On-Page Optimization - #seopdocast 170

marketing. My name is Chris Burns, owner of eWebStyle. I am Charles Lewis, your internet marketing specialist. Thank you guys for tuning in. This is podcast number 170. You are listening to the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes. That is because of you, you, you, and I see you back there, over there. Yeah. And because of you, as always, we have a tip from our previous podcast. That tip is be sure to incorporate G plus in your SEO strategy. Yeah, you have to. It's not one of those social things where you're not going to do LinkedIn or you're not going to do Facebook. You're not going to do Twitter or whatever it is, by the way, I don't know why you would do that. But G plus is one of those things you have to do. It's, it's, it's mandatory at this point, especially if you're a local business, especially if you provide a, a local service, then it's even more effective for you because you, you look for foot traffic. And so, um, so yeah, incorporate Google plus, um, and on both sides of it, um, one for your local page and two on your site so people can push your content. Yeah. And make sure you have your relative author tag taken care of, uh, so you can have a little image of you next to the, uh, description, uh, on the search, search engine. Let's talk about author tag today. We'll say that for next week. So I'll tell y'all how to set it up. All right. Uh, remember we are your friendly local neighborhood top position snatchers. I thought I'd change it up. Where our mantra is, don't be a deuce. That was kind of deucey right there, just a little bit. Uh, if you're in a position to tweet right now, as you're listening to this, get on your device and tweet. And, uh, what you should tweet is hashtag SEO podcast, uh, space one 70. Then make sure you tag us in it at E web style. Um, that

way we can link up and network and everything else. You will notice that I do not have any sort of tattoo on my face today. That is because we have a number of reviews. Let's blow through these because, uh, they've kind of accumulated. We've got, uh, one, which is five stars title is great work guys. I've been churning through the entire series at two times speed and it really is two times speed. Yeah, it really is as entertaining, not just because of the two times speed as it is educational, a great info, great chemistry between cohost. Thank you. Appreciate it. Mr. Mandarin. Does that sound right? Mandarin? Mandarin. We'll go with Mandarin. Uh, and here we have entertaining and educational. This is from elite sports collector. Uh, I recently started a website and after going through 20 different podcasts, I always came back to these guys. Their podcast might not be 30 straight minutes of information like some are, but you guys keep on, keep me listening because podcast, because the podcast is entertaining. Just like in high school, you learn more from the cool teachers than the dry, boring teachers. Bueller. Bueller. Anyone? Bueller. Ben Stein. Uh, punch in the face. Elite sports collector. Go check them out. I didn't get a chance to look at their career. Yeah. Five stars. Didn't get a chance to look at their, um, oh, and actually he, he, he wrote us a letter. I thought that name sounded familiar. Exactly. Uh, the title of his email was speed bag punch in the face. Poof. Four times really fast. Yeah. Uh, I was, uh, being kind of a douche. Uh, he was actually trying to find our email and he was emailing us at ewebstylepodcast at e-webstyle.com. It was bouncing. Um, he's usually driving. So his memory was failing him. Uh, he's listening to many. It's not a good time for your memory to fail. Yeah. Do you end up on the other side of town very often? Let's see. Uh, so here's a good question. I have

a question about no following links from my primary menu. So this is off the cuff. You didn't have time to prepare for this, Chuck. So, uh, these links are to pages like, I'll read slow. Uh, policies, shipping, uh, policies, shipping and contact us pages. I heard on one of your podcasts about no following these links because Google looked to them first and the more relevant links are usually on the secondary menu. I have researched this quite a bit and it seems that the opinions are split right down the middle. I've even seen a video, video from Matt cuts saying not to use no follow for internal links. What are your thoughts on that subject? You have helped me come from ground zero building my site to kind of knowing what I'm doing. Uh, hopefully in a year from now, my site will grow to the point that I will be in a position to utilize your services. First, we hope that also, uh, and second, what about no follows? So I think he asked two questions. One was no following links basically in his primary nav. And then the second question was, um, kind of no following internal links. And so I think part A, um, I've always been the, the, um, under the logic that you do no follow, you no follow links to about us to pages that you don't want to necessarily pass link juice to because you wanted to have most of the juice going to your primary pages that, that either you were wanting to rank for or pages that you wanted to generate a conversion on. And so pages like, um, if you were, um, a plumber pages to your, to your plumbing services page and not necessarily to your company history page. Um, I still believe that. I'm pretty sure it doesn't have as much weight now as it did, let's say two years ago or two years ago. Google's been refining their algorithm. Yeah, definitely. Uh, well, and, and not just that, um, due with the, with

the, uh, caffeine update, they can index much more faster, receive a lot more information. And so, you know, it's not probably not that important, frankly, to, uh, to no follow those certain links because they'll get past juice anyway. No follow usually takes a little extra time. Mm-hmm. I don't think it's worth the time, right? So if you were going to do it or you had somebody who was doing it, okay. Um, the other, the other logic in terms of page rank, there, there's, there's a, a good rule of thumb, which is there's an optimal page rank that your own site can give to individual pages. So there's an optimal link structuring on your, on structure on your site. Mm-hmm. You can never exceed it, but you can be less than it. So for instance, if the about us does have a link to the services page and it's got proper anchor text, that's another page that is linking to a relevant page with a relevant anchor text. Those are internal links, by the way. So if you've done those linked, that linking properly, then you actually don't want to do no follow. Mm-hmm. If it's a dead end, really it's just a history page and maybe you can get back home. Nope, you know, no follow it. If you want to, frankly, don't spend the time on it. Yeah. That's, that's what I would, we're, we're not split down the middle. We actually have a consensus here. So again, Dale, anyone? Anyone? Mueller? Anyone? All right. And we got some UK reviews. This is awesome. This is from Chris Churchill. You just assumed he would be from the UK, right? Yeah. That's me, Churchill. Five stars. Best SEO podcast on iTunes. Simple as. Very, I think that's a braziology that they use in the UK. Very informative. Free content. Wish people would stop moaning about their chit-chat at the beginning. I kind of like it. It brings a personal feel to the podcast. And I can tell these guys are doing it for the love,

not for the bucks. These guys are engaging and top guys. Could tell a night out with these guys would be a lot of fun. Hey, when you're in Houston? Let us know. Let us know. Ching-ching, guys. And you're right, Churchill. Small correction. For the love and the money. Yeah. Love and the money. There's nothing wrong with both. There's nothing wrong with both. As you were. Next one is, well worth a listen. Five stars. Also, this is big laces. Content is relevant, useful, and above all, well presented. Style of the podcast keeps you listening. Congrats. I appreciate all y'all who are tuning in, all who take the time to do those three things that they need to do to write a review. Yeah, because it's only three things. Create an iTunes account, write a review, and then let us know if you want to. And you can let us know, podcast at? E-WebStyle.com. While we're at it, you could also go to the following link to get to our G Plus page. E-WebStyle.com slash? G Plus. Which G Plus? G Plus. All of them. Google Plus. Google Plus. G Plus. G Plus. How do you distinguish the symbol plus and the word plus as you're trying to say it without saying the symbol plus? If you're in front of somebody, you go, you do the cross with your fingers. Plus. Yeah, anything. G Plus, G the symbol plus, Google Plus. Yeah, when you're under Google Plus. You see what I tried to do? Plus. I don't know if that worked at all. Hashtag Plus. All right. You can go there and write a review. We would really appreciate that. And one last thing. We do have a Facebook page. You guys can find our Facebook page. Facebook.com slash? E-WebStyle. We also have Twitter. Twitter.com slash? E-WebStyle. How about YouTube? YouTube.com slash? E-WebStyle. And you can email us, podcast at? E-WebStyle.com. Here's an interaction from Facebook. This is Evan Thomas. Always look forward to new episodes of the podcast. Thanks. iTunes review pending. Have you covered SEO

tools before? I'm working on my link building and had a look at Market Samurai. Also, I've started using a plug-in called Google Global. This is a Firefox plug-in to do U.S. Google searches as I'm trying to attract traffic from the U.S. Any thoughts? Tools? Yeah, if you're in Firefox, man, I'm a big fan of SEO Quake. Great tool to use. Look at some back-end information. SEO Moz. You mentioned something about back-linking, I think. Great tool. Use the... I'm just drawing a blank. The back-link tool from SEO Moz. Yeah. It's got a name. I just can't think of the name. But yeah, SEO Moz. Check out that suite. It's a little pricey, but if it's in your budget, do that. I mean, you know. I don't know too much about Market Samurai. I think I've... I've seen it a couple times before. I've used the previous version of Samurai. Actually, Scott Bonner turned us on to that. So I do have it on my computer. I just haven't used it very much. And Google Global, yes. If you need to work on your SEO in another region, and Google Global isn't the only thing to use. Like here in the States, I don't know how it's different over in the UK. In our case, when you sign into Google, you do a search, we end up... our search is a Houston local search. If we want to see what it looks like in Las Vegas, we actually have to select a different city, Las Vegas, Nevada, and redo the search and it shows us different results. By the way, I can concretely confirm that PPC is affected by that location as well. I was under the impression that it wasn't prior, that it was purely IP driven, but the entire search page can be driven by selecting a different city. In the case of Google Global, you're just, you know, giving the impression that you're in a different location. And yeah, that's a great tool to use so that you can see how your search results

are going in another location. Let's just blow through some news real quick. This is pretty cool. Google Chrome got 26% faster. I mean, it's already fast. First off, it's almost blank stare. You mean I've been using Google Chrome and it was 26% slower? Slower? Why'd you make me do that? Okay. So they got faster. Yeah, I've been using it. Yahoo seems to have a new Windows 8 kind of layout. If I'm Windows 8, I'm not happy because pretty much everything Yahoo has been touching lately has been going. Well, they already in deal with them. So, you know. Foxcom, there was one article that was interesting. Is it possible that Foxcom, that's the company in China that makes the iPads and iPhones, are they going to have a new U.S. address in the future? I don't know. That's just a teaser article. In general, we don't allow companies to put nets around buildings to prevent people from killing themselves. That doesn't happen here. So, as long as we have that kind of policy, they probably won't show up here. That is the potatoes. It's time to get into the meat. Okay. We already probably extended the genome, so we'll go quick. It's not that much content here, but I thought it was interesting. Pulled this from Search Engine Journal. General. Search Engine Journal. Evolution of on-page optimization. So, which is interesting because I actually, that's part of what I'll be doing today. A couple of sites we just launched, go back in and tighten up some titles and meta information, things like that. And on-page optimization has changed. You know, the same things we did years ago, months ago, frankly, you don't necessarily do those now. Some of them you do, but they don't have the same weight or the same value. And you do them a little bit differently. Yeah. Do them a lot of bit differently. Yeah. You know, there used to be, let's get into the article. So, he lists six different things you can do in regards to the evolution of on-page

optimization. And I think the first one he mentioned was user intent. User intent, at this point, is key when you work on your SEO strategy. It used to be where you couldn't, you were worried about the search and ranking and getting your site listed. And that was it. Now, you really have to consider the user, the person who's going to find your site, the person who was in Google searching for that term. What is their intent? Matter of fact, he goes on to say, really understand what you should rank for. Get your keywords right and stop optimizing for keywords, but optimize for users. We have to understand when that user searches this phrase, what are they looking to accomplish? And then make sure that your site is optimized to handle that task. So, you must understand the user intent. I'll take it a step further and say, not just for on-page optimization, but throughout the whole production process, what that user is going to do on your site should be taken into account. From production, to how the site's coded, to what platform it's built on, to the color scheme, to everything. Yeah. Because at the end of the day, it's about the user. Number two is content keyword optimization. He goes on to say, modern day on-page optimization needs to focus less on keyword instances and more on keyword theme building. I totally agree with that. Yeah. So, if you have a page full of content, you know, old standard, we would say 250 words, right? So, let's say you had 250 words. You know, old practice would be include our exact match phrase, you know, a few times in here and make sure it reads well and makes sense, right? Now, you know, that may not be the best route to go. Do you still need that exact match in there at least once? Yes. But more importantly, theme your content around it. So, you include maybe more secondary phrases, more synonyms, things like that. That reference that exact match phrase. And so,

that way your content is not spammy, frankly, or it's not panda bait. Right. You know, you'll have a theme about what you're targeting. A good, a really good example of this is the transcription of this, as good as a penguin slap, is our podcast. The beginning of our podcast, as you regular listeners know, often doesn't have a ton of SEO content. It's us interacting with our audience. It's us talking a little bit about the news to kind of set the tone for the rest of the podcast. And that content isn't really great for, so the first third isn't really great for, let's put together a blog post, let's make a strong SEO title and use that content and throw some SEO terms in there. That's not really good content because the content is not relevant to those terms. So, frankly, when we get that transcribed, the first third of our podcast transcription is almost throwaway stuff. I mean, we'll put a title on it, but we're not expecting great results from that because the content's not relevant to the keywords we might focus on. Whereas the second two thirds and we break the transcription of our podcast into three pieces, those next two pieces, we pull out relevant terms and we amp them up a little bit with some content rework and then those get posted. And so, that's a great example of where relevant content around your keywords is important. I do have to interject this, just from the last podcast, Gary Troy Miller, we see you. Okay, so the next one on here was the optimized search listings. And so, he goes on to say, you know, think about the SERP listing as an advertisement. And so, optimized search listings, what he's saying here is make sure you take advantage of being listed on the search in the results page. So, if you're, you know, you usually would include your main key phrase in the title. And so, that title is what shows up as the ad. So, you know, don't just focus

on that keyword, but instead make sure that your title is descriptive enough of an advertisement to prompt people to click. What they shouldn't see is the exact same word that they search for with no supporting CTA or some supporting action for them to take to prompt them to click. So, what you have to do, this goes back to your on-page optimization, which the article is talking about. When you're writing page titles, you need to make sure that you, if you can, include an action or take advantage of branding, which I'll go right to the next one. Branding is the next one. That's a great place to take advantage of branding in that title tag. Maybe you want to include a copyright symbol or trademark symbol, or, you know, definitely have your logo is showing up in the tab, or things like that, because these show up in searching results pages. These show up on your site as people are browsing the web. And so, take advantage of it. The opportunity is there. Last one on here is page speed. So, while it's not that huge of an indicator in regards to placement, it is counted. And what Google doesn't want, frankly, what you or I don't want is a bad experience. And a flow site is a bad experience. A page that takes forever to load is a bad experience. It's also, I think, isn't that also called a bounce? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I'll bounce. This page doesn't load quickly. We're just talking about Chrome being 26% faster. That's making me, that's reducing my patience. And so, yeah, I don't have time to wait for these large images to load. Um, lastly on here, make it shareable. I think this is key. Um, social is a huge indicator for, for SEO. And so, all content, especially if you're blogging, um, if you're blogging in, I would even say e-commerce. If you have products, then yeah, make, make those product pages shareable. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, uh, tweetable, things like that. Um, Reddit or, or dig it,

uh, make it easy for people to share what they read. Um, that way you can gain some traction from it and also build links. Um, I like his conclusion and I'm gonna read it and we'll be done. It says, uh, do we stop respecting the classic form of SEO? No. A lot of classic stuff is really important. What needs to change, get this, is the way we do it and incorporate new stuff that has evolved in an on-page front format. Aspects such as usability and social search. They are not individual entities anymore. What does that mean? I mean, similar to us, we have to evolve, right? We do SEO and right now we were, um, Google Plus, at one point was considered social. In order for us to manage that, you had to sign up for a social media marketing package. Right. Now, Google Plus is part of our SEO package. Yeah. Um, it just has to be and we just have to do it. And so, I think that's what he's saying here. You can't continue to do the same things you had been doing expecting to get the same result. You gotta change. Yep. You wanna, do, do we wanna get, get to this one? Um, oh, the injury? Yeah. Um, sure. You wanna save it for, okay. Um, this is interesting. So, this is a, she's referencing podcast 157. She sent us a kind of a long email. Yeah, like two pages. She's talking about Littleton flowers and she's talking about dupe content. So, um, here she says, I don't care if the information on Littletown flowers, Littletown, obviously, you know, whatever, small town, XYZ, part of the country, um, .com. I don't care about how to make a corsage last longer, uh, if that was the last word from a popular botanical website, as long as it is accurate. So, she's saying, I don't care if they copy information. She actually, I don't care if the information is stale. For instance, uh, if it's a Littletown flower shop, I don't care

if they put something nude recently. Um, if the pictures and descriptions are accurately presented, and it's a decent website, that should be good enough. Um, she also says, I don't expect the Littletown flowers or, they dry cleaners to spend a substantial part of their week posting and chatting, et cetera. And doing Google offers, I expect them to show me pictures of their products, accurate prices, accurate descriptions, and if they've stripped all of those pricing and everything from somewhere else, I don't really care. So, if Littletown flowers stops coming up on the first page of my search for Littletown flowers, because they did not follow the advice in Podcast 157, it is me, the user, who is being ill-served by the search engine. Um, I think it's very interesting. Interesting. Well, and there's two things. One, this is a dupe content issue. Two, from a business owner's perspective, she's saying she doesn't think it's fair to have to do all of the things that you have to do with SEO in order to ring. I think she has the impression that in Littletown, for flowers, if the Littletown, uh, business owner, flower, uh, business owner is not being social and has duplicate content. Exactly. Not blogging, then their site's not going to show. Then their site won't show. And that's actually not the case. Yeah. A Littletown, the efforts that you need, and to, to get Littletown flowers on the first page of Google, especially for people who are searching from within Littletown is, is next to nothing, especially if it's the only flower shop. Google, Google takes that into consideration. We have a client who has literally a, a dupe content for every city with 10,000 people or more in it, some 500 cities, exactly dupe content except for the name of the city. And that page shows up in small cities. And it's for a popular phrase, quit smoking. And so, but it, that page will never show up in Houston because there's competition in Houston. That page will never show up in LA,

Chicago, even mid-sized cities. But in little towns, it shows up. Um, so dupe content is, is penalized. It's not removed from the index. Yeah. So it's still there. It's still there. It's just not going to show in an, in an area where there's more inventory, right? There's more results to show for this specific search query. And since there are more results, let's not show the one that has duplicate content. But in the case where, where there aren't, the search inventory is low, there aren't that many results to show. If this one has all the content and images, prices are accurate, then this is the most relevant list in the show. Yeah. Good content or not. Frankly, most of that doesn't even matter. It could be irrelevant images, irrelevant pricing, et cetera. There's probably nobody else with the word Littleton and flowers on their website. Little town, not Littleton, little town, um, in, in that state. So especially in that region. So really in that situation, you could probably, you probably don't even need a website. You could just have a little town Google plus page and you will show up and then people will find you. So, um, um, Adriana, that's a, that's Langston. That's a great question. Thank you so much. And, uh, she's actually an SEO specialist for transamericanautoparts.com out of Compton, California. Um, you got some competition there. So you need to either engage somebody or, um, or at least be doing these things because in little town, they don't have to. In Compton, you do. Um, I like this, I like this description. Uh, this is really good. Nightmare scenario. Do we have any blank stare news? Um, no. Nightmare scenario. You hire a company to make you a great website and they do. You hire a company to drive lots of traffic to your website and they do. And you get no business. Who do you fire? You have a great website. It's getting lots of traffic. Our suggestion is you fire both of them and find a company that

is responsible for the web design and for driving traffic to it. In fact, a web designer who doesn't, isn't responsible for the iterative process of closing business has, has a disadvantage to a company that makes that website, drives the traffic to it, and then monitors what happens to that traffic. We are such a company, so you're welcome to give us a call. Just make sure that if you're going to engage somebody, uh, to do internet marketing, that they do both and they're responsible for both. Um, because the advent, the advantages are significant. Yeah, what you don't want to do is, is, is have, first off, from a business management perspective, that's another vendor, right? And so if you could, if you could eliminate additional vendors by having one who, who specializes in doing both, then, um, you, you make the process easier for yourself and frankly easier for them because they're doing both. I mean, we've had clients where someone else was managing the site and we were managing the marketing. And so you create that third party, you now have to go to someone else to make a change on the landing page or something like that. And it's, it's a lot easier when there's one company doing both. There's a good parallel in, in the IT world, which is a software blames hardware, hardware blames software, and no, it's no one's responsibility to fix it. So if your website's beautiful and they're blaming the traffic, well, they're sending the wrong traffic and maybe they are, I mean, maybe they're sending the wrong traffic. It's lots of traffic. But when the company is ultimately responsible for, um, getting interactions on the website and increasing your leads, then it doesn't matter what the website looks like entirely. It doesn't matter how much traffic is a sent entirely. It just matters that the people, however large or small the quantity is, actually engage with your business on some level or on the level you want to actually. Yeah. Yeah. Whatever your desire and action is. So

you have been listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. This has been podcast number 170. We really appreciate all of you out there. Uh, we are really are pushing and asking you to do a G plus, uh, review of us. Go to e-webstyle.com slash G plus or slash there you go. Um, G plus or Google plus. Remember we are your friendly local neighborhood top position snatchers, where our mantra is. Bye. Bye for now.