Bad Competative Analysis and Keyword Prominence Vs. Stuffing - Unknown Secrets of SEO E-Webstyle Number 14
In this episode we discuss how not to do a website competitive analysis. We also discuss the importance of keyword prominence to SEO, keyword…
Avoid nine common SEO mistakes including click-here anchor text, Ajax-driven content, splash pages, flash menus, missing or duplicate title tags, and unoptimized image alt attributes to improve Google indexing and rankings.
Ajax is a way to dynamically bring in content onto a webpage without refreshing the entire page.
We discuss optimal title tags for SEO. We talk about the example of Internet Marketing Houston. Many people what to have fancy FLASH splash pages, they are beautiful but when should you use them and when should you avoid them. We also discuss some negatives like, AJAX sucks for SEO.
Search engine bots like Google and Yahoo do not click dynamically loaded links or read Ajax-generated content. If your target keywords only appear in Ajax-loaded sections, Google will not know that content exists on your page, so you cannot rank for those terms.
Title tags should be about 65 characters. Going over that limit causes the text to get cut off, which can chop off important keywords. Each page should also have a unique title tag reflecting that page's specific topic rather than a generic site-wide name.
A splash page is acceptable when it serves genuine utility, such as country or language selection for a global site. FedEx is cited as an example where users select their country before entering the site. Otherwise, splash pages hurt both SEO and user experience and should be avoided.
Google counts image alt attributes when indexing a page. Adding descriptive alt text to images provides an additional SEO signal and also improves usability by displaying text when a cursor hovers over an image, making it a practical double benefit for site owners.
Google is expecting there to be information about click here on a page where click here is the link.
Chris Burris
if you don't have title tags, go back and listen to the rest of our podcasts because you're probably missing a lot of other really simple things that can do well for your website
Chris Burris
Hi, and welcome to the Unknown Secrets of SEO Podcast. Yes, thank you for joining us, and welcome to another fun-filled edition of our SEO Podcast. My name's Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. And this is Paul Hanson, the sales manager of eWebStyle. You know, it's in our title, Unknown Secrets of SEO, and I don't know that we've actually given away the unknown secret of SEO yet. Is it time? Is it time that we give away the secret? No, it's not time yet. But in the next podcast, we're going to give away the unknown secret of SEO, or unknown secrets of SEO. So, every day we like to start off, last time we just kind of covered our five-point, that's actually six-point SEO analysis of a website for a Costa Rican villa. That product's moving forward great, so hopefully you guys enjoyed that. If you didn't catch that podcast, go ahead and go back and download it. That's a really good podcast about how we analyze a website. We now have a form on our page where you can actually fill out your name and domain name, and we'll give you a free five-point analysis. And when I say free, how long is that going to be free, Paul? Well, let's run it for a month, end of the month. Not long. Okay. We'll say end of the month. I like that, because that's not long. Yeah, get them in now. Yeah, because it won't always be free, because that's a lot of work. I got to do it. It is. Oh, and to, if I could make a quick note, to Elizabeth, you sent me a request, but I need some information from you, so get back to me. Send that, fill out that form again. I didn't have your website. Elizabeth, I think in Maine or New Jersey? I don't, I can't remember. But get back to us. We need your website to do your analysis. And since you're doing shout-outs, I want to give a shout-out to our friend Gustavo Salami. He's, Salami, I'm
sure I'm pronouncing that wrong. Salami is probably more appropriate. Sorry about that, Gustavo. He actually put a note in his contact to us. He's asking us to do some, to put together a quote for him. But he said that he loves our podcast. Thank you very much for listening. We love it. We really appreciate it. Gustavo, here's to you. Thank you. All right. I've got to update that. Remember, so update the form. Oh, yeah. And sorry about that. If you were in four countries, sorry. He put a great note that we need to add to our form the ability for people in other countries. Because he's in Zurich. And so our form isn't, you know, very user-friendly for people in Zurich. And we're going to make that happen for sure. Time to start thinking globally. All right. News for the day. You know, this is a little weird. It's one of those things that jumps out at you on the page. And you know what? Chastity Bono is going to change gender. What? I don't even want to touch that one, man. Yeah, you don't want to touch that one. Yeah, literally. I don't. You're right. I don't want to touch that one. I'm like, all right, then let's not spend too much time on that just for you guys who may know where to go. May not know. Sonny Bono, who used to be Cher's husband and manager and all of this. Chastity Bono is Cher and Sonny's, well, was Cher and Sonny's daughter. And soon will be Cher and Sonny's son, apparently. You know, and the next topic that I'm going to bring up that's really appropriate, this is going to be our apology podcast. I'm very sorry for that. Cher and Sonny, rest in peace. I figured that, you know, all the right-wing radio stations are talking about Obama's apology to her as he's going around the country and apologizing for being Americans and all of this stuff. And even David Letterman the other day was actually, like his top ten list,
I think, was even apologies for things he had said about Sarah Pollan's daughter and all of this. I'm like, oh, man, everyone's doing apologies. I want to apologize for something, right? So let's offend some people real quick and we'll apologize. Well, so we did that. That's excellent. And I, you know, the only thing I could really come up with in terms of the podcast is we have to apologize. We're not getting our podcast up as quickly as we like. Oh, yeah. We miss a couple weeks every now and then. So we apologize for that. We're trying to get them up every single week. We know that that's value. We know that you guys, we're hoping that you guys are, you know, waiting with bated breath for our next podcast and we're going to work on making sure that we continue to deliver that because that's pretty important. So we've gone through a lot of different things on a weekly basis. We like to talk about what we've done during the week typically. And I wanted to take it, we kind of got away from some of the fundamentals of search engine optimization. So I wanted to, you know, put together some sort of list of, you know, nine mistakes that should be avoided when you're doing SEO. So you're making your website, you're doing SEO, and there's nine things that you want to avoid. There's a whole lot more. But, you know, we like these numbers, nine, a five-point website analysis that's actually six, et cetera. So one of the things that I want to start with is we'll say, and this is, you know, in the old days when you designed a website, you, well, let me get, it is click here, link anchor text is a mistake that you want to stay away from. And where that comes from is when we used to do websites in the past, we would say click here, and then that would be the link to the next page. And the reason you used click here, it
was, you know, some surveys that you're 80% more likely to actually get them to click something if you said click here, which is probably still true. You still want to have that around, you know, for your really important calls to action. They should be image slash text slash whatever. So your calls to action should say click here, I believe. But I think, like, also back in the day, you know, people didn't quite understand, like, what a link was. So there was some text that was in a different color with, and I think a lot of times it was underlined. People didn't necessarily know if I click that, it'll take me. It would do anything. Yeah, it would take me to another place. Right. And when I first started searching the internet, I didn't, I didn't understand that. And I remember someone actually had to show me, yeah, if you click that, it would go somewhere else. It was years ago. And you're like, wow, this is so cool. There's more than one page on the internet? There's two pages on the internet. That's awesome. It just doubled. And it's been doubling every day ever since. So now what we understand, and we've talked about this in some of our previous podcasts, so if you haven't heard those, make sure you go back and download those. Click here. You know, the text that is on the link going to the next page is one of the things that Google uses to determine the information on the next page. So what we've talked about in the past is a lot of people would have the word home going to their home page. And Google thinks that what you're trying to say is that there is information about home on this page that you're going to. And so that's actually a mistake because there's usually no information about home on the page you're going to. Of course. Same with click here. Google is expecting there to be information about click here on a page where click here is
the link. And so you want to stay away from click here now. It's pretty straightforward. It's also very important. We work on that. I had some engineers kind of kick me in the butt the other day about, hey, we need to get some of our linking straight for this one client of ours. So let's go on to the next thing. One of the things, and you know, we've never bumped into this. I've just seen it on enough forums and mentioned enough times and it has to do with, you know, potential CRM, any sort of environment where you have a theme where people will actually move, you know, have different theme versions. For instance, if our current version of eWebStyle was e-webstyle.com and then we'd do like slash v version 2 and then our entire website was under version 2. Mm-hmm. And that would kind of make sense from a programmer's perspective if I know that I'm going to make a new version of eWebStyle, then the next version I could put under version 2, the folder version 2. There's a whole lot of challenges with that. The most important one is that your backlinks, if you decide to take down version 2, is no longer valuable. If you do have to move a page, you know, you want to try not to. We've got some clients that we're going to be migrating from .asp to .php, so we're working on best case solutions for those. Google does have an acceptable methodology for moving a page permanently in its database, so it can keep the link tracking and all of that. So, you want to use that, and versioning you don't really want to use. That's not going to be a good thing. And like I said, the main reason is as you move your website around, you're going to be losing a lot of backlinks, and Google's just not going to like it. Ajax, have you ever heard of Ajax? Yeah, actually, I cleaned my sink with Ajax two days ago. That powder stuff, you
get it in the can, sprinkle it in your... Podcast, remember? Podcast. We're on a podcast. Oh, yeah. We're not general home improvement. Well, you said Ajax. I was like, yeah, I know Ajax. I clean my stainless steel sink cleaner or something like that. Ajax is a pretty cool technology. It has a lot of really, it totally can enhance the user's experience on your website. Ajax is also known to have some particular challenges with security, so you've got to be careful when you use Ajax. How does it relate to SEO? Specifically, Ajax is a way to dynamically bring in content onto a webpage without refreshing the entire page. So we may have been on a website where, I don't know, where they're saying, you know, top ten lists, and it's got ten lists of top ten things. And the first one is, you know, top ten fattest cities, and I have to mention that because we're here in Houston, one of the fattest... Are we the fattest? I know we were back in 2003, 2002, whenever Super Size Me came out, we were number one. We were number one. What's happened to us since we're just not eating enough anymore? We need to get back on the ball. Yeah, that's right. I don't know what our problem is. This is ridiculous. Come on, Houstonians, let's pick it up. You know, shove another burger in your mouth. Come on, and go to Burger King, at least go to Burger King and get one of those tiny burgers. After you're done eating, get two more tiny burgers again so we can be fatter. Geez, number one or nothing. That's what we're talking about. And we're certainly not going to be the number one healthiest city anytime soon. Not anytime soon. So let's keep that fattest city going. Anyway, so let's say that's one of the lists. So you click, that's the list that starts off. And then the next list is the healthiest cities. And you click that. And without the entire page refreshing, boom, there you have
the top ten healthiest cities. And, you know, the next one could be, I don't know, some sort of top ten things David Letterman apologized for. And, you know, boom, it comes in, again, without refreshing your screen. Now, why would someone, why would we want to stay away from using that? Well, that's a great question. Because Google and the bots out there, so that would be like Yahoo bots and, again, bots are the name that we give to the software that Google uses to go through your website and figure out what's on your website. Well, they're not going to click all those links and they're not going to be able to read all of that dynamically generated content. And so if your target was to be on the first page for top ten things that David Letterman apologized for and that's the third of those links that I just mentioned, well, Google's not even going to know that that information is on your page at all. And we all know if Google doesn't see any information on your page relative to a certain thing, you are not optimizing for that. So does that make sense? That makes perfect sense. And, you know, to someone, like when I first came across this, my first thought was, okay, well, changing content is a good thing. You want to have changing content. And I was first thinking, oh, kind of like an RSS feed. It gives you dynamic content. You know, if you have an RSS feed on your website, the content's changing. Google likes it. It looks good. And that was what I was thinking at first until I actually made the distinction between, you know, doing that and then Ajax. Ajax is not going to be Google-able, excuse me. It might be spider-able. Yeah, there we go. I'm just making up words. It's a good day for that. Ajax, cleaning my sink. No, that's exactly right. There is actually, you know, normally when a page refreshes, there's what's called a server hit. And that means that there's
a request from, you know, your user who's viewing your website. And it goes back to the server that's hosting your website and then sends new content. That does actually occur in Ajax, but it occurs on the page. So the entire page doesn't refresh. The other thing that's important to remember is, say you wanted to send the list of top 10 things that David Letterman apologized for to a friend. Because the URL is not changing on that page, the best you can do is send him the URL and then tell him to click the top 10 David Letterman apologies list. So you've only given him a two-step process. Whereas if you have, if a new page refreshes, not only is it good because Google can see it, but you can actually send that URL to your friend and they can go directly to the top 10 things that David Letterman apologized for. I don't know any others than Sarah Pellin saying bad things about Sarah Pellin's daughter. I don't know. The people came down on him for that one. Yeah, pretty hard, but I don't know. They were saying David is not funny and, I don't know, the guy's hilarious. He's a very well-paid guy because he's hilarious. Did you know he hosted the movie awards, Academy Awards once? Really? Yeah, he hosted the Academy Awards. I don't even know that. This was a long time ago and apparently it was an abject failure. Really? Like, just bombed. His performance was just horrible. I didn't know that. I wouldn't think so. I wouldn't think that because that's what he does every day. Gets up and jokes and clowns with people every single night. And there were pundits who were saying, oh, that's the first step in the fall of David Letterman. He's never going to be in business again. And to David Letterman's credit, he's smart enough to get, you know, he went on his show and made fun of his own performance. That he had given that was so bad. So, it's, you know, turn
it into humor. If self-deprecation is a very endearing quality and it can get annoying, so don't do it too much. The next thing on our list is image and flash content. Image, I like flash and I think, like, this can go in a million different directions. I think it's a good thing if you do it properly on your website. Now, that's kind of like a... You mean like us? Yeah, of course. I mean, is there anyone else that can do it properly? It's kind of a fine line you've got to walk when you are using it. So, what are we saying? It's good? It's bad? We're saying that you have to use it properly. And, for instance, this is a classic example because we used to do this long ago here. The header of a page could say, let's just, we'll just stick with our theme here, you know, top ten things that David Letterman apologized for. That can be across the top. But you could throw that in an image and, you know, fancy it up so it, you know, it looks like a fancy Google. You know how Google's always changing their Google title on their search? So, you could do that with top ten things that Letterman apologized for. But if that's an image, then the text, top ten things that Google, I mean, that David Letterman apologized for is in an image. The best you could do is add an alt tag, which isn't nearly as effective as having a header tag, H1, H2, H3. If you guys aren't familiar with those, you should get familiar with them. It's not nearly as good as just having text there. So, although it looks prettier and it, you know, creates a nice thing for the customer, for the user, you know, a nice interface, it's not very good for search engine optimization. Again, you could have, and we've seen this, I don't know if you've ever seen this, an entire website, somebody we were quoting recently, or a while back, one was all
flash and one was images. So, it's like somebody took the PDF that they were making for their brochure and just stuck the image, the JPEG image up. So, it had all the text, it had everything, it looked nice, and it even had some links. The challenge, it's an image. And Google cannot go through the text of an image. And when Google can't go through the text, Google thinks there's no text, boom, you're not going to get, and you'll get indexed, but you're not going to get indexed the way you would like to get indexed. And, you know, I don't see that too often anymore, but I do still see it. I think I saw one maybe last week, the whole site was flashing. And it's not just, if you like flashing, you want to do your whole website and flashing, and if, well, I'll say this, if you don't really care about your search engine optimization, hey, do your whole site and flash, but, you know, don't say we didn't warn you. Your marketing budget is going to have to be a lot bigger. Yeah, exactly. So don't say we didn't warn you. That's true. And so, yeah, image and flash, same kind of thing. They can have these great menus. You can have great all sorts of things. And just remember, Google and Yahoo and, is it Bling now? Bling. Bing. It's Bling. Bling, the gold search engine. All gold, all the time. You know, and I just got on Bing yesterday for the very first time. I won't say anything about it. It was all right. I was on it the first of this week. To me, it was like live. They just made it prettier. They just added Bling to it. Yeah, exactly. There you go. They just added some platinum to it. Bing added Bling to live. Yeah. This is their third effort at search engine. Yeah. I was, personally, didn't use live that much. I didn't really like their search results. I didn't use it. To me, Bing is just
kind of like, they just fancied it up a little bit. Yeah. But, yeah, you know, to each his own. You need a little bit more than a window of dressing on a search engine to make it really pop. So, the next thing we've got here is a splash page. Splash page. What do you think? Paul, give us your honest opinion. What do you think of splash pages? Why? Seriously. Come on. Like, why? Like, we've been through this over and over and over again. You know, I feel like when I see a splash page, I'm like, dude, did you not listen to the podcast? That's what I think. Like, stop, stop, stop. Man, I just have so, like, I just want to grab those people and shake them. I want to baby shake them. Sorry. Okay. Let me clarify that. Apple, iPhone, baby shake them. Yes. You have to listen to a previous podcast, I Do Not Shake Babies. That's where that comes from. But just, I, if I run across a splash page and I tell, if I'm on the phone with someone talking to them about it and I'm looking at their site and they have a splash page, I tell them, don't do it. Or I would say, listen, if you have, if your little intro movie or whatever is just awesome and it really gives a lot of insight about your company, put it on your home page, you know, don't. As part of your home page. There you go. You know, don't make me have to watch this thing because the first thing I, when I see those, I'm immediately looking for skip intro. Skip or back. Yeah, or there we go. Or bounce. Or back. I will bounce. I'm going to hop, skip, or bounce. Yeah. And hopping is not an option, so it's skip or bounce. And if there's no skip, it's a bounce. Yeah. So, and if you're, if you're not kind of not sure what we're talking about, it's, you know, everyone's been to a site where
they make you watch this little intro before you get to the site, the actual home page. That's what really what we're referring to. Yep, that's a, that's, that's a big problem. You know, there is some, there are some instances, having said all of that, all of your, you've released all of your anger. I'm good now, yeah. You're in a good place now. There is, there's actually a website, a massive website that uses what you could arguably call a splash page, and that is FedEx. Really? If you go to FedEx.com, they have a simple, no text, nothing to it page, and then you select your country. And that's arguably a splash page, right? And, but it makes sense, right? That makes great sense, because that's, there's some utility to that, you know? Necessity. Yeah. You know, we've got clients that have websites in multiple languages, and if there were enough languages, we would probably recommend that they do something along those lines. Until there's enough languages, we recommend that they have a link to each language on each and every page. So, if you're on the home page, you go to English, Spanish, French, Portuguese. If you're on, you know, the products page, you go, you can click English, Spanish, French, Portuguese on each of those pages, because that's only four languages. But when you start adding a whole bunch more languages, you can't list all of those languages. You probably could do a drop down, but it just makes a lot more sense to have a splash page like FedEx. Also, on FedEx, I don't think they do have any sort of flash on there. Okay. Which, in that case, I would actually recommend that they have something, you know, motion, something, you know, showing their delivery, showing worldwide capacity or whatever, there where they can also have the drop down of which country. Yes, most people are never going to look at it, but if anybody gets there for the first time and didn't realize that FedEx has a splash page, you know, they
got, you know, it's a powerful brand, and it's an opportunity to brand again. In fact, the smartest thing might be to put some sort of charity flash on that front, you know, what are some of the charities that FedEx, you know, you know they're involved in some charities. Oh, that'd be a great idea. What are the charities they're involved in, because, you know, it's like a no business cost way to advertise the charities that they're in. And so that, I would actually recommend some flash on that. And I think that's a great example of where that particular splash page has some utility to it, and it's a good idea. And remember that, not the shot guys that we're looking at, but we went to another site that they had linked to, and they had, it was, they had their shots, and it was, they had, you know, you could choose the language. And I was like, okay, yeah, this country, they operate out of Europe, but they have, they, they sell to many different countries, so they had the three biggest languages that they, that they support, and you could pick your language. And I was like, okay, great idea, especially if you're a global company. I think that's a great idea. Makes a lot of sense. Which we're, aren't we all global companies now? I don't know. Yeah, I get it. Not the dry cleaner down the street. Tim and his new baby. There's a shout out to you. I'm sure you don't listen to the podcast, but. But thanks for cleaning my clothes. Thanks for taking care of my clothes. New buttons. Look, look at that. Oh, really? You need to take your stuff there. Because I lost a button this morning. Stronger than you look. That's pretty bad. Thanks, Chris. Sorry about that. All right. Next one we have, and we've kind of covered this as a non-spider-roll-bull. Apparently it is a word. There we go. Here it is on my list, flash menus. So, we did cover this a little bit,
and again, that's just across the top, and we will often use this, and that's not really a problem, provided you have another way to do it, a traditional HTML way to view all of the pages. And so, use them judiciously, but you want to be careful that you have more than one way to navigate your website if one of the ways you're using is a flash menu. And, you know, the first thing that I, when I, when we were talking about this, the first thing that comes to my mind was, does it, it's going to affect your, like, your site map, or maybe not your site map, but, well, I guess if you have a site map, then that would, that's a way around. Yes. It actually is. That's what I'm trying to say. Now, one of the challenges, remember, though, and go back and check our previous podcast, remember that you can improve the ranking of any one of your pages by improving the linking that exists within your website. So, if you're, if the only thing that you have is just a site map, then you're going to be missing that one step, the ability, so, within your pages, let's, let's, let's use eWebStyle. So, we've got a link that's SEO. Well, then, then Google knows at the end of that link is information about SEO. So, that link adds some credibility to the SEO page. If the only way Google knows how to find it is from a site map, then it doesn't have the advantage of those links. So, you also want to have links, but you're exactly right if, if, again, if you weren't that concerned or whatever, you just wanted it to be indexed in case, you know, you're selling blue one-armed widgets. I think we're still on the first page for that. I think we are. Ha, ha. Look at us. That's proof that it's easy to get on the first page of Google. All right. So, we've got a whole lot of, you know, title tags are
something that we talk about on a regular basis. There's a, and there's a couple of mistakes here. We're going to count these all as one. But there's a couple of mistakes that you make with title tags. One of them is just be aware that the title tag needs to be about 65 characters. So, when you start running more than 65 characters, those characters get chopped off. All right? And so, you don't want it to get chopped off in the middle of one of your keywords. You know, you only, you type out this long title and then your keyword's there. One of the other things that's, you know, in the old days you used to just do a title like eWebStyles Website. And that was the title for every page. Well, then Google doesn't know that one page is about, the title isn't indicating to Google that one page is about search engine optimization. One page is about web design and development. One page is about link building. One page is about pay-per-click. One page is about, we do IT work here in the city of Houston. One page is about, you know, whatever it may be. Because if the title is the same on every page, then you're not kind of optimizing each page for the keywords that would be relevant. Because clearly, the information on the hosting page is going to be different than the information on the SEO page. And the title should reflect that, as any inbound link should reflect that as well. So, you know, I'd even say, hey, mistake number one is not having title tags. I still do see some sites that don't have title tags. Wow. Yeah. You need to have some of those. Yeah, title tags, you know, if you don't have title tags, go back and listen to the rest of our podcasts because you're probably missing a lot of other really simple things that can do well for your website. You've got to have a title tag. Yeah. I ran across one the other day
and I was like, wow. Seriously? Where's the title tag? And then you're searching more. You know, maybe my browser's broken. I've got to reboot. Yeah. Because certainly no one has a lack of a title tag anymore. One thing that we do want to mention here is, you know, any sort of black hat technique you don't want to use. This would be keyword stuffing. This would be all the things associated. Go back and listen to our previous podcast about black hat techniques. Not so you can learn them and use them. Yeah. But so you can avoid them because you may get away with black hat for a while. You may get away with black hat for a long time. But, you know, right when your business is booming and based on Google, Google will find out and they will just remove your website and, you know, all your infrastructure for your business is now an overhead that you can't afford. Yeah. So don't even bother with that. Just make sure you're doing things the right way. Anyway, one thing, now we do a lot of, in fact, we landed a big contract this week. By the way, high five on that. All right. Awesome on that. And in that big contract, we're going to use some open source. We're going to use SugarCRM, which is a content, no, excuse me, customer relationship management software that's available on the web. It's open source and we're going to customize it for this particular customer. And things like those packages, CRM is customer records management, CMS is content management solution. There's a lot of open source ones out there. We're going to start using Joomla soon, even shopping carts that you would plug in, WordPress, which we use on a regular basis. All of those are these packages that have built into them a whole amount of features and structure and everything. Most of them have what's called a friendly URL versus a dynamic URL. And the challenge is that Google is much happier with the friendly URL, plus
it's easier to send to people. Let me give you an example where you might come to Patrick Wanus' website. And the URL could be because his smoking product is actually product ID number five in the database and the weight loss is six in the database. So it could be that you could get to those pages by typing patrickwanus.com slash product ASP question mark P or product equals five to get the smoking page. Or the same thing except question mark product equals six to get to the weight loss. It would be much better to have patrickwanus.com slash weight loss dot ASP patrickwanus.com slash what was the other one? Quit smoking dot ASP or dot PHP or whatever or just quit smoking. Most of these packages, CMS, CRM, most of these packages, WordPress, have a feature that you can turn on, which is friendly URLs. And make sure you use it. You know, it's a simple thing. You just got to turn it on. And, you know, really what it is is it's there's one way to code a website that's awesome for for programming. It's like a logic in how you're taught to program. And then there's a way that's actually valuable for for search engines and sending to people. I notice we're going to go a little over time. So you guys don't worry. We're not going to charge you extra. You're just going to get a couple extra minutes out of our podcast. For free. In fact, we're on our last thing. And the last one is not using your image alt attribute. I've heard you describe what is that alt attribute on an image? What? The alt attribute. And people don't use it. That's the that's an SEO problem. All right. So, Paul, the alt attribute is when you move your cursor over an image and what happens? Oh, and it changes. Yeah. And the text shows up in that little pop up. That's your alt tag. So you move your cursor over a picture of Paul and it says Paul Hanson. You
move a picture over a picture of Chris and it says Chris Burris. That's an alt tag. Google does count those. It's pretty important to Google. So you want to make sure that you use those. I really do. I think they're a great idea. And when I started to see those, I'm like, okay, yeah, that's awesome. And it's just a, I feel like it's very user friendly. It's good for providing extra information for visitors. But if it's also going to help your search engine optimization, it's like a double bonus. You should definitely, definitely, definitely use it. Absolutely. I think that's very true. You know, one thing that we said, and that's really all the information we have in our podcast. One thing that we said over the week that we wanted to, you know, we did our apology. Now we want to do our thanks. Hey, thanks again to everyone out there. Gustavo, sorry for mispronouncing your last name again. And we wanted to say, you know, we appreciate everybody who's listening. Our listenership is growing. Hey, help us spread the word about our podcast. You know, we love giving back to the community. We love to give back in a bigger way if possible. So if you're in a position, you've got access to a blog, write a blog about us. You know, put an iTunes link, put a link either to our blog where they can get our podcast or, you know, to an iTunes link, which if you need any help, you know, giving a direct link there. We understand maybe you don't want to link to our blog. That's fine. But, you know, our podcast has a lot of valuable information. When we started, we were actually using other podcasts to help train our salespeople. Now, of course, we're using our own podcast for that purpose. But if you, you know, if you want to, feel free and use that. But to help spread the word, we feel like we're giving a lot of valuable information. So far, the people that we're
hearing back from, they're, let me quote, love your podcast. So help us spread the word. Spread the love. Thank you very much for listening. Until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burris. And this is Paul Hanson. Bye-bye for now.
Matthew Bertram is an AI keynote speaker, creator of DIG® (Digital Information Governance), and owner and CEO of EWR Digital. He helps energy and industrial leaders win visibility in AI search (GEO and AEO), is President of ModalPoint and CMO of the Oil & Gas Global Network, hosts The Best SEO Podcast, and has authored eight books including LLM Visibility. More about Matthew Bertram.
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