Internet Marketing - Submission, Alexa and Larry Page - Unknown Secrets of SEO E-Webstyle Number 5

Welcome to the eWebStyle Podcast. Welcome and thanks for joining us. Welcome to another excited, fun-filled edition of our podcast. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. And I am Paul Hanson, the sales manager at eWebStyle. So we always want to put something relevant in each of our podcasts. What we're going to do today is we're going to give a cheesy shout-out. Who are we going to shout-out to today? We're going to give a shout-out to Captain Sullenberger, the third. Yeah, the pilot, the guy who landed that plane. Yeah, who landed the plane in the Hudson. Obviously not the best place to land. But considering the circumstances, it'll do. I'm sure they'll take it. We really, my brother-in-law hates Canadian geese. And apparently they really need to do something about Canadian geese. Because that was the cause of this flight going down. And that's just pretty amazing. There's some pretty amazing photos of that. So, again, shout-out to Mr. Sullenberger, the third. Sully, Chelsea B. Sullenberger. Shout-out to you, Mr. Sullenberger. You're an American hero today. Absolutely. So we want to, as usual, cover what we covered last time. We want to just kind of briefly outline it. We talked about directory submissions that led us into people who are advertising and saying, hey, we're going to submit your website to 1,000 search engines. Basically, stay away. Stay away. Stay away from those services. Because there aren't 1,000 search engines that you need to be on. There probably aren't even 1,000 directories that you need to be on. We also talked a little bit about article submission. There's a whole lot more. We can go into article submission. There are SEO companies and very good SEO companies that focus entirely on article submission. So we will definitely be covering that in depth. That is one of the many tools we use here at eWebStyle. We also discussed content. And as everybody knows, content is king. Content is king. That's what people go to your website looking for. They're looking for the content. So it's very

important to make sure that your content is aligned. Your content of your website is what they're looking for. And more specifically, that your content is relevant to the keywords that you really want people to find you on. People love content and Google loves content. So content is king. Yes, sir. We talked about RSS feeds. That was from the perspective of having dynamic content. We got into dynamic content because we were talking about SEO copywriting and what it takes to write good copy is a little bit different than what it takes to write good SEO copy. And we covered that in some detail. RSS feeds are a great way to add dynamic content to your website. So look into those. I think that covers it. If there's anything of those that you're interested in and you didn't hear our last podcast, make sure you go back and listen to our last podcast. You can always find our podcast at e-webstyle.com. You can put the www in front or you can be lazy and just type e-webstyle.com. As always, if you have any questions, comments, concerns, you don't like our shout-outs, you don't like my sense of humor or whatever, please send it to us. That's at podcast at e-webstyle.com or podcasts at e-webstyle.com. And let's also add, if there's something that you want to learn about that maybe we're not covering, feel free to send us an email. We'll definitely take considerations as to new topics. Absolutely. So the first thing we have on our list today is page rank. And if you've done any work or any research in search engine optimization, you are familiar with the term page rank. Now, you may have this kind of understanding, yes, it is clearly the ranking of my page. And in some regard, you're absolutely right. You just assumed that page rank refers to web page rank. When in reality, here's a little tidbit, a little, we should have some sort of alarm for a nice little... You've got to get one of those. Yeah. Like a

bell. A couple. Ding, ding, ding. For a little bit of trivia, the term page rank actually doesn't come from the fact that it's ranking your page. It actually comes from Larry Page. And who is Larry Page? Larry Page and his friend, Sergey Brin, are part of the group that founded Google. Interesting. So it's not surprising. And at the time, they were studying at Stanford University. And it turns out that the patent for the page rank process is actually patented and it's assigned to Stanford University. Did you know that, Paul? I did not know that. I did not know that. Yeah, I could even read you the patent number, but who's going to use that? So, interestingly enough, Google has exclusive rights to that particular patent, as you can imagine. And Stanford University was compensated pretty well for... I bet they were. For that exclusive right. For some Google Page rank. Wow. So, it is patented. It does refer to Mr. Page. And it is really the nuts and bolts of what makes Google such a powerful search engine. It's what enabled Google to come from nowhere and really take by storm the search market. Because what they started doing, more than just looking at the content on a particular page, they started looking at what pages were linking to other pages. So, you can imagine the most useful piece of information that the web could possibly provide would probably have a lot of people pointing to it because it's so useful. And you just kind of use that premise and you expand it so that you have this way to rank your pages. There are some really interesting facts regarding page linking. Some of them that I like are that the maximum amount of a page rank in a site increases as the number of pages in your site increases. That's an interesting point. So, you can increase your page rank by building more relevant pages to what you do. And adding them in your site. And adding them to your site. And making sure

that you link them together properly. So, that's important. And I love this fact. This is kind of a mouthful, but here we go. By linking poorly, it is possible to fail to reach the site's maximum page rank. But it is not possible to exceed it. I'm going to let you take a stab at that one. So, I'm going to say, okay, if you are linking to someone that maybe is not related to what you do. I'm Joe the Plumber. I'm linking to... Well, this is going to be internal links. Oh, okay. So, if you do internal links poorly, you can fail to meet your maximum page rank, but you can never exceed your maximum page rank. Okay. And I know it's important to link to all of your internal pages because Google won't be able... If you don't link to a certain page, if there is no link to it, it's not going to end up in the directory. Correct? I think we would call that poor linking. That would definitely be called poor linking. If there's no link to a particular website that you want people to find, that would be incredibly poor linking. Another reason to have a sitemap. Exactly. Except the last podcast for that one. Exactly. And there are lots of tools actually out there to check and make sure that all of your links go together. You can actually type in page by page for some tools and it can tell you what other pages link to that page. So, there are lots of things out there available for you to make sure that a particular page is linked to. Here's a question. Here's probably what a small business owner is thinking. You're Mr. Small Business Owner. You're thinking, okay, page rank is important. I know I need to have a good page rank, but why? How is page rank going to affect my business? I mean, by now you know how keywords are going, you know why they're important, you know how to do that, you know what link

building is and how they're important. So, why is page rank, why are we even talking about it? Why is it important? That's a great question, and I'm sure that Joe the plumber is out there, in addition to making as many political commentaries, is wondering why page rank is important and probably what to do about it once he realizes it's important. So, page rank, we already discussed, is how Google defines the value of a particular web page, not necessarily the content inside of it. So, you can imagine if we've got two web pages, that one of them is pointed towards us with the term search engine optimization, and another one is pointed to our competitor with the term search engine optimization. Those would probably have an equal weight to Google or a search engine using some sort of page rank. Now, if the page pointing to us had a higher page rank than the page pointing to our competitors, it makes sense that Google is going to want to give more credibility to that website, because it's a more valuable website than the one pointing to our competitor. And, of course, the only websites pointing to our competitors are almost of no value. None. Absolutely none. And everything pointing to ours is of significant value, because it ends up at ewebstyle.com. Exactly. All kidding aside, that's just a simple example to illustrate. You know, why do I want to have good page rank? Why do I want to be spending my time if I'm going to do any sort of link building? And that's external link building. Why do I want to bother, not bother, with the guys with a lower page rank and spend my time trying to get links from the people with the higher page rank? Does that make sense? That makes perfect sense. So, basically, I need, page rank is important to me, Joe, the plumbers, because it's going to help with my positioning and with my credibility. Exactly. Okay. It just kind of makes sense. You've got a higher page rank.

You're going to show up higher in the search engines for different terms. Now, page rank, you know, somebody may have a higher page rank, but not use search engine optimization. They're clear in the text, in their content, which is king. They're not going to use the term search engine optimization. So, they may have a higher rank, but they're not going to show up above us, or maybe not at all, if they don't have the term search engine optimization. So, I think I've made that clear. I think we have a clear understanding of what page rank is and how to use it. We may end up covering it more in depth because there's, you know, there's pages of algorithms, and we can get into that kind of detail. We can have those kinds of discussions. It's not our target right now. Yes. Let us cover a lot more of the basics, and we'll move on. The next thing we have, you were going to say something? Well, no, I was just going to say, let's talk about Alexa ranking. Oh, yeah, we can bring in Alexa ranking, too, because that's one that I like to use. So, there's a website out there called Alexa, A-L-E-X-A, and I believe it's actually an Amazon.com company. And they have a toolbar, which you can download, and the toolbar does this nifty little thing. It'll tell you its version of page rank, or it's kind of like page quality, if you will. Quality is not a good word. It tells you relative page rank. That is, everybody who has an Alexa toolbar installed on their Internet Explorer, all of those Internet Explorers, as people are surfing, the data is getting sent to Alexa. And then Alexa compares all of that data and says, okay, this web page, according to those people who have the Alexa toolbar installed on their browser, is getting twice as much or half as much or a relative amount of traffic. It's obviously not going to be 100% accurate because it's not tracking all of the

traffic. Additionally, there can be some skews in it. For instance, people who tend to have the Alexa may be people who tend to use MSN, or they may be people who tend to use CNN, or some other particular larger website. So, it can certainly be skewed. But it's a very good way to compare and contrast how much traffic a website. And, in fact, we've got a great example of that. We had a client who called us, Paul, and you were telling me, and that you were telling him, hey, you know, here's one of the services we offer. You know, we can take care of your website. We can also do your SEO. That's search engine optimization. Get your website on the first page of Google. Google, and what did he say? He said, I completely, I just drew a blank. I think he said something to, that's all right, he said something to the effect of, oh, I don't need search engine optimization. I'm doing great. I get 2,000 hits a day. No, I get, no, like 20,000, 20, 25,000 hits. That's what he was saying. Was that a day or a month? A month, I think. Okay. So, in a month. So, you know, we have lots of websites that are getting, you know, 20,000 and more. So, I pulled up the Alexa ranking, comparing him to one of, a website that was comparable. And here's another thing that we can, this is a nice piece of information, because often when you look at statistics, and I know Webalizer is one of the ones that we use here, or used to use, actually, we now use Google Analytics. They have a term, a traffic term called hits. And what they really mean by hits are not just the number of times your page has been viewed, but actually how many times an item was taken off of your server. So, if you've got images on your server, say you've got, you pull up one page, and it's got 20 images on that server, on

that web page. It's going to hit your server 20 times to pull each of those images. That's going to count as the 20 images hits, plus one hit for the page. So, you can imagine that the number of hits a website gets has nothing to do specifically with unique visitors. Oh, very big difference. Because if I go to five pages with 20 images on each, I've got 105 hits, but I'm one guy. So, we were able to explain to that customer, I don't know if we've had the chance, actually. Oh, I can't. Yeah, not yet. I haven't done it yet, but I can't wait to have that conversation. It's on the to-do list. So, that's just a really good example of how you can use Alexa, because we know the traffic our websites get, we know the traffic his site gets relative, we know the hits he's claiming, and we know the unique visitors. And I think we did a comparison where this particular client that we compared him to is getting 2,000 hits a month, and we're talking 2,000 unique visitors a month. And he's, and that particular client was actually like 10 times higher ranked than the guy you were pitching. And so, I'm going to give a side note. To anyone out there that doesn't understand unique visitor, a unique visitor is valuable because it is, well, it's exactly what it says. It is a unique visitor. It is a visitor that is unique. If I go visit your site today, I'm counted as a visitor. If I go back and visit your site tomorrow, I'm not a unique visitor. I am the same visitor. So, having unique visitors is good because, and I mean, you can clarify this. Yeah. Unique visitors is good because how many people, how many unique people came or people came to your website that particular month? Yeah. And one of the things we look to Google Analytics for is they'll talk about unique visitors. They'll talk about new visitors. And so, you may be an, if

you come the same day, you're definitely not a new unique visitor. And you're definitely not a new visitor. Yes. You're just somebody who happened to come back. Maybe you closed all your browsers because Microsoft crashed on you. You know it does that every now and then, right? I hear, I hear they do. Or, you know, whatever the reason, when you come back, there are, you know, there are some statistic software that won't, will actually count that as a new user. And it is, in fact, from the perspective, from the CPU perspective, a new user. But because it can identify where you're accessing the website from, it understands that you're just a guy who's coming back. So, you're not a new visitor. And so, Paul, you're exactly right. New, unique visitors are how you're expanding your business. If you have a subscription service, it may be okay for you not to get many new clients. I mean, you want them, of course. But as long as your people who are paying your subscription service are coming to your website and finding the information they need, then you can be pretty happy with that. In general, and I'm hard-pressed to think of a reasonable example, in general, you want new visitors. You want new people finding your information, new people finding you, new people signing up for your service or product or calling you or buying. You want new people. So, remember, hits doesn't mean anything. So, and again, that's how we use Alexa ranking here. Alexa, once you've added that toolbar to your Internet Explorer, they also have a version for Firefox. You have the ability to compare Alexa ranking history, which is a really nice feature. You know, you can compare it to different websites. You can see how you're doing compared to MSN, American Idol. I like it. It's an interesting one because the traffic's a lot lower than you'd think. So, just it's got a lot of good tools in it, and it's a good rank, and it's fairly well publicized, so people

will use it. What else? I think we're almost done with page one. Almost. So, we've got, the last thing we have is, you know, we've covered all these details. We covered, you know, what is SEO, how to do it, and there's one question that is, why should I do SEO? That's a great question. Right? You know, maybe I've got a website. You know, we could even take that one step, step back, and why should I have a website? Well, you know, five years. Because we live in 2009. Exactly. That's why. Exactly. Five years ago, I had to explain the reasons. Now, we don't have to explain it so much. There are some people who still believe they don't need one, or they believe a not-so-good webpage is good enough. Both of those, I totally disagree with. You really need, you know, your website needs to represent the quality of service or product you provide to your customers. So, if they come on there and they see something that's not high quality, that doesn't, you know, flow well, that's the impression they get about your business. So, if you've got a great product or service and your website just doesn't look up to par, you really need to upgrade it because that's the face of your business. I kind of relate it to, like, if I'm going to a business and it's dirty, the sign is hanging, I'm going to physically walk into an establishment. If it's dirty inside and outside, the sign is hanging off the door, I might think twice, like, man, maybe I don't want to do business with this kind of company. And that's how I interpret websites. If I look at a website that's just, it's not put together well, I can't find the content, I'll go somewhere else and find someone that's actually spent time and invested in their website. And that's the impression you get of the business. If they're not going to take the time doing their website, which, frankly, is not that big of an expense, then

they're not going to do that quality of job for you in general. And your website is probably going to be the first thing that anyone sees because these days, if you're doing business and you're speaking to someone on the phone, they're going to go to your website probably before they even meet you. And that's the first thing anyone's going to see. So, I think I asked, why should I do SEO? And we did a great job of answering, why should you have a website? Yeah, I think you're right. So, we've got this list. We're actually going to cut this podcast a little short today because we got started a little late and I have some place to be. But why SEO? Why should I do SEO? So, now you've got a website. The relative cost of doing SEO to the rest of your business is, frankly, probably insignificant. I agree. The cost to run your business, to operate your business, to pay your employees, to pay for your space, your warehouse, your trucks, your gas, whatever, the cost of SEO is relatively insignificant. And what can it do for you? You know, we work on giving you higher page ranking. We work on giving you more traffic. It's a way to market your business 24-7. The guy who sleeps all day and can't ever call you and needs your service, he can't call you because he's sleeping. Let's make that clear. And he wakes up in the middle of the night and he wants to find somebody who can provide that service. Well, he can find that information about your website and he can find it. He's going to search Google and search engine optimization is going to allow him to find you, which is exactly what you want. This is a great, great term. It's permission-based media. I love this term. That term's awesome. So, you're not throwing something at these people. You're just making yourself available when they're looking for you. So, wouldn't you like it? You know, somebody steps out front and

says, hey, I need Joe the Plumber. Boom. There's Joe the Plumber. There's Joe the Plumber. There's a brochure right there in front of him. That's what search engine optimization does for you. Having your website out there, necessity, right? It needs to be on your business cards. It needs to be on your truck. It needs to be in every piece of media that you ever put out because it gives more information to the end user because it looks great. It represents your business professionally. And on top of that, when they're looking for you, let us help them help you for them to find you. And I think that's probably, in my opinion, that's the biggest benefit to SEO is to be able to be found when they're looking for you. Because if they're looking for you and if you're not there, they're going to go somewhere else. To me, that's just the biggest benefit. If I'm looking for you, I want to be able to find you. And SEO can help. Doing search engine optimization will help them find you when they're looking for you. Well, and regarding this, why should I do SEO? We also have a great case, a great kind of white paper, if you will, that we can showcase, not just SEO from the perspective we've been talking here, but why should I do SEO instead of newspaper ads? When should I do SEO instead of Yellow Pages? And the company's Rattan Showcase. They're here in Houston. They're one of our clients. They sell Rattan furniture or Wicker furniture. We're going to talk about that next time because we're going to cut this podcast a little bit short. How do you leave me hanging like that? And this is a great example because here's a client that approached us and said, hey, I want to understand the advantages and disadvantages of doing SEO. Let's compare their targets were cities around the city of Houston, and we did a cost analysis, and the numbers are staggering. We won't be sharing too many numbers

with you, but the premise is fundamentally sound, and it's a great way to understand why you should be doing search engine optimization. Oh, yes. So with that, we're going to sign off from this podcast. I'm Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. And I'm Paul Hanson, sales manager of eWebStyle. Bye-bye for now. Thanks for listening. Free. Free.