Internet Marketing on Bing - Unknown Secrets of SEO E-Webstyle Number 24

Hi, and welcome to the Unknown Secrets of SEO podcast. Yes, thank you for joining us for another fun-filled edition, and welcome back. Yeah, my name is Chris Burris. I'm owner of eWebStyle. And this is Paul Hanson, the sales manager at eWebStyle. Did you hear that? I was so excited to get started, I almost forgot to introduce myself. Wow, this is going to be a great podcast. Listen, the first thing we want to do this time is cover a little bit of what we talked about yesterday. Not yesterday, on the last podcast. Last podcast. Damn, I'm excited! Woo! One of the things we talked about was our Yellow Pages bill went down. And if you want some advice on how to make your... And Paul, you used to work with Yellow Pages. How often does that happen? Apparently once in the history of the Yellow Pages. So it's never happened before. Our Yellow Pages ad, same ad as last year, is half of... 50% cheaper. 50% cheaper. So if you want to hear some details about that, go back to our previous podcast. Was that 22? I think that was, yeah, 23 actually. Okay. Yeah, so this one is actually podcast 24. We also had a listener question about .NET Nuke. So if anybody out there is a .NET Nuke fan and interested in .NET Nuke and SEO, we made some comments about that. I think those were very valid and useful comments. We also covered, from an SEO and web perspective, the layout and look and feel of one of our potential clients. I know you met with them yesterday again, so... Day before yesterday and again today. Day before, yeah. Yeah, so they're about to be on board, so excellent. As soon as they get on board, we'll actually mention them so you guys can visit them and check out the work that we're doing there. Along the lines, actually, while Paul and I were discussing that particular client, I've got some bad news. Wait, we forgot something. Oh, wait, wait. Yeah. Okay, that's

what we did. That's what we did last time. And remember, this is our Talk to Your Mama Outside podcast. Oh, yes. Talk to... I'll talk to your mama outside. Yeah. That's good. That's good. Yeah, we're going to dedicate a little bit of this to Henry Louis Gates, who got arrested the other day. And who is a Harvard, a Harvard, a tenured Harvard professor for the Center of African, no, the W.E.B. Dubois Institute, Center for African American Studies. That's what he does. And so he's probably the most, what's the right term, when you've got a lot of accomplishments or whatever. The most accomplished, decorated African American scholar. At least that's what the news is saying. There are probably a few other scholars who might argue with that intelligently. Me. Because I'm sitting right next to arguably the most intelligent African American in the country. That's right. Paul. It's on Wikipedia. It's on Wikipedia. Look it up. Or it will be shortly. Thank you. So why are he yelling at his mama? What's going on with him? Well, you know, it's a whole case. And these things, you really wish that this race could be taken totally out of it. And we know, I think there's a sense, I don't know if you can agree, there's this sense that we're slowly transitioning to having to do affirmative action. And I think the court recently said, okay, this is enough. We don't need any more affirmative action. We're really, you know, we have an African American president. So we really are on getting on, not on, but getting a lot closer to even ground. And it's things like this that really still, I think, highlight, you know, how different African Americans are from Anglo and potentially Latin, although that doesn't come into this particular discussion. And it's just the same, because it feels like, at least to me, of course, this is my Anglo perspective, that Henry was a little sensitive when the cop showed up. You know, when you examine the facts, the cop had every right

to be there. And it wasn't. If you haven't read it, if you haven't seen this yet, he got arrested. At his own house. At his house. Which is not as uncommon as you may think. Yeah. But, you know, the cop was called there because there were two men apparently using force to get into a house and a neighbor, and maybe the neighbor, racially profiled. But the cop just showed up because the poor guy's doing his job, right? I mean, that is his job. And it feels like the first kinds of things that Henry was saying was, are you here because I'm black? I mean, he owns the property. It's his house. And, you know, the cop wasn't, obviously wasn't there because he's black. He was there because the neighbor called the cops on him. So, and then at one point, you know, this is why we have, this is a talk to your mama outside podcast. At some point, Mr. Gates says, you know, the cop says, I'll talk to you outside, trying to kind of get him out of his environment so that they can be on even kill. It's actually a very effective technique. A cop used that on me once at a party that I was having. Oh, yeah. They showed up, and I was like, hey, you told me you didn't want to come back. Why are you here again? And everybody in the room was not too happy with their presence. And so it was actually a female lead officer asked me outside. And that really totally changes the dynamics of the situation. So it's really, that's, cops do that for a very specific reason. And then Mr. Gates says, yeah, I'll talk to your mama outside, which I don't know at what point in any culture that's really accepted, acceptable. I'll talk to your mama outside, copper. But, you know, okay, okay. And it seems like as the cop was leaving, and this is where I, you know, I don't know the facts. Certainly, I don't think Mr. Gates

should have followed the cop and berated him as he's going back to the car. That's not going to end well, probably. But this happened to a friend of mine. It was at the moment that my friend requested the cop's name and badge number that the cop then decided to arrest him. So when you're truly at the point, and my feeling is the cop was probably okay with him saying, I'll talk to your mama outside and being berated. The challenge is the cop, at the point that you start truly questioning his authority in a way that could be effective, calling it, you know, saying you talk to your mama is really not going to do anything. But asking for his name and badge number, boom, then that's when you get arrested. It's like challenging. I just don't, you know, I think that sucks. I think that's, you know, if he wanted to arrest him because he said, I'll talk to your mama outside, okay, that's a reason to arrest him. But not because he asked for your badge number. And I suspect, I don't know the facts, I suspect that's probably what happened here. It was wrong when it happened to my friend. It's wrong when it happens to Mr. Gates. Mr. Gates probably was significantly inappropriate in the situation. And none of it should have really had anything to do with race other than there's clearly tension around. So, I don't know. You've had more unhappy experiences than I have. I can say that I understand Henry Louis Gates' point of view. I've been in a similar situation. But, you know, when you're in that situation, sometimes you don't always make the best decisions for yourself and for your health. Well, you know, in a sense, unfortunately, you don't win. Never. Winning is what? You spend the night in jail and then you file a complaint and he actually gets fired. But you spend a night in jail. Exactly. And he's not going to get fired. And that's also, I think people will argue, part

of the challenge of that part of the system, which is it's so designed not to question that authority that it doesn't get questioned enough. And I would tend to agree with that. And so, you know what? I'm happy that Gates is out there questioning that authority. That means I can be a good citizen and do everything they say and say, yes, sir, yes, ma'am, no, ma'am, and just go with the system and avoid all the headaches. And he can take care of that. Thank you. So now I know, don't ask a cop about his mother while you're being arrested. So how is your mother doing this afternoon? Because I saw her last night. And she was screaming and hollering. All right. So that's a, you know, we'll mention this real quick because you brought it up and it was pretty funny. What? Apparently in Rhode Island, you can be six years old and a stripper as long as you're home by 11. This is a true story. You can find, I found it on CNN. True story. So you can be 16 and a stripper in Rhode Island, but you can't, what can't you do at? You can't work on a ladder. This is true. On a ladder. You cannot work on a ladder. You cannot pump gas. So that whole stripper ladder routine. Oh, yeah. That doesn't work. You're getting arrested. You can't pump gas. Man, crazy stuff. And there's one other thing you can't do. I can't remember. But that's just, that's crazy. All right. That's enough news for us. I did want to announce we are on Twitter. We do post, we're kind of ramping up our Twittering or our tweeting, I guess is what it's called. You can find us eWebStyle on Twitter. I'll be frank, open, and honest. I don't know what you do to find us. I think you just type in eWebStyle and you'll find us. But that's got to be true because we've got some of our clients and potential clients who are already following us. So

go ahead and follow us because we're going to announce, I know sometimes you don't really know when a new podcast is up. We're really trying to put them up on Friday and that's been working pretty well so far. But we actually will tweet when a new podcast is up and when we do a new blog entry because we do do some pretty interesting blog entries. And we're going to kind of ramp that up and just kind of make general announcements about maybe events that we're going to. Of course, those would be in the Houston or within the U.S. area. So go ahead and follow us on Twitter. Since we're making these kind of announcements, also make sure to send us an email. Send us an email. Wait, why not? Because we like your emails. It gives us some extra information to talk about. We'd like to hear from you. What do you think of our podcast? You like it. You hate it. It's great. It's ebony and ivory and it's beautiful. Yes, and we're awesome. So send us your emails. Podcast at e-webstyle.com. That is W-E-B-S-T-Y-L-E dot com. So I was getting into something that we were talking about relevant to that client that we discussed last time. And again, once they're signed up on board, we'll mention them on our podcast so you can follow the work that we're doing with them. And I kind of made a statement to Paul, a kind of offhand statement. And Paul was like, you know, we need to write that down and include it in the podcast. And I've got some bad news. Here's the bad news that I wanted to bring out earlier. It's not as easy to make money on the web as it used to be. What? Man, come on. Yeah, I'm sorry. I know. It's a shock. Is that possible? It used to be, you know, kind of the logic in the transition that we've gone through is in the beginning, build a website and you will make money. It was almost that

easy. It has a little more to it, but almost that easy. And then it transitioned to, you know, and this is where we really got into search engine optimization, getting your website on the first page of Google, search engine marketing, pay-per-click, all of that, where get traffic and you'll make money. So if you just had a high traffic website, you would make money. And what we're really looking at now is that you have to get traffic and you have to have the right calls to action in order to make money. And it may not be money specifically. When we say calls to action, we're like you want to get calls. What is this? We've got you want to get people on an email list. Maybe you want to sell a product. Maybe you want to give away a product. Maybe you're a not-for-profit organization. It's not just easy enough. It's not just as easy as getting traffic, having a website, getting traffic. You also have a website that's geared towards converting that traffic into something with a call to action. So your website has to be, you know, attractive enough to get them to stay there. You have to have the right content on your website, the right products and services to offer, and you have to have the right calls to action. And your website structure has to be good enough to easily convert a visitor to a paying customer. Yep. And then you have to support it with great customer service. Yes. And then you'll make money. And then you'll make money. Well, you know, great customer services, that's a great point. I don't know how many of you out there know Amazon and Zappos, which is a huge shoe sales website, just gargantuan on the web. And they're well-known for their bizarre, odd corporate culture. So, you know, when you go into walking through the halls, there's just, you know, weird things, weird people. And I mean that in the nicest way. Yeah. And they're unbelievable focus on customer service, which is

why there's the Jeff Bezos at Amazon.com, which is why he really wanted to merge with them and work with them, is because Amazon does a great job of selling. They just need that focus on customer service. So Zappos has a great website that comes from customer service. They sell their products. They're not the cheapest shoe sales. Oh, they're definitely not the cheapest because I looked at it. And you're like, hmm, cheaper over here. Cheaper on Amazon. But their customer service is, it's the kind of customer service experience that causes their customers to talk to other potential customers and recommend them. You know, so they take opportunities like somebody got the wrong shoes and they turn around it and they make it something brilliant that the customer's blown away by. And all of a sudden that customer is, you know, shouting on the mountains you're about, you know, Zappos and the fact that you need to go to Zappos and buy your shoes there, even if it's a little bit more expensive. So that is something that Amazon's looking for. So really what we just described, good website, good traffic, calls to action, great customer service, isn't that really kind of the foundation of just a good fundamental business? Yeah, but I think that that's over, most of those things you just mentioned are overlooked a lot of times. And it's, I feel like it should be second nature to any business owner, but a lot of times they're overlooked, especially the things pertaining to their website. Yeah, and I think, you know, business owners are typically, have a lot going on. So they're, in some senses, overwhelmed by what's going on. And I remember this, it's a great quote about a business owner who maybe isn't growing as much as he wants or isn't already as successful as he wants. And the statement goes like this, the reason you're not as successful as you want to be isn't because of what you don't know. It's because of what you know and you're not doing. So

there are business owners out there who know they need to improve their website and they're not doing it. There are owners who know that they need to do search engine optimization and they're not doing it. That's where companies like us come in. We do it for you. Just get in contact with us. You know, one of the greatest things that we offer to, I was talking to a customer yesterday and I've, from my perspective, been harassing him. And I know that that's a value that we add because he does want and need to make changes to his website. He's incredibly busy. If he doesn't have somebody chasing him to make changes to his website, it's not going to happen. He won't do it. And so I'm playing that role. Maybe his personal assistant should be doing that, but we're doing that. And that's just, you know, part of the world-class customer service that we provide here at eWebStyle. And didn't he say thanks? Yeah, he said thanks. He actually did. He said thanks, you're not bothering me. Thank you. And, you know, and then I scheduled another call. Because he was too busy this week. So that is just how it goes. So has anybody heard of Bling? Bling, Bling, Bling. Bling. Microsoft. The blinger of search engines is Bing. That's cheesy, my bad. I'm sorry. It's still a cool name, though. I really am sorry about that. Microsoft's latest branded search engine. Which, by the way, has the same results as Live.com. You know, I looked for Live.com yesterday. I couldn't even find it. It doesn't exist anymore. Because I was like, I would remember when you said, when we looked at some of our results. I was like, these look the same. So I looked for it and I was like, I can't even find it anymore. When we were running reports, just as Bing came out, Bing and Live were side-by-side on reports. And they were identical. It's like, how is this even possible? Yeah. So it's the same results. They have

changed stuff. They're probably going to be continuing to change stuff. We want to talk about Bing and search engine optimization. How you get, for those who don't know, how you get on the first page of Bing. And we've got some interesting information for you. And, you know, one of the things that we're going to talk about in this discussion is the fact that we don't know. Okay. All right. In the podcast. Thanks for coming. We'll see you guys next Friday. Here we are, podcast number 23. Excuse me, 24, right? 24, yeah. 24. Let's be honest. We just don't know. Well, there you have it. There you go. What I'm really saying is Bing doesn't publish their algorithms. Google doesn't publish their algorithms. All we can do is kind of work to extrapolate from the results we see what is it that's causing those people to be on the first page and extrapolate out of this. That's why in the SEO communities there's so much discussion and people say this works, people say this works, I have a feeling that this works, he has a feeling that that works. And with experience you begin to understand and make good progress. And it's quite possible that it's a combination that no one person has that actually works. It's just the combination. You know, each individual is working enough on those things to get you to the first page. Which, clearly, we're working on enough of those things to get you on the first page because our clients are on the first page. Some of them for every keyword that they've given us, which is actually a couple of them. And we're moving the rest of them in that direction. So we'll discuss that a little bit. For those of you who have not heard of Bing, I'm really surprised because usually when a company spends $80 million. $80 million on advertising. We're advertising a product, a whatever, this is a product, it's a search engine. It's supposed to be a decision engine optimization, well, it's supposed to

be a decision engine. And then we're going to become not SEO, but D-E-O. And that's still something I don't really understand. I played around with Bing a little last night. It's not, I used, I didn't really like MSN. I gave Bing a second chance and it's not a bad search engine. It's got pretty pictures. It really does. I mean, those pictures are gorgeous. It has some really nice pictures. I think yesterday there was a turtle or something. It was. It was a, yeah. I was a phenomenal picture. I just don't, I think they're saying it's designed to help the searcher make decisions. And that, you know, I think they need to work on a lot. I just didn't feel like that was there. There's a lot of great information. Like you can find flight information a lot easier and hotel information and you can do shopping very, very simply on Bing. But in terms of decisions, I think they've got a little work to do. But still, good search engine. Well, and so it's a great point. It's what a great concept, right? Like a decision engine. And a lot of our customers, you know, those who are selling, then we're hoping to help, you know, if it's a decision engine, then we're hoping to skew the results so that people tend to make a decision towards our customers' products. That makes sense. It makes a whole lot of sense for things like, like you mentioned, any product base, any service base, anything else. The question I have is, you know, a lot of the Googling that I do is not necessarily looking for products or services. It's actually looking for information. So I don't really need to make a decision about the research I'm doing. I just want to know, you know, who was the president of Zimbabwe in 1745. Although there probably wasn't you again. Yeah, back to you. That's why you're the most accomplished African American in history now. I get around, you know. In history. I do my thing. Paul Hanson.

P. Hanson. P. H. for short. Yeah, so that's just kind of an interesting question. I just thought of it. Actually, you know, there is no real answer. It's just, you know, if they're really helping making decisions, what happens when you're making searches that are unrelated to the decision making? That don't need a decision. Yeah. You know, if you're shopping, and I think it's, they separate their searches into like shopping, travel. It's like called a quick pane or something. Kind of like when, you know, at the top of Google, you can see web, images, video, shopping. Bing has something similar. If you go to Bing, there's a search box, and on the left-hand side of the pane, you can go shopping, travel, whatever it is. Travel, shopping, health, and local are the four categories that Google really breaks it down into. And I assume, like, you know, if you're looking for those things, it definitely will help you make decisions. You can put in, like, flight to Miami, and it will give you prices of in-the-art search results, which I thought was really cool. That is really cool. Wow. I'm going to have to try that out. You can do the same thing for hotels, for shopping. You can type in, like, shop GPS. It will give you lists in your local area of GPS prices. I thought that was cool. That will help me make that decision. Yeah, that's true. Wow, so you do your research on Google because it's not a decision yet, and then when you decide, you go over to Bing and buy the bling. Use Bing for your bling. There you go. There you go. That's the marketing campaign. Microsoft, if you use that, I will only charge you $1 million. There you go. So, in terms of SEO and Bing, one of the things that Bing does is it organizes categories. Microsoft calls them Explore Pains. By the way, we're getting a lot of this information. We did a lot of research, but we found a really, really good article

by a person named... His name is Dante. I can't... Dante. I'm going to try his last name. Monteverde. Monteverde. I think that's right. So, that actually means green mountain. Interesting. Okay. So, Dante Monteverde. It's a really good article, really concise, and so we're just going to outline some of the things from this article that we picked up on that were really important. So, Microsoft, they have these things that are called Explore Pains, and within them, there are links called Quick Tabs. Really, all of this is blah, blah, blah, because for SEO, you know, the point is made that Bing is constantly tweaking these things. So, if you were to maybe focus on one category or focus on one Quick Tab, and then Microsoft switches and tweaks it or whatever, you really, you're not going to be happy with that. So, you just need to do consistent SEO still. And consistent SEO is, of course, great content, focus on your keywords, make sure your meta tags are accurate, and make sure you have a good inbound linking campaign. Very important. What you'll also notice when you're looking at a Bing result is that the title and the description in the Bing results are coming directly from your tags. So, you know, if you're interested in optimizing for Bing, you need to do a search that's going to pull up your site and then look on Bing and see what people are seeing. Because, remember, that's where your sales opportunity begins, right there. So, you don't necessarily want, you know, I don't know, let's say Joe the Plumber. So, you're looking Plumbing Houston, and they type in Plumbing Houston. You don't necessarily want your description, your tags to be Plumbing Houston, Plumbing Houston, Plumbing Baytown, Plumbing whatever. Because that's not really going to entice them to click your link. You want to say, you know, for the great customer service and maybe even put the phone number there. They don't even have to go to the next page. Just dial it. So, what you're saying is the

selling begins at your search result. At the search result. Before they even get to your website, your selling needs to begin. That's true. I'm going to write that down. Selling begins at search results. Results. There it is. Yeah, results. Remember that. You know, I would never understand that. When you write something down, people talk at the same speed that they're writing. Selling begins. I don't know. I do that, too. I don't know why I do that, though. That's just. That's because you're the most accomplished African-American in history. There you go. There you go. That is the way that you started that term, didn't you? I did. It was you. It was because of you that everyone now, when they're writing, they speak at the same speed that they're writing. That's right. So, well, you can Google that, too. I'm sure it's true. Or Bing it. Either. There you go. But it's research, so you should Google it, I guess. Yeah, Google it. I mean, I need to make a decision about the... I guess you're deciding if you believe it or not. I don't know. Whatever. That's just all stupid. Bing also has site links. For those who do not know, do you know what site links are? Yes. I just recently learned that it's called a site link. I made my own name for it. Site links are when you search for something on a search engine and you get a result. Let's say that result is ewebstyle.com. And then below our list, there's our list of web address, our title, our description. And then below our web address, you'll see maybe a few links for our site, like home, products. Search engine optimization. SEO, the major links on our website will be displayed below your search engine listing. Those are site links. Those are site links. And obviously, they have a lot of value because if you have site links up there, they give you real estate. Yes. When they give you real estate, it's also another opportunity for sales because, remember, selling

begins at the search result. Yes. So, it is another opportunity. More real estate is always good. What you also want to realize in the site links with Bing is they're not like Google. Google, if you use the webmaster tool, which I was going to talk about today, but apparently we're going to talk about next time. Google's webmaster tool enables you to adjust the site links. You can remove them if you don't like them. So, if on eWebStyle, one of our site links was to, I don't know, a particular client that we had a sample up there. So, we've got a sample of Seamonsters. And for whatever reason, if Google had decided that Seamonsters should be one of our site links, by the way, Seamonsters is a website we did a long time ago. It is still up there because it's a pretty attractive website. And if it were there in Google, we could remove it. In Bing, you don't have that kind of control. Now, you do have webmaster controls in Bing. Apparently, you can just go to bing.com slash webmaster. And I say apparently because I haven't done that yet. So, you don't have that kind of control, the same kind of control that you do have in Google. Let's go on to the next thing. As with any search engine now, and this includes Google, but we're talking about Bing today, images and video are significant. You know, let's face it. As people are getting higher and higher bandwidth and getting more and more comfortable, you know, this is not even more and more. Now, people like to watch YouTube. Yes. Now, people want to see images of stuff, pictures worth a thousand words. They want to see graphs. We've got a short attention span. We want to see bullet points. Graphs are great in images and, you know, a YouTube video can go a long way to imparting a lot of information. So, you want to continue to spend time optimizing those image alt tags. Yes. Do you know what an alt

tag is? Yes, I know what an alt tag is now. No long pause where I'm like, what are you talking about? Just a pal. You know, when you hover your mouse over an image and it tells you exactly what that image is, whether a person, a book, or whatever, it's an alt tag. Excellent. I like alt tags. I really do. Well, and, you know, there is some, and remember, all of this is conjecture because we don't know the algorithm, but there is some belief in the SEO community that alt tags affect your search engine optimization. So, and that makes sense. If you've got an image and you've taken the time to put something relevant in terms of text on an image, alt tag, then Google should give some importance to that. Also, you know, tag your videos with descriptive keywords and just keep an eye because, you know, these are all important things for getting those videos and images, you know, potentially ranked well, both in Google and in Bing. So, you want to keep your eye on both of those. Now, there is some, I actually got a call the other day. There was a company, wow, we're at 30 minutes. Let me just, we'll finish this and we'll discuss everything else that we have next time. There is a Bing Maps, kind of like Google Local Search and Google Maps. Make sure that your profile is on there. I'm going to do that immediately after this podcast. Good luck. I looked for, it says, like, there's something called the Listing Center and it's not easy to find. Or maybe I'm just crazy and couldn't find it. I found it. It took me about 15 minutes to find that sucker. It's funny you mention that because I did set up a Bing AdWords campaign. That's a pay-per-click campaign. And when I went back the next day from a different computer, I couldn't find where to put in my username and password. For the AdWords, so I've got, I know I have an advertising account

with Bing. I would like to sign in. I even know my username and password. And I ended up doing a blog entry in our blog because when I typed in, you know, how, where is the sign in for Bing AdWords, nothing came up. There was, like, I, this took me like 25 minutes to figure out. You're the first person in the world to ever ask that. Maybe I'm the only one with a pay-per-click campaign in Bing, which brings us to our last point. I should not be the only one with a pay-per-click campaign in Bing because although Bing is kind of the bastard stepchild of search engines, and that's why they've probably called themselves the decision engine, so they're the leader of the decision engine market. Never forget, they have 10% of the market, and 10% of online searches right now is a whole lot of traffic. So do not write them off. Do not forget them. We mentioned in one of our previous podcasts that there is a reason to use Yahoo and Bing with pay-per-click, and it's a potentially significant cost-saving reason, so go back and listen to that podcast because you want to capture that. There's a lot of value, and we're talking ROI value in Yahoo and Bing to a lesser degree, but certainly in Yahoo. So remember, selling begins at search results. Yes, and that is our podcast for today. Today, my name is Chris Burris. And this is Paul Hanson. Thank you guys for listening, and we'll see you at the next podcast. Bye-bye for now.