Internet Marketing - Google Local Process - Unknown Secrets to SEO E-Webstyle Number 3

Hi, my name's Chris Burris. I'm the owner of eWebStyle. Paul Hanson, sales manager at eWebStyle. And this is a great day. We've actually got a little special surprise for you. We're going to do a little... A little surprise. You ready? Warmed up? All right. Let's do it. This is our last podcast actually before Christmas and New Year's. I'm going to be on vacation, so we decided we would sing you a little Christmas carol. We're going to get a lot of emails. Yeah, I think so. Whatever you do, don't ever sing again, so forgive us in advance. Me, me, me, me, me, me, me. What are we singing? Tis the season to be jolly, fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la. That's it. Because that's all I know. Yeah. We thought about looking up the lyrics online. We decided against it. We thought we wouldn't torture our audience. We'll spare you guys. Thank you for joining our podcast. This is, I've been corrected, this is podcast number three. Three. Podcast number three. Going strong. Excellent. I did say this is our last podcast of the year. Of 2008. That is because I will be taking a vacation. I'm heading up to New Jersey. Apparently the weather's a little rough up there. Oh, man. Good luck with that. Yeah. So I may not see you. Yeah. I may not be back. You might be stuck. I may be stuck at the airport here in Houston before I head out. Oh, yeah. That's right. So we'll see how that goes. How about you? Are you heading anywhere? Yes. I'm headed to Beaumont, Texas that all of you have heard of. The bustling metropolis of a country town. I'm sorry. Did you say Beaumont? Yeah. I'm sure that's what everybody else is like. That's on the way to something, right? Yeah. It's on the way to Louisiana. No, not Beaumont from Footloose because I know a half of you people are thinking, oh, Beaumont, California, that's where they filmed Footloose. No, Beaumont, Texas. Heading home to go see the good old family, get some good

southern eating in. Oh, sounds good. Sounds really good. What are we talking about today? How are we? Well, we want to recap like we usually do. And I know we covered a whole lot of things. One of the things that we covered in depth, potentially ad nauseum, was keywords. And really, I think you could summarize what we said about keywords. Yeah, keywords. Keywords. Keys are probably one of the most important things to your website and to your search engine optimization campaign. Keywords are how people are going to find you. They're going to type in a keyword like dentist or plumber, Houston, and then up comes a list of available dentists or plumbers. It's very important to choose the right keywords. Make sure they're relevant to your business, to your industry. And that's keywords. What else? Did I miss anything? You know, I think you got it. We also just kind of mentioned that sometimes the keywords aren't that obvious. Oh, yes. Depends on your particular business model. So you certainly want to work with an SEO company that can understand your business model and how to best utilize search engine optimization for your website and your business. And to help you pick the right keywords. Exactly. Which is a very, you know, as we mentioned, iterative process with the customer, at least in our case. What else did we talk about last time to cover? I think we did internet marketing last time. We did keywords. And did we finish? Did we finish on keyword? I think we started on link building. Okay. So we talked a little bit about link building. I think we mentioned on-site and off-site SEO, right? Yes, we did. And that's not at our office and not at our office SEO. That's actually on your website and not on your website SEO. And what we're referring to there is anything, of course, that's off-site would be something along the lines of link building or article submission. Anything that's on your website is going to, wow, that's a long list. That's

right. Oh, we do that, right? So we do all of that. Wow, okay. Yeah, that's a long list. On-site is the longer list. A lot of SEO companies that you work with will have an upfront fee or, what is that called? The startup fee. The setup fee. The setup fee. Thank you. My brain was just not working. The setup fee. And some people often ask, I think Paul was dealing with somebody today, a customer who he's working with. Do you want to share that experience a little bit? He had a question. He says, Paul, why is there a setup fee? And I said, well, Mr. Customer, there's a setup fee because your site, I'd say, I told By the way, I've got to interject here. Okay. I love your confidence. Mr. Customer. I like that. Yeah, because he is going to become a customer. Excellent. I should have said Mr. Prospect, but no, he's going to become a customer. Excellent. He was worried about the setup fee. Paul, why do you guys charge a setup fee? And I said, well, Mr. Customer, 99% of the sites that we see are not ready to begin a search engine optimization campaign. They need some kind of work. Maybe we need to suggest new keywords. Maybe they don't have enough content on your site. Your meta tags are all wrong. Maybe your robot.txt file is wrong or something. So, the setup fee is where we're going to go in and set your website up for optimization. Get it ready to run your search engine optimization campaign. And 99% of the sites that we see have to do some sort of setup. Yeah, there's a big setup involved. In fact, the upfront work is where a majority of the work actually goes. And keywords, as we've belabored, being one of the features of upfront work. The other thing that that kind of reminds me of, you know, a lot of customers come to us and they're, you know, they're all gung-ho. They're ready to do search engine optimization. And

they can already picture all the traffic that we're going to bring to them. So, we look at their website and, frankly, the website looks horrible. Or it's one page only. Or, you know... Two paragraphs and the whole website's got two paragraphs of content. Yeah. So, you look at that and the content speaks to the search engine optimization process. The look and feel and content that the customer, their potential customer, is going to be exposed to is just not up to par. You know, you would end up wasting a whole lot of money getting your website to the first page of Google and having a website that gets only bounces. Do you know what I mean by bounces, Paul? Bounces. Well, I'm bouncing on this stability, Paul. I would probably say bounce means I get to your website and I bounce right back to where I was before. Yep. It's like walking into a club and there's nothing worth staying for. So, you bounce. I'm bouncing. So, you go into a website, like I described, a one-pager, two paragraphs or whatever it is. And there's nothing there for you. There's no eye candy. There's nothing that catches your attention. There's no reason for you to be there. So, you leave. So, that potential customer, which we would never handle that way, but that potential customer could end up spending money to get on the first page of Google or any one of the search engines and then turn around and it's just a total waste of money. So, we often start and we want to make sure that our customers have a really nice, user-friendly, attractive, we like to say most of our websites, in fact, 99% of them have a little bit of motion in them. We like a website to, I like to call it Breathe. We don't want it annoying. We don't want any epileptic fits caused by the flashing that's there on the screen. You don't want it to take away people actually looking for your content. Exactly. You don't want to

flat your animations and things to take away from the site. Exactly. So, we've got a little bit of motion. We do all of that and we want all of that done first and then we'll really endeavor into the search engine optimization campaign. So, what is it, the first things that we do? Well, we mentioned keywords and we'll talk about on-site right now. Link building is, there is some link building that occurs on-site and we didn't go over what we did on the last podcast. We talked about how if you've got a link on your website that is to your home page and you're using the text HOME, H-O-M-E. Google actually thinks that if it follows this link HOME, it's going to find information about HOME. So, it's okay to have HOME because that makes it user-friendly. Paul was pointing out that we have a HOME link on our website. We definitely have a HOME link. And we know what we're doing, so don't sweat that. We also have other links to the homepage with appropriate text. For instance, a good one would be Web Design Houston, Search Engine Optimization Houston. Those links actually say that. That's the actual text link. So, that would be part of the link building on-site. Now, we did, this will be the third podcast that we've mentioned meta tags. And I have a feeling we'll probably keep mentioning them over and over again because they are an important aspect of search engine optimization. That's one of the next things we do. So, we're going to look at the two most important meta tags are your keywords and your description. Some of the search engines use the keywords to identify what are the relevant keywords that your site utilizes. And the description is often, not always, but often what the search engine displays when you've done a search. So, hopefully that's pretty clear. I got a question for you. Like, to the brand new SEO guy, where is he going to find his meta tags? Okay, so you're going to find

your meta tags in the raw HTML if you're doing the actual coding. So, it's in the raw HTML. Or, if you're just looking at a website and you want to see, you know, hey, let me go check out some of my competition. What do they have for meta tags? What you can do is you can open up, and I'll talk about Internet Explorer. You can open up that webpage, your competitor's webpage in Internet Explorer. I'm actually going to teach you a cool trick here, so hold on. You can right-click on the text of the webpage, and a pop-up window will come up. And on that window, you have the option to view source. Meta tags are usually at the top. They don't always have to be, but they're usually pretty close to the top. And you can find those meta tags, keywords, and descriptions. Now, the trick, I'm going to tell you, there are some websites who go to the effort with a JavaScript so that when you right-click on the website, it says that you can't use that command. I don't know if you, have you bumped into that? Yes, I have. Man, that's annoying. Yeah. There's a trick around it, and I'm going to give that trick away right now. Enlighten me, because I've got to know that. So, kind of the first question is why would somebody put that JavaScript in place? One, maybe they don't want you to see the meta tags. They want you copying what they're doing. Exactly. Okay. More than likely, it's usually on a photo or an image that they're trying to keep you from downloading that image directly. The trick around it, if you open up an Internet Explorer, and you go to the tools bar at the top, actually to the view, there's a source option. So, again, up there at the top of your Internet Explorer, you've got file, edit, view, favorites, tools, help. Click the view, and then there's a source. And that will actually allow you to see the source code where

they've actually tried to lock you out with JavaScript. Learn something new every day, right? I learned something new today, because I did not know how to do that. And that definitely comes in handy. I love to see source code. I love to look at everyone's source code and see who's doing what, what's working, what's not. So, did anyone ever call you a nerd before? Yeah. Okay. You, you. Don't call me a nerd. Just me. All right. Well, we got it. You like source code. You're bouncing on a... I've got to think about a thing before I speak. So, that was MetaTags. Again, feel free to send us an email if you've got any questions about specific MetaTags that you may or may not want to use. And we're talking keywords, descriptions. And our email is podcasts or podcast. I'm setting both of those up at e-webstyle.com. That's e-webstyle.com. So, if you've got any questions about anything we're saying, feel free to send us those questions. And we'll address those in a podcast and actually get a response to you as well. Okay. Next important thing that we do is a sitemap. So, what is a sitemap? A sitemap is going to help a web crawler or a spider index your site. Yes. Every page of your site. Absolutely. Now, in regular people's term, what does that mean? It is a text file that contains a list of all of your pages and links to them. So, that really, it's exactly like you said. It's just an easy way to allow the search engines to see every page on your website. One of the things it does is sometimes, maybe you're making changes on your website. You know, you're making, adding new content, pulling down pages, moving pages. Maybe you end up with one of your important pages for search engine optimization kind of hung out to dry with no links to it. If that's included in your sitemap, then Google will still be able to find that and they'll still index it. So, it can

be very useful all the time. There are also lots of services out there. You can Google them. You know, Google something like find dead links in a website and I'm sure you'll come up with a lot of tools that you can type in a particular website and it'll find any dead links in your website. There are other tools because in order for that tool to work on what I just described, it's got to actually have access to the raw pages. So, that's a tool you would have to download and they probably are available free. We don't tend to use those here because we've got full control of what we're working on. And if there's a page out there that's hung to dry, it's probably for a reason. Sitemaps are very important. You want to have a sitemap. You want to, I mean, basically you want every page of your website to be indexed. You don't want anything falling out. Yep. It's very important. So, if you don't have a sitemap, get one. Get one. Yesterday. Send us an email on how to get one. We can help you. The next thing we have on our list is search engine local maps and it applies to Yahoo and Google. This is something we would probably, we'll probably handle in an entirely separate podcast because it is a, excuse me, a very important story, a very important tool. And it is part of our base package. We set our clients up with Google local maps. We give them some good advice about how they can get on the first page of Google local maps, when it's possible, when it's not possible, what they need to do, you know, all of that great stuff. So, we really help our clients getting there. One of our clients, and it's actually, it's a theater here in Houston that I perform with, Third Coast Comedy. I do improv with them, and their biggest traffic comes from people typing Houston Comedy. And it comes not because they're on the first page organic,

but they're on the first page of the Google local maps. And so, you know, that's an example of getting significant traffic, just being in the right space on Google local maps. And we do do that with our clients. To the, okay, now tell them, to the guy that doesn't know how to find Google local maps, or what it is, or what it looks like, how could you, how could you know when you're looking at Google local maps? Okay, so, specifically with Google, and it's not local maps, it's actually Google local. Yeah. It tends to have a map with it. Google local will, there'll be a separate section. So, if you type in, I don't know, you can type in, what's the good term? Dentist, I guarantee there'll be one on dentists. Yeah, Dentist Houston. Then, you'll end up with a Google local maps section. And the Google local maps section, again, it's not maps, but it's Google local section. I got to call it Google local. It's written here, so I'm going to keep saying it until, here, I'm going to scratch it out. There we go. So, on Google local, it'll show up there, just, and I'm going to type this in. All right, Dentist Houston. We're going to Google that. What comes up? So, the very first thing, you see pay per click, and we covered that. That's the sponsored links at the top of the page, and there are three of them in this case. And they're in kind of yellow, so Google's kind enough to indicate to you who the sponsored links are. Immediately below that, it says, Local Business Results for Dentists Near Houston, Texas. And it's got a list of A through J, and then there's a link, More Results Near Houston. So, that's what we're talking about when we talk about Google local. Google local. I almost said maps. They need to change it. They need to change it to Google local maps now. So, and then right under that, under that, More Results Near Houston, you'll see

Houston Dentists. Actually, you'll see their regular organic results. So, we don't have a client, a dentist client yet, so you don't see us on the front there yet. I like that. I believe Paul's working on a dentist or two. So, that would be Google local, not maps, but Google local. And you definitely want to set up a Google local account or have a professional SEO company set one up for you. There's a lot of value in being listed there in the Google local or being listed on any local version of a search engine. It's going to have that map comes up. You know, it's got A through J. It's a quick visual reference to see, oh, well, this guy's located here in this spot. There's a lot of value to that. And we include that in our SEO package. So, the next thing we've got here listed here is the landing pages. Wow. Given that I'm flying to New Jersey, I'm a little worried about landing here pretty soon. Landing in the ice. So, what is this landing pages all about? And it sounds, I think the name kind of helps give the definition. It's where you land. When you go and you're Googled or you search for something on a search engine, your landing page is where, if I typed in dentist, Houston, Texas, I come up with a list of dentists that Google is going to provide for me. And I click on one and I go and I land on a specific page. That would be the landing page for that term. That would be the landing page for that term. If they were doing search engine optimization. Exactly. And landing pages also typically refers to not just your core. Say you've got 5, 20, 100, whatever the main pages of your website. Landing pages also can refer to, okay, those 100 pages, they're kind of doing well with certain keywords. And we really want to focus on another set of keywords. And we don't want to lose any of the position

we have on the existing pages. So, we'll make a new landing page. And that landing page can have specific target, will target a specific keyword or small set of keywords. So, a dentist who might be optimizing for a bunch of different things. Cosmetic dentistry, for instance. Okay. Say he's a dentist and he's got a great, wonderful site and he's doing really well. Dentist Houston, he's doing really well for Cavity Houston, whatever it may be. And then he decides that he's partnered with somebody new who does cosmetic dentistry as a focus. And he wants to add that. Rather than jeopardize the position that he might have for the terms that he's already doing well with, we would make a landing page, a new landing page, cosmetic dentistry. Obviously, he should have a page in general for cosmetic dentistry because that's something that he's added to his practice. But we might actually add a couple more landing pages that weren't in the general scope of the website but were available, again, via sitemaps to Google so that it would have a lot of keyword-rich text and content. Because if someone's searching for it, you might be thinking, okay, well, why do I need a landing page? If I am searching for cosmetic dentistry and I find your listing, I click on it, and I get to your contact us page. Or your office hours page. You know, I wasn't searching for that. I'm searching for cosmetic dentistry, and I want to land on... What you just described creates a bounce. Ah, there you go. A bounce. I'm going to bounce back to where I was because I'm looking for cosmetic dentistry. So you want to make sure that your landing page has got the information that that person is... Your landing page is relevant to the search. And that's part of what we offer for our search engine optimization here. That's correct. We work continually on search engine optimization. And then on a quarterly basis, we'll actually do an analysis from the perspective of your potential clients.

That is, okay, we've got great search engine placement for XYZ terms. We're working on great search engine placement for K through L terms. On those terms that we're doing really well on, when they do click it and get to your website, what do they see? And I can give you a great example. I already mentioned Third Coast Comedy. In the case of Google Local, anybody who would type in Comedy Houston would end up on Third Coast Comedy's main page. This is a great example. I'm glad it came up. Well, Third Coast Comedy, their core business is actually selling training services to corporations. We're in Houston, so we've got a lot of oil-based companies here. So a BP, a Shell, ExxonMobil, they sell training services. It turns out that the rules of improv are really great training tools for anybody. So you get your office working and communicating a lot better. That's what their big business is. So somebody goes in, and they happen also to have an improv show on Friday nights, almost every Friday night, which I happen to perform in. So if you guys are in Houston, certainly come out and see me. Let me know. You heard us on our podcast. So that particular term, the way people were finding their website was Houston Comedy. They would click it. They would go to the Third Coast Comedy page, and they wouldn't find anything about comedy. It would be about corporate training. It would be a bounce page. I would bounce. That's not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for comedy. I'm looking for a Friday night improv show. I'm not looking for ways to train my employees. Exactly. And so what we did is we just made a small modification onto the very first paragraph to make sure that anybody who goes there for Houston Comedy sees it immediately and then get to a page that's more specifically relevant. They didn't want to change their front page, but they did want to capitalize on that traffic that they were getting. So that's

the kind of analysis that we do on a quarterly basis when we're working on a search engine optimization campaign for you. So would it be safe to say that a relevant landing page could reduce your bounce rate? Yes. It could help keep people there. Yes. Yes. I think emphatically you can say that. Well, I'm going to say it emphatically. You say you need a landing page. You need a relevant landing page. It's very important. I think that's good. The next thing we have here, and I've actually drawn a box around it. That's important. Because it's web analytics. In this case, it's actually Google Analytics. Anytime you're going to endeavor to do search engine optimization, you need to have some way to track, and I'm going to use a big corporate word that a lot of people don't use, metrics. Ooh, that's a big one. Isn't that good? It's kind of short, but it has an X in it. It's really... Anywhere special has got an X in it. Okay, so we can out-of-the-box metrics that we want to monitor can be monitored with Google Analytics, and that's what we use here. Why would you want to do analytics? Okay, so Google Analytics is a way where you can monitor how every piece of traffic gets to you. What keywords did they use to get to you? What other websites? Say you've got a link on some blog somewhere, or you've got a link somewhere else, or are you even purchasing a banner somewhere that you're hoping will give you some traffic? You're able to track that information from Google Analytics, and you're actually able to do a whole lot more. We will definitely do an entire podcast on Google Analytics, and then some of the tools that Google provides. And you may be asking, okay, here's a free tool, Google Analytics. Why would you use a free tool? You're a big SEO company. You can afford any piece of software to help you with anything, and frankly, it's the best thing out there. It's just

awesome. And it's getting better all the time, so probably one day it's going to turn around and bite us on the butt because they've got so much data. I just don't see the drawback of that, ultimately. I know there are a lot of people who are really concerned about privacy, and it irks them that this company gets a lot of information. For us, whatever that irk is, it's not worth looking for another product or using another product that's just not as good. So if you're doing your own SEO, you definitely want to have, in my opinion, a Google Analytics account. Your opinion? Definitely a Google Analytics account. That's 100%. We're two for two. And why pay for an inferior product? Exactly. Analytics is awesome. Very true. The other thing that if you're out there and you're looking for search engine optimization, you're educating yourself so that you can make better decisions and work with the right company, you really should request, insist, whatever it is, put your foot down and say, look, I want you to use a Google Analytics account on my website, and I want you to give me access. The way we work is we've got all of these pages, and when one of our employees needs to start working on one of them, we add his email address to the Google Analytics account so that he has access to the specific data on that account. So your SEO company, or eWebStyle, will actually, once we get your Google Analytics account set up, if you don't have a Google Analytics account, we will set one up for you, and that will give you access to your domain's traffic's information. And that's a really nice feature. It's really, it just allows you to monitor everything that's going on on your website. And you really want to do that, because you can. You look at newspapers, you look at Yellow Pages, you look at radio ads or whatever it may be, it's a lot harder to track where that traffic goes, where those dollars

go. You know, at the end of the month, you know, Paul takes calls from, we do have a Yellow Pages ad, and we can ask Paul, how many calls did we get, and that's dependent on Paul keeping track, you know, writing it down. He was writing it down on a sheet of paper. So if he's on the cell phone in the car and the phones were forwarded or whatever it may be, and he doesn't have opportunity to write that down, then those metrics can get lost. They do not get lost in Google Analytics. So that's pretty important. Yeah, and I'm sure a lot of business owners out there are wondering or may think, well, where does my business come from, and they may not have someone tracking every phone call and asking, well, how did you hear about us? You can do that with Google Analytics. It will tell you everything. Who came to you, how they got there, where they came from, what search engines they use, what keywords that they use. You know, it's just an awesome tool. What browser they use, where their IP address is, what part of the country slash world, whatever. Remember, it's just an amazing piece of software, and we will certainly talk about it later because we're just barely touching the surface here. Well, it looks like we're about halfway through our list. It seems like a good point to stop our podcast, actually. I didn't cut it off. So just to kind of recap real quickly, link building on your website, very important. Beta tags, you want to work on those. Again, email us if you have any questions. You want a sitemap. Search engine local is something that your search engine optimization should provide. We do. It's part of our package. Landing pages are a great way to target keywords and still keep the standard aspects of your website consistent so you're not necessarily altering the user experience by having all of these pages that they could just get lost and confused in. And then

web analytics. So next time we'll talk a little bit about article submission, very powerful directory submission, and we're going to talk about the king. The king. Content. Your content is king. That's what I'm looking for. When I'm searching your website, I'm looking for your content. If you haven't heard that phrase, content is king, then you haven't been researching SEO for very long because content is king, absolutely. There are a bunch more things we're going to cover. Please check back with us on our next podcast. That will be our third podcast. It will be in the new year, 2009. We're going to suit for our first week of January? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So we're going to sign off here. Paul, you have a great Christmas. I wish you'd do the signing. Thank you. Be safe. Yes. I'm landing in Jersey. Hopefully that goes really well. Don't tip any cows in Beaumont. I can't make any promises. Amen. When in Rome, tip cows. Yeehaw! And have a great new year, and we'll see you in the new year. This is Chris and Paul Hanson, sales manager, signing out. We'll see you in the new year.