On Page Optimization Tips - Internet Marketing Podcast Number 203

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I've got to get my arm in here. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. I am Charles Lewis, an internet marketing specialist. Welcome to another fun-filled edition of our most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. That is because of you, you, you. You right there who just tuned in, who just started listening. Thank you. All you all out there. As always, there is a tip from our previous podcast, and this tip says, GWMT is a must for anyone building and managing a website. Yeah, GWMT, Google Webmaster Tools, is a must. If you are building a site, especially if you're doing SEO on a site, anything like that, make sure you submit that site to Google Webmaster Tools. It's just a must. If your site gets hacked, they'll let you know. If they're banning you because you have bad links, they'll let you know. And all sorts of other things. If your site's doing well, they'll let you know. So definitely make sure you sync your account with Webmaster Tools and Analytics, for that matter. They work well together. And go ahead and do Bing Webmaster Tools as well. Please remember, we are your friendly local neighborhood Top Position Snatchers, where our mantra is, don't be a douche. You know what? I like our mantra. Every time somebody complains about it, I like it more. Even more, right? Yeah, our mantra is, don't be a douche. Please remember, if you have some sort of device that enables you to make contact with the internet sphere, with the World Wide Web's internets, then go ahead and tweet us. Yeah, hashtag is right up above here. I only got to show y'all. Hashtag SEO Podcast. This is number 203. Yeah, it's 203. 203. Make sure you tag us in an at eWebStyle, that way we can link up and be social and do all of our social stuff. You know, I was looking at that 203, and I was like, oh, somebody left off a one.

2013. It's like your brain thinks 203, 2013. Hey, there's two small favors that you could possibly do for us. One of them has three steps. If you like this podcast, if you think the audio value has increased, if you're just a really nice guy or gal, go onto iTunes, create an account, write a review, and if you choose to, you can submit, you can contact us and let us know that you did write a review, and you do that by writing in an email to podcast at edswipstyle.com. I'm sure there are a hundred easier ways to say that than the way I just said it. An example of an iTunes review that you could submit, this one is by T-Pain 1000. T-Pain 1000? I take it. The title says, entertaining and informative. Five stars! And the review says, what's in the title is all I have to say, now punch me in the face. Put-tooth! I don't know, T-Pain, I don't know if I, T-Pain is a name, I don't know if I want to punch somebody named T-Pain. T-Pain is a singer. Oh, okay. Yeah, he uses auto-tune. Oh, okay. So, he would be something like, thank you for your review. If that was an auto-tune voice, you know. I like that. Thank you for your review. Yeah, exactly. You know, it would have to go something like this. The other thing that you could do, again, if you like the audio, like that the audio has improved, like the content, like the humor, like the fact that we're the Red Bull of SEO podcasts, you can actually legally listen to our podcast and drive at the same time without fear of falling asleep. You could write us a G-Plus local review. We've made it really easy for you to do that. All you have to do is go to the following URL, e-webstyle.com slash... G-Plus. Or? G-Plus. Or? Google. Plus. Or? Google Plus. And while you're there, you can write us a review similar to this one. Jonathan Brown wrote, great podcast. I

always learn something from each podcast. There have been, oh yeah, five stars. There have been some audio issues, but I can get past that for the great content. Plus, they are fun and entertaining. Woo-hoo! Infotainment. Fun and entertaining. Punch into you. What was that? Jonathan Brown. J.B., appreciate you tuning in. All right, here we go. This is from our Facebook page. Okay, these are questions. Yeah, this is a question. All right, put your question answering hat on, sir. Please. Thank you. Renee Fish Robbins says, howdy guys, you rock. We know, but appreciate it. Thank you. And she's like, now that I have your attention, it does have an accent in it, so Renee could be a dude, possibly, like that's a possibility, so I just want to leave that open. All right. Now that I have your attention, do you happen to know a Twitter keyword search tool that provides insights and data, like hashtags.org, that isn't hella expensive? I don't know how you got that text in there, so I knew to articulate it that way. It's pretty good writing. So, like hashtags.org, keep up the good work. Did you know, Renee? I did a little research on this one. You did? I put on my answering questions hat. Yeah, I mean, because I usually use Twitter, especially now that they've evolved a tool. They've improved their search, they opened up global search, and it's pulling hashtags, it's pulling followers and tweets that have any reference of that phrase that you used in the hashtag without the hashtag or not. And it's been pretty intuitive for me, but to answer your question, I don't. I'm glad you did some research. I found a couple that looked pretty decent. I didn't spend too much time with them, so let us know. One is hashtracking.com, and again, these did not seem to be expensive. And the other one was tweetbinder.com. Hashtracking.com and tweetbinder.com. All right, you know, I'm missing anything. I would be willing to bet that you could probably Google it, Twitter, space, hashtag, whatever

your search query is, and likely get Twitter results. Maybe even Twitter colon. Some of the stuff I think that, so I saw, I looked at hashtags.org, hashtracking.com, tweetbinder, and some of the things. I haven't heard of tweetbinder, but I think about it. Some of the things that it shows are like trending, right? So what's going on with the hashtag SEO rapper, right? So did it peak because you did a show with HubSpot or whatever it is so you can follow those trends? Is it on the rise? Is it on the decline? So I think those are the kinds of things that they're looking kind of more trend related as opposed to just what's going on right now. So all right. So this next one is also a Facebook question. Jeff Guest says, hi, Chris and Charles. Hope you are both well. Thank you. We are. We're doing pretty good. I have a question, and you are the only guys I can think of that might have an answer. A friend recently booked and paid for a holiday online. Sites available on request. Oh, if we requested. If you wanted to know. However, the site's emails were diverted to another address. Who answered inquiries, sent booking forms. The site emails were diverted to an... Okay, I'm with you. Right. And they answered inquiries, sent booking forms, and took deposits, pretending to be the venue's owner. Obviously, the money is now gone, and there is no holiday booking. The question is, is either the website hosting company, the website designer, webmaster, or the site's owner accountable legally for alleged lax security? Could they be sued because the site has been hacked? Thanks for your time, and keep up the great work. So this is a little outside of our kind of purvey. What I would suggest is that if somebody's getting your... It's kind of like if somebody got something out of the mail. Say you sent an actual piece of snail mail to a particular travel agency, and they were able to actually get the snail

mail before the actual travel agency and be responding that way. I don't think that that's anything that the agency is responsible for. That's what I would say. I think your problem... I didn't quite understand the whole email diversion part. Was that emails from the site that you purchased that were coming to you that were somehow diverted to somebody different, or was that the emails from the site to a different email address that was supposed to come to you? A little convoluted there, but by logic and gut tells me your problem is probably right there. Yeah. I think it's possible... My guess would be that the emails were actually Gmail accounts or something that maybe looked like the actual agency. We don't know that detail, so in that situation, you just got to be really careful. Probably worth picking up the phone in those situations if you're sending any sort of payment to anybody and you have doubts. The other thing you could do is use Amex, because Amex says, yeah, you get your money back. They have a lot of protections in place. All right, so that's all of that. I do have just a little bit of news. I thought this was hilarious. This news actually pertains to search. Stephen Colbert was talking. He was doing a little snippet about this whole NSA security, monitoring the public, and it had an interesting piece where he actually had a speech by Obama saying, there is no monitoring program, and then days later, we are forming a committee to look into the possible mishandling that the agency that didn't exist actually did. It's NSA. It's national security, and that's not actually that surprising. Yeah, I mean... It's just funny. We watch movies. You know what I'm saying? So Colbert was saying, so the question that remains is, how much information does the NSA have on us? Do they have, like, Facebook amount of information, or do they have, like, G+, because no one uses it? That's funny. I thought that was awesome. That's funny. What level

of information on us do they have? Facebook or G+, all right? The Jobs movie is out, and it has a 25 out of 100 rating on Rotten Tomato. I'm looking forward to seeing it. I read... I think... I'm looking forward to seeing it as well. I like Ashton Kutcher. Yeah. You know, I think he could pull that role off, but, you know, at the end of the day, is it going to live up to the social network? Yeah. I mean, that's the question. Yeah. Because that was an awesome movie. I think they did a great job of portraying Facebook and how it came to be. Yeah. And so, you know, Apple has a great story. Yeah. Right? And so, true nothing to something story. Yeah. And so, you know, hopefully they can pull it off. Nothing to something on its way to nothing and back up to the biggest company on the planet. I mean, it's a great story. So, I'm looking forward to it. I'm sure I will enjoy it. I actually saw Ashton in an interview with, I think, Conan O'Brien. Maybe it was Jimmy Fallon. Anyway, it was a good interview. He's a cool cat. I like Ashton. We go way back. And finally, I posted this on my Facebook page. I'll probably add it to our Facebook, to the company Facebook page. I actually was on a corner at a stoplight today and I saw a chick holding a sign and she had kind of, you know, some ammo, camo pants or whatever. Kind of Bob Marley-ish, right? If you get what I'm saying. And she was holding a sign and she actually had a, there was a, I think it was a newsman cameraman or something right there on her because it was, you know, one of those big fancy cameras. It wasn't a dude with an iPhone. Or a little handy cam. That was me taking a picture of her from my car. And the sign said, we'll rap for weed. I have to imagine that she was fairly

unsuccessful in securing any weed since she was actually on the corner asking for it. Two busy streets with the camera. Like, who's going to just be like, here you go? I don't even care how good your rap is. I just can't pay you right now. And I'm not even saying in front of the camera that I'll ever pay you. And here's my card. Yeah, call me later. All right. So that is the potatoes of our podcast. Let's get to the meat. All right. So today's meat, I really wanted to talk about on-page optimization. I had been actually thinking about doing some more content about on-page for a few weeks now. And then I came across this article by Rand, Rand Fishkin, great dude. He posted this on Moz.com. The Visual Guide to Keyword Targeting for On-Page Optimization. And it's a very lengthy article. So first off, Rand, if you see this, kudos to you for taking that time to really put some data and some good information into an article and not focusing on keeping it short and simple. It took several scrolls and several infographics and images and charts and really good data. It's like probably 1,500 words. Great article. So kudos to you. Punch in the face. But with that, I'm about to go through your article. Now let's break it down. Yeah, exactly. So the first thing he said was in regards to the content and keywords, it should be uniquely valuable. And I totally agree. You know, he added the word valuable. We've always said that content must be unique, right? It must be fresh, it must be different and not duplicate. But he said uniquely valuable. And I totally agree with that. Long gone are the days where it can just be unique. This content must provide some sort of value. It needs to be useful. You know, what takeaways can the visitor who's absorbing that content, what can they pull from it? What value can they get from this content? Or will they just read it and it's just

another opinion about some topic that they're researching? No, you want people to come to your site, absorb your content, and leave feeling like they've gotten something. Because that will prompt them to share it and do other things. So uniquely valuable. Number two, your site must provide a phenomenal UX. That's a user experience. And again, we're talking about on-page optimization, so sites should be easy to understand. We should provide intuitive navigation, meaning, you know, make it easy to get around your site. You know, people shouldn't be restricted to, let's say, one navigation. Leave breadcrumbs. Maybe give them a footer nav. Drop-down menus if you have to. Things like that that help people navigate freely and through, freely and throughly, freely through the site easily. That can make sure that by saying throughly. Throughly, yeah. So give people a great user experience, right? Number three, which is kind of key here. Make sure your site is crawler and bot accessible. You know, a lot of times you use different plug-ins and whatnot to automatically generate a robot's text file and things like that. And you may be trying to prevent certain pages from being shown. Like, for example, we have a process where we will deny access to slash WP, you know, things like that that don't really have any content, right? Just WordPress folders and things like that. But when done incorrectly, you could be blocking your whole site from being indexed. And so make sure you're not doing that. Make sure that your robot's text file is configured correctly so all bots can access it as easily as possible. So number, the next one is keyword targeted, which is key, right? Keywords have to be in the content at the end of the day. And so he went on to list, you know, seven crucial things about on-page optimization in regards to keywords. And most of these haven't changed, so we'll breeze through them. Number one, your page title must have your important key phrases in it. That's worth repeating. Your page title must have

your important key phrases in it. Number two, he put headlines. We call them headers. H1s, H2s, all the way through H6. These subheadings are important for a couple reasons, which he didn't talk about, so I'll discuss with you. It's kind of like reading a newspaper. Yeah. You know, your newspaper has one heading, and then you have some content, and then you have subheadings that kind of outline or dictate what the next section of content is. What content you're about to read is all about. And so use those for the user experience we were talking about earlier. Let people maybe want to skip down to what they came to look for. And from a search perspective, headers are important, and you should have keywords there. It's kind of like you're trying to read the newspaper, and you want to finish the newspaper before your cup of coffee gets cold, because your time frame says, as soon as the coffee's cold, you have to leave. And so you've got to read what you can read that's going to be valuable to you really quickly. What do you do? You scan, and you look for headers. You find out where the sections that are clearly going to be valuable to you are, and you find those by reading the headers. Yeah, so definitely make sure you have keyword-rich headers. But more importantly, it's a fine line, because you want them to be keyword-rich, but you really want them to also discuss what this next block of content is about. You know, I've been to sites that have been over-optimized, where this header says one thing, and the content below it has nothing to do with the header or what's on the page itself. So make sure your headings walk that line. I think that's called being a douche. Yeah, it is. Yeah, I felt very douchey. No, I didn't. That didn't sound right. I did not feel very douchey. You felt like I had been douched? No, like that one either. No, that doesn't feel right. No. Long

story short, yeah, don't do it. That way you won't feel like that. Number three, your body text, right? So make sure you have the content of your keywords in that text, and we talk about it all the time, you know, making sure that the content reads well. Again, we're writing for the user, and so you want to make sure that you have those keywords to satisfy the search engine, but at the end of the day, the search engine isn't going to pick up the phone and call you. The user is, and so you need to make sure your content is talking to them. Chris always says, you know, use a story when you can. People relate to stories, and especially if you can lace your story with the right keywords, and it makes sense, then you're probably doing a pretty good job. It's like our audience is going to remember the cup of coffee that's getting cold, so you have to leave what parts of the newspaper I'm going to read. Exactly. Also because I've said it twice now. It's called reiteration. So number four, the URL. You know, have your keywords in the URL. Now, let me take this time to say this, which you didn't mention. We're not talking about necessarily the domain name, which is also part of the URL, right? We're talking about the string after that domain name. You know, don't go chasing some keyword-rich exact match domain unless that's your company name. If that's your company name, then you made a great decision for your company name. But if your company name is not Houston Water Heater Repair, then don't go get that domain name because it's not going to work. But in regards to the URL, you want to make sure that you do have keywords in there and a few other URL basics. Like, don't make it extremely long. Don't have it more than five or six words. Use hyphens instead of underscores and things like that. Number five, images and image alt attributes. Duh. Duh. Yeah.

Don't, you know, continue to tag your images. That's not a lost art. You know, that's one of those old things that still works, tagging your images. Title, name the image. Not title it, but name the image properly. Well, it's called an image title. Give it an image title. Give it the alt tag as well. And depending on your CMS, like if you're in WordPress, WordPress will title a tag, and they'll allow you to give it a description and a caption. Yeah. Like, do all of those. Yep. Take advantage of it. Thank you, WordPress. Yeah, appreciate you, WordPress. Punch in the face to WordPress. Number six, internal and external links. So I guess we could talk about that here. Internal links are great, right? You give people the option to navigate through the page easier. Google loves them. They help your site get crawled better. Internal links are just awesome, right? External links are necessary. External links come in two ways, right? Into your site from another site, that's an external link, or out from your site to another site. Yep. Which is also an external link. Have to be careful with those, right? Long gone are the days of just, I read a post earlier that said remove link, it said remove backlinking from your vocabulary. Okay. And so I didn't agree with it, per se, but I got the point it was making. And you have to be careful with the sites that are linking back to you. You know, link building. That's what it said. Yeah, remove link building from your vocab. Well, no. Yeah. No. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's a great title of something in order to get attention. It made me click. Yeah. You know, made me click and read it. And I got the concept of what he's saying. Link building is so, like, Google is targeting. Penguin was strictly targeting links. And so, you know, if you're going through some old processes of getting just as many links as fast as you can from as many sites as you

can, yeah, you shouldn't be doing that. But external linking to your site is good from proper sources. And external linking out from your site could be even better depending on where you're linking to. For example, if this was, you know, Houston water heater repair, why not have an outbound link on that page to some water heater manufacturer who you sell? That's a great link to have outbound. Yeah. Or to details of the largest water heater on the planet. Well, yeah, something like that. Like something that is relevant and hopefully not competitive. Exactly. Although that's debatable and, you know, it's going to give value. Remember, at the end of the day, it's all about providing a good experience to the Google user. And when you reach the end of the Internet, it's not a good experience. So your web pages really shouldn't end and they shouldn't just point to your own site. Yeah. You should be sharing and linking. So, number seven, meta description. Now, this is cool here because the description is not really used in, let's say, in Google's ranking algorithm. They don't necessarily pull that data from there to see, to rank you higher. Right. But they do use that information to display it on the search engine results page. Often. And so, yeah, often, more unless you have some crazy description that's not suitable or you have some graph set up, knowledge graph, open graph, whatnot, and that information is being pulled from somewhere else. But if you don't have that, then your meta description is likely to show. So take advantage of that. You know, one of the things we've said years ago was that's your first opportunity to start selling. Perceivo, yeah. Yeah, I would include a CTA in there if you can. It's something subtle, you know, that ties into the keyword they're looking for that also ties into what you're offering. So take advantage of that description. And that was it. Oh, no, that's not it. Oh, the last one. You did say it was a long article.

Yeah. It was a long article. Keep scrolling. Oh, so make sure your site is built to be shared through social networks. Yeah. This is extremely key now, you know, because if people go through this long content and they absorb it and they find it valuable, which is point number one, then they will likely share it. Especially if you remind them that they liked it, they should share it. And so, you know, make it, tweet this article available. Share this on Facebook or G+. Make those links available and easy to be done with one click. Again, if you're using WordPress, then WordPress makes this extremely easy to add these plug-ins in. So take advantage of that. I like this one. Multi-device ready. Check how your site views. Yeah. Right? It may not view the same on, let's say, a phone or on a tablet and a desktop. And that's okay that it doesn't view the same. But as long as that user can still get the same experience across devices is what's key here. Frankly, it shouldn't look the same because you're on a smaller screen, smaller real estate and things like that. But the experience should be the same. I should still find exactly what I'm looking for in relatively few clicks and the content should be valuable. And so as long as people can have that experience, regardless of what type of device or platform they're on, then you're doing pretty good. So make sure your content and your site, we're talking on-page optimization, is multi-device friendly. Last one. Inclusive of authorship, metadata, schema, and rich snippets. I'm talking about all four of those real quick. These are must-haves now, right? You know, starting with authorship, still kind of new, about a year and a half in now. This is extremely important, especially if you're creating valuable, unique content. First off, you want to be the author of that content. You want Google to know that you wrote that. And so authorship is the way to do that. Furthermore, SERP results that have authorship

set up get clicked more. So set that up. Metadata. We just talked metadata. Some of it's not really used in ranking, but it's good for display. And so take advantage of metadata. Make sure you have that stuff set up. Schema. Schema is kind of an advanced markup, if you will, to help search engines recognize what this content is really about. Take the time to do that. Fusion WordPress, Yoast, does a great job of implementing some schema markup for you. So do that. And lastly, rich snippets. You must have good media on your site, images, videos, things like that, citations and things of that nature. Use them. Make sure that they're accessible. Make sure that the people who are viewing your site can see them. And last but not least, make sure that the search engines can index them when they're on your site. And that's where the value is. So authorship, metadata, schema, and rich snippets are key. You know, maybe a couple years ago, you could have went without schema and rich snippets and still ranked fairly well. Right. But by just having, you know, your page optimization done right. Not no more. Yeah. You got to keep up with the time. So set all that up. And those were some techniques for on-page optimization. Cool. Do we have any blank stare today? A little blank stare. A little blank stare. Again, it's supposed to be called, what? Yeah. Do I have to make the noise while we're blank staring? Can you do that? I think you're. What? So this what goes to the COO of BlackBerry. So they're talking about what they can do because they have a new OS coming out and new phones and this and that. And they're still on the fence in regards to creating some partnerships or whatnot. And then he comes out and he says, but everything's not off the table, including selling the company. Wow. That's great for customer loyalty. And that's genius. Yeah. So how do we get more people to flock away from BlackBerry

devices? And not even the people. I started thinking about the employees. Yeah. So we get this straight. I just really worked really, really hard on a new OS. But we may just sell it. And now we're in. Okay, so. Resume. Yeah. What are we doing today? Listening to CEO, selling the company, working on resume. Yeah. Hoping Android is hiring. Yeah. Oh, man. That's good. All right. So remember, we do have a referral program. We haven't covered that yet. And we also have a newsletter sign up for those of you who have not signed up. So for those of you who haven't bothered to like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, G plus, plus one us, or G plus one us, or plus G us. All it. Here. Now you can go to our website. Put us in your circle. All it. That's e-webstyle.com. And on the right, near the middle-ish area, there's actually a newsletter form to fill out. First name, last name, email. And you can start receiving our newsletter. We got a lot of really good information in our newsletter. So make sure you do that, please. I think that's it. I think that's everything we have. You guys have a good weekend back at you. And you guys have made us the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes. That makes us proud, happy, and honored. Yeah, that's good. Can I pose a question? Yeah. Question. So me and Chris were debating on a consistent timing for the podcast. So some of you guys who've been following us for a while know that probably zero through 140 maybe were done consistently in the mornings, Friday mornings around 930 central time. Right. But we've noticed we tend to get a little bit more activity when we do them in the afternoons. And then, frankly, schedule permits them to be done in the afternoons on some occasions. Right. So I want to pose this question to you guys. Hit us up, podcast at e-webstyle.com. For those who are current and those who may

watch it, what's your time preference? Would you like to sit down in the morning while having coffee and watch it? Or in the evening and having maybe a different type of beverage? Or noon eating lunch, 1230-ish. Exactly. And remember, central standard time. Or at least just let us know what time zone you're talking about when you give us a time frame. Excellent. Thank you guys again for making us the most popular internet marketing and SEO podcast on iTunes. Until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burris. Charles Lewis. Bye-bye for now.