Keywords and Twitter, What to do with both? - #seopodcast45

Hi, and welcome to the Unknown Secrets of SEO Podcast. Welcome back to another fun-filled edition podcast number... 45! 45. We had to verify that. It's been a while. I've been out on a project in California. I'm glad to be back. Sorry our podcasts have been coming so slow. And glad you're there either watching and certainly listening to this podcast. As always, when we get started, we want to make sure that you know how to follow us. We are broadcasting this live video. Hello out there. Hello. To TV land or internet land. Internet land. You can find that stream where we typically broadcast at 9.15 Central Standard Time every Friday. Today, it looks like we're doing at about 9.40, 10. 10 till 10. It's a slow day here. But we're glad you're joining us. You can go back and watch the video of this so you can actually see us live. Or not live, recorded at that point because it's no longer live. Well, you can find it at eWebStyle.com slash Ustream. That's the letter U and then stream. And that will automatically send you to our Ustream page. Okay. You can also stalk us on Twitter. Go to Twitter.com and then type in eWebStyle.com. And you can also find us on Facebook. Facebook, the easiest way to get there is to go to our site, eWebStyle.com slash Facebook. That will forward you to the Facebook, our Facebook, our Facebook group page. It's not a group page. And you can become a fan of eWebStyle. And we appreciate all our fans out there. We're getting more and more feedback. We love it. We're getting more and more listenership. We love it. We're happy to be entertaining you. We've got our, I forget, what was the guy who complained last time about our time? Sangvi? I don't know. Yeah. So we're going to be mindful of not talking about too much generic stuff and really getting into the meat of SEO. You're listening, so you probably know what SEO is. We help you get your website on

the first page of Google or at least help you to help whoever you're hiring. Hopefully you're hiring us. But if you're hiring somebody else, great. The more you know about SEO, the better you're going to be able to, one, police them and to help them. So keep listening and keep sending comments, which you can do at podcast at e-webstyle.com. And that one has a dash in it. So that's podcast at e-webstyle.com. I think if you leave the dash out, it'll still get to us. Yeah. It'll still come. But put it in there because it kind of helps define e and then web style and that's us. That's us. And if you want to call, you can reach us at area code 713-592-6724. We'd love to hear your calls. We still have a free analysis. So you can call that and give us your domain name and one of us here at the office will help you out. It very well may be Paul. So you can actually talk to an internationally famous guy on SEO. An expert. I'm a SEO rock star. World class expert. Wait, that's another podcast. Be careful. Okay. You are listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes and I have statistics to prove it. I don't even know where to go. End of podcast. We'll see you all next week. Thank you. It was a great podcast. Last time we did 2009 in review, we covered kind of the major key things that you need to be focusing on and key, speaking of key, we're going to be covering keywords again because I think we came up with something creative. Oh, there's three things you should be focused on. Key. Oh, no, no, no. It was four. It was content. Content. Keywords. Links. Links. Keywords. And... Keywords. Remember keywords. We're going to get it from a different angle, though. So before you hit stop listening, we're going to approach it from an angle that we haven't approached before and it is very, very important. This is... A lot of

people that I talk to, I notice they're going in one direction when they're selecting keywords and I'm like, skrrt, put on the brakes. Let's think about that first. And I think a lot of people are doing this. I don't want to say it's a mistake, but... So this is something I think everybody really needs to listen to. Don't think, oh, they've already talked about keywords. I'm going to go back to it. This is a different spin on keywords. Keywords are the most... Really the most... Where you're going to target your SEO efforts is determined by your keywords, the keywords that you select, and that process is immensely important. We've talked about a keyword selector tool that Google has available that you can go back and listen to that podcast and find out how to use that tool. It's a very important tool you want. Seriously, keywords are almost everything. You can have amazing SEO skills or a team working for you. That's amazing. And if they're focused on the wrong keywords, you are not going to get any ROI, return on investment. So this is going to be very valuable. We'd like to cover a little bit of news. Some interesting stuff in the news. I found this yesterday, February the 4th, about Twitter. And if you're not on Twitter, you need to be on Twitter. We're on Twitter. I just got... I have my own Twitter. I don't really do much, but I'm getting better at it. But the CEO of Sun Microsystems resigned yesterday or two days ago via Twitter. And I'm thinking, okay, you have 140 characters. What can you put? Yeah, it wasn't a long resignation letter, was it? Yeah. The first thought that came into my mind was, screw you guys, I'm going home. I'm going home. From Cartman at South Park. You can get that in 140 characters. Screw you guys, I'm going home. What else is in the news? Apple came out with the iPad, which got a lot of press. I'd love to hear your opinions, because

we were talking before the podcast, and, you know, it looks amazing, and the video is unbelievably well done marketing, and for what it does, it is Apple, so it does it incredibly well, and I won't buy one. I know. You know, the user interface is going to be awesome. Yeah. It's going to be awesome. That's like, I don't know, the user interface on the Segway is great. Yeah. I'm not buying one, right? There you go. Well, maybe if they were like 150 bucks, I'd go buy one. It's a little different, and I, you know, it's, I just don't need it. I don't know what it's, you know. I think it's very cool. I'd love to play with somebody else's. Yeah. Or when I had, for free. Yeah. Which, actually, another point in the news, Google and I, this is my own personal opinion, but I think Google and Apple are going to start butting heads here. What happened recently is, you know, Google came, Apple came out with the iPad. Google's actually going to come out with a version of it. They've been working on for a while, actually. I didn't know this. And Google and Apple have some of the same board members on each other's board. So, the guys from Google stepped down off of Apple's board, saying that, hey, you know, Apple's saying, hey, you guys are getting into our core business. You came out with the phone. Right, right. Competing with our iPhone. Now you're coming out with this pad, you know. You know, you're kind of, you're interrupting our core. Boom, off the board. Yeah. Get the hell off of my board. So, I think there's going to start being some major competition going between these two companies, which makes it better for everybody else. And the last thing I saw on the news is that Yahoo is selling hot jobs. If you haven't noticed lately, Yahoo's been getting rid of some pretty big assets. GeoCities, they got rid of. They just shut down GeoCities, right? They shut down GeoCities.

Okay, hello. They didn't sell it. Shut it down. We've got a buttload of traffic still. Let's just turn it off. Yeah. You know, I would have been, you know, give it to me. Thank you. I was looking for taking it. Figure something out to do with it. So, watch, I think that this is going to affect just how Yahoo is perceived in the search community. They've given away their search responsibilities to Bing. They're selling off major assets. So, I don't know. Yahoo. You mentioned earlier, like, a company is supposed to focus on their core competencies. What's Yahoo's core competency now? Search. Wait, wait. I'm sorry. Doesn't Bing do their search? Bing does their search. Wait a minute. Advertising? Portal. Maybe. They are a world-class portal, which happened to be a... Netscape! Which happened to be a dime a dozen. Thank you. I remember Netscape. I hope Yahoo doesn't take that route. Are they even around anymore? Netscape. I think they are. Okay. I don't know. And there's some people out there like, NetWho? Net what? Yeah. Netscape. Netscape was the bomb back in the day. When we started doing web design, we actually designed, and I know I've mentioned this in one other podcast, we actually designed our websites for Netscape. Okay. Only. Because that was the pre-dominant, the dominant, pre-eminent browser. Then we slowly had to start designing for Netscape and IE, because IE started gaining in popularity. For a while there, we were only designing for IE, because, again, it was the dominant browser, and by a significant margin. And now we're having to transition and start accommodating Firefox, because there are subtle differences that can have a significant impact on the look and feel of your... Well, not really a feel, but the look of your browser. Images can get juxtaposed and things like that. So, now, in our shop, we've got a design for two browsers. Thank you, Microsoft, for not conforming to the specifications of HTML. Thank you very much. All right. And I was reading... Go ahead. I was

reading a list of bizarre complaints that web people have had, and one of them was like, so we want you to do our website. We don't want you to use any of that HTML crap, because our technical guys don't know how to use it. Are you sure you want a website? You sure you want a website, right? Here, here's your website. All you need to do is hand out this CD to people. It's totally not in HTML. I want you to paint my house. I don't want you to use paint. No paint. No paint. You've got to get it done my way. Okay, let's talk about some keywords. I had someone call. I want to say thank you to T at teaspurplemartinishop.com. It was teaspurple, just the letter T? Oh, excuse me. Let me give you some backlink love here, T. T-E-E-S, purplemartinishop.com. Cool. I like the name. I like the domain name. That's cool. She sells a lot of purple and a lot of cool martini glasses and stuff. She came in a while back, asked for analysis, and we talked. She gave me a call over the Christmas holiday and had some questions just about keyword selection. So it prompted me. I said, oh, other people would probably benefit from this. And I found an article actually from EZ, and I do a lot of research and reading on EZ, and a guy by the name of Kelvin Johnstone had an article that says, most searched keywords, not always the best approach. And, uh... What? Yeah. What? The basic concept is, you know, okay, let's say I'm a plumber, and I go after plumber. So I'm going to select plumber as my keyword, or, uh... Let's use the example of, uh, say, let's say you're a hypnotist. Okay. Who knows how to help people quit smoking. Okay. So the first thing that comes to your mind is what keyword... Stop smoking or quit smoking. Stop smoking or quit smoking. Yes. So, yeah. So I'm going to optimize my website for those words. And

you're saying that's wrong? Yeah, that's wrong. And here's why, well, unless you got a staff or you hire E-WebStyle, that's going to be tough, you know? And when Tia and I were talking, I said, well, here's basically what you're going to have to do. You got to look at your keyword. How competitive is that keyword? Stop smoking? How many... It was millions? Yeah, it was millions. Millions, yeah. If you're going to select a keyword that has, gets a million plus searches per month, everybody else and their mama is going after that same keyword. Here's a suggestion. Here's what I do. You want to look at your competition. So type in Stop Smoking on the right-hand side of Google. You want to see results. One through ten of... And you may get 35 million results, okay? That you are competing with every single person that's on that list for ten spots. Yeah. You know? So think about that. And I've said this in a previous podcast. You know, if you want to go after Stop Smoking, Google Stop Smoking, look at everybody on the first page. You're going to have to knock one of them out, essentially. Yeah. You're going to have to out-SEO them. So out-keyword them, out-link them. So you want to look at all those people. And then look, you know, if it's one through ten of 35 million, you know? Yeah. It's a tough road. And even, you know, in the particular case of Patrick Wanus, we are working on some of the quit-smoking keywords. And we've opted for something more specific, like quit-smoking hypnosis, as opposed to quit-smoking. And we've even gotten down into cities. Quit-smoking hypnosis Miami. Quit-smoking hypnosis Houston. And those names, so because we're more likely to have success on those with the budget that we're given, right? Given an unlimited budget, we'll get it done. That's not a problem. The challenge is, okay, within the budget constraints that somebody comes to us. So, like, in the case of T's Purple Martini, you know, she's going to do

it herself, is what I'm understanding. Or eventually hire us, because she appreciates the help we've been giving her. And, you know, so she's, obviously, you know, that's not her job. Her job is to run her business, not to be optimizing her website, doing search engine optimization. So, she doesn't have the budget to go after the really big terms. I mean, and she can go after Martini. Again, that's going to be a lot, that's going to be much more competitive. Much more competitive than Purple Martini glasses. Right. Because that's much more specific. And that kind of segues into the next one. He had another good point on this article. Well, before you go there, you know, even our campaigns are designed with 15 keywords. And part of that reason is because we know sometimes clients are going to be angling for, like, the quit smoking. And, yes, we're going to work on those, and we're going to get there eventually. The challenge is that we also want to show, well, we definitely want to show you results quickly. Yeah. And the way to show you results quickly that are going to bring return on investment are to go after what are called long tail keywords. So, we do that intentionally. Those 15 keywords are so that we can give you immediate results and then long-term more valuable results. And people will come to us and say things like, I want quit smoking or I want a national term. Yeah. And we'll say, hey, yeah, we'll do that. But. Here's the budget that you need for that. Yeah. And, you know what I'm saying? I'll have no problem telling somebody, hey, we'll do this. But we would recommend you do X, Y, and Z. How about we go after a local term like we did with Patrick? Let's get some results for local terms, maybe a statewide term. Because your national or worldwide terms, they're going to take much more time, more man hours, you're going to have to invest more money into getting those terms. So,

you want to really think about that. When you're looking at what keywords to select, look at how many searches they're getting in the keyword selector tool. Look at how many other people are listed under those keywords. And then, you know, think, can I out SEO these guys? That's a strategy you should take now that is going to be time consuming. You are going to have to invest some time in this. Sorry. Yeah. Or you could make an SEO company invest their time in it. Lucky web style. Us. For those of you who are listening, I'm pointing at myself. Yeah. I was doing this, and I'm like. They can't see. They can't see that. Most of them. And he brought up a good point. Long tail keywords. This is a word that I'm not familiar with. And so, I'm familiar with the concept, not the actual word. He brought in two words, long tail and short tail keywords. And a long tail keyword is basically. Well, let's go. A short tail keyword would be stop smoking. Yeah. Yeah. Quit smoking. Smoking. Or I want to. Here's one. Here's one I'd never recommend. I want to optimize my website for the word Google. I know somebody's thought about that. When somebody types in Google, I want to show up first. I want to show up. But, okay, I would not recommend that. Probably no ROI there. There you go. And the long tail version of that would possibly be, is Google the best search engine? That's a long tail keyword. That's probably a bad example. But here's a. Let's go. Well, it's interesting. And so the short term and long term have, it's a really interesting mixture of the phrases. Because the long term, the long tail keywords actually come from the classic bell curve. You know, that they either adjusted your grades in college or whatever. We all know, you know, 90% are within the bell. And then there's these, the long tail. The guys that blow the curve, that get 100 on the exam. Bastards.

Yeah. So the long tail is also typically longer keywords. Yeah. So, you know, instead of quit smoking, it's quit smoking, hypnosis, seedy, Miami. Right? So it's actually a longer keyword and it's the long tail because they call it the long tail because it doesn't get as many hits as those words that are in the bell curve. And it still gets enough traffic to go after. It's easier to get. So go after those first. Spend your time on them. Like he says, the long tail keywords give the short results. They give much more. It's much more specific as to what you're looking for because there's more words. So it's going to give you a shorter list of results, but that sort of list of results is going to be more specific. And I'm going to tell you that those are the ones that you really want. Higher value. If you get the short, and so the short tail are the ones that are shorter in length and fit inside that bell curve. If you get a short, I was going somewhere with this. If you get a short tail keyword and you're getting a lot of not relevant traffic, right? So if all I'm selling on Patrick's website is quit smoking hypnosis CDs, well, some people, when they type quit smoking, are looking for patches. Oh, yeah. A Nicorette gum. They're looking for whatever it may be. How do I advise my friend on how to quit smoking? They're looking for all sorts of information related to quitting smoking that don't necessarily have anything to do with the desire for a hypnosis CD. So, you know, those short terms, you may go after those and realize, you know what, that's not as good. Whereas if somebody types in quit smoking hypnosis CD Miami, the city is not that important in that way. But we want that traffic, and we have exactly what they want, so it's, you know, more likely to result in a sale. So any effort I spend on that is valuable effort. And

I'd say the more specific you can be, the better. And the more specific, because if they're typing in, if I'm going to type in something that long, I know exactly what I want. I'm looking for this, this, this, this, and this. So that's going to be like a prime sale or a prime sales opportunity for your company. Now, I don't want you to say, think, I need to go after all long tail and drop all my short tail. Just understand there's a difference, and you need to approach them differently. They will bring different results. Short tail will bring more results, less relevant. Long tail will bring less results, more relevant. So you really need to think about this when you're doing your SEO, and you're selecting your keywords, and which keywords am I going to choose. So I thought it was a really cool article that I'm looking at the wall, but here's where I have the article. By Kelvin Johnstone, most search keywords, not always the best approach. I found it on e-zine. And I want to say thanks to T again at T's, T-E-E-S, purple martini shop. So maybe we can make some recommendations for her. I'm sure you did in the phone call. Yeah, I did. What was she actually going after? What short tail was she after, and what kind of long tail did you recommend? I don't remember. I have a specific kind of remember. It was about a month ago. I don't want to put you on the spot or anything. I can say this. She sells lots of purple gifts and trinkets and things, and she has a lot of martini items and bar glasses and things. Does she sell the fake ice with the fly in it? I don't know. If it's purple, maybe. And she had, I don't remember specifically, but she was looking at some short tail keywords, and I said, okay, these are fine keywords to go after, but remember, I think it was like martini. I do remember it was martini. And let's

just think about that. If somebody's typing in martini, first off, they're probably looking for a recipe. That's what I'd be looking for. So if she shows up there, it's not really that valuable to her. What percentage of people who type in martini are actually looking to buy martini glasses? They're at least going to type in martini glass at a minimum. And I think that's a good word to go after, but at the same time, you're going to compete with everybody else that's under martini glass. So does she sell plastic ones? I'm sure they're like nice quality plastic martini glasses. So plastic martini glasses is a long tail term that would be easier to get on the first page. That's a good one. I should have told her that. She's going to listen, though. It would be easier to get on the first page, and it would be very specific, hopefully, to a product they have. Now add the word purple in there, and it's a no-brainer. If they're looking for a purple plastic martini glass. Plastic purple martini glass. There you go. I mean, I like that. So then those are terms that should be very easy. She really probably just needs to set up one page, optimize the text on her own page, because not that many people are going to be typing that in, and she'll do pretty well. That would be an easy thing to go after. So there's an example. Anything else that kind of pops to mind in your conversation with her? Because I think these real-world examples really, really, really do. Oh, I love it. Yeah, I love it. And thanks for T for calling, and thanks to everyone that's called in. I got about four calls this month, and sorry, T and AJ, you're the only two that I actually wrote down. Sorry I got busy, but I love this example of short tail, long tail, and having real-world examples. All right, well, we have about five minutes left, so it was interesting, because before the end of

the year, we were covering an article. I think it was John Reynolds sent a letter. John Reynolds at John Reynolds Media. And I love the question was, Google acknowledges that there are 300 things that they look for or use to determine search engine placement, and I know of, it was content, keyword, and links. And links, what are the other 297, yeah. So we found an article, which is a really interesting article. It's from SEO Moz, and it was just covering the main things that are of interest. We were doing that by the end of the year. Our first podcast in 2010, we decided to do a year-end review, so we interrupted that process. Because, incidentally, the next few items in the continuation of what we were doing in 2009 is actually the stuff that we talked about in that kind of year-end review. And so they're worth going over again, and we're just going to do that real quickly just to wrap this up. What is important? Keyword-focused anchor text from external links. And so we've explained it a number of times before, but it's worth explaining again. And the great example I like to use, and although this is an internal link example, is everybody uses the word home for people to get back to home. And Google probably has excluded that from their algorithm because everyone uses it, and the page that comes up when you press home has never anything to do with homes, right? Yeah. So that's a great example. Really, you need links on your page that go to your home page that are, you know, let's say, you know, Houston Plumber, right? So your links need to be Houston Plumber. You also need to have the home because everyone, that's for usability. And Houston Plumber tells something to Google that home doesn't. In fact, Houston Plumber tells the right thing to Google, and home tells the wrong thing to Google. Well, you also want that keyword text that's linking to your website from external links to have the keyword

text. The right keywords. You want them to have keywords in your anchor text. So very important when you're working on external links. By the way, if you're not working on external links, you need to call us because you should be. That's where you're going to get your search engine placement from. External link popularity. There's kind of two. There's quantity and quality. What is the quantity? Obviously, that's number. How many people are linking in? Quality is related to effectively the page rank of the website that's linking to you. You know, a link from MSN coming to my plumbing shop is going to have a lot more value than a link from, I don't know, JoeBlow.com JoeBlow.com I wonder if there is a JoeBlow.com You don't wonder. You don't wonder what's there. I like this one. Interactive, excuse me, iterative, algorithm-based, global link popularity. I don't, man, I don't even know what that is. Let me translate that. Page rank. Oh, yeah. I got that. It's just page rank. So page rank, we all know, is very valuable. Google recently took it off of the Webmaster Tool page because they really don't want you focusing on page rank. Remember, and I've got a good quote, which is, your job when you're doing SEO or your job as an SEO company is to provide a good user experience to Google's users. If you do that, you're going to do well in SEO. So that's going to wrap up our 45th podcast, our second podcast of 2010. We really appreciate you listening. You are listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. Until next time, I'm Chris Burris. And I'm Paul Hanson. Bye-bye for now.