Internet Marketing, Tables and CSS for SEO - #seopodcast 38

Hi, and welcome to the Unknown Secrets of SEO Podcast. Hi, welcome back to another fun-filled edition of the Unknown Secrets of SEO Podcast. This is podcast number 38. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. And this is Paul Hanson, sales manager of eWebStyle. So great of you to join us. Actually, on the video, we don't have anybody watching yet. So that we get you next time. We're watching. You can see us live on Ustream at 9.15 on Friday mornings. We actually record our podcast on video. And then we get it out later as a podcast on iTunes and other services, podcasting services. So if you want to see us live, we're here. You can actually see the videos of our previous podcast. And you can find those at Ustream. Once you get to Ustream.com, it actually transfers you over to Ustream.tv. I bet you didn't know that. Paul? I did not know that. There you go. Paul's busily working on pulling up some incredibly interesting news for you. So go to Ustream.com and then search for eWebStyle. And I think you need to search for e-WebStyle. I'd give the URL, but the URL is really, really long. Like, yeah, it's not something that I want to get over. In fact, every time, just before we go on air, we actually tweet the fact that we're about to go on air. So you can actually sign up and follow us on Twitter. That's Twitter.com slash eWebStyle. That eWebStyle does not have a dash. You should recognize our logo and everything there. Start following us, and then you will be reminded that we're about to do a show so that you can tune in. And that will have a link with it. You can also follow us on Facebook. The easiest way to get to us on Facebook also has a very long URL, so we made a nice, easy method. Go to e-WebStyle.com slash Facebook, and that will automatically take you to our Facebook page, and you can become an eWebStyle groupie. I mean, stalker.

Speaking of groupie. Follower. Uh-oh. All right, I'm looking through the news today. Some funny, odd, random news that came out today on the AP News Press. The title is, Sex Toy Study at Duke University Raises Some Eyebrows. So, man, where was this when I was in college? Yeah, they never had any sex toy studies. A religious leader at the campus of Duke University is unhappy about a study at Duke University that invites female students to attend parties where they can buy sex toys. Wow, sponsored by the university. All I'm thinking now is Revenge of the Nerds and cameras. Hidden cameras. That's all I'm thinking of right now. And the little Asian guy, oh, we want moth. What? We want moth. Here's something. This is pretty interesting. Another thing out of the news I just found came out yesterday. There was a design flaw in Indiana jail that allowed inmates to leave their cells. They were altering a part of the jail. They were redesigning a new part of the jail system. And it basically allowed people to crawl out of their cells. You know, this is just another horrible thing that Microsoft has brought upon us. Because of Microsoft now, it's acceptable for our jail systems to have bugs, right? You know what? If Mac was the predominant operating system, they'd never get out of jail. There's no way out, right? They'd be trying to figure out how to get them out. That's pretty interesting. That's pretty crazy. All right, so what we covered in our last podcast, we actually started going over the lyrics for Design Coding, which is a rap by Moe Sirius, also known as Chuck, also known as Charles. He wasn't able to be with us today. So we're going to continue going over that for the rest of today. I also wanted to talk about, well, we wanted to read our reviews. It's shout-out time. It is. It's shout-out time. I got everything over here. Oh, okay. Where's the lyrics? The lyrics are right there. Okay. Yeah, here. You can

hold these. You seem to want to hold some. There you go. All right, we're ready to go now. We got a really nice email from Dean Calhoun. He's with Affigility. And that's A-F-F-Y-G-I-L-I-T-Y. And he says he's been enjoying our podcast for three months. That's great. Thank you so much, Dean, for listening. He's trying not to focus on page rank. It's interesting because we were just talking about that, I think, two podcasts ago. So we'll talk about that a little bit more. He actually said his page rank went down from three to two. It didn't seem to matter because he's still at the top three or four in the SERPs for his keywords that he's chosen. Dean, I glanced at your website. You have a very, I think it's a very niche market. Send us some keywords. Yes, we'll be happy to give you some backlink love. We're just that kind of, we're that easy, actually. We're just that easy. All you got to do is ask and we'll give you some. But let's make that backlink love a little more powerful. You've been listening to our podcast, so you know something like, I don't know, healthcare services, which is too generic for what you guys do. But something like that is going to be better than just us pointing to affigility.com. So thanks for listening. Thanks for sending us an email. And, you know, actually about the page rank, remember we were talking the other day, Google recently pulled page rank off of the Webmaster Tools. And it was actually Charles was saying that they pulled it off. I don't know if his statement was that they're no longer using it. I doubt that they're no longer using it. I think they're still using it in their algorithm. I just think they're not publishing it so people can't use it to try and market their websites and, you know, sell backlinks. If you've got a really great page rank, what we found is people are trying to sell links off of those great pages. And

Google, in trying to control that, has said, you know what, we're just not going to let you know what your page rank is. So go ahead and good luck selling it. So no more page rank. That sucks. So I do think it's still important. I think it's an important part of their algorithm. I just don't think we have it. And just like Dean said, he dropped in page rank, but he still, you know, positions three and four on the search engine result pages for his keyword. So don't worry about page rank. In fact, you can't because you can't even know what it is. So, you know, stay focused. If you're not sure how to get on the first page of Google, then you have approximately 37 other podcasts to listen to. Go back and listen to all our podcasts because we tell you how to do it. We do it well. We do it strong. And it's free if you listen to our podcast and implement. So go ahead and do that. We've got a couple more we had been requesting, and we still request. If you guys are getting any good information from this podcast, please, however you signed up. If you signed up on iTunes, you know what? Even if you didn't sign up on iTunes, go create an iTunes account and submit a review about our podcast because we've got three reviews here. And I'm going to, you want to jump in? Any one of these, your favorite that you want to read here? I like, from Wonder Nate, Nate D-O-double-G. What up, Nate? Nate, greatest of reviews, says, I was told about this from my brother-in-law who's one of those rich and successful people that you get really jealous of. It was a great recommendation, very informative, which would be enough by itself. But they are fun and laid back, and you feel like you're hanging out with them shooting a breeze about the Internet. So that was cool, man. Thanks, Nate. We appreciate that. We like that, Nate.

We've got Dr. Video said, real solid info, no hype. I think we may have even mentioned that one before. And I like this one, keeping the workplace fun. That's what we do, right? We're good at that. Try to keep it light. Try to keep it fun. I was told about this by my boss, and Wonder Nate actually told him. And instantly found the podcast, and it fit my needs and listening style. I'm not one to sit and listen to someone that's all work and no play. These guys combine the right amount of both in their 30-minute podcast. Not only that, but they actually work at answering your questions and do so in a timely manner. You hear that? So Dean is going to get a little bit of link love. Come on, you guys. Keep sending in questions. Keep sending in emails. Not only will we answer those emails, but we also usually end up pointing our customers and our listeners in your direction. So that's going to have some significant link value. So great. If you are getting value out of this podcast, please go to iTunes or some other place where you can write a review. Link to us. There's lots of ways to do that. You can find our podcast actually on our blog, which is at e-webstyle.com. And then just go to the homepage and click the blog because I don't need to give out the whole URL on that one. All right. So I think we're ready to get, you know, I wanted to mention one other thing. This has been, this happened a while back. And Yahoo closed GeoCities. I don't know if you remember what GeoCities. Yeah, you read, you said that to me. I haven't actually used GeoCities. If you go back, GeoCities is one of those free web services. You could actually have a website for free. And if you think, you know, I'm sure there's lots of other services out there that are still doing that. If you think there's,

that that's worth doing, you really need to go back and listen to some of our podcasts because we talk about hosting your website for free and the value or lack of value in doing that. So go back and listen to that. Anyway, I was really surprised because GeoCities was getting like 1.5 million hits a month, right? And this is, these are new hits a month, and instead of selling it, they just closed it. That I thought was kind of weird. Like why wouldn't you just pawn it off to a, I mean, that's usually what a lot of companies do whenever they're, you know, I guess when they're, I guess I can't think of a general example. But you just sell it off. That's what I was thinking. I know my experience has come from corporate America. I know AT&T does that all the time. But whenever they add a product that's just, they're not really interested in or not really working, they'll just sell it to a smaller company. They'll take it and run with it. Yeah. Well, and so I don't, I don't know what that thinking was. I know that now they have a service, they're offering kind of the same service at a fairly inexpensive price. But you think they would have like transitioned them or something that's very strange. I don't know. I thought I'd bring, if anybody's got any kind of pontifications on why Yahoo closed GeoCities instead of actually spinning it off or trying to convert all of them to, or, you know, whatever, 10% to paying customers. Because they're pushing their own hosting now, aren't they? Yeah, yeah. Yahoo hosting. So why not roll it, keep it together, and roll it, and then transition it slowly? I don't know. It's very strange. Which, and again, 1.5 million hits, you know, there's a lot of people out there who would love to have 1.5 million hits. Okay, let's, Well, I guess in the grand scheme of things, they're

like, all right, whatever. Yeah. We get, you know, we get, 1.5 million a day. Yeah, we get 10 times this on our other stuff. We can afford to lose GeoCities. It just falls off the map. Yeah. All right, so let's hop right into Moe's series' lyrics here. We actually only got through the first two verses last time. Got through the, if you weren't here last time, then you should have been. Go back and listen to podcast number seven, or you can actually go back and watch podcast number 37. Yes. And you can watch that at Ustream. We're going to have these podcasts available in video at Ustream. So you can watch them while you're working, while you're on lunch break or something. All right, next verse. Design coding. I don't know. I was like, He's having a breakdown. I just, I just drew a blank here for a second. All right. You can't, okay. The word is move. All right. Quoting from Moe Sirius. He says, move into production. Please follow these instructions. Your Photoshop functions. Slice that design. Do the layout with divs. Make sure there's a line. Do you know what that means? Slice that design? No. I have no idea what that means. Yeah. Just ask Javier. He's our graphic designer. You can ask him. He'll tell you. Basically, you make, Javier. Oh, he's not here yet. He's not here yet. Basically, you take an image. You create one complete image of what you want the website to look like. And then you use what's called slicing to slice it up so that you can address each image individually and turn images into buttons instead of having them be one image. Oh, okay. That's pretty interesting. I had no idea. I thought it was just like, I've never done it. I just know that's what it's called. Slice it. Slice it. I'll slice that design. All right. So, your Photoshop functions. You want to slice that design. Do your layout with divs. Make sure

there's a line. Please don't use tables even though they work fine. When it comes to indexing, they give searchers a hard time. Well, what are divs? I have no idea what divs are. Divs is like a division. So, you can actually hide divisions. Okay. Maybe you've seen someplace where you click something and the division opens up right on your website real quickly. Yeah. That's got a couple advantages. It can be hidden. You don't want to use it to hide text, but it is also text that a search engine should see. So, it's a way to incorporate kind of more text and make it available to the user if he wants to look at it. You can also hide images. It's really crafty to use it in forms. Okay. If you want to hide, you know, say you would just want to have a form that appears like you're only giving, I'm giving a little secret here. Okay. A form that appears like you only need their user name, you know, their first name, last name, and email address. And then when they click the next button, boom. Now they need a dress name. Mother's amazing name. Like a blood sample, please. A blood sample, everything. Okay. Yeah, I've seen that. That's what a div does. Okay, so you need to make sure that you're using divs, and you need to make sure that there's a line. Don't use tables even though they work fine. We've talked about that several times. I mean, it's rare that I see a website made with tables. Or maybe I can't see the tables. Yeah, you actually see them all the time. Most of the time we do them here. And it was actually this line that caused me to go back and do some research. And if you do some research on tables and SEO, you'll actually find that there's no, there's actually no general consensus on whether tables are good or bad. They do have, there are some drawbacks to them. One of them is that some of

the browsers will not show anything in a table until the whole table has loaded, which kind of makes sense because the table has, you know, rows and columns and everything. And until the whole table is loaded, the page doesn't know how to display it. And you can see that if you go into Firefox, Firefox will show you everything it has immediately. And then, you know, the whole page will be juxtapositioning around and formatting and getting all straightened out. I don't know if you've ever seen that happen before, Paul. No. So all of that will happen. And, you know, so it can be a little disconcerting to the customer, to the visitor. As far as SEO goes, I haven't found anything conclusive that says tables are bad for SEO. So, Mo, it's a great rhyme. It is a great rhyme. I called him Mo, right? Yeah. Whatever we're going to keep calling him, Mo Serious, Charles, Chuck, it is a great rhyme. Okay. Now, next part of this verse says, make it easy for spiders to crawl where you provide. Remove font type, font color, and font size. No background colors, keep your coding real neat, and tag your look and feel on a separate style sheet. Better results with XMI and CSS. Now you're making progress a little closer to success. Describe what doc type so the browser can relate and make sure you do it great or it won't validate. Where do we begin? All right. Make it easy for spiders to crawl where you provide. Obviously, everybody understands that. In fact, that's one of the first things we do as an SEO company. As soon as we get a website, we want to make sure that if you're using all of your navigation in Flash, or if it's JavaScript that we're not 100% sure that the search engines will navigate, then we actually want to make, that's the first step. Because if the search engines can't find your relevant information, if they can't find your pages, then what good is it? And you

don't end up on the first page of Google. Google, yeah. Which we get paid to do, so that's our first focus. So remove your font type, your font color, and font size. No background color. No background colors. Keep your coding really neat. Yeah. You just want a clean, easy look for your website. And actually, some of this stuff I'd like to get, I was hoping, Chuck, we were hoping he would be in here today. Maybe he's tuning into the video right now. Hey, Chuck, if you are. I know he was a little bit busy this morning. But I'd like to ask him some questions about these, because some of these I'm comfortable using, and maybe there's just some other reasons that he would want. So I'd like to get that input. And like I said, I don't know everything about XMI versus, I know CSS, cascade style sheets. But these are nuances that I didn't, I don't think really affect SEO per se. They're probably more about visibility and usability. So I'd like to get his input on that. Of course, validate is pretty important. Make sure you do it great or it won't validate. Because to validate your code, there's services out there. You can actually go to Google and you can type in, you know, search engine validate. And there's lots of free services out there that will actually look at your website and make sure that it validates. And by validate, you want to make sure that you have your open and your closed tags. And everything in your HTML is done correctly so that the search engines will actually, again, visit your website. I assume that like, and validated, that's kind of like, is that with like if you're building your own website? So if you're, if you're using a program, not like a, I mean, like if you're using like a notepad instead of, not like, I mean, like an easy web design program, would they have that function or is that more with like a Photoshop? So any, any

reasonable web design program should be creating valid HTML code, right? As it works. But sometimes, you know, you start, some people will get up into the source code and I like to get on the source code and start doing their own. Oh, and if I make a mistake there, the, the package that we use might not be able to catch that mistake. You put it online and you validate and you'll find it out. The other thing is, is you can put a whole website together and you post it up there and validate. Sometimes the term validating a website will actually apply to making sure that all the links are, are, are, you know, that there are any, what are called dead links, you know? So maybe your homepage used to link to, you know, we were talking about this recently, SEO Houston, and we decided that we wanted to change that page to internet marketing Houston. Well, if we still have links to SEO Houston and that page no longer exists, that's a dead link. Okay. And so validating is, is part of that. That's why you want to make sure you do that great. And that's, again, that's, you know, just something that we do on a daily basis here, here at eWebStyle. WebStyle. Okay. Next, uh, next verse. All right. Checking all browsers. I do it directly. Got to make sure that it renders correctly. All right. So that's good. Well, yeah, go ahead and finish the next two. Some use IE. Others use Flock, which I have not heard of. I have not heard of either. Uh, and, uh, some use AOL. I use Firefox, just like I do. Uh, title everything, including links and images. Don't use italics. Use emphasis. Don't use bold. My favorite line. Don't use bold. Please use strong. Because if you use bold, it's old and wrong. That's my favorite line. Chuck, I saw you that in the shower last week. That's no joke. I don't think Chuck wanted to know that. I love that line. All

right. So, you know, I assume he says, check in all browsers. Make sure that your website appears and looks and functions properly in all browsers. Well, just like I was talking, there are differences between IE and Firefox, right? So, it's going to render, it's going to display the page differently on the different search engines. So, you really do want to check. You know, when we first started in this business, all we did was design for Netscape. And then we had to transition and actually design both for IE and Netscape. And then we only had to design for IE because almost nobody used Netscape. And now we're having to transition to Firefox, IE, and Chrome, and Safari. And Flock. Yeah, I've never even... I've never heard of Flock. I've never heard of Flock. We'll have to Google that. Somebody who uses Flock out there and is listening to this podcast, send us an email. Yeah, please. Let me know what that is. I'm assuming Chuck at least knows what it is, you know, since he wrote the lyrics. But we want to hear from somebody out there who actually uses it and why do you use it? And is it just because you're maybe anti-establishment and you want to use it? Or, you know, what is the reason that you're using it? And so we can get you on air. All right. He says, don't use italics. Use emphasis. And that's just you can use the actual tag inside HTML. The actual code is an I for italics. And what we're supposed to be using is EM for emphasis. And don't use bold. Use strong. Yeah, and that's, again, the old one is B and the new one is strong. So we're supposed to move on to the new one. Apparently, remember, that was done in, what was it, 94? 94. No, 04. Oh, 04. Yeah, I remember that. All right. Next verse. It says, use CSS to your page to load quicker. Your client's satisfied and they're eating like they're eating on a snicker. Awesome

line. They're stuck on your page like you made it with the stickers. And then they convert. Now, that's the real kicker. So use CSS is going to make your pages load faster, apparently. Yeah. Well, so what a CSS will do is, again, it refers to cascade style sheets. So you can, if you want to define different, let's say you want to have a web page that's oscillating every other line. This is going to sound retarded, but just follow me here. Every other line is a different font and a different size, right? So if you don't use a cascade style sheet, you actually have to define the font and the size on each line. So if you had hundreds of lines, every fourth line, or every single line, you have to define it because you want every other line to be different. So all the text associated with the font that you're using and the size that you're using is duplicated over and over and over and over again. Now, if you just use a cascade style sheet, you actually define that four times, and then you reference it on each of the lines that you're doing the text on. So that short reference is a lot less text, and that's, you know, the amount of text is faster. Assuming it makes it faster. That does indeed make it faster. So I got, you know, so, and I want to get on a soapbox about making your pages load faster. And the reason, because I got a question last week from a guy that asked something. He asked me, is it best to use HD images and HD video on your website? And I was like, you know, I'm not really sure. Let me speak with my graphic artist. And he says, well, and this was an attorney that we're working with, and he says, I don't think it's necessary for this particular case. It would be one thing if he was in an industry where they needed to see his face and they needed to

see all of the stuff with him. But he says, in this case, I think he can pass on it because I think having high definition images and high definition videos on his website will slow down the loading of his website. And that will drastically affect the load time. Yeah, his load time. And so he was like, in this case, I don't think it's necessary. You can think of a case where it would be, you know, if you're, maybe you're in production, maybe you're in video production and you need to show the quality of what you're doing. I definitely would. I definitely would. If you are in the adult industry, because I'm sure there's somebody that listens that is, that would be in a scenario where I'd say yes. You probably, because your videos and images are what bring you traffic. So I'd say yes. So Paul's professional opinion on porn is HD. There you go. All right. There you go. I mean, because, you know, I run a little porn consulting on the side. So in case you're wondering about that, should I switch? You know, you want to take that into mind. If you do switch to HD images and videos, it will make your page load longer. So just remember that. All right. Next verse, it says, then it's stuck on your page. I like that. Yeah. They're stuck on your page like a, like a sticker, like you made it with a sticker. And then they convert. And now that's the real kicker. And we talk about that. That's back to CIVO, search engine visitor optimization. That's, you know, that's what we talk about. We've actually coined that term here at eWebStyle, search engine visitor optimization. Because again, you know, for us, it's an easy thing to get website to your website. But what do you do after you get that traffic? You know, what do you do when you get the people to visit your website? What are your calls to action? What are you doing to convert them? What are

you doing to, to, to, to take the effort that you've made to get them to your website and turn it into actual value for your business? And so that is the real kicker. That is definitely the real. I mean, that's why we're here. That's seriously why we're here. You know, unique visitors are great. But, and being on the first page of Google is awesome. But, hey, I mean, we're all looking for business here. That's, that's the, that's the whole point is your marketing campaign is to bring in business. All right. Next verse says, make you a little richer. Your site a little slicker. Design and co-write, man. I hope you get the picture. What I'm telling you is true, man. It should be a scripture. If it's built right, you'll be the pick of the litter. Everyone will want to follow you like Twitter. Competition will get bitter. You're shine, you'll shine like glitter. Uh, you're, if you're trying to grow now, your company will get bigger. Design and co-write, man. Can you get with it? So, that was the last two verses. So, basically, if you follow all this stuff, uh, people will want to follow you like Twitter. You know, which is awesome, man. And I, and you'll, you'll be the pick of the litter. And remember, Mo, Mo, Mo, Mo Serious. Remember, Chuck gave us a, uh, a little, it was two, two podcasts ago. He gave us a couple, couple little secrets. A couple free tips. Regarding Twitter and Facebook and whatever. So, go back and listen to that. That's going to be podcast number 36. Um. This is an awesome rap, though. And, uh, we, you took two podcasts to go over it. Uh, I hope you guys go out there and just type Google design code, design and coding rap lyrics. I think that's how we found these. But, they're, they're informational. They're accurate. They, it's, it's good stuff. And it's, you know, it's a fun, it's a cool rap. And hopefully we'll put, we can, uh, get, get

a video up on our side or something like that. Yeah, we'll, we'll, um, yeah, make sure you can, you can, I think you can find those, uh, all the videos, all the rap videos that Chuck has done at The SEO Rapper. So, you can find them over there. And, uh, go check those out. Remember, you can, this is the end of our podcast, actually. So, this is pretty good timing. Uh, remember, you can follow us on Twitter, twitter.com slash eWebStyle. Find us on Facebook, e-webStyle.com slash Facebook. Send us an email. We haven't given an email out yet today. Podcast at e-webStyle.com. And, you know, and you can always call us at 713-592-6724. Uh, so that's awesome. Uh, thank you guys for listening. This is, has been another wonderful podcast. Tune in for our next wonderful podcast. Until next time, I'm Chris Burris. And this is Paul Hanson. Bye-bye for now. Have a growl, have a growl.