Myths vs Facts - Internet Marketing - #SEOpodcast 232

Hi, 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 edition of our podcast. This is podcast number 232. You can see that number right behind us if you're watching the video, and you can also see a hashtag, hashtag SEOpodcast. We'll get to that later. As always, there is a podcast from our previous tip. Yeah, tip from the previous podcast. Podcast, yes, and it's develop keywords based on the actions you want your web visitors to take. Yeah, I mean, for example, if maybe the action you want people to do is, I don't know, download a mixtape or subscribe to something, then include those type of actions in your keyword research. People who tend to want a phone call, then they're looking to contact. And so you want to use some sort of keywords that has an action related to the action that you want them to take. That way, you're not optimizing for just visitors who don't actually do anything. You're optimizing for people who will eventually turn into leads. Absolutely. And you might as well, while you're doing that, make sure some of those actions actually occur or are mentioned inside, well, at least the call to action mentioned inside the ad. Yeah, mentioned inside your ad or inside your description. And frankly, if that's the case, in the keyword, in the description or ad, and then after they click, that should be what they see on that page as well. Yep. We call that continuity. That's one form of continuity. Definitely. Please remember, we are your friendly local neighborhood top position snatchers. Yes. That was good. That was good. That was pretty good. Where our mantra is. Don't be a douche. A douche is a not a good look. I don't know where the Italian guy came from. That would sound like Luigi from Mario Brothers. It's not a good look. You don't want to be a douche. All right. Tweet now

if you can. There's a couple things that you could tweet. Really, there's two things that you could tweet, or we could combine them into one. Chuck, take it away. This right here that's behind me, hashtag SEO podcast. Be sure to tag us in it, at bestSEOPodcast, at eWebStyle. That way we can follow you back and do all of our social stuff. If you like our podcast, and hopefully, even if this is the first time listening, you already like our podcast, actually, history tells us that if you're first listening to this podcast, if you're listening to this podcast for the first time, you're kind of like, what's going on? Are they going to cover any SEO information? Don't worry. We're going to get past the Gino time limit. Go back and listen to the rest of the podcast to find out. We haven't been broadcasting 232 podcasts because we suck. Exactly. That's what I'll say. And if you're enjoying the podcast, you could do three things for us that would really help us out. The first one has actually three tasks. Go onto iTunes, create an account, write a review. If you write a review, we're hoping that you'll give us five stars. And if you give us five stars and you choose to, go ahead and send us an email, podcast at e-webstyle.com. The next thing you could do is you could go to our G Plus local page and you could write a review and do some circle stuff, all sorts of stuff over there. And we made it really, really, really easy for you to get to our G Plus local page. Well, what that blog post said, I was going to say minified. Minified. Simplified. So, the way you get there is you go to e-webstyle.com slash Google plus or slash Google plus or slash G plus or slash G plus. All of those links will take you directly to our G Plus local page where you can do all sorts of things. When you get there, put us in a circle,

write us a five-star review and give us a plus one. Cool. The final thing that you could do for us, like us on Facebook. Our Facebook page is facebook.com slash e-webstyle. And when you're there, over on the right down, a couple sections is an area where you can write reviews. You could go ahead and give us a five-star review over there. We would really appreciate it. And while we're covering all the social media, I want to say all the ways you can stalk us and haunt us. Facebook.com slash e-webstyle. Twitter.com slash e-webstyle. YouTube.com slash e-webstyle. And Instagram.com slash e-webstyle. I think that's all of them. I even got the Instagram in there. Yeah, you did. By the way, if you don't know, and we had to do this a long time ago, we also do websites. I'm just going to let you know we also do websites. And we do great search engine marketing, internet marketing in general. In fact, if you have an SEO customer that comes to us, that you send to us, and they pay their bill, you can get paid. That's our referral program. It plays cheddar. Next, we have a free website analysis on our website. Our new website, which, by the way, apparently everyone is reading the free website analysis. Remember when we used to say we were a little behind? We're a little bit more behind now. And actually... We're talking about site launch and... Yeah, remember that commercial when they launched it? This is, man, maybe four or five years ago. They're like, hey, we're launching our website. And they're all standing around the little laptop. And the laptop goes, cha-ching. And everyone's like, ah! And then it goes, cha-ching! Ah! Cha-ching! Ah! Brrrr! Dead silence. That's how it was. It was like, whoa! We got some phone calls to make. And I've been cranking through them. I mean, you know, got new agreement and some other things. And so we'll get to you. Yes. We'll get there. Cool. And any Algo Cat? So a little bit.

Okay. A little bit, actually. All right, wait. So now it's for the section called the Algorithm Cataclysm. I forgot I read this earlier today, actually. So Google is experimenting. Remember, they released Carousel last year. Yeah, yeah. And so Carousel was really for, like, events and restaurants and things like that. Hotels. Hotels and other venues. So Google is experimenting with showing products in the carousel. Duh. Duh. Makes sense. And so those will be fed directly from your merchant account that has to work with AdWords now. So your Google-based merchant. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's pretty cool. I think that's a better way to show them than the little kind of six-pack they were showing. Yeah. Might as well put them in the carousel. Yeah. That way you can just... I had that sound in my head when I did it. I don't want to use the first one. That one. Yeah, that one. That was good. Yeah. I heard the stop sound. That was pretty good. All right. So a little bit of news. That's probably how it would really sound. Yeah. It's like... Yeah. It locks in place. Target acquired. All right. So in our news, we've got a little bit... It's Zuda Pocket Printer. This is kind of cool. It's a little device that you set on a piece of paper and it prints. So you can imagine... Also, it crawls on the paper. Crawls on the paper. Isn't that so smart? It's like why it hasn't anyone... I'm going to print this for you. Like, yeah, we need that. Yeah. I'm going to print this contract right now. From your phone, from any device that it can possibly connect to. Yeah. Wow. That's kind of cool. It is a... What kind of... I can't remember... Kickstarter. It's a Kickstarter thing. So it'll be out soon. It's kind of cool. I want one. Right? Like, it's cool. Now, you've got to set it in the right place and all that stuff. You've got to program the fact that this is an 8.5 by

11 size sheet of paper and blah, blah, blah. You're starting in the upper left corner. Anyway, very cool. I thought this was really cool. A Chinese company has created 3D printed houses. You know how you can make 3D models? So they just made a really big printer that does concrete. They printed a house. Really? Yeah. I mean, it's a small house. But still. They printed a house. Less than $5,000. They already have a contract with the government because they need housing over there. Remember, once upon a time, there were two Chinamen. Now, look how many there are. Benny Hill, go. So, most of you will probably have to look up Benny Hill to know what that is. Yeah, that was all right. I used to watch him way back in the day. Oh, yeah. Late night TV, black and white. He came on and, yeah. There was only one reason to watch. Yeah, because he was. Had scantily clad women all over his TV. It was, yeah, it was great. The other thing that was interesting, kind of the opposite end of the 3D printing, is doing printing, 3D printing artificial eyes. So, welcome, sir. Would you be interested in our houses or an eye? Yeah. Well, if you need artificial eyes, then you probably want the artificial eye. Yeah. By the way, if you get an eye, we throw in a house. You just have to provide a lot of land. All right. Which is quite small. This was interesting. Yahoo exec let go. He worked only 15 months. Oh, 3.8 million per month? Yes. $58 million parachute. Yeah. I don't know. And, like, Wall Street wonder which is why America's mad. Like, 15 months. Yeah, I saw the article. He's making $3.8 million a month. Yeah. Stupid. All right. And then, this is interesting. So, we all remember our what from last time was Heartbleed, right? And this hack and the availability because of OVA and SSL and all that stuff. Huh? I was thinking about a client. So, yeah, that would be

a good client to ask. So, the Canadians arrested a Canadian teenager who used the Heartbleed opening to get into the Canadian tax system. Like, so, you can just see a teenager. This will be cool. Yeah. And then, you know. And then they actually do it. No, it won't be cool. There is nothing cool about getting arrested. So, they actually had to delay filing Canadian taxes by a week. Right? So, they shut down the website. So, you could not file your Canadian taxes for a week. Like, that's, man. That's, I think that makes it the most. I didn't get through all of the article. I think it makes it the most expensive hack ever in history. Ever. Ever. Wow. That's just. That's like. That's like. It's kind of cool, though, a little bit. Like, he actually did it. Yeah. The fact that he actually pulled that off. No, he got arrested. I know. He was going to jail probably for a really long time. But, he shut down. Yeah, he postponed taxes. You know. That's kind of cool. There's some, like, 0.5% of the Canadian population. I was like, yes. That kid is a god for them, right? It's like, I need that week because I didn't. My tax is not done yet. Wow. All right. A couple reviews. This one. The title is, great mix of SEO news, education, and fun. We give it a five stars. This is from Evgeny from Australia. Yeah. Yeah. So, I couldn't think of one. I was trying to come up with an Australian accent. Evgeny New. Right? I don't know. Yeah. It's the same thing. This podcast is so. It got much clearer when I tried to articulate that. Clearify it, yeah. This podcast is so good that I write short summaries of each episode and email them to my colleagues at the office. Wow. Wow. Just to repeat that line again. I hadn't read this yet, actually. This podcast is so good that I write short summaries of each episode and email them to my colleagues at

the office. Now our Google search impressions are growing like crazy. Thank you so much, guys. Put podcast at e-wordstyle.com on that email list. Yeah. Send the email to us. That's awesome. We'll, like. Wow. I'll post it and link back to you and then. Wow. Thank you, Evgeny New. Yeah. And a phonetic spelling of that name. What you accomplishing there? Yeah. Because I'm missing something. Man. I just read that. That's pretty awesome. Yeah. That's pretty cool. I write short summaries of each episode and email them to my colleagues. When did you start, right? Like, how long have you been doing that? That's awesome. All right. Richard Doughty. I wonder if he writes the summary of the potatoes part. Probably not. That's my part. That sucks. You suck. Evgeny New. Punch in the face. Yeah. Punch in the face. Richard Doughty. Maybe you guys can answer this question. So this is a question. Actually, let me cover the reviews. This is Juan Hassoun. It says, great podcast. Love the info, guys. Boom. Thank you. And then we've got two questions. One is Richard Doughty. Maybe you guys can answer this question for me. Hopefully we can. I'm helping a relative with their business site. They have the site created and hosted by web.com. Web.com was charging a crazy amount per month and not doing much as far as optimization and SEO. So he asked that he help. He purchased the rights to use the domain name. So he owns the domain name. But the price for the site designer is way too much. Still there. He retains the right to the content as he created it. We will be changing, hosting, and building the site again. With the pages already being indexed, do I run the risk of dupe content? What else do I need to consider before starting to work on this project? Well, if you took the domain name. Great question, right? Phenomenal question. Punch in the face. Punch in the face. For choosing us to even answer it. I don't think you run a

dupe content issue because you're taking a domain name. And so essentially that site goes away, is my understanding. Well, web.com is not going to leave it up once you stop paying. Yeah, once you stop paying, they're going to take it offline anyway. So I would be sure to not only get your content that's posted, but look at the URLs. If that site does have any ranking, look at the URLs for each page of content you have on there and copy those. Maybe put them on a spreadsheet or something like that. Because it's likely that web.com, so they're probably .web something or another or whatever. And if it is HTML, then they're probably .html or .asp or .php or something like that. And hopefully you'll be moving over to, let's say, WordPress. And so you'll want to redirect those URLs. Yeah, you can use a tool like Xenu, X-E-N-U. Yeah, good tool. Go to Xenu.com. I think that's it. If not, just Google Xenu site, whatever, robot, something. And it'll scan your existing website as it is. Make sure you do it before you shut it down. And then that'll give you the list of all the URLs. It'll also point out all your broken links and stuff, so you'll know what to fix. And we run it after we launch our website to make sure, you know, you usually want to do broken links, so we fix that. And then, yeah, like Charles said, make sure you do the three on redirect. Because remember, the entire internet is going to stop going to web.com, and they're going to start going to whatever server you have with your domain. So now you've got full control. If somebody linked to you and they're trying to find that old URL, you can tell, your server can tell that individual, hey, that's moved. I'm not over there anymore. I'm over here now. Permanently, which is the 301. There you are. So make sure you do that. You look with that. Yeah, great question. Another question, John Liu, did he

know both of his names are bathroom reference? I don't know. On one of the pod, I'm sure he does, right? Like, he did not get through junior high without, yeah. On one of the podcasts, Chuck suggested WP SEO by Yoast as the top three pick out of the three that he previously used. Okay. Yeah, because we used Ultimate SEO and a couple others. Above the all in one. Yep. When you guys utilize this plugin for clients, would you suggest the paid premium version or would the free one suffice most needs? Great question. Yeah. We still use it. The free one is sufficient, right, for what we're doing because what it does is essentially makes it easier to knock out most of your on-page stuff, right? So instead of having to, I don't know, go in and edit every single page to edit every single title and add descriptions to every single post of Yoast allows you to kind of do that from a glance. And bam, bam, bam, bam, knock those out. It also syncs up well with your Google profile and makes authorship setup easy and syncs up with Webmaster Tools and makes that whole setup and approval process easier with Bing Webmaster Tools as well. And so, man, all of that's in the free version. So I haven't really used the paid version. Right, right. So I'll be honest. I'm not sure what Yoast paid version would probably offer you. Maybe it could get our clients from position one to, wait, there's nothing better than position one. Okay. Yeah. No. Yeah, so we're doing okay with the free version. So you could probably do okay with the free version as well. All right. And it probably has more reporting kind of stuff. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's all analytical data that they can give you or maybe even tips. Recommendations. Things you should probably be doing. So if you're a newbie, then maybe, right? You need some information on what you should be optimizing these pages for, then maybe that paid version does

that. And it gives you those recommendations. You're a podcast listener, so you'll be able to kind of filter out which of those recommendations really do make sense for you and which ones don't. Definitely. Excellent. Thank you again, John Liu. Punch in the face. Pa-toof, pa-toof, pa-toof. That was the potatoes of our podcast time to get into the meat. Take it away, Chuck. Yeah, so I was at Surgeon's Den Watch today. Want to give a huge punch in the face, and that's a good thing, to Christine Schackinger. I had a clue in that that's a good thing, because we got one of those webinars we got. Yeah. They questioned that. Oh, yeah, yeah. So what is a punch in the face, anyway? Oh, okay. Yeah. So it's a good thing. It's equivalent to a pat on the back, shout out, kudos, you're the man kind of thing. Yeah, so it's a punch in the face, literally. So this punch in the face goes to Christine Schackinger over at Search Engine Watch. She posted an article, SEO, your website, and you. Five myths and 10 tips. 15 things, right? So, of course, we'll breeze through these. Right. But I did go through them. That's a lot, so we'll go through them fast. But a pretty good article. I like the myths, especially. And so let's dive in. Number one, myth one, if you build it, they will come. You know, I had a client the other day. I was like, still, so we're three years. People still think that. That's why I like this one. Four or five years past that, right? And, like, look, just putting it out there doesn't help. Even in a lot of cases, in most cases, just doing good on-page stuff and having it be an island of good SEO, not enough. Yeah. You have to, you know what I'm saying, do some more. It needs links. It needs a strong tech base. It needs, you know, fast-paced downloads and other things. It needs activity. Like, it needs constant refreshing. It needs

updating. It needs fresh content. It needs to be relevant. It needs all of that and then some in order for it to eventually generate traffic, which turns into leads. So if you build it, I don't care how awesome. Well, if you're using a company like us, traffic turns into leads. Turns into leads, yeah. If you just build it, no, they won't come. No. It'll just be there. Yep. Everyone that you tell exactly where it is, they will go. They will find it. All of them, all four. Maybe, if you built it right. We've seen sites that didn't rent for people. For their own name, it's like, yeah, I'm not, is your website down maybe for the last nine months? Yeah, so myth number two, link building is dead because it's not dead. Oh, wow. Matter of fact, it's alive and kicking. It's just kicking in a different direction. Yep. You have to be a lot more careful, a lot more. Strategic. Yeah. Yeah. Strategic. Yeah. A lot more strategic. We'll make that mean something in a minute. Yeah. But a lot more strategic in how you link build. Right. To be honest, a lot more natural. Long gone are those gust blogging days for the sake of building links and submitting to a thousand directories and all of that kind of stuff. Hmm. Doesn't work anymore. Frankly, may even have a bad adverse effect. Yeah. On your link building. Significantly bad. That's called a manual spam action. Exactly. But link building is not dead. You have to be creative. You know, so one of the things I like to do is give tips. So, for example, if you, maybe you sell products, right, then you should link over to the originator of those products if you're a reseller. Right. Or maybe you're, well, we use AC repair a lot. Right. Maybe you install AC and you're the biggest supplier or distributor in your area. Maybe you can get a link from American Standard or Rheem or whoever your, whoever your manufacturer is. Right, representing, yeah.

Exactly. Get those kind of links. Those are natural links. They're relevant to what you offer. And if you're not, then another thing you can do is create content. Create share worthy content is what I wrote down. So, for example, instead of putting a video on YouTube, which I normally wouldn't recommend that, but you keep this exclusive viral video on your site. And the only way people can get to it is on your site, on that specific page. And then if people want to share it, make those share options available and just ask for the link. Yeah. That's a natural way to get links back to your site. Everybody may not do it, but most people will if you ask them to. Yep. Number three, myth number three, using Google Analytics that Google spy, let's Google spy on you. And she said, well, yes and no, and I kind of agree with that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes and no. Yeah, so no, they're not spying, right, in regards to, you know, any negative thing like that. Right. But it does let them know, you know, how much traffic you're getting. They already do some of that. That's how they know how to rank you. And I'm a firm believer, and Chris differs on this a little, that I think they use some analytic data to influence. Yes, I just thought of a wave. So we've talked about how if you're looking at a search engine result page, and you click through to a page, and you come back and then click the next one really quickly. Like you bounce and come back. Right. Google can use that to kind of understand how long you stayed on that first page, right? I think that they probably would use analytics to confirm that they're- Okay, to verify some data. Right, so I don't think- So page on site should be equivalent to page, okay. Yeah, when they're, so I think they use them as independent silos of information, but may utilize them to make sure that their guesses,

their estimates are correct. Kind of a chicken balance. Exactly. I can see that. Because I don't think that they're using time on site that Google Analytics has to kind of- Say, hey, this site is- Impact the results, yeah. People who come here spend 20 minutes, so you should rank them higher. I don't think that happens. I think they may see that if, again, from the search result page, you click there, and then consistently, people who click there 25 minutes later, come back and click the next one. They're like, okay, algorithm is working, check. Yeah, so they check it, and then they use that data, not the actual on site. Okay, I can almost- So it's kind of a, it's a yes and no, right? It's a no, definitely. So myth number four, ranking, and then you should put positioning in parentheses, doesn't matter, and that's a myth. Is that an actual myth? Well, so I've heard some people say that ranking don't matter, but I think one of the keys here is why you should put positioning in parentheses, because truthfully, it's not really about ranking anymore. Right. A lot of people call and say, I want to increase my rank. We even have- Oh, you're right, yeah. You know, or not even necessarily page rank, what I think you're thinking of, but just rank in regards to where you're at on the page. Frankly, we use placement. Yeah. Right, we focus on a certain placement. First, second, third, that's what we're focusing on. Exactly, because, you know, things change. Like you said, sure, there is no true top 10 anymore, and there isn't, right? No. Because you get a set of local results, you get some paid results based on where you're located, you get personal results. Yeah. And so, your top 10 is going to be different from my top 10, you know, speaking of search results, when you search for a specific query. And so, ranking in regards to that, knowing that everybody's going to get different results, is not really effective

anymore. It's not about placement in those results. I want to be placed in the local listings. I need to be placed in the paid listings. I need to be placed somewhere in the natural listings, preferably closer to the top. And that's what we really focus on, rather than a rank. Right. Because the ranking... Is nefarious. It changes on location and person and whatever. Definitely. Myth number five, social is the new link building. Yeah, totally a myth. Link building, like we said earlier, myth number one, link building will not go away. Link building is extremely in person. Now, I do agree, what she says, that neither company is willing to, and neither company, referring to Facebook or Twitter, is willing to give Google consistent access to their firehose of data. Right. And because of that, Google can't factor them into the algorithm. And that totally makes sense. Because Twitter was doing it at one point, and you could find Twitter results in the feed and search results, and not anymore. They removed it. And because of that constant back and forth and bickering, if you will, Google just said, okay, fine. We just won't include any of your results in our search algorithm. Now, I will say, social media has an inherent value that's probably more valuable than link building. Oh, Chuck, what does that mean? That means, let's say, like, if you're being socially active, right, you're getting shares, you're getting tweets, those normally equal more website visits. More website visits normally equal more time on site. More time on site normally equals more conversions. More conversions tends to mean that's a better user experience. And if you have a better user experience, then your ranking usually goes up. And so I think all of that is applicable, right, with the use of social media. So social media is not the new link building. And that was very distracting, but it's not the new link building. So let's get into our top 10 SEO tips, right? So that was the five myths and the top

tips. Number one, she says use authorship. And I totally agree. Some people, you know, authorship just went down a lot. Yeah. When it first came in, it was the big deal. Everybody was doing it. And you could see images everywhere. And Google quickly cleaned that up. But you still must use it. But the key is only use it on your posts that are really good, right? Like if you have a really great article and this article is getting lots of traction, use your authorship there. Because that image, when it does show up, still increases your click-through rate. Number two, citations. It's an easy one. Make sure you have consistent app, name, address, and phone. No matter where it's at. If it's anywhere on your site, make it the same as it is on Yelp, the same as it is on Foursquare, same as it is on Google Local, the same as it is on your Yellow Page. Wherever your company name and address and phone number is, make them identical. Right. If you use parentheses in your phone number, use parentheses everywhere. If you use suite in your address, use suite everywhere. Don't use suite here or ST here or, you know, pound sign here. No, keep it consistent. Number three, the content. Interesting. She says 600 words per page. I could see that when Google's shifting to having more content that's better, frankly, and that's more informational. Yeah. So, yeah, we used to preach 200 to 300 words. That was like two years ago. Yeah. So, 600 words seem about right now. Yeah, so somewhere between 300 and 600. Yeah, there you go. Number four, URLs. She says, make sure your URLs are absolute and not relative in the code. I could see that, right? You want absolute URL being the whole URL, ewellstyle.com slash SEO podcast, right, and not just slash SEO podcast in the code. I think WordPress does a good job of rendering that the correct way. So, I'm not entirely sure there. And then when I think about even analytics,

when you're setting up conversions or goals, Google specifically says, do not put the entire URL. Only put slash thank you or whatever it is. Right, because they know you're doing. Exactly. And so, I don't know about that one. Number five, the alt attribute. Use it all the time. Yep. Period. Yep. On every page, on every image on your site, you'd have an alt tag. Even if, I like this one, sometimes it'll be empty. And it just may be for some odd reason or not. But use the alt anyway. That one I don't know about, huh? So, sometimes it will be empty. Even if it's empty. I can't think of a way when it shouldn't be empty, because if I'm going to tag it, I'm going to put something in it, but... And why use it if you're not going to put something in it? I got to disagree with that. Little tiny part of it, if it's going to be empty, don't bother. And if you're going to bother, by the way, you should bother. It's kind of like our Facebook rule, right? It's circular. You should do it and never leave it empty, so... Number six, page speed. Page speed needs to be fast. Yep. Just plain and simple. Why does it need to be fast? Because people will, for several reasons. One, because people are impatient. This is just a user perspective. They don't feel like waiting, watching your images load, and watching, taking time for their day, even if it's only less than two or three seconds. Yep. Secondly, page speed is a huge factor in Google's algorithm. And we've seen this. We've had sites that were fully optimized, and links are built, and great content, and doing well, but just can't seem to get them from position five to position two or three, and we tighten up some CSS, remove some style sheets, fix some jqueries, and all of a sudden, the site loads faster, and whoa, they move to position one. Page speed is that important. More important. So, this

goes back to how important placement is. More important than that, we got more form submissions. Yeah. Right? That one position move up three spots, and all of a sudden, you get a 30% increase in contact forms. Right? So, people were clicking it. We knew that. They just weren't submitting forms. Now, the page loads faster. They were waiting. They were skipping. They were bouncing. Number seven, your robots.txt file. Just make sure you have it. Right? And so, I like what she addressed here. A lot of people get confused. The robots file doesn't block your webpage from being indexed, only from being crawled. And so, I think it's worth briefly explaining that difference. Crawling is Googlebot literally crawling your site, looking at links, looking at your domain name, looking at your content. Yeah. Figuring out what this site is really about. Once it's crawled, then it gets indexed. Indexed is kind of like it being archived, and so Google can come back and find it whenever somebody searches for something related to what was crawled. And so, when you do that robots file, that doesn't prevent it from being indexed, because frankly, it's probably already indexed. Right. That just stops it from being crawled anymore. Right. And so, that's what that's about. Number eight, penalties. If you've been penalized and you haven't addressed it yet, shame on you. Yeah, day one. Yeah, I mean, penalties. Don't sleep until you've addressed it. Yeah, I mean, seriously, because the longer you stay penalized, the worse it gets. And so, I'll take this time to say, make sure you have Webmaster Tools set up. And that you check it. How do you find out if you're penalized? Yeah, you need your Webmaster Tools set up, and you should, you know, if you see, you stop getting phone calls or you see reduction in form submissions, you've probably been penalized. Yeah. And so, log in your WMT, look at your messages, and it'll say you have a manual spam action penalty for, I don't know, unnatural link building, or thin content,

or, you know, a number of other penalties. And so, if you happen to get one of those, they can be kind of tricky. Yeah. So, you may want to, that's the time when it's time to consult a professional. Yeah. Because it takes a disavow file, it takes a lot of emails to people who've been linking to you, and a whole slew of other things in order to get that penalty removed. And even then, it still will take time for Google to say, okay, I guess you fixed it, we can put you back. We'll start indexing you next time. Next time. Yeah. So, then you may want to have to go down that path of rewriting all your content and everything else. And so, if you get a spam penalty, address it quickly. Number nine, new sites, right? Some people launch a new site and they don't want it to be indexed because it's under construction or you don't have all your content there, or maybe you got dupe content that you plan on rewriting or whatever it is. Lock it down. She says, lock it down with a login. That's the only way to prevent it from getting in Google's index. Because the worst thing in the world is having one of your beta pages rank for when better than your live thing. Yeah. And that just kind of sucks. So, we've had that happen before. Yeah. It just does. The old, your old site sucked. Our beta page, which isn't even really indexed very well. Right. Better than your new site and still in the construction. Yeah. Yeah. So, log in and lock it down. And last but not least, number 10, get a site every year. And I wrote down good old website analysis. Yeah. Just get your site checked out. Yeah. Right. Every year. I think that's a great tip. That'd probably be our tip. Get your site checked out every year. Yeah. Just for, you know, things like dupe content, bad links, your on-page SEO, page speed. Is your social connectivity

right? Does your form work? You know, is your phone number in the right place? That sort of deal. How does your layout work? Is your bounce rate too high? Like, look at those things, at least annually. You know, we tend to look at them weekly or monthly with our clients as we meet with them. But if you're doing this yourself, definitely check it out annually to make sure everything's good. Yeah. So, shout out, punch in the face to Christine. Five myths, 10 tips for you and your site. Excellent. So, that was the meat of our potatoes. We'll just leave that alone. Yeah. Do we have any other punches in the face? Do we have any what? I don't know. I think the Canadian kid could have got a what. Yeah, he could have got a what. Jumped into Canadian taxes. Yeah, that was, I don't think we have any. Wait, so, you know, I just get, like, if my child had done this, it was like, what part of you thought this was a good idea? Like, in the grand scheme of not even that much, what part of this? The fact that it was possible. Yeah. There you go. I just wanted to find out if it was possible. And I'm going to tell you how I know the answer to that. I have teenagers. Yeah. And that's how. So, you know, one of the things I remember reading is sometimes, you know, your mind isn't done developing until, like, 23 or something. So, often when you're asking your teenager what were they thinking, they actually weren't thinking with their entire mind. Because it's not all there yet. Exactly. So, the answer that they give really makes sense to them. Yeah, it's like, I don't know. Even though I'm like, psh, I cannot know. You know, today my son took a sheet of stamps and stuck them on our bed. You know, if you have stickers, you stick them everywhere. We pull them off. They don't come off easily. Yeah, it's in their stamps.

Oh, man. That was rough. Why do you keep touching things that you're not supposed to touch? If you don't have permission to touch it, just don't touch it. How hard is that? Apparently, it's impossible. Yeah, because his brain hasn't been, he doesn't know it. Yeah, I've got to touch that to learn. I'm trying, yeah. And it's a sticker, yeah. So, anyway. All right, this has been podcast number 232. Thank you guys for tuning in. We are the most popular internet marketing podcast on the iTunes. On the known planet universe, iTunes, Stitcher. Yeah. All that. So, thank you guys. Hey, we're going to be, there's a guy who is on Blog Talk Radio called Steve Sleeper. Yeah. We're going to be on his show June 4th. Yeah, Wednesday, June 4th. So, plan on, I don't know, throw it in your calendar schedule or something. Yeah, we'll tweet it and let you know. I was actually listening, he was on yesterday, I was listening, and he had an SEO guy out of Chicago, and they were talking about NAP, right? So, he's got some good guests, some good people on the show. Anyway, thank you guys for tuning in. Until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burris. I'm Charles Lewis. Bye-bye for now. Slightly raised up eyebrow high.