you can still get it. I don't believe it's on the iPhone store anymore. It's the Apple's not supporting it, I guess. Exactly. Probably a good decision. Yeah, I think it is. And it's kind of one of those things, you know, we were talking about some of the things that Obama said recently. And you're like, you know, this is just one of those things, you know, you play it, I'll play it, it's funny. At home with your friends. Yeah, you

just wouldn't want the president playing it on national TV. You know what Obama's saying? Oh, I got this new baby-shaker software for my iPhone. He's over in the corner with his iPhone shaking it and it's crying. And then it goes silent. President, you shook it too much. Well, thanks, Apple. We appreciate you giving us a good laugh. All right. Well, straight to our podcast or now to our podcast. We were talking last time about competitive analysis. And we want to keep talking about competitive analysis. We were just having a little discussion before this. Like, when would you want to do competitive analysis? We don't do too much competitive analysis because it really is a process of, that's what we did long ago so we understood what it took to get to the first page. So we had a good feel about inbound links, meta tags, backlinks, you know, internal structure. All of those things we educated ourselves on and researched, you know, via competitive analysis. And so we don't do competitive analysis very much anymore. You know, I'm sure if a customer came to us and said, all they want from you is competitive analysis, we'd put, you know, something amazing together because we know what to look for. And the final product that we would give them really would be more about what they need to do on their own site to convert traffic that they already get because that's what we see more often than not. We're, I mean, we see everything. We see horrible websites and I know a lot of them don't even come across my desk. You deal with those, Paul. We see horrible websites. We see decent websites that still need a lot of improvement. And we see good websites that still need a lot of improvement. You know, we see decent websites with bad traffic. We see bad websites with good traffic. You know, we see everything. And when it boils down to it, you want good traffic, good site. And a good site really means a site

that converts or generates some sort of call to action. So in the vein of continuing competitive analysis, and last time we didn't get very far in our list, right? We just talked about... Number one. Yeah, number one. That's it. Keywords and competitive analysis of keywords. And we covered a little bit of software on that. What we're going to talk about now is backlink analysis. And there are software packages out there. You can actually do this manually. If you go into Google and you type in link and then colon and then a website, you'll get the backlinks to that website. And the backlink is all the websites other than your own that link to that particular page. And that can be really valuable. We, from time to time, use a software here called Advanced Link Manager. It's put out by the same company that does the advanced web rank that we use. So it's good. And I'm just looking at a quick little sample here. Some important things to look at when you're looking at backlinks is you want to look at relevancy. So, you know, again, if we've got a great web design and development website and one of our backlinks is Joe the Plumber, we like that, but it's not relevant. Of course. And relevant terms make a lot more sense. And that goes back to, you know, if you've listened to our podcast, you've heard us talk about how the link to your home page shouldn't just be home because Google sees the word home being the link and says, oh, this page is about home, which it's actually not about home. It's actually about, in our case, web design and development. So a link on our website to our home page is actually going to be, you know, website and development. We'll probably have home also, and we have home specifically because people are used to it and know how that means to get to the front page, but we're also, for the purpose of Google and search engines, going to have

a link to web design and development that links back. So the same thing on Joe the Plumber's website, you know, if it does say something like, you know, Houston SEO or Houston Web Design and Development or whatever, then that link becomes significantly more valuable. It also becomes more valuable for a couple of reasons when it's actually inside, you know, maybe somebody's put together an article about web design and development and they included our link. Because that article is about web design and development and we're in Houston, maybe they had links to, you know, different, it's a Texas article writing website and they had different links to different web design and development companies in Texas. So one in Houston, one in Houston, one in San Antonio, and they choose eWebStyle. That has a lot of value because, one, the people reading that article are interested in web design and development in Texas, and so then there's a link back to us. That's incredibly valuable and that can just give you traffic right away. The other is Google sees the relevancy of the terms on the page and the fact that it links back to our website and gives that backlink more credibility. So backlinks can, I mean, getting more backlinks can be very beneficial to your website as long as it's relevant. And correct me if I'm wrong, backlinks can also be harmful to your website if they're not relevant or if you're linking to people that are not, just if it's not done the right way, I guess. Well, relevant is the right term, and so, again, that would be along the lines of Google. Google will track things like, say, if you were an inscrupulous pornography peddler website and you decided that you wanted to go after the keyword web design and development. It would be a foolish choice, but you decided to do this. So now what you're trying to create is backlinks to your pornography website, which say things like, you know, web design and development Houston, and it links back to

that website. So that's clearly not relevant because the information on the website is pornography, and the link going back to it is not. So that would be, you know, a very easy to understand example of a non-relevant backlink, and you can actually be penalized for that. That's not, you know, Google recognizes that the page is, the page that the link's coming from is one set of information, and it links back, and it's a totally different set of information. So you definitely can be penalized for that. And there's one thing that I know for sure you can be, or not, I'm not sure if you can be, actually, I am sure you can be penalized for it, but this is just something I don't like to see. When you go to a website, and they have a link from their homepage that says links, and you click on the links page, and it's just a page full of random links that this particular owner likes. Maybe they're his buddies, or just pages he likes to go to, but it'll be a page, maybe a real estate link, it'll be his favorite music link, a link to just random, random, maybe a link for his church, just random, random links. I don't see it as much as you used to, like in the early days of the internet, but I still do see it, and it is, it just, I don't ever go to those pages. Well, so I can tell you're a little new to the industry, because you noticed it before. The reason you did that is when it first came out that Google was giving credibility to links, to backlinks, you would just set up a links page, and you would send an email to anybody with a moderately reasonable website, and you would add as many links as possible to them, from your links page, and from them to your webpage, and that gave, that actually did give you some advantage, and as you've noticed, people don't do that as much anymore. I

think the other issue there is that, you know, the owner's putting up his favorite links, is kind of, the web wasn't that professional, if you will. It was kind of a way for, if you were a little bit technical, you could put a website for your business, and it was a way for you to express your, your, your... Express yourself, yeah. And so, you know, your favorite pet link is, is kind of, you just expressing yourself, and then, all of a sudden, you realize that it's not, you know, now it's no longer professional, it's a business. Exactly, your pet link has absolutely nothing to do with your plumbing company. And there's still people who use it, in fact, right up the street, we can almost see the building, is a company called HostGator, and they're one of the largest hosting companies on the planet, I believe. And, uh, right here in Houston, Texas, believe it or not, yeehaw! And, uh, and he's got a hobby, which is, which is an interesting hobby. He'll dress up as a bum, he'll go on the street, and he'll, he'll basically beg for money, and then he'll post his results. And it's, you know, $10, $15 an hour, right? Yeah. So now, this is a little frustrating for me, because now every time I'm driving around my office, I'm, like, trying to recognize the bum. And is it the CEO of HostGator? And, you know, do I roll down my window and ask if I can get a special on a reseller program? Should I ask him for some money? Exactly, because he's, he's definitely loaded. Um, I, again, I think that's a very interesting experiment. I love, I love psychology and sociology, things like that. And, I wouldn't see a problem if he had linked from his business's webpage to his personal webpage about this story. Um, what he's doing there, in my opinion, is not right, because he's turned his business website into a personal expression. And, um, you know, some people get a kick out of

it. You know, maybe most of his clients are nerds, and they love it, and that's great. And then, so it's actually catering to his market. Um, but when you're one of the largest in the world, I doubt that your customer base is, well, there's no way your customer base is exclusively, you know, these kind of geeks who like to intermix business and pleasure, or business and computer stuff. Yeah. So, um, you know, my druthers in that situation would be, and my recommendation would be, hey, you should take, keep that up there. I think that's great, and there's no problem people knowing the CEO participates in these kind of, uh, sociological experiments. Um, but it's not part of your business. It's not relevant at all. Yeah. To what you do to your business, so I have a link to it on your business website. Uh, so far I have not seen him on the street. I'm still looking. I don't know what I would do if I saw him, but I don't know. I'd throw out some tech-narati jargon and drive off. That wouldn't give him a dime. Uh, yeah, exactly. No. Can you sign this? Yeah. I'll draft this. Check. Or whatever, something. Um, so that's just, you know, a brief discussion about relevancy and kind of my own musings about, you know, what do you really want to do with your website? And again, uh, from our perspective, this is what we'll get. If, if he were our client, I would tell him exactly that and he might say, you know what, I like it there and we would help him put it there because it's not, you know, at the end of the day, he would be our customer. Um, and, you know, we're just supposed to give the input, the expertise that we feel is the right thing to do, uh, voice our opinions and then do what exactly what the client wants. So, uh, I think that's the way to do business. Yeah. You know, if you disagree with it, if

you agree with it, you know, throw it out there and then, uh, once, once the decision's made, everybody grabs the baton and goes in the same direction. So, that's how we do things here. Um, uh, some of the stuff that you want to look on backlink analysis are actually like the Google rank. So, you can imagine that a link from msn.com to ewebstyle.com has a lot of value. Uh, Google says, wow, this is a really impressive website in terms of traffic and, and, uh, how many people use it, uh, msn, and it's linking to this other website. So, that gives a lot of credibility and this is just kind of logical, right? It gives a lot of credibility. If you've got, you know, three links, one from MSN, CNN, and NBC coming to your website, then whatever's happened, you're probably doing a pretty big, you're, you're, you're doing it well. So, that's, uh, that's definitely something that Google does. So, when you're looking, if you're doing a competitive analysis, you want to see, uh, and this software we use, Advanced Link Manager, actually does show you the links that come back to your website and their rank. So, that's, uh, that's important. You want to, definitely want to look at, uh, Google rank. I think it's great that they include the rank because if, by looking at their rank, you can see if, you want to pick someone with a high rank or with a good ranking. If you link to, uh, your next-door neighbor asks you for a link and, you know, he has a bad ranking for his website, you might want to think twice about, you know, link, giving him a link or because that could actually, that could have a negative effect on your score. So, you want to, um, you know, really pick and choose who you, who you give links to and who, uh, who gives you back links and who you give links to. Well, that's a, you bring up a very, a very good point, um, because

in the old days, it was understood that having links out of your website weren't of any value. And that's actually changed now. So, when you do have outlinks to other relevant information, and again, from Google's perspective, they really want on the first page those websites which are the best information source for what you're looking for, right? Most relevant. Exactly. And so, you can imagine a really good information source would actually have links to Wikipedia. Here's the same thing on Wikipedia. Here's the same thing, you know, some relevant articles at MSN. Here's some relevant articles there. So, Google has started giving, um, bonus points, if you will, or giving some credibility to those websites and their outbound links. So, if you are linking outbound to relevant and powerful sources, and when I say powerful, I just mean, you know, high Google rank sources, uh, then, then that's very valuable. So, as opposed to the old days when it was, okay, only get inbound links and try not to give outbound links, well, you may still want to do that, but what you really want to do is make sure that your outbound links are going to, you know, powerful and relevant sources. So, that's, that's really good. Um, so what we have next is, uh, do, so you think we covered that good enough? Yeah. Yeah. I think we're, I think we're good on links. All right. Next, we're going to discuss, and we'll discuss this briefly, it's meta tags. This is something really easy. When you see a website that's, uh, right there on the first page of Google, it's real easy to get in there and see their meta, meta tags. And if you're not experienced on this, you don't know exactly what you're doing, uh, all you need to do is, in, in IE, pull up the web page, right click, not on any images, but on any text or white space on that web page, and view source. Somewhere in the top, you know, 3% of that web page is source code,

because that's going to show you the source code, uh, you're going to see meta tags. And you're going to look for description, you're going to look for title, you're going to look for keywords, um, the amount of times that that particular website in their meta tags has those particular keywords is what you're kind of looking for. And we, we were talking about that, some of the analysis that it will do, uh, the software does is, um, and that was, uh, web position gold will actually, you know, map out, you know, what is, what is recommended in terms of the number of words and how much relevancy should your keywords have, uh, or percentage-wise should your keywords have in, in relationship to the number of words in the title and the keyword and, and those things, so. And was that the last podcast? I think that was the last podcast. I think so as well. So, yeah. So, if you're not sure, just listen to podcast 14? It's actually 14, yeah. Okay. In podcast 14, you will hear us talk about it being podcast 13. Okay. It was actually 14. But it was actually 14. So, that makes this one 15. This is 15. This is podcast 15. Yeah. Check out 14 if you're just, you're kind of confused about, um, that software. We, we run through the whole thing. Yep. And, uh, and you can, you can actually get those podcasts, you can listen to them on our blog directly. And to get to our blog, you can go to www.e-webstyle.com. Uh, on there, there's a blog link. Or you could type e-webstyle.com. And yes, they can leave out the hyphen. We actually have that domain as well. Um, so you could go to e-webstyle.com slash tech info. That's T-E-C-H-I-N-F-O. Uh, and that gets right to our, right to our blog. Uh, on there, you've got all the podcasts. You can listen to them right there from our blog. Or, um, you can subscribe to us over at, uh, at iTunes. So, um, lots of

options there. Now, here's a quick question for the new guy, or the new person is probably asking. Why do I need MetaTags? Or why are they important to my website? Well, um, they used to be really important. And they're, they're less important now than they used to be. Um, I can tell you for sure the description can be very important. Specifically because Google, when it displays you as one of its results for a search, will often use the description in its description of that website. So, you do a search for web design and development, up comes e-webstyle, and it says web design and development, and then it's got a short little description under it. You know, each of them do. That often comes from the MetaTag description. So, for that reason, you, you know, you don't want to, you know, you don't want in your description, uh, you know, we, we are not comfortable doing web design. Yeah. Yeah. Or something just completely unrelated. Yeah, so you want, that's a, it's another opportunity to pitch. So, you want your, your MetaTag descriptions to be pretty good. Um. So, it's a good idea to have a description tag. Yeah, absolutely. And the crazy thing is, I'd probably say that 90% of the sites that I take a look at are people that are interested in, in SEO, don't have that. They don't have. MetaTag. Any MetaTags. Yeah. It's not just descriptions. They don't have any. And I'm like, okay, well, there's, there's where we need to start. That's, you know, party number one. It's a short, simple, uh, thing to throw out there. So, you know, you really should spend the time to do it. It's not, it's not that much effort. You're really, you know, you should, you should have for your business, um, some succinct selling points. And so, those types of selling points are what you really should have in your MetaTag description. So, um, I can give you an example. One of our clients that we got, they do phone systems here

in Houston. And, um, you know, one of their high value, um, keywords, if you will, is phone system repair. Or, in a, in a particular case, ESI is a particular type of phone, uh, or Nortel. And so, if, if, if a user in Houston went and typed Nortel phone repair Houston, what are they probably looking for? They're probably looking for a Nortel phone system somewhere in Houston. They're probably, and how to repair it. Yeah. So, they're trying to find a company how, how to repair it. So, when they're, when they look for that, what I suggested to them and what we've implemented is that the description MetaTag actually has their phone number in it. So, when that first page Google result comes up, and they're on it, because they are, because they work with us, that's just, that's just how it goes. They're number one. Um, the description has their phone number in it right away. So, the user, who's possibly in a state of panic because his phone system isn't working. Ah, my phone system went out. I need somebody yesterday. Boom. He doesn't even have to go to their website to get their phone number. He can dial straight from that first Google results page. And I think that's, that's valuable. You know, that's, that's, you were asking, you know, what is the value? There's an incredibly valuable. And I like that, because it makes it as easy as possible for them to find their phone, to get in touch with a Nortel Houston phone repair company. Because the number is right there in their description tag. There's no, there's no issues, right? You don't, you don't have to think twice. So, that's, that's MetaTags. A number of years ago, we probably would have spent a lot more time on MetaTags. I mean, we did with the analysis on the last podcast. MetaTags just aren't as important as they used to be. What's more important is the content on your website. So, that's the other thing that if you're doing a competitive analysis,

you really want to look at the content for the website. You know, what do your competitors talk about? Are they talking about things? And, and we're about to launch a total redesign of our website. Ground floor up. Because, you know, we're kind of like, I don't know if everybody knows, you know, the car mechanic that you go to always drives a POS car. And the reason he does is because he doesn't get paid to fix his car. Of course. And he knows what he can get away with. Right? He knows that little rattle in the back right of the car isn't going to leave him stranded somewhere. So, he doesn't bother to fix it. We're kind of the same way here. We don't get paid to fix our website. But we're, we're growing as a company. And we're at the point where it's time to spend time and make that website. And, and really to implement everything that we do for our clients, and we see great success with them, we need to start implementing that for us. So, we're going to do a total redesign of our, of our website. And with that redesign, we're going to start on the keywords. And with the keywords, you start, you create the structure, you don't even do any graphics. We really don't even do much layout. And, and then we start, we're going to start building it from the ground up. So, that's, the text, the time we spend on the text of our website is going to be some of the most valuable because the text is pitch. And, and again, it goes back to ABC. Always be closing. Everything on our website is going to be about closing customers. Giving them information, giving them all the information about us and how we do business and, you know, this podcast is a great example of us sharing information, sharing with the community and, and also providing, you know, hey, this is how we do our business. This is, we're world-class experts in what we do

and this is how we do business. That's my cell phone. Sorry about that. It was supposed to be drowned before we started. So, all of that is, is how we start that from, from the ground up. The next thing that you want to look at for competitive analysis is actually site structure. And what site structure is, you may remember, we talked about Google PageRank. And remember PageRank, page comes from Larry Page, founder of Google, not actually from WebPage. The actual page, yeah. Which is kind of cool that it works out that way. So, we, we talked about Google PageRank and we mentioned that you can actually improve, there's, there's a, the highest value that you can create for your website in terms of links, internal links. Okay, I do remember that. You, you can, you can improve it to a certain point and your overall pages can have a maximum page rank and you can never exceed that maximum page rank. But, improper linking can reduce your page rank. Can decrease your page rank, that's right. So, internal site structure is actually something that is very important. It's important for, um, Google PageRank. Yeah, of course. Or Larry PageRank, we can call it. Um, so, so that's something that, uh, that is very important. You want to look at it from that SEO perspective, of course, that's why you're here listening to this podcast. You also want to look at it from a convenience. Do your customers, are your, are your customers able to find what they're looking for? Because if they're not able to find what they're looking for because your link structure is, you know, back to front, then you need to work on your website just for your customer's ease of usability. Um, if your website's not easy to use, they're probably not going to go to it again. Yeah. So, you know, they're, they're going to bounce, they're going to leave your website. Yeah, bounce. That's the, that's the forbidden word. Yeah. Bounce. That's, that's what you don't want them doing.

You don't want them coming and, you know, maybe they, maybe you've written some great copy and the first two paragraphs of your webpage really sell them and they're ready. Wow, I want to buy and they can't find a buy button. Yeah. Oh gosh. They'll spend like, you know, 10 seconds. You probably have 10 seconds for them to find that buy button and if they can't find it, bounce. Yeah, they're gone. They're bouncing. So now they're all enthused. You got them all excited about the whole process of whatever it is that you're selling and they go to the next company in the Google list and buy because the buy button's right there. So, and again, that, we're, there's a theme. I think there's a theme that keeps coming up and it's this call to action. Call to action. Yeah, that was in my head too. Right. So we've got this, a couple of themes, keywords are huge. Content is huge. Calls to action are, are right up there, right? You know, they kind of fall in line. If you don't have calls to action, then, you know, people are just looking at your pretty webpages and that's not your goal. That's not what you're really after. So, you know, there are a lot of things that we've covered. I think that some people are out there thinking, oh, we've, you said keywords are important. You said meta tags are important. You said this and that. And then, so everything is important. And, and really it's, it's all, you need to do it all. And so if, well, the point I'm trying to get across is if you don't have time to do all of this, call a professional SEO company. Because if you don't have time to sit and, one, learn the industry and figure out what's, what you need to do, call a professional company and they'll call eWebStyle and we'll do it for you. Exactly. And we do this over time. You know, our, our SEO programs are on a month to month basis.

So we're working on each one of these and, and, you know, we won't necessarily work on your calls to action from day one, but we would like to sit with you either on the six month or the one year anniversary and say, okay, now we've improved your search engine placement, we've improved, improved your traffic. What are we doing with that traffic? Are we taking that traffic? Are we utilizing fundamental calls to action? And are we converting that traffic? Are we enabling you guys to work with that traffic? So, um, that's what we do. That's what we'd like to do here. Uh, we've actually come to the end of our podcast. We almost got through our, today's list. So we'll, um, we're going to end the podcast here. We'll, uh, thank you guys for listening. This is, uh, great that you come and talk to us. If you have any questions or comments you'd like to send to us, you can email them to us at podcast at e-webstyle.com. We love your comments. We're, we're getting comments here and there. Uh, we'd like more. We'll address your questions right here on our podcast. Until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burris. And this is Paul Hanson. Bye bye for now. Set me free.