Long tail keywords, google position and traffic decreasing - #seopodcast 47

Hi, and welcome to the Unknown Secrets of SEO Podcast. Hello, and welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our Unknown Secrets of SEO Podcast. All our listeners and viewers. This is podcast number 47. You are listening and or watching to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. In the world. On everything. iTunes is the world, right? Yeah, iTunes is the world of music, and we're the most popular SEO podcast. And we have music on it. You can see we look pretty balanced in the image over there. We look awesome. All right, good. I know, but you're only going to get one answer to that question. We're looking hot. All right, as always, we want to follow up a little bit about what we talked about last time, which I don't have in my notes here. Do you remember? What did we talk about last time? We talked about... It was brilliant. It was amazing. Gosh. It was podcast number 46. It was... Hold on a second. It was podcast 46. I remember it's on the tip of my tongue. I just can't think of it. We talked about... No, backlink. We wrote that down. We had a really good talk. Oh, keyword selection. Keyword selection. Proper keyword selection. Not going after the big dog, so to speak, every time you go after a keyword. This is probably one of the most popular things. Mistakes I see people make. All right, let me take that back. It's not a mistake, but most people don't understand what they're getting themselves into. Yeah, there's a lot of room for error in that process. Yeah, you want to go after a keyword that gets a million searches. Most people just don't understand the work that's going to be involved. So I'd say the mistake that they made is picking the keyword and not committing to the work that they'll have to take to get there. Because you can go after a keyword with one million searches a month, but you've got to think about it. Are you prepared to

do that? Is your website ready to do that? And here's maybe a reasonable example. You're thinking about starting a new business, and it's a retail business. Most retail businesses, you want lots of traffic, right? So if you go for the piece of property in your city, town, state, wherever you're at, that has the absolute most traffic, you've got to pay a premium for that piece of property. And maybe your small business isn't ready to pay that premium. Maybe that's not a burden that your business can handle just yet. You want to move it there, right? You want to get it there, but you've got to start at kind of a lower traffic. So you want to start on the tail, long tail keywords, which are usually the longer keywords, more words in the keyword, and also the less searched keywords, and then move up from there. So that's really how that goes. Okay, so definitely think about that. I think it was an awesome podcast. If you haven't listened to it, go back and listen to it, because keyword selection is one of the most important parts of SEO. I'll probably say that every other weekend, or every other podcast. It's kind of like real estate, right? Real estate is location, location, location. SEO is keywords, keywords, keywords. And so make sure you do your keywords right. After that, you want to do content. But that's more like building the house as opposed to the foundation. And the foundation. By the way, where can you find our podcast? You can find us on Podomatic. The best way to find us, though, is just go to our website, e-webstyle.com, and you can find a link to our podcast there. I don't think it's across the top, but I think it is right across the bottom. We've got a link to the podcast directly. Or if you get into our blog, yeah, I know. I'm sorry about that. I need to check that. If you get into our blog, then you'll find our podcasts, and you can

actually play them directly from our blog. You can see transcripts of our podcasts. You can also find these podcasts in video format because we're recording right now. We're recording live. I thought I turned all those off. I'm recording live. You can find these. And the best way to get to that is e-webstyle.com slash Ustream. And when you go there, that will take you directly to your Ustream page, excuse me, the e-webstyle page on Ustream. That's right. Just hang up. Another way that you can find us is you can e-mail us at podcast at e-webstyle.com. We're actually going to be talking about an e-mail from Darren Boy. Darren Boy. Here's one other way you can find us. I found this last night. You go to iTunes Store, type in SEO, and iTunes lists a bunch of podcasts at the top. And directly below it, I just found this, they have live podcast episodes. Wow. And we are on the top ten. Wow. I found that last night. You type in SEO, you'll find us. And if you type in SEO podcast, we have two episodes in the top ten. Awesome. I just found this last night. So thanks, iTunes. Yeah, that's awesome, iTunes. I thought that was really cool. And one thing that we were really excited about last time was the amazing reviews that we got on iTunes. One of them said that he's learned more from our podcast than reading multiple books. So you're learning right now. Thank you. It may not feel like it because it's fun and exciting, and you are learning. You're learning about SEO. So that's great. Oh, I also wanted to throw this in, because we were talking about an Australian comedian last time. Oh, yeah. And his name is Yahoo Serious. Okay. And he was in the movie Young Einstein. Einstein. He had a little crazy hair, and it was really kind of wacky. I don't know, Beavis and Butthead, dumb, probably American type humor, although he's Australian. I don't know. That seems a little weird. Somebody makes

a comment. That's a good point. That was John in Western Australia. So he's like, you guys are funny for Americans. American humor, yeah. We're going to have to step up our humor game, John. We need to become worldly funny. That's not funny. I don't know what that means. Me neither. All right. And also, I wanted to bring up, last time we were talking about what not to post on blogs, right? So what's the value of posting on a blog and getting a backlink to your blog? And we said, make sure you add value to the blog. Here's an example of not adding value to a blog. Oh, from our blog. This is from our blog. They posted it on ours, and it says, great website. I cannot remember too clearly, but I think I found your site through a link someone shared on Twitter. I like the way you write, and I'm going to subscribe and read more whenever I can. Oh, yeah. Are you on Twitter yet? How'd you find me? Again. You found us on Twitter, right? Yeah, I found you on Twitter. Are you on Twitter? Are you on Twitter? Or just people tweeting about you because you're tweetable. I don't know. So that's an example. When you do, there is value in posting on blogs because it gives you the backlink depending on the blog. And when you do that, just make sure you're contributing. I mean, the whole concept, the whole way to succeed is to give back. You know, we give back with our podcast. We're excited to do that, and it's added value to our company, to us as individuals. And, you know, we're required to research things that, you know, like Greg Bui in Australia sends us. And that just makes us better at what we do. So just always be giving back, and you're going to do really well, I think. That's an axiom of life, I actually think. Give back. I don't even know what axiom means. I'm going to be honest with you, man.

I'm like, ugh. How about rule? Hey, there we go. It's a rule of life. Man, come on. You've got to keep them under five letters here. And it should not have the letter X. Yeah, yeah. Five letters, two syllables, you know. You've got to dumb it down a little bit here. And that's for our audience. I appreciate you making that sacrifice and throwing it out there like that. All right, so we're going to answer Mr. Bui's question here. Darren, yes. So he sent us something a long time ago, and how did that end up working out? Yes, Darren sent something a few months ago. He asked for requested analysis. I sent it to him. I gave him some great pointers on it. I can't think of exactly what pointers I gave him off the top of my head. But we went back and forth a few times. And then Darren sent us an email, and he asked a really good question. He says, you know, I'm still a little confused, but, oh, wait, I'm going to skip that because I'll let you answer the analytics one. But he says, I have a proper question that actually, this may be related to how I've added analytics to my site. But he basically wants to know the number of visitors on his site is reducing, you know, along with the percentage of visitors to his site. He used to have one number, and then it is, you know, it is decreased down to another number. So he's basically asking, you know, what's going on with my site? That people are, yes, you know, people are, I'm getting less visitors, and that was his concern. Now, yes, a couple different things. That was one of them. Do we want to go over to analytics as well? Yeah, well, he postulates, is it possible that Google crawlers are no longer crawling on, I'm sorry. Yeah, I'm like, ah. He opines. He says, I am thinking this might be the, that the Google crawlers are no longer crawling his website

because they recognize that he's on Google Analytics, blah, blah. That is not the answer to this particular question. I'd want to ask a couple things. One of them is you do realize that your traffic is not going to be consistent. You're not going to look and have 419. And, in fact, when you go the next day and when Google Analytics is looking at, you know, a month starting from today going back a month, whatever traffic you had on the day it just dropped, you know, is going to be different. So that is going to be changing on a regular basis. The number, the delta that he has here is like 70 visitors. I wouldn't even think twice about 70 visitors in a month-long period. He sent this in February, so we could have been coming off of, you know, the January, off of the holidays. Okay. And maybe he had more traffic in the holidays because of the type of website he has. And so, you know, that peak over the holidays is kind of tapering off now and you're getting down to the baseline when it's not the holidays. So there are so many things that could go into that. You really kind of need to spend a little time and give that analytics a little TLC and, you know, just try and understand what's going on. It's not unusual for your traffic to change. To increase. To decrease. Go back up. And what you're really looking for is, like Chris says, you're not going to stay steady. And if you are, please tell me how you do that. But you're going to go up. You're going to go down. But you want to go up, down a little. Up, down. So you want to slowly go up, up, up, up, up, up, up. So rather than going down, down a little. In the long haul, your goal is to be going up. And if you're doing proper SEO, that's definitely going to happen. And that's a great point. If you're doing proper SEO,

if you're traffic, you're out there and you're like, my traffic is decreasing, you know, what? There could be a myriad of reasons as to why your traffic could be decreasing. It could be that your competitors are out SEOing you. That's a term I like to use. It could be maybe you lost some links. It could be a piece of code on your website. I mean, it could be a lot of different things as to why your traffic is decreasing. What I would say is, you know, focus on what you know best. I love that phrase, what I would say. I guess it would be what I am saying. What I'm about to say. You know, focus on what we all know is relevant and is of importance to your website, like keyword selection, like link building, like keyword selection, like keyword utilization inside of the content, not just in the content title, in the alt tag title, in the you know what? If you haven't heard this, you need to go back and listen to our old podcast because we do cover each one of these in details. You know, where do your keywords need to be? What kind of ratio? Oh, by the way, so a while back, remember when we were analyzing the SEO rappers? Chuck. Lyrics. Chuck. Most serious. Most serious. Yes, there is an SEO rapper. Go back and listen to our podcast. And we actually break down one of his rhymes. It's kind of cool. I like saying that. Break down his rhymes. We broke down some rhymes on our SEO podcast. So, one of them was that you need to use Cascade Style Sheets, CSS, instead of tables. And at the time, I was like, you know, I'm not really buying that that's important. And I don't think it's that important. I do see the value now because what happens is you get to get a lot of the text that is on the backside of your website off of your main website. And it's on to Cascade Style

Sheet files. So, your content, your actual content that Google focuses on is more keyword rich. So, if anybody has any questions about that, you know, let me know because I can certainly explain that maybe a little bit better. So, we are now a Cascade Style Sheet house. It's for two reasons, but one of them is because with Cascade Style Sheets, you're going to do better with SEO. That's awesome. Yeah. So, we're excited to be moving in that direction, too. And thanks, you know, it was kind of a culmination of information coming from different areas. And Chuck, most serious. Thanks, Chuck. Appreciate that, Chuck. Giving us some good information. We need to get him back in here. We do need to get Chuck back in here. You know, at least once a year. I mean, he's a very, very busy man. He's rapping all the time. He's doing SEO for a couple of companies here in Houston, I know. And so, we need to get him back in here. What else? You want to go over to the other question? I have something to follow with Darren. Okay. Yeah, I got this other question. So, he was asking, I got me, he started thinking, I think Darren is a pontificator. A guy who thinks a lot. Okay. Yeah, throw me a bone here. A little more context. I'll figure that out. Because he was like, you know, he installed analytics and he's looking at the dad and he's like, you know, maybe this website is too intelligent, especially if you have just launched. Maybe it could cause you to overanalyze the data. Certainly, there's enough data with Google Analytics to overanalyze. Oh, gosh. And, yeah, you could get lost in that trap. And you actually want to get lost in it, I don't know, maybe once a month. Don't wake up every day and go to Google Analytics and just start digging in the data because that's not really going to help you in the long run. And we have a podcast where we talk about

what do we look at in Google Analytics. So, go back and listen to that podcast. But at least once a month, you really do want to kind of dive in and maybe look at some different areas of data and see if you can kind of pull out some information. We have a couple podcasts on what to do with Google Analytics and the value of Google Analytics. So, go ahead and do that. And then Google Intelligence really changes the game. And you can really get lost in analytics. I have. And I've had to kind of back up like, whoa, I'm just getting way too deep into this. You know, and if you're doing your own SEO and working on your own website, you know, pick a few things that are just of importance. I'll tell you what I look. You know, I look at visitors. I look at that. I look at the amount of traffic derived from a particular keyword. Right. Because that's what you're going after. If you're going after blue one-armed widgets, you know, I'm going to check that keyword. Every time I go to my analytics, I'm going to see how is that particular keyword generating traffic because that's my number one seller. Right. And with analytics, you can actually see they came in with those keywords. Where did they go? And then that actually goes through. Wow, that was a great segue. Right into our next step. That's not the thing that rides. The segue, like, from one into the other. So, do we have any guides on setting goals? Right. And so, I don't know what kind of guides he's looking for. And he's actually hoping they're on YouTube. And the short answer to that is no. Not yet. We don't. Until this podcast actually, the video part of this podcast gets put on YouTube, which we will do eventually. We're having some staff issues. Issues. We won't go there. So, how to set up goals? Well, really, again, a goal is a target page inside of your website. And

so, we can give you two really quick examples. We've done this before. And we'll go, we can get this information for you more in depth if you go back to our previous podcast. But here's the long and short. We have, on our website, we have a free analysis. If you go fill in the form for the free analysis, it takes you to the thank you page. The thank you page is a goal. So, every time somebody gets to the thank you page, the only way to get there is having filled out the form and gone through the proper validation. And so, when you get to that thank you page, we have a goal. Check. Goal. Woo-hoo. Goal completed. Goal completed. So, that's the kind of things that you want to follow. The other is, on a shopping cart, the thank you page after purchasing is a goal. So, now you know that your goal is to get them to purchase. The only way, the thing that indicates to Google that somebody has purchased is not the order form page, is not the shopping cart, you know, the actual shopping cart with all the items in it. It's the thank you for purchasing page. That's when you've reached your goal. And you can actually do full e-commerce and track the amount. And we've done that on a number of our clients. So, Darren, hopefully that answers your question. If you wanted anything, I don't know if it says guides, I don't know if you need anything further than that. But let us know. You've been in contact. You've been a long-time listener. So, we really appreciate that. I also like this. He asks, does anyone actually know what Google means, right? And he goes to this website. And the website is abbreviations.com. And then you put a slash Google. And they'll find, apparently this is a website that goes and finds abbreviations that people make. And there's a whole bunch of them. And he says he likes God's only online gateway linking electronically. I thought that

was pretty creative. Which was pretty good. I liked great ogling options gathered legally every day. Legally. The emphasis on legally. And Australians, and I'm sure the QEs, have a very entertaining word that we don't use here in America, which is perving. So, that's the process. Perv has a, definitely has a meaning in the United States. Perv, yes. Now, perving is, let's say you're, I don't know, on holiday. You're on the balcony of your hotel. And you're looking over the pool. What are you looking at? Chicks? That's perving. Oh, okay, okay. That makes sense. That makes sense. That makes sense. So, now we'll bring that into the English dictionary. And you know what? I actually happen to know the meaning of Google. I looked it up a couple years ago. So, Darren, this is for you. Google comes, is a number. It comes from the number 10 to the 100th power. Wow. That's where it comes from. But it's not spelled that way. It's spelled a little bit differently. But I actually just looked it up one day. You know, bored. Don't ask me why I'm bored thinking about that kind of stuff. But I thought it was research for the podcast. Yeah. I looked it up again today just to figure out. And I was like, yeah, it was still the same thing. But 10 to the 100th power is supposed to be a really big number. And it's supposed to represent, you know, how they're biggest and the baddest at what they do. Now, if I do it. And they are. Yeah. Tell me. They wrote the book on searching. Yeah, I'm being big and bad. And do we have time? Because somebody else sent me an email. I got an email and someone asked something. It kind of related to what Darren was asking. And it was a website. Let me give them some backlink love. It's nolacouture.com. N-O-L-A-C-O-U-T-U-R-E dot com. Is that like New Orleans, Louisiana? New Orleans, Louisiana, Couture, Couture. Couture. Well, I don't know. I don't even know what that

word means. You know, I asked, when I got the email, I asked a girlfriend of mine and she says it means like trendy fashion. Cutting edge fashion. And I'm like, okay, all right. But Nola Couture sent me an email and says, hey, I got, and some of you may have received these. She says, my position on Google has changed. I know for a fact that at one point I was in the top of the search results, the natural search results. I was in the top five. I'm not there anymore. I received a call from an SEO company and they were marketing. They were trying to pitch me, trying to sell me on it saying, hey, we put your competitor up on the first page of Google and we would like to do the same for you. So she went back and forth and it was a friend of mine. And she asked me, hey, Paul, you know, is that possible? Did they do something to my website to knock me out? I'm getting less traffic right now. Is it possible that they did something? And the quick, short answer I had to tell her was no. Yeah, they didn't do anything to her site. They cannot affect your website without your permission. Unless it got hacked, which you should know. And it did not. I mean, I didn't know it, but it's most likely your website did not get hacked. Unless you, you know, all of a sudden have just millions and millions of dollars or access to the FBI database. They're probably not going to target you. But she asked, you know, why is my traffic decreasing? This kind of goes on to Darren's point. And I told her again, you know, focus on, you know, I'm sorry that your traffic is decreasing. It does suck. But what you want to do is focus on your content. You know, focus on link building. Focus on what we know you can manipulate and work on. Focus on getting more links, which leads us into the

next point about linking. And what was that? Back links. Yeah. We had, if you're a long-time listener, not even that long, it's probably about five or six podcasts ago. I know I said, we talked about it in December because I was kind of upset at Google. Yeah, he was like, hey, where are my links at? Give me my links back. Give me a Google star. Give us our links back. Yes, yes. If you've requested an analysis, and I know Darren knows this because I've sent him an analysis, to say if you want to check your backlinks, you can check it using the link operator. You can find it in the Google Webmaster Tools or type. It's link, colon, and no space, and your domain. I think it's domain is just the eWeb style, not the www. And for a while, that was a great way to check links, and that's how I would check links, rather than using the Google Webmaster Tool. And then one day, we noticed that, you know, we went from thousands of links to 27. I checked it two or three days ago to 27 links, and I'm like, Google, what's going on? Where are my links here? You're messing with my links. And so, finally, we said, let's go do some research, and basically, the consensus is, don't use the link operator tool. It sucks. Yeah. Sorry, Google. And it kind of goes in line with the fact that, you know, Google pulled off your page rank from Webmaster's tool. I think you can still look it up. Frankly, we haven't focused on that that much because the reality is, is if you are consistently working, and this is kind of our statement here at eWeb style, if you, as an SEO person, are consistently working to provide a good experience to the Google user, and also helping your client and or your page, you will succeed. Because that's all Google cares about. If you're using tricks, or if you're, you know, buying links that aren't relevant, if you're doing

things like that, you're not going to succeed. And that was the general answers that I, you know, on the internet, guys were saying you shouldn't be focused on that. And you said that, like, months ago. Like, you know, you shouldn't, don't focus on, don't focus on your links, focus on providing value, on good content. Because if you're trying to focus on links, I mean, which you have to have. And frankly, when we do SEO, that's part of what we're doing is providing backlinks and working hard to provide backlinks. And those backlinks we're working on are valuable links. Yeah. Those take more time, so that's why it takes time. So Google basically doesn't want you to focus on it. They don't want you to know how many links you're getting. You can actually still use the Google Webmaster tool to find your links. However, I think the general answer was that the Webmaster tool still provides more data than the link operator, but it's still not a good indication of your links. There are other sites where you can go to and find your backlinks. And, you know, the short answer is you don't know if Google's, you know, whatever numbers they're giving you and whatever links they're showing you, you don't know if Google takes any of that into account. They probably do. They probably take most of it. In fact, they probably take all of it into account. But, again, don't focus on that. Make sure your efforts for getting links back to your website are geared towards two things. Finding quality websites with quality information about what you're trying to attract traffic to your website for. I think I said that right. And then make sure that the backlinks have the keyword text that you like. If you focus on those two things in terms of backlinking, you'll be a winner. So you're saying, hey, make sure those backlinks have correct anchor text. Anchor text. Ooh. I mean, I forget what that word is like every other day. I'm like, anchor text? Anchor

text? What is that? I've never even heard of that before. That sounds like it will slow you down. Yeah. So focus on that. I've got to remember that because, boy, I forget that term every other day. So everybody out to Darren, to Nola Couture, whatever. I think I've been watching too much gay reality TV because I know how to pronounce Couture. So focus on the things that we've talked about. Focus on your content. Focus on your keyword. Having proper keywords. Make sure you have good anchor text. And that should help you. Watch your Google, your particular keywords. Look at the guys that are on the first page. See what they're doing. Borrow ideas. Don't steal. And you will get there. And if you're really having trouble, call a professional SEO company like eWebStyle. We can definitely help you out, give you good tips and pointers, and do it for you. And let you, like Chris always says, you run your business. You focus on your business, yeah. We will take care of the SEO. We'll get you the traffic and the customers. We'll help you on the SEVO, Search Engine Visitor Optimization. Oh, and that is if you Google to iTunes, and if you type in SEO podcast in the iTunes store, you know, at the very top, 10, 8 podcasts, and below it, there's a list of 50 podcast episodes. Number nine was Search Engine Visitor Optimization. And this is how I found out. I'm like, ooh, somebody did a podcast on Search Engine Visitor Optimization. Let me see what they got going on. I click it, and it's us. It's us. Yes! Well, we're the ones who coined the term. Nobody else is using that term. Yeah. I think it's an incredibly valuable aspect of, well, Search Engine Optimization, to be sure. And this is for Darren. I'm going to address the very last part of your email, Darren. Sometimes people, you know, let's just say you're not the best speller, right? I am not the best speller. You know, I butcher stuff

up all the time. He's like, ah, you know. He can't even pronounce half the words he uses. There you go. And so he was asking about, you know, analytics and stuff like that. And yeah, that's the question. I won't get into it. But I'm going to go ahead and bite the bullet on this, and I'm going to take all the heat for you, Darren. I just looked this up. If you type in Google and what you're thinking, A-N-A-L, you will come up with Google Analytics as the first result. If you type in Google Anal, you will come up with Google Analytics. You can abbreviate Google Analytics to Google Anal. Google Anal. And the first natural result. And if that doesn't come back to what I said, great ogling options gathered legally every day. Legally, baby. All right, guys. Thank you so much for listening. We did miss two things. You can stalk us on Facebook. The easiest way to find our Facebook page is e-webstyle.com slash Facebook. That'll take you to our Facebook page. You can find us on Twitter, twitter.com slash ewebstyle with no dash. Again, that's ewebstyle with no dash after the twitter.com. Follow us. Stalk us. Send us emails. We love having you. We love sharing information. We love these questions that really push us to look up. I mean, he had to look up Google Anal today. I mean, we love that. That's research, baby. All right. Well, you are listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. This is podcast number 47. Unknown Secrets of SEO Podcast. Thank you guys for listening. My name is Chris Burris. Yes, it's Paul Hanson. Bye-bye for now.