Keeping Track of Site Metrics - Internet Marketing Podcast Number 195

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. I am Charles Lewis, your internet marketing specialist. Welcome back to another fun-filled episode of the podcast that I just mentioned. Remember, we are your friendly, local, neighborhood, top position snatchers, where our mantra is... Don't be a douche. As always, there is a tip from the previous podcast, which I've written on the wrong page, so let me forward to the right page. That tip is, do SEO audits frequently to ensure best practices are being followed. Yeah, especially when you have a site where you may have multiple people updating things, some people doing posts, other people doing pages, some people managing media, things of that nature. You want to make sure that all of the best practices are being followed. That way you won't suffer any algorithm backlash or anything like that. So, audit your site frequently. Frequently. And there are changes regularly. Today, we do not have an algorithm cataclysm. No, we don't. We do not have an algorithm. Sometimes there's an algorithm cataclysm. And there's a little bit of irony in that name because what we found is that our customers don't experience the cataclysm part of the algorithm cataclysm. And we do get feedback that other people do. If you are in a position to, and you have one of these devices, or you're at your PC, go ahead and tweet now. And you should tweet, please. Hashtag, SEO podcast. This is number 195. So, make sure you tag us in it, at eWebStyle. That way we can link up and get social and do all of our social stuff with you. There are a few people who have followed our pleads, pleads, pleads, pleads, yeah, followed our pleads to actually go and do one of two things. One of them is they can write a review on iTunes. It only takes three steps. You go onto iTunes. You create an account. You write a review. If you choose to, you send us an

email, podcast at e-webStyle.com. And here are two people who have done that. Actually, I'm going to read one. We'll save one for next time. One of them, this is from here in the U.S., SEO Advice in Plain English. Five stars. Five stars. Audio, let's see. This is by rparker1334876. I'm not going to repeat that. I like the, okay, no more. RDD, too. Audio Schmario. It's the content that counts. These guys have great content. By the bucket full. Each episode is packed with simple, actionable SEO advice delivered in plain English. Love it. That's it. Thank you very much, Mr. R. Parker, 1334876. Boom. Punch in the face to you, man. Ptiff. Appreciate it. And we try to. We try to put out some information that you can take and use and apply. And so if you have done that, reach out to us. Let us know how it works for you. Remember, we are the Red Bull of SEO podcasts. You can actually listen to us while you're driving. Next, we've got Paul Hill. This is from the. I want to see where you're going. Safely. This is from Paul Hill from the UK. He did the other of the two things that we like. I thought you were going to tie it in the wings. Wings, yeah. Okay, go ahead. We'll get that later. And he actually did the other of the two things we like, we ask of you. He went to our G Plus local page and wrote a review. So thank you, Punch in the Face, Paul Hill. And the way you can do that is all you have to do is go to. So as you know, the G Plus local page is really long, intricate. It's even longer than Mr. R Parker 1334876. Although it wouldn't surprise me if that's a G Plus local page. It might be it. He went to e-webstyle.com slash G plus and slash Google plus. Any version. Any way you type it in, G plus or Google plus, G or plus symbol will take you

to our plus page. And write a review there. Now you know, or you may not know, you have a G Plus account if you've got a Gmail account. And if you're an SEO, we know you have a Gmail account. Yeah. If you don't, you need to send us an email and ask us, ask us, why do I need a Gmail account? We'll explain it to you in really short terms. Yeah, you do. I'm not going to even say that you don't. You do. After we kick you in the shins. So Paul Hill had this to say. The quality is excellent. He says, hi guys. I just started listening to your podcast. I'm going to read this fast because it's long. Podcast a few days ago and I've been very impressed with the content so far. I'm from the UK and have been in the SEO I am industry for a couple years now. Mainly in the niche sector, but also for local businesses as well. This is kind of in the niche sector. Yeah. Which niche? That'd be kind of interesting to know. So each podcast I've listened to has provided some real, actual steps for me to address on my websites. So many thanks for that and I look forward to hearing more. Not sure if this is because I've not listened to enough podcasts yet, but I would like to hear about more case studies and real life examples of SEO success. Yes, there are some sound issues in earlier podcasts, but I figure your shins are hurting enough already. Yeah. Thank you. We appreciate that. The way I see it, as long as the content is solid, which it is, and provides value to people, which it does, I can overlook the sound issues. I have used this phrase, though, before. If content is king, then presentation is queen. Presentation. Okay. So that's why we are working on our audio, because we believe it is important. Still true to some extent, but great content will always prevail. Look at Craigslist. I think

that's a great example. Great example. Straight up content. Zero presentation. F for presentation. A for content. Great show, guys, and keep up the good work. Best regards, Mr. Paul Hill. Punch in the face from the UK across the pond. That is, you know, overhand. By the way, I did want to give an example. This is an example I've been giving in presentations recently. It's the example that I've been using is for one of our clients. They actually had a form on their page. They had across kind of the right banner or the right sidebar, they had a testimonial, some kind of credibility links like BBB, a picture of a credible source doing a video about them, and then a form. And we noticed that the form was getting, we're sending lots of traffic to it, and the form was getting zero. Literally, we would come in on Monday of every week and say, let's test the form again. Are we sure it's not broken? And we would test it. It would work. So it wasn't broken. And we made an adjustment. We pulled out the testimonial. We pushed everything up. They're now getting two to three form submissions per week. That's an example, not specifically of SEO, but of the value of doing both the web design development and the SEO. You know traffic's going to it. You know traffic is or isn't doing something, and you're able to adjust and measure what delta you create when you make an adjustment on the website. So I wanted to mention that. I've been mentioning that lately in our presentations. Remember, you can stalk us, haunt us, corral us, facebook.com slash, twitter.com slash, youtube.com slash, and we've got on our Facebook page, Giovanni had this question. I have a question for you. I did 301 redirect for some old HTML pages to new CFM pages. Why are you using CFM pages? Okay. Do I add the new pages to sitemap.xml and remove the old? Do I leave the old and not add the new since they redirect?

My old pages are about 8 to 10 years old and have good link juice. I don't want to lose that. What thou suggesteth? Thanks for fixing your sound, by the way. Interesting concept. Well, I guess I would ask you how much value is on those old pages. Well, if you've got 301 redirects, you put the new pages. Yeah. At the end of the day, go with the new pages because those are the pages that you have live, frankly. Remember, the purpose of the 301 redirect is to keep that link juice and redirect that link juice to the new pages. So you want to make sure you keep your 301 redirects there and put your new pages in your sitemap. In fact, your old pages should be pulled out of your sitemap because they're no longer relevant. Because the sitemap is a tool for Google. For the webmaster tools, whether it's in Google or Bing, frankly, to index your site and know which pages that they should be crawling that's on your site. So, yeah, you want to have an active one. Frankly, we addressed your Codefusion pages for a while. I'm not sure why you're using those. Most people use those for some sort of database-driven site. It just seems like PHP would be sufficient at this point in the game. Frankly, and if this is a WordPress site, your XML plug-in would automatically manage and update this sitemap for you. And do it the right way, which would be to not include the old pages. So thank you, Gio Bani, punch in the face to you, hitting us up on our Facebook page. And then finally, Joe Cannon, MSCSCS, that's his credentials, five stars on the audio now. That's good. Even on my iPod. I don't know exactly what that means. Great work. Punch in the face to you, Mr. Joe Cannon. Thank you. And that, oh, I do have two quick pieces of news because we've got to keep this short. I think you've got lean content today, so this works. Part two

of what we did last week. So Apple Radio has signed the three major labels. So now Apple Radio, kind of a Pandora-type thing, is going to be coming out soon. And then I thought this was really cool. Quantum Spin has been controlled in a Boy's Einstein condescent. So basically you slow down atoms by getting them literally to within a billionth of zero Kelvin. Zero Kelvin means literally not moving. It's actually unattainable, as far as we know now. Unattainable Temperature or State of Non-Movement. When you get them that slow, you can actually watch the individual spin on the individual atoms. And they were able to have a cloud spinning one direction and then adjust one of them and watch it move around. The implication is atomic-level data storage. Atomic-level data storage. Right, because having a zero or a one is data, so having an up-spin or a down-spin could be data. Interesting. They're cool stuff. I'm surprised you didn't have, what you think about Yahoo's redo. They redesigned a search result page. So it's a lot cleaner. Look at that, right? Yeah. I like it. It's a lot cleaner. They kind of streamline the navigation across the top. I like it. And so hopefully improved search results will follow. Just say it. Because remember what comes first. The king, not the queen. Exactly. The queen is up front on Yahoo. That's awesome. So last week we talked about what to include in a website audit. And it was broken down in two parts. Basically, SEO sort of changes and then things you do on your site or site metrics. And so we went over part one last week, which is the SEO stuff. We talked about, you know, standard stuff. Titles and meta tags information. Content on your site. Make sure it has the right keyword density and things like that. We talked about having Google Webmaster Tools set up. And things like that that you can do on your site. Right. To make sure that you're at least dodging any audits. Right. And making sure

your site is coded and compatible and everything is current. But today, part two, I wanted to talk about site metrics. Which is the other part of the article. And it was pretty cool because these are a lot of some of the technical things that come with SEO and online marketing. That people tend to overlook or may not do correctly. And I also wanted to give some clarity on a few things. So, first, let's talk load time. Right. A lot of people get load time confused with page speed. Two totally separate things. And so the load time is really based on the click. Right. What happens after that click? Let's say you're downloading something. And you click how long does that take to load so you can download it. Or you're looking at an image gallery and you want these images to load when you're looking at, let's say, thumbnails and you're clicking them. How long does that full-size image take to load? So that's your load time. Your page speed. Your load time is an attribute to page speed. Because the page speed is really how fast does that page view the entire page on the click as well. So if they click, let's say, a navigation item to your about page, how fast does that page view happen, including the load time? Does the images load on the page and all of the other media? So we want to make sure in both cases that your load time and your page speed. Well, no, not in both cases. You want your load time to be extremely fast. Right. You want to optimize your images. You want to optimize any media, any files that people may have. And your page speed, you want that to be extremely fast as well. Because at the end of the day, that's going to help your page rank and help you get a higher placement in Google. And a great user experience. Definitely. So robots.txt, right? Make sure you have that. Make sure you're not blocking any robots accidentally.

One of those reasons I work them in WordPress. They make doing most of these things extremely easy, even for people with minimal experience. Malware check. This kind of goes into having your Webmaster tool set up. Google does a great job of letting you know if your site's been hacked, if you have malware and things like that. And I know because I've personally been through that experience. Google Analytics integration. This is key. We have a couple of clients who've came in recently. And once you've had several companies managing your site, frankly, you may end up with multiple analytics codes on your site. And we had one who was not getting conversions. Not tracking. But it wasn't tracking right. It did come to analytics on one site. And it was a big mess. And so you want to make sure that you have all your Google code right. And your Webmaster and your Bing code. Whatever tracking codes or marketing codes you have on your site. Scripts. Whether it's an analytics script or a remarketing script or whatever it is. You want to make sure that you have those clean. That they're the right ones. You have them in the right place. And any duplicates or a script that you don't need, remove that. Like old, you know, site verification meta tags and things like that. If they're not in place, you're not using them, get them off your site. HTML validation. This is key. This was really huge some years ago. I think it's still important today. Make sure your site's validates. W3C. That always helps. Make sure your site's compatible in any browser. Whether it's Firefox, Chrome, IE, Safari. Make sure that it looks good. We detour down here and say on a mobile browser as well. Mobile is extremely important. And if your site isn't presentable rendering well on a mobile device, then that's a problem. So make sure that you have a mobile version. Make sure that you have the XML sitemap we were talking about earlier. This is something else you can

manage with WordPress. And sync that directly to your webmaster tool. So that way, Google will always have your updated list of the active and live pages. Just so you know, WordPress is open source. There's really no way for us to get compensated. Yeah, yeah. I'm pro-WordPress. And that's what it is. Shout out to Matt. Punch in the face to Matt. And a dead link check. I think this is extremely important. Yeah. Because there's a reason why Google gave us the opportunity to disavow links and things like that. And so I want to add to dead link check. Yeah. Check your site for any dead links. Four or fours and things like that. Get rid of those. But also check your site, which is not on the list, for any bad links. Yeah. Any people linking to you who you don't want to link to you. Or maybe that link is coming from a source that's sketchy a little bit. You know, then definitely disavow those links so you won't have that association with them. For dead links, on-site links, we use Xenu. X-E-N-U. And that'll scan your website and give you a report on what links are dead, what links are good. Definitely. So that was your site metrics. And I'll post this article. And that way you guys can see all of the SEO metrics and the site metrics that you should really be checking when doing an audit on your website. Cool. Is that it? Do we got any blank stare? No blank stare today. No blank stare today. All right. You have just listened to the meat and the potatoes of the SEO podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing, the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes. That is because of all you all. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you want to, send us an email, podcast at e-wefstyle.com. And we got an app coming soon. I thought, oh, you're going to drop a leak. Yeah. I was trying hard not to say nothing. I couldn't do it. App

coming soon. We got a new logo we're going to put out there for you guys. We're rebranding. So, yeah. Check it out. Give us some feedback. All right. Thank you guys for tuning in. Until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burris. Charles Lewis. Bye-bye for now. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.