Minor Panda Refresh - #seopodcast 135

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. Yes. My name's Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. I'm Charles Lewis, your internet marketing specialist. Thank you guys for tuning in to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. That is because of you and you and you commenting over there. No heckling today. As always, we have a tip from our last podcast. It was a hard one to do because really we just kind of went over Rand Fishkin's predictions. So, our tip is test and follow Rand's predictions by following the Unknown Secrets of SEO Podcast. That's us. And we're supposed to start tweeting it. Somebody told us we need to tweet our tips. Oh, that's a good idea. It may have been Aaron. I don't think AT did it. It was, I forgot. Somebody on our Twitter. You know, I'll tweet it. Aaron punched in the face. We had a conversation. This has been a long week. Sometime in the last ten days. It was a good conversation. We talked about Teleprompters New York. Gave him some ideas. Kind of shifted over to his production company in New Jersey, New York area. Also serving Philadelphia. And a great conversation. Hopefully, we can get you on board. Oh, last Friday. And punch in the face for you because you are always an avid listener and follower. Hey, do not forget we are your friendly, local, neighborhood, top position snatchers where our mantra is. Don't be a deuce. Do not be a deuce. That's a good one, too. Either or is kind of bad. I know. One's smellier than the other. Right now, you should tweet if you're near a device. This is for you, Aaron. You should be tweeting right now, and you should be tweeting hashtag SEOpodcast135. Do I got that right? Yeah. Look at that. And you can actually read my handwriting. Man, this is my handwriting. It's so bad. Yeah, it's a whole other podcast. This is on his handwriting. How his handwriting hurts your issue. Hashtag SEOpodcast135. Tag us at eWebStyle.

And let us know if you're watching it. Tell us what you think. And if you've got a site or something like that, include that, and we'll check it out. And there are a myriad of ways you can actually follow us, contact us, stalk us. Facebook.com slash eWebStyle. Twitter.com slash eWebStyle. YouTube.com slash eWebStyle. Podcast at e-WebStyle.com. And that is, of course, our email address here. Feel free to send. We get lots of good questions. Did you see the new tier tattoo? Oh, new tier. Yeah. I'll tell you what. There's actually something that accommodates that. We do have some reviews that are on our Google Places page. Google Local Places. This one is, these guys provide very knowledgeable and up-to-date information. Thank you all for the help. This was from Robert. The next one is from Aid. These chaps claim to have the most popular SEO podcast on the planet. With good reasons. These podcasts are most informative. I wish I had listened to them as they were broadcast originally. I would have learned from them then. By the time I caught up with them, SEO had moved on. Yes, there is a certain style to these podcasts. Blah, blah, blah. We're just going to go on this. He actually has, just like we have blue one-armed widgets, he's got bribe people with cake. His website will come up. Listen and talk to them about Sevo, not dissimilar to the chaps at Copyblogger. This is a long one. We're done. Punch in the face. What was his name? That was Robert and Aid. Oh, and then on our Google Places ad, there is one more by Mo, and it's titled, Worst Service Ever, No Comment. Yeah. Thanks, Mo. Why don't you get in contact, and we can actually address whatever pseudo-concerns you have. Little notes that I have about news. I was remarketed to on Ustream. So as I was researching our last podcast, listening to our last podcast, trying to figure out what our tip was going to be for our last podcast, because normally we

do it immediately after a podcast. Last podcast we forgot, and I can't even find my notes. So that's just how that goes. His handwriting is hiding from you. Don't make me worse. So I'm looking on Ustream, listening to our last podcast, and there we are, remarketed to Goose Creek Candle Valentine's Sale. Yeah. Punch in the face to Goose Creek Candle. They're a client of ours doing a lot of remarketing, a lot of good things going on. The best in the candles in the country right now. The next thing I noticed, just because as I was doing research this morning, Flash is crashing a lot. Are you bumping into that? I have like a hundred windows open all the time. It's crashing on you in Firefox? In Firefox, yeah. I've been Chrome-y lately. Oh, okay. So maybe it's a problem. Well, I'm still using both, but I haven't been accessing any Flash component websites in Firefox. You know, Gmail has some Flash in it. That's pretty, it does have some Flash in it. So you have, because I know you're on Gmail all the time. What's interesting is I was going to make a point in the podcast that, you know, hey, here's Steve Jobs. This is the reason that he didn't want to have Flash on his devices. Ironically, I opened iTunes and it crashed. So I won't be making that comment. Wow. There was a Panda data refresh today, and I read through some of the details. What I found was really interesting is Google actually won't do algorithm updates in the holidays. Like, they readily say we're not going to make major changes during the holidays, right? Because if you've kind of built up into a particular place and then they slash you, it kind of admits that our algorithm updates aren't perfect, right? And so we're not going to do them at a critical time for a business because, you know, it could do way too much damage to a business. Well, thank you, Google. Yeah. We appreciate that. Also, Gmail has

been a little buggy. Gmail has been crashing on me. And like I said, maybe it's a Firefox thing. Maybe it's a Gmail thing. Maybe. I don't know. I don't know. It's a little frustrating. Google has been crashing. Well, I won't say crashing. But when we had the storm and we had the outage here. Right. When the internet did come back up, I could access every site but Google. Oh, that happened before, right? Yeah. And then it eventually came up. So I don't know if it's an issue with my PC or what. Well, our router barfed on us, too. So we had to switch out our routers. Router barf. We're optimized for that. Router barf. Just create a page for a router barf. That's good. All right. So we actually have content for today. Yeah, yeah. This is an article called SEO Short Cheat Sheets, which is a pretty good cheat sheet. Of course, I've read through all of them before we decided to present it to you guys. You cheated about the cheat sheets? Well, we wanted to make sure I agreed or even disagreed, but at least make sure it wasn't off the wall ridiculous. And it's actually pretty good. It has some cheat sheets. Basically, some of the things, basics, you should be doing if you're running an SEO campaign. And so this is by Max On Fire. Yeah. That's got to be a pen name. Probably so. Hopefully so. His dad opened Office Max. And he's on fire. And a gas station. Number one was keyword basics. And it goes on to say that the most important thing with keywords for your website is that you begin the process with proper research. And that's definitely true. Like, you must make sure that the keywords you're targeting, especially for SEO, are the right phrases. Last thing you want to do is optimize the site for the wrong phrases. You know, phrases that bring unqualified traffic or aren't searched that often or, frankly, just don't fit. We were visiting with our client, Delta Autoglass,

last night. Yeah. And punch in the face to them. Their campaign, well, punch in the face to us. Yeah. Because their campaign is rocking. And they're excited. Their business has doubled. Their marketing budget actually hasn't doubled. It has increased a little. So that's really exciting. And one of the points that Charles was making during the meeting was that go search glass. Because just the word glass is not the word you want to be optimized for for an autoglass company. There's just too many options. It's too unqualified. Residential glass and commercial glass and all sorts of stuff. And the reason that even came up was because he was saying that one of his competitors is always on top, paid search. And I gave him that example to just really highlight a mismanaged pay-per-click budget. Right. Coming up for glass. Yep. They can service windshields. And with regard to keyword basics, I mean, we always say, keywords, keywords, keywords. Everything starts with keywords. Yes, sir. And number two is create great URLs. And it goes on to say, there are many steps that go into creating great URLs. Starting from the beginning, you should pick a domain name that is short, memorable, and includes the most important key phrase. While hyphens are acceptable, more than two begins to get excessive and spam-like. Like, this one here I feel so-so about. Yeah, I'm more than, I haven't heard, I've never heard that. Yeah. Well, I've heard it before, but I felt suspect about it then. And so, you know, my thing is, the keyword rich domain name is always great to have. And in regards to the rest of the URL, if it's the three- or four-word phrase, you know, windshield replacement Houston, like our Delta client, then there's two hyphens that I have to have. Right. And there's no way around it. And so, I don't think it becomes spam-like. Frankly, I think it's assisting in the SEO because now I have a clearly identified key phrase in my URL. Yep. And that breaks it apart. It

actually makes it easier to read. Even users who aren't aware of an address bar and that the address bar exists, if they glance up there, it makes sense for them. And not just that, when you start thinking about blogging and how different platforms and permalinks and things like that work, if we do a blog post, then it's probably going to have five or six hyphens, you know, due to the post title. Yep. And those make great URLs, so I kind of disagree with this one. So, I do agree with the fact that you need, it's great to have keywords in your domain name, but if you have hyphens in your URL due to the subject matter of your post, then so be it. So, number three, find long-tail key phrases. Long-tail keywords often are the secret to great search engine ranking. Check. Long-tail key phrases are great because doing SEO, they tend to rank easier. Usually, someone searching a long-tail key phrase is more qualified because they know exactly what they're looking for. And so, yeah, if you can find long-tail key phrases that kind of support your highly, you know, competitive target phrase, then find them, optimize for them, and use them. Number four, use Latin semantic indexing, or LSI, which is the process of including related key phrases in words to your main phrases in order to boost your site's value in the search engines. So, that's kind of along the line of long-tail, right? So, for example, the example they gave was if you were optimizing for coffee makers, then you should include some other phrases like iced coffee or organic coffee around those phrases to kind of help boost your rankings and show relevance. Yep, and we tend to, we'll target three keyword sets or so depending on the, per page, depending on the competitiveness. And so, that's kind of going to happen naturally with the content that we tend to create and the end result of a page that we tend to have. It's interesting, the latent semantic would also

imply that, you know, there's other ways to describe a particular service. So, auto glass, well, it would almost be like auto glass repair and replacement except for the fact that, in our case, our client actually doesn't do repair. They only do replacement. I'm just trying to think of some other example where there's two ways to describe it with two totally different keyword sets and to include those on the same page has value because of the fact that the semantics are, the semantics are different but the meaning is the same. And Google is aware of that. Definitely. Number five says, get smart with internal links. Many websites don't properly use their internal links to their own advantage. It's an easy way to help each of your pages get a higher and more targeted ranking in the search engines. I agree. And frankly, from a user perspective, it's an easier way to help the people who visit your site navigate through the site by reading content. Especially if you, you know, have these links with the right anchor text in the content in the right places as they're reading. Kind of guide them through the path you want them to take. That really lends itself towards SEVO, search engine visitor optimization, which is being able to take somebody who's come to your site, in this case usually from a search engine, and guide them towards whatever end goal that you have. Whether it be picking up the phone, whether it be filling out a newsletter sign-up form or a white paper sign-up form, which obviously should also get them on a newsletter, whatever the end goal is. It does have some SEO ranking as well, but keep in mind that if you have multiple internal links that all go to the same page, Google is only going to pay attention to the first one. And so make that first one have the right ad text, the right keyword anchor text that you want it to have, because that's the one that they'll actually pay attention to. So

dive into PPC, whereas other SEO strategies take time to work, PPC advertising is a great way to see immediate results. Start running a campaign for your website, back with the keyword research you're already done, and start small because costs can build up. We agree, one of the things we do here is we offer a package. That package includes SEO and pay-per-click management, because that's the easiest way for you to, first off, get an immediate return on your investment. And two, it's the best way for us to gauge which key phrases are going to work best. If it's not costing any money, it's not generating any results, then I probably shouldn't optimize for it. If it is costing money, it is generating results, and it's seeming very popular, then we should optimize for it. Absolutely. And it has a lot of other advantages. SEO, sometimes you have less control of the landing page. So that's one of the reasons that your landing page needs to be really succinct and have the ability to send people in the right direction, because people can land on our landing page, on our homepage, because of SEO Houston or because of Pay-Per-Click Houston. Whereas with a Pay-Per-Click campaign, they actually would land on our Pay-Per-Click Houston page for Pay-Per-Click ads, or our SEO Houston page. And so the advantage with Pay-Per-Click is your landing page for a particular ad group really can be highly targeted on our landing page for PPC. We don't even have to mention that we do SEO. No reason to confuse the client about, oh, what's SEO? Let me go research it before I make a decision. No. If you clicked a Pay-Per-Click ad, and you landed on a Pay-Per-Click page, you're probably ready to go. So pick up the phone, call us, and we'll get you started on Pay-Per-Click. And again, organic tends to send people to the homepage. You do have some control over that, and there are mitigating factors that help you control that. You've got to make sure that your homepage has

clearly identified ways. And frankly, we're not doing a great job of it on our own site. So that's something that we have under works is to revamp our homepage. On that same topic, we talked earlier about keyword research. And I'm thinking about Delta, a client we just spoke about, doing really good. And this is a situation where keyword research and PPC helped us with the SEO. Because during the research part of this campaign, auto glass repair was a phrase that they wanted to target. And so we began doing keyword research. I pulled probably 150 different variations of the auto glass repair, windshield repair, car auto glass repair. But what we found out while doing a paid search campaign for repair was that people who search repair don't want that windshield replaced. They actually wanted a repair. They wanted repair, the little crack, you know, fixed and things like that. And it's not what they do. They do replacement. And so luckily, I go in and pause that campaign, and I took the time for repair. Right. That would have been a problem. Yep. But I had already optimized for replacement because I knew that was their target. And so, again, PPC helps you realize those, and that way you don't make a long-term mistake. And it explains to you why, you know, why all of this internet marketing needs to be a month-to-month process where we're iterating with a client, understanding where they're at, what results they're getting, are they the right results, and then tweaking the direction of the campaign regularly. Yeah. Number seven, optimize your images. Always include alt tags for your images that describe what the image is with targeted keywords and phrases. Check. And I would also include image title because what I've learned, well, yeah, what I've learned is that do-ba-dee-doo browser updates. Because now it's not the alt tag that shows when you hover over it, it's the image title. And so, people who don't have an alt, they do have an alt tag but no image title, if

you hover over the image with your mouse, you won't get the pop-up. Right. It's the title that pops up. And, frankly, screen readers read the title. And so, definitely give your images the alt tag and an image title and put the keyword in both places. Yep. You can take it a step further for a while people are doing some advanced SEO and change the image file name to keyword.jpg. Yep. Okay. That one was free. Ooh, yeah. Giving it all away. Number eight, optimize your title tag. Many people think that anything they put in their title tag will be sufficient, but this couldn't be furthest from the truth. Your page title provides an excellent opportunity to boost your rankings, as well as draw people into your site to see more visitors. Yeah. Yeah. Optimize your title tags. Don't overdo it. You know. No keyword stuffing. Yeah. Don't have, you know. Well, and it's kind of strange, because on your homepage, when you're covering a variety of topics, kind of introing people to the site, then maybe you do want to have two or three different key phrases. Well, I was thinking, like, stuffing, like, Autoglass Houston. Houston Autoglass. Okay. You know, Autoglass. Replacement. Autoglass repair. Houston Stafford, you know. Yeah. You want to be careful about your keyword density. And you're right, you know, we've got all those terms. We've got, you know, SEO Houston, PPC Houston, and our title tag on our homepage, so. Yeah, and then on the individual pages, it's direct for that particular phrase. Number nine, meta tag notes. The meta keywords tag is no longer used by Google for ranking, although other search engines may still use it. More important are the meta title and meta description tags. Keep it 70 characters or less. Keep your meta description 160 characters or less. And, or anything more will get cut off by the search engines. And we always say that meta description is the thing that shows up as the description in the search and result page. Search and result page. So,

that's your first opportunity for CIVO. That's the first opportunity you can start closing clients. We've actually put different phone numbers in the, in the, and tracked the phone number in the description and know that we get phone calls without people going to the website. I mean, maybe they call first and go to the website or whatever, but they're actually calling the number that's only in the SERP. It doesn't exist anywhere else. So, you know, it is the first opportunity for search engine visitor optimization. Definitely. Number 10, link building. What not to do. Many people go in the wrong direction when it comes to link building. For example, buying links or participating in a link form is doomed from the get-go. You should also avoid low-quality spammy directories. I concur. You know, definitely. Link building is one of those things where it's not hard, but it's definitely time-consuming and tedious. And so, um, if you're going to do it, um, do it the right way, you know, guess blogs, um, and really submitting to directories that, that aren't spammy, that are relevant to your industry. Uh, blog posting. And don't, don't go posting spammy comments. Oh, I like your post, but check out my site link. Right. You know, because frankly, if it's my blog, I won't approve your comment. Uh, but most people won't either. But instead, say something relevant to the post and then link to your site. And if they'll let you link to your site in your comment text with the right anchor text, kind of an internal link, uh, some sites will allow you to post, uh, HTML in the comments. Right. Some don't. Right. If they do, take that route. It has a huge effect. You can get your keyword in there, and usually they'll get approved. Um, number 11, link building what should, what you should do. Um, okay. As I just said, submit to high quality directories. DMOZ, best of the well. Um, these can, can pay off huge dividends. I agree, and I also add, uh, Yahoo

search directory to that. Like 300 bucks, um, and it's worth getting that high PR link to your site. Um, whatever's that word again. Can, canonicalization. Yeah, don't forget. Canonicalization. Yeah. You want to maximize your search engine results while improving your ability, to track your site's traffic, then ensure your pages aren't being counted more than once. Yeah. Don't have, you know, ewefstyle.com and www.e-wefstyle.com. Yeah. Make one of them the default and forward the others to it. And it's, it, that's all about link juice. You just don't want to spread, you know, if people are linking to www and non-www, uh, and other people are linking to the non-www, you're, you're, you're spreading, spreading your link juice, um, canonicalize, uh, canonicalize them and, uh, and have, uh, at all one. We actually do 301 redirects. Yeah. Um, which is, is more solid. Uh, the canonicalization is more of something that you want to do if you've got some structures that's related to blogs that really make sense, and you want to keep that structure and still kind of tell Google where the original content is. Definitely. Um, uh, last but not least, number 13, um, stick with HTML. The benefits of JavaScript and other program languages are lost because code isn't searchable by the search engines. To help your cause of ranking highly, stick to easily accessed HTML for your website. Like, avoid overcomplicating your site with excess forms, frames, of any kind, or code that isn't searchable. Yeah. I would agree. Um, some JavaScript is good. You know, um, I would say what he didn't say, and I'll say, is stay away from Flash. Yeah. You know, if he's in Flash navigation or, you know, different Flash headers, um, that rotate, you know, all these new sites, rotating banners is, is the new thing now. And so, use JavaScript for those. So, that way, the text that's on those is usually pretty keyword rich and should be, uh, scannable, indexable. And with Flash, it's not with JavaScript it is. And so, uh, I would definitely, you

know, stay away from Flash and use the new script when you can. I like the note. The note. I don't know if you read that note. As I'm stating in number 12, I love WordPress. Go WP. Why? Well, one of the main engineers at Google said it best. WordPress does 80 to 90% of what Google loves without changing a setting. If you haven't already, look for ways to use WordPress in your business. Yeah. I love it. Yeah. All the sites we're building, we're building them on WordPress. Uh, and I'm finishing a Drupal site for, for one of our clients and it's a mess. I mean, it's a mess. Yeah. It's, it's, it's a client that we are, we're taking care of, uh, they actually build websites. They subcontracted it to us and so it's her responsibility to take it to the client and we're just going back and forth. I'm like, you're going to have to explain a lot to your client and your client's never going to get it and that's okay. Frankly, when we do WordPress sites for our clients, we understand that nine times out of 10, they're not going to do any what they envisioned they were going to do from the beginning. They're not going to get in there and tweak content, upload photos, all that stuff. Um, that's just how it is. They'll end up coming back to us because the learning, they just shouldn't be doing it. They shouldn't be doing it. But they can. And with WordPress, if they choose to, um, is, is, is, is significantly easier, like just crazy easier. So, um, so excellent. So that's a good article. So check that out. Google post this on the, on the Facebook page. Excellent. Remember to follow us on our Facebook page. Remember, uh, so that I don't have to, you know, put another tear tattoo. To, you need to go to iTunes, you need to create an account, and you need to submit a review, please. Yeah, hit this up, man. And you can also,

uh, submit a review on our, on our, um, Google Places page. All you gotta do is, actually the best way is go to e-webstyle.com slash seopodcast. And there towards the bottom, right above the, uh, Charles bio and my bio is a list of links that are related to e-webstyle. One of them is our Google Places page. You got a brilliant idea. I am going, we'll talk about it. Yeah. Oh, got some blank stare. Remember, brilliant, all right. Yeah. Blank stare with the smirk. Oh, with the smirk? I was, I was blank. Like, this blank stare is at the, uh, CEO of, uh, RIM, right? Right, right. Blackberry, RIM, right? So, yeah, he made a comment that, uh. Research in motion. Yeah. He, he gets on, he gets on ESPN2. He's been interviewed about something. And his comment was, no, I don't think we need change. And so, uh, I, first off, I thought you were going to say his phone rings and it was an iPhone. Yeah, he probably carries an iPhone. Right. Uh, but no, I don't think we need change. And so that went nuts. And I was in my mouth, I was like, yeah, I don't need change. Like, yeah. Have you paid attention to your market share? And so, uh, but then he came back and he had one of those, well, what had happened was moments. Right, right. So he came back and cleared it up and was saying, um, I don't think we need structural changes like in regards to, you know, employees. Oh, the organization. Yeah. He was saying that we need a lot of other changes, you know, in regards to the products we're putting out, how we're releasing them. And so they said they have some pretty big things. They got a new OS for the playbook. Right. Which is supposed to be nice. Um, and instead of releasing three or four phones at one time, like they usually do in an Instagram. Right. And hit, like Samsung does. Yep. And so, uh, so hopefully it'll

work. I used to be a Crackberry using, so we'll see. Yeah. They, they, they made a good product. It was, it was the best business phone ever, really. And, well, until now. At the time it was the best. Their, their push technology was pretty, pretty ingenious in the way they integrated it. Um, not easy to submit reviews using the iPhone. Uh, yeah. Yeah, that does suck. The iPhone, are we asking for an iTunes review? Yeah. We, uh, actually I was on the phone with one of our listeners in Australia. Oh, yeah. And, and he, he said he can only, he submitted a review a long time ago, uh, and it's not showing up. So I think iTunes actually does keep Australian reviews separate from US reviews. Cause he says he only sees 17 reviews and we have like 75 reviews. Um, and so I asked him to send a screenshot and he goes, well, I'm, I'm viewing it on my iPhone. I have no idea how to send you a screenshot. So, uh, another iPhone issue. All right. Flash is cheesy. Who was that from? That was, uh, that was from Jan Beckman. Punch in the face. All right. Well, uh, that it? We're done? You have been listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. That is because of people like Jan Beckman, Aaron Thomas, who are actually listening live, real time. Thank you guys. Um, remember you can follow us. Actually, you can watch the video of this by going to e-webstyle.com slash SEO podcast. Uh, we broadcast where our start time's a little rough. Sorry guys. Uh, for sometime between nine 15 and 10 15. Yeah. Follow us on Twitter. Cause I tweet literally about five minutes before we go on air. So then you don't have to be sitting at your computer. We don't want that unless you're tweeting about us. Yeah. Hashtag SEO podcast 135. Thank you guys for tuning in until next time. I'm Chris Burris. Charles Moose. Bye bye for now.