Optimization Under the Hood - #SEOpodcast 267

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. I'm Charles Lewis, your internet marketing specialist. Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our podcast. This is podcast number 267. We are broadcasting live from Houston, Texas, and we are your friendly local neighborhood top position snatchers, where our mantra is, Don't be a douche. Do not be a douche. It is not a good look. Not a good look at all. As always, there is a tip from our previous podcast, and that tip is, allow enough time based on how much traffic your site receives for A-B testing. Yeah, a lot of times, and I hear this a lot, people, oh, A-B test, A-B test, A-B test, and they make the mistake of every day changing ads, every day adjusting budget, every day tweaking keywords, and you're not really letting enough data accumulate in order for you to make the best decision. So allow some time. If your site gets a lot of traffic, like every day, then let the whole week go by, and then look at that data. And maybe your site doesn't get a lot of traffic. Maybe you're working on a really small budget, and you don't rank well. Let the month go by. So at least that way, you can have enough data to support the A-B testing decisions you're making. Yeah, it makes sense. There's a phrase in statistics called statistically significant. If you let like eight people visit your page, and two of them go one direction, and six of them go the other, it's just not enough information. So make sure you get enough information for that. So our article today, we've got a really good article about... Man, so I want to give a punch in the face to Neil Patel, seven under the hood. We've heard from him before. Yeah, Neil's pretty good, man. I actually had a chance to sit next to him some years ago at SCS in New York. Oh, cool. And so it

was pretty cool. But man, he posted his article, seven under the hood optimization techniques. And it was pretty good. So we're going to dive in and see what we can do under the hood of your site to help your SEO. Actually, before that happens, if you're in a position to, go ahead and tweet now. And what they should tweet, hashtag SEO podcast. Hashtag SEO podcast. Decision number 267. Be sure to tag us in it, at eWebStyle, at bestSEOPodcast. That way we can follow you back, because we will follow you back, and do all of our social networking stuff. Absolutely. If this is the first time you've listened to this podcast, welcome. Welcome. We're glad to have you in Texas. How you doing? Parlance. Howdy. Yeah, howdy. Hey, y'all. If you've listened to this podcast before, we do ask you to do one favor. Now, this little segment, if we get a boost of 10 Twitter followers, or 10 Instagram followers, or 10 Facebook followers, fans, likes, I think, and then 10 G+, followers. If any one of those bumps up 10, we're going to skip this section in the next podcast. So, if that happens, if you guys make that happen, great. We'll skip it. If not, we're going to do it again next time, and this is what we're doing. If you've listened to this podcast before, we ask you to do us one of three or four favors. I can't even remember right now. Brain's kind of fried. Yeah, it's late. Yeah. First one is write a review on our G+, local page. We've made it incredibly easy to get to our G+, local page. That is e-webofstyle.com slash Google+, or slash Google+, or slash G+, or slash G+, and all of those will take you to our G+, local page, where there used to be three things to do, and now there's only two. Yeah, put us in a circle. That way, you can share some content with us. We can share some content with you, but more importantly, give us a

five-star review. Yes. Next, on iTunes, three steps. Go on to iTunes, create account, write a review. If you choose to send that review to us, hopefully you'll make that review. Five stars. Send that to us via podcast at e-webstyle.com. I was on a roll. Couldn't stop. Next, Facebook. Go to our Facebook page, facebook.com slash ewebstyle. There, you'll see the little review section. Write a review. Hopefully you make that review. Five stars. And Instagram. Skip that one. Stitcher. You can go to our Stitcher page, e-webstyle.com. You'll see a Stitcher link. Go there. Write a review. Hopefully that will make it five stars. In all of these cases, please share our show with other people. That way we can get to our 10 followers, additional followers between this podcast and the next one. And we'll skip this whole section. Finally, there are a whole myriad of ways you can haunt us and stalk us. Yep. Facebook.com slash ewebstyle. YouTube.com slash ewebstyle. Instagram.com slash ewebstyle. E-webstyle. I know I'm missing one. And YouTube.com slash ewebstyle. And Ustream. Ustream. Dot TV. Yeah. Slash ewebstyle. Yeah. You can follow us all those ways. Hey, if you're a PHP expert on any social platform, you can almost go slash ewebstyle. Yeah. We'll be there. Yeah. Yeah. And this is from the guy who has at Chuck on Twitter. So he's on top of it. Hey, if you're a PHP expert, hey, you just dropped your mic. You're probably hearing Chuck a lot clearer now. If you're a PHP expert or a WordPress genius, we're interested in what you have to offer. We're looking for talent. But just call and leave an audio resume. 713-510-7846. If you want a free website analysis, all you need to do is go to our website, e-webstyle.com. You will find our free website analysis. If you're in a hurry, call us because we're a little bit behind. Yeah. It's a lot of people. Any Algo cat? Yeah. Do have some Algo cat. By the way, you do notice that. Yeah. I saw the cat. I wasn't

going to bring it up. Yeah. But I saw it. It's still a little raw, this tear tattoo because no one left the review. Yeah. It's raw. Yeah. So you want to get into our Algo cat? Yeah. Wait. Time for our favorite segment, The Algorithm Cataclysm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So dig this. So remember last week we were talking about the Google making changes to the knowledge graph. Right. Include more information. Another knowledge graph change, which is why this is included in our Algo cat. So now they're rolling out health related questions. Okay. So you can go to Google now and search for any symptoms you may have that may be affecting your health. And in the top portion of the search results, that knowledge graph will not only give you the diagnosis of what it is you may be having, it'll tell you if it's serious, if you need to go to the doctor or go get some over-the-counter meds. Wow. Yeah. It's pretty kind of... Bye-bye WebMD. Or WebMD stepping up some. Yeah. You know, and so that's where Algo cat. I think they're making it... It's clear that their focus is to help the mobile user. Yeah. Because all of those sorts of deals make it easier to use a mobile device when you're searching for stuff. Absolutely. And one thing we didn't mention is our current Twitter account. Our Twitter account went up seven since last time, is now at 467. Instagram went up one, is now at 88. Facebook went up two at 594. And G plus is at 35. We don't remember what it was last week because we didn't write... I wrote it down and it's hidden on my desk somewhere. All right. Great. Algo cat. We've got just a little bit of news. Firefox is using Shumway to play Flash. So, it's kind of sealing the death of the Flash plug-in so that some of the Flash videos will actually play directly in Firefox without a Flash plug-in. Yeah. Without the need of Adobe Flash play. I'm so thrown

off because there's no review to read. That's... Anyway, let's get that review. And Apple's working on a car. Yeah. The mystery car. I saw that. So... Everyone else is. Hey, you want to start working on a car? Sure. Yeah, let's do it. We'll work on a car. Well, we can... If you look at our Instagram pictures, we are using tools. Yeah. Real tools. You can see them in the pictures. That's Instagram.com slash... E-Webstyle. And you can see us using real tools. We could use those same tools to work on the car. Yeah. I think we should do that. Maybe we even use a 3D printer. Yeah, we can do that. We can just print our own car. We can buy a 3D printer and we'll build it one square foot at a time. Wow. By the way, there is... There is no process. There is no process that I think a Chinese student organization built a car that looked pretty awesome with a 3D printer. Really? Yeah. Seriously. I'm leaving. I wouldn't mind trying it. All right. So, I got some news as well. Let's get into this. First off, Facebook wrote out a new change. Now, you can actually decide who's going to manage your profile after you die. I'm not sure why that would be a concern. I mean, I'm dead. Yeah. I don't care what you post. Think of it like a Michael Jackson or a celebrity. Well, who has a state that's still generating income. Yeah. You need to assign somebody to that. I mean, I get it, but, you know, if you're not... It's not really applicable to the lay person. All my family watching, when I die, like, Twitter, Facebook, shut all that down. Delete it. Yeah, delete it. Because in 300 years, I'm going to look like an idiot. Exactly. As are we all. Exactly. And lastly, yesterday was Safer Internet Day. And so, Google celebrated that by giving everyone two gigs of free space on Google Drive. Two gigs. Yeah, which is pretty cool. Only one caveat,

though. Okay. You have to log in and confirm that your account is secured. This is the right backup phone number, the right backup email address. You know, these are the apps you have synced up to Chrome and blah, blah, blah. And check that and get your free space. That's cool. Kind of cool. All right. That is the... I got a punch in the face, too. And this punch in the face goes to Carlo. Carlo Vergara. She's on Twitter, at VergaraCarlo. She says, loving Chris Burris and Charles Lewis on the E-WebStyle podcast. Thank you. The way they talk brings a smile to my face. That's cool. Let's just pretend for a second... That's a review. So, that's... No, that is Sofia Vergara. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. Yeah. At E-WebStyle. Back to reality, Carlo. Hashtag podcast. So, yeah. Punch in the face to you. Appreciate you tuning in. Glad we can make you smile. Excellent. All right. That is the potatoes. Potatoes of our podcast. Time to get into the meat. Let's dive right in, ladies and gentlemen. Like I said earlier, punch in the face to Neil Patel. He put this article out on Search Engine Journal called Seven Under-the-Hood Optimization Techniques That Will Rock Your SEO. And so, let's get right into it. Number one, he says, make sure, make your site secure. And I totally agree with that. He says, although it's an immediate impact, its immediate impact on the search landscape is marginal. We can expect that signal to grow as time goes on. He's referring to that recent algorithm change Google wrote out about making your site secure. So, a lot of sites haven't really adopted it yet. And that's why he's saying it's marginal. And I agree. I will say, making your site secure could do nothing but help. I mean, when you consider all of the WordPress hacks and the brute force attacks and things like that, any additional security you can add to your site would probably be a benefit. Absolutely. Number two, add above-the-fold images or videos

with full optimization. And so, he went on to say that such images can improve a site's ranking in the image or universal search. And that's key because I do a lot of image searches on Google and I find myself clicking those and ending up on that site. And so, you want to rank there. Let me take this time to give a pro tip, though. Pro tip. So, if you're going to add video and images to your site, he suggested putting them above the fold. And I get it because you want to engage those users. Better way to engage the users, don't put it above the fold. Put it on the fold. Right, yeah. So, half of that image shows. Teaser! Yeah. Half of the image shows, half of the video shows. Well, Chuck, why would you want to do that? Because that inherently forces people to scroll. And so, now they have to scroll. Now they're looking at the other content you have. And now your time on site went up. Your engagement goes up. Let's say the bullet points you have above the fold don't resonate with a particular user. And because he or she sees the video, they scroll a little bit more and see the bullet point that does resonate with that visitor. So, yeah. He says add videos. And I think the key here is making sure that they're optimized. Right? Because when you add these videos, make sure that title has that keyword in it. You've tagged it with the keywords. You've put enough keywords in that description. Right? And make sure those videos are fully optimized. That way you can get the most value for them. Number three. Three. He says create an image sitemap. Kind of a new deal. People do video sitemaps and page sitemaps. He says do an image sitemap. And he went on to say that to create an image sitemap, simply add extra info about the images on that page with your existing sitemap. I think this is really key for people like photographers

or artists or people who really need those images to show maybe it's an e-commerce site and you want those product images to easily be found. Yeah. Definitely go with an image sitemap in that case. Yep. Let's see here. And my papers are getting stuck together. Houston humidity. You know, it's just how it works. So, number four. Four. He says regularly. Regularly. Yeah. Regularly review and request removals from your link profile. And Neil, I'm glad you touched on link profile for a minute because that's one of the things that has a huge effect and impact on the performance of your SEO. It has an impact on the performance of your ranking and it's also one of those things that people tend to not look at until they get in trouble. You know, you get hit with a penguin smackdown and then all of a sudden now you're trying to check your link profile when you should be checking it regularly is what he's saying. That's a great tip. Yeah. Monitor your link profile. He says request low authority or spam sites removing their links to yours even if you haven't been penalized. He's trying to stay ahead of the game. Man, just stop linking to me, please. Yeah. You know, or and then submit a disavow. After you requested them to remove it, go ahead and submit that disavow. I wasn't quite sure about that one because that's kind of inherently letting Google know, hey, these people are linking to me and they may not have penalized you for that yet. Right. But I get it. Right. Yeah. So he says. You may want to wait a little bit to see if they actually remove it. Exactly. If they remove it, you don't need to disavow it. If they don't, then of course disavow it. I went on to say, yeah, monitor the links and be careful at the end of the day. You're being careful who you're connected to because what is it? Like birds of a feather flock together. And so if two spammy

sites are linking to you, then you look like a spammy site. Whatever you do, make sure you don't link back to them. Exactly. Whatever. You don't have somebody on staff who's not aware of it and making links to the wrong place. Definitely. Number five. He says, create keyword specific URLs. And so for all of us WordPress users, this kind of comes default. Turn on permalinks. We do this. He says, although. Well, technically not default because default is not permalink. It's like you have to turn that on. Yeah, you got to turn it on. And once you turn it on, it's pretty straightforward. He says, exact match domains or EMDs are an SEO spam technique of yesteryear, but there's no question that Google still considers the URL to be a significant indication of the page's relevance and therefore a ranking factor. And I agree. You just have to make sure that you're not really spamming this page, that this page is optimized well, that if that URL is a keyword, then it's relevant to that page. You have enough supporting content, along with those images and videos on the fold, that make that page valuable. You don't want to have that URL page and it's just the content sucks and it's just thin content and then that will turn around and bite you back. Number six. Six. He says, use your target keywords across the entire site. Hmm. I get it, Neil, but I don't get it. Yeah. Right. He says, many SEOs believe mistakenly that they can rank for a given keyword by churning out a few blog articles surrounding a keyword. Neil, I'm going to have to say that that works. Yeah, it does work. I'm going to have to say that that works. And the reason I wouldn't necessarily target keywords across an entire site, especially for the type of clients we deal with, is because usually these clients have more than one service that's not really related. I have a company that does AC and plumbing. And so there's no way I

would optimize their entire site for AC. AC and plumbing. And plumbing. Or AC or plumbing or AC and plumbing. And plumbing. No, I'm going to optimize the AC pages for AC, the heating pages for heating, the plumbing pages for plumbing. And so I wouldn't necessarily do that. And furthermore, yeah, we've written blog posts that targeted a certain keyword, and it does work, especially if you put some muscle behind it. Like, I don't know, a press release about that page, some social campaigns that link to those same blog posts, and those blog posts are well written and have quality content. Good outbound links from those posts. From those posts. Good images, good media, good video. Those pages will rank for that term. Proven. Yeah. So that's number six. Number seven, optimize your brand's social profiles. Google recently began displaying the social profiles for brands directly in the knowledge graph. And that's true. If you go and search for a company name specifically, you used to get site links. Right. And now in the knowledge graph, you'll still get the site links below their listing. Right. But in the knowledge graph, you'll see Facebook icons and Twitter icons and links to their social profiles, LinkedIn and things like that. Very cool. And so you want to make sure that you optimize those. Why do you optimize the social platform? Easy. Make sure that they all have the consistent links. Make sure they all have a consistent bio. Make sure that, you know, the address is the same. The username that you're using, hopefully, like we said earlier, I said you can go to any of our profile, any social platform you want to, and the tag will be the same. It's the optimized social platform. So something that, since we are talking about under the hood and is really simple, make sure your website links to your profiles. To those profiles. We've had prospects call and they're like, oh, yeah, we do Facebook all the time. We don't know why it's not working. And it's literally not

on their website. Not nowhere on their site. Yeah. Or worse, it's linked to the wrong one. Yeah. Right? Like it's linked to your personal page and not your business fan page or something like that. So make sure that those are linking back. And I would take it a step further and even tag that link. Use the URL builder. So when you go back to analytics, you can kind of gauge how much traffic is coming from those social profiles. Another pro tip. Another pro tip. They're flying. Man, that's what happens when you podcast on a Friday evening. And the last one. Wow. His title says seven. It's actually eight, Neil. I just caught that. Wow. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Number eight. Maybe one of them's not under the hood. Add schema everywhere. I totally agree. Yeah. He says schema markup shows up in, dig this, shows up in more than a third of all Google search results. That's because Google places that much weight on schema. Then he says, unfortunately, only a mere 0.3% of internet domain names are using it. And so I'll say when you mark your site up with schema, mark up everything. Social profiles, addresses, phone numbers, events, like everything. Images, videos. Images. Whatever you can mark it up. If you had a skill set to do so, mark it up and do it. And that way, you have a higher chance of increasing your search engine results. And that's it. Seven under the hood. Eight under the hood optimization techniques that will rock your SEO. Punch in the face of Neil, dude. Mr. Patel. Great article. I still kind of disagree with the optimizing the whole site for one phrase. Now, I get it. In his defense. In his example, he used credit repair. So if you're a site that- A whole site does. Yeah. The whole thing is about credit repair. So you should optimize your whole site for that. But if you're in a service where you provide multiple services or multiple products that may not be closely related, don't

optimize your site for one of those phrases. Because at the end of the day, that's going to be some bad SEO on one of those pages. It's not relevant to that key phrase. And if we miss that, Mr. Patel, why don't you- Hit me up. Yeah, hit us up. Yeah, hit us up. At eWebStyle, at Best SEO Podcast, and clarify. Excellent. Do we have any what? No, no what news today. We don't have any what. All right. Well, I think that kind of wraps it up, right? Yeah, happy Valentine's to all the ladies and guys, I guess. Yeah, I guess. Well, the ones with a date. The rest of them, go have fun and find a date. All right. So if you're interested in growing your business with the largest, simplest marketing tool on the planet, the internet, call eWebStyle for increased revenue in your business. Our phone number is 713-592-6724. If you have a referral, and actually we got a referral this week, I'm following up with it. Send them to us. When they pay their bill, we will pay you. It's that simple. This is filmed live from 599-9, there's three nines there, West 34th Street, Suite 106, Houston, Texas. Thank you guys for tuning in and making us the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes. Until the next podcast, my name's Chris Burr. Charles Lewis. Bye-bye for now. Slightly raised up, eyebrow, eyebrow, head in my...