Optimize your podcast title to get your podcast listed first. What does google think about hiding text on your website - Unknown Secrets of SEO E-Webstyle Number 32

Hi, and welcome to the Unknown Secrets of SEO Podcast. Hi, welcome back. Thanks for listening to our Unknown Secrets of SEO Podcast. We have another fun-filled edition on its way. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. And this is Paul Hanson, owner of eWebStyle. Is it me or are we just not? I don't know. It feels different today. Are you the owner of eWebStyle? I am. It just feels different. Yeah. Just promoted himself. That's cool. Hey, why not? I think it feels a little different because usually we're doing this in the morning and we're not knocking this podcast out until later. That's right. We're behind schedule. It's like, what, 1230? Yeah. You may even be hungry. Yeah. I am hungry. We've got to finish this up now. Did we rename the podcast or did we just do that for search engine optimization purposes? You mean the Unknown Secrets? Yeah. Is it Internet Marketing, Unknown Secrets of SEO, or we're just still calling ourselves? Unknown Secrets of SEO, slash internet marketing, slash web design, slash PPC, slash search engine. Action, action, calls to action, slash search engine marketing. Good graphics, slash improve your business, slash ROI, and ROI isn't the only thing. Yeah. Comma, et cetera, et cetera. Et cetera, et cetera. All right, so we got that cleared, so we'll have to write that in. I think I'm still confused, actually. Yeah, all right. And what I'm referring to is on iTunes, our title, our description of our podcast, or yeah, the title is Internet Marketing, Dash, Unknown Secrets of SEO. And that was obviously done for, once we figured out and did some background research, we realized that Internet Marketing is something that people search more often than SEO or search engine marketing. So we realized it needed to be in our title so that we could get our information to as many people as possible. Speaking of which, we have a favor. If you, a listener out there, have received any sort of modicum of useful information, we ask that you go

to iTunes and write a review of us. Please write us a review. If you, thanks. You know, if we did something for you, do something for us. Give us a review. Give us an honest review. We're getting some good feedback. In fact, we got a shout out, a guy by the name of Mike Child. Mike Child. Mike Child at mikechild.co.nz, which I just learned is the country code for New Zealand. Didn't know that we have yet to optimize a site in New Zealand. Hopefully that will be coming soon. Hopefully so. So, Mike, thanks for listening. Mike asked for an analysis. I'm going to work on that and give that back to you by Monday, Mike. We really appreciate it. And hey, write us a review if it works. If it helps, write us a review. Let us know. And it may not just be on iTunes. If you found our podcast some other way, even if you found it on our blog, go ahead and put a review there. You can write a comment. And so that adds another country to our list. That does. So we've got Costa Rica. Okay. Speaking of Costa Rica. I'm lost track. Oh, yeah. That's our news. Yeah, one of our news items for today. Apparently, and Paul kind of filled me in on this. Apparently, Tom Brady and Giselle Himigamana. Yeah. I don't know her last name. We'll call her Giselle Brady now. Giselle Brady. I don't think she had a last name. She was just Giselle. I saw it in an article I read. It was Bundurkin or something like that. Yeah. Brady. Brady. Yeah. Apparently, they hired some not-so-well-trained security guards when they were having their reset. Did they get married in Costa Rica? They got married in Costa Rica, I believe, over this past weekend. And this is a perfect example of how to start a marriage in debt. Well, for any other couple is how to start a marriage in debt. Because they got sued for like a million dollars, right? Yes. I think

they got married like Saturday. The reception was Saturday. I mean, the wedding was Saturday. The reception went Saturday night. And I think it kind of went on until the early morning or something. And the bodyguard, they were getting harassed by these photographers. Paparazzi. And bodyguard, they wouldn't give the bodyguard. They were requesting, I want your camera and your film stick and your memory card. And they wouldn't give it to him. So he was like, hey, I'm just going to kill this guy. We are paraphrasing here. Well, no, not paraphrasing. We are assuming. Assuming, yeah. So he whips out a gun and starts shooting at the guy's car. Shot a couple times through their SUV. Through the back windshield. Through the back window. And through the front. Yes. And apparently ricocheted off the front windshield. Yes. And I think this happened like late Sunday night. Or early, excuse me, early Sunday morning. First thing Monday morning, there's a million dollar lawsuit against Tom and Giselle. Giselle Brady. Wow. Wow. What a good way to start. That's right. Let's get married. Now we owe somebody a million bucks. Can you imagine, you know, you're like, you're hiring people for your wedding. You're hiring, you know, your cake decorator, your flower provider, your security guard. And because you don't know how to hire them, which you probably didn't even do anyway. This is probably a big affair. You get sued for a million dollars. Yeah. And it's probably your planner. Yeah. Oh, we'll hire some security for you. Okay. Thanks, lady. Now I'm on the hook for a million. Now what I was thinking is, you know, maybe they were Costa Rican security guards and maybe what they did wasn't illegal in Costa Rica. Maybe. Maybe. Hence, he was thinking, oh, I'm just going to kill this dude. He's not giving me this memory stick. So. That's, in Costa Rica, that's how we roll. Oh, let me not laugh because we have listeners in Costa Rica. We do. And actually, let's get a shout out. It's a Red

Palm Villas. Yes, Red Palm Villas over at, I got a chance to talk to him about that. He was like, no, it didn't happen at my property. But he has some of their guests over there at Red Palm Villas. I think we, a couple podcasts, probably about ten podcasts ago. We talked about Red Palm Villas. We talked about Red Palm Villas. Yeah. Awesome site. Apparently, so like somebody in the Brady party stayed at his place. Yeah, they had, he said his mom, dad, sister, and best man all stayed over at Red Palm Villas. And I'm, I can't, I've got to get down there. That guy has an awesome setup. So, what's up, Mike? Mike over at Red Palm Villas. All right. Thanks. Thanks, Mike, for listening. Um, our other news for today is, um, uh, I'm gonna, I'll probably butcher this name. Okay. Hossam Maher Hussain Smadi. And that's S-M-A-D-I. He's the guy that they caught in Dallas, um, with a sting for terrorists. He was, apparently he was in this chat organization online or something, FBI was turned on to him. And they started, you know, they tried to convince him, hey, you know, you don't have to blow up anything. He didn't go for it. So, they provided him with a, a fake bomb. He went to the building in his truck and he was supposed to dial from his phone a particular phone number and that was gonna blow up the bomb. He dials it and they're like, hello, you're under arrest. Or maybe that was, hello, you're under arrest. You're under arrest, fool. You've been in jail forever. He was waiting for his seven virgins and, look, I'm just quoting whatever they put in the press. I don't know the details. I haven't read it myself. But, uh, uh, uh, uh, arguably he was waiting for his seven virgins after this phone call. One of them he was hoping was getting, hi, and welcome to your seven virgins. Yeah, welcome to your, yeah, welcome to your first. Giselle Brady. Wait, not

a virgin. So, that guy. So, that guy's going to jail. He's going to put him under the jail forever. That is crazy. In Dallas, too, that kind of sucks, man. That's a little too close to home to me. Yeah, and he was gonna take, it's kind of funny because he was gonna take out, not funny, but his thought process was he's gonna take out a bank in Dallas and this was gonna cripple the remaining, you know, crippled American economy. A local branch of a bank? Well, no, it was a big, you know, whatever, 20, 40, 80 story building or whatever. It was a skyscraper. But, you know, it's still just one building. That doesn't cripple the industry. I know. You need to go after, I don't know, something. Let's not pass on, uh, advice. You need to go after a bigger. Yeah, I don't know. You suck, man. I'm gonna go ahead and say that. You suck. Yeah. That's whack. Smart, smarty. Yeah, you're gonna get what you deserve. Smarty. Not so smart, huh? Thank you. All right. What's on the agenda for today? We've got a couple things on the agenda. Actually, um... What did we cover last time? Yeah, we got it covered last time. We had the final two, um, podcasts of interview with Joe Orsack with Improve My Credit. And, uh, he's actually, in the last two, we gave him very specific advice about what to do. He's already incorporated some of it. And he sent us a question about that information. A really good question. I think this is a question that a lot of people who are possibly beginning SEO might have this, uh, this question. So, he keyed in, you know, and he really understood, uh, about title tags and header tags and having the titles on the page. And that's what gives a lot of value to Google. And he understands that, you know, from a marketing perspective, the front page is a page where you're really, you know, kind of hammering home your marketing information, which

may not necessarily be, um, work well with the keywords that you're targeting. So, if you're, you know, if your ultimate goal is to do credit repair anywhere in the U.S., you may not want Credit Repair Houston, even though Credit Repair Houston is what you're targeting right now. Um, so what he did is he actually took some text, uh, and it's real small. It's not on his live site. Um, it's real small and it's, the text is on a white background and it is white. Therefore, it is hidden text. Ding, ding, ding. And he asks us, how does this affect Google? Does this little trick work? And, um, so this is kind of a very tricky question. To be a stickler for Google's rules, um, you know, hidden text, this is definitely going to be a black hat technique. Um, can you get away with it? You know, I know people who have used this similar black hat technique, hidden text, uh, on websites and they're still up and it's been years. They're in a very low market. Um, they, you know, there are not many people who traffic that website and the people who do traffic that website aren't very tech savvy. So are probably not even going to realize what's going on. Um, and that may be true. So you may be able to get away with it because at the end of the day, if you're typing in, um, if somebody's typing in, uh, improve my credit Houston and they end up on his page, has he really deceived Google or the end user? Uh, and the short answer to that question is no, he hasn't. Um, is he going directly against their policies? Yes, he is. So if somebody were to go to his website and recognize that he did it and report it to Google, he could very easily get banned. Yeah. Just like Kay Bailey Hutchison got banned. That's right. And it's basically kind of doing the same thing. And that was about five or six podcasts ago, uh, that

Kay, that we talked about that Kay Bailey Hutchison. She had, um, she was using CSS tags, um, or just, just, um, cascade style sheets to hide a big block of text, which one of the phrases in it was, uh, why do we have knees? Why do we have knees? And then she had like an image over the, uh, all the text. Yeah. She used her cascade style sheet, uh, also known as a CSS, uh, to actually make sure the picture was over it. So, um, she actually got banned from, uh, from Google. So until she got that all fixed up. So Joe, the short answer is, uh, I wouldn't mess with that. I, I would find another way to incorporate that text in there. Um, and we'll be following up with Joe to make sure he does have, uh, that information. So, um, so that's a great question. Uh, you know, it's one of those things like, I'm just trying to do the right thing. Um, it makes sense. So this is how you've told me to get on the first page. And this is why it's important to deal with an expert company because you can read, you know, the information we gave him was just information that you could find anywhere on the web. We're, we're, we're, we're world-class experts at what we do and we're not perfect. Um, he takes that information, he goes off and he makes what he thinks are the best decisions with it. And he ends up doing something that could ultimately get his website banned. So you really do want to be working with some sort of expert. Um, preferably with us because we're happy to help you. We're reasonably priced and, um. We're awesome. And, and we're awesome. There you go. You can give us a call. You can reach us at 713-592-6724. Um, we also are on Twitter. So you can follow us on Twitter if you go to twitter.com slash ewebstyle. Uh, or you can find us on Facebook. Also, you can become a

fan of our company at Facebook. Uh, we'll keep you up to date there. And also remember you can send us an email, podcast at e-webstyle.com. Um, we've got another question. It's actually very similar, almost identical, but we'll, we'll address it, uh, individually. This is from Sebastian Gonzalez. And do we have a website for him? No, we don't. No, Sebastian didn't submit his, uh, website. Okay. So what he has is, really what he has is the CSS image replacement. Um, and, and what he says is, one question that I've been wondering about is CSS image replacement. And he's saying that's where you can use an H1 tag of text. And then you use CSS, which puts the text indent, you know, minus 999, 9,999 pixels. And basically what he's saying is, I'm going to put an image over this text. And it's going to hide the, um, it's going to hide the text. And again, this, this is the same response that we just gave to Joe. You know, if you've got legitimate text there and people find you because of that, then, uh, and, and, and you're not, you know, trying to get people to your website who type, you know, why do we need knees or why do we have knees? Then you're really not doing it. Again, you're not doing a disservice to Google and you're not doing a disservice to the Google user, which is ultimately what Google cares about. Now, the flip side of that, and, and, and I didn't mention this in, and when we were talking about Joe just moments ago, Google has robots and robots don't make those kinds of decisions, right? They don't say, uh, oh, this is hidden text and, um, and, and it's, but it's relevant. It's really not going to mess with our users. Um, they just say, you know, here's hidden text or here's text that's not going to be displayed or here's whatever and, you know, put a flag up and, uh, so you could get banned using this technique and that's

just something that you don't want to mess with. There's got to be another way, right? Um, and, and really this is, you know, where kind of your creative web design team, which we have a nice one here, uh, comes in real handy because, you know, you're thinking I've got to have this image. Well, maybe there's a way to do both or maybe you incorporate it or there's something, there's a way to do this that looks good, is user friendly, sells your marketing message and also appeases or caters to Google the way that you need to. So that's really important that you, uh, that you do that. Yeah, and we've stressed it so many times before, you know, Google has the lion's share of the market. Their word is basically gospel. If, and even if you're not using, if you're using relevant keywords and you're hiding them, uh, behind an image, if Google says you're, you're doing it wrong, then you're doing it wrong. And if they ban you, then your website's going to be in a great deal of trouble. And I, to my understanding, it's tough to get out of their, um, their supplemental. I, I've, we've never had to pull anyone out, but, uh, I hear it's really, really tough. So just kind of stay away from stuff like that. But great question. Thanks. Thanks again, Sebastian. We appreciate you asking. That was awesome. So I think we covered that well. Um, let's go on our next thing. We're going to talk about, this is a very serious SEO subject. Which one? S, SEO. Yeah. Right. S E O rapping. Rapping to SEO. That man. Are we going to rap about SEO? Not today. Go Paul. Not today at least. Go Paul. And we found this guy who raps about SEO. His name is. I don't know. Chuck? Mo Serious. Oh, Mo Serious. Yeah. Mo Serious. Mo Serious is his name. He works out of another company here in Houston. Uh, a competing company. Um, and I was almost a little hesitant to

talk about him because he's our, they're a competitor of ours. But he put something together that I thought was so good. I was like, man, this is really worth giving him a shout out for it. We got to give him props. I really do. And I haven't even, I've never talked to a guy. I've never met him. But he did a rap about different SEO techniques and it actually, it's good. It covers the techniques. It covers the techniques. And his delivery was, was very impressive. Uh, where can they find this rap? If you go to Google and you, uh, search for design coding rap, and that's R-A-P, um, you'll, he'll come up as the first video there. And, um, and design coding is actually the name of the video. I got to tell you, the information in it was awesome. I was listening to it. It really was. And, and, you know, everything is enunciated beautifully so you can actually follow it. Yeah, so you can understand it. And, um, and he, I mean, he talks about, uh, linking, how to, uh, lay out your websites. Good image colors. Yeah. Uh, action calls to action. Strong versus bold. Well, that was, you know, I was just going to bring that up. You know, cause there's something, um, that I've been hearing lately, uh, you know, strong. I, I just continue to use bold when I'm doing HTML tag. I'm going to get a little technical here on you guys. So bear with me. Uh, I use the bold tag, which is just a B in order to make some text bold. And apparently the new one is strong. Nobody called me up and said, Hey, Chris, now we're using strong back in 04. Because I read an article recently about it that was written in 04. You didn't check your, uh, HTML tag memo box? Yeah, no, I didn't. And bold is still working. So I was continuing to work, uh, work with bold. Uh, but instead of using the B, uh, you're supposed to

use strong. Um, and, and he pointed that out and kind of reiterated it. So, you know, I'm going to go back and do that properly now. Um, which is cool. I mean, this is, this is, you know, we're, we're experts. Yeah, it's, it's a learning, I mean, stuff changes all the time. You have to learn, we have to figure stuff out somehow. But, uh, everybody go take a look at this. I thought it was really awesome. And, uh, hopefully we can get most serious on the show. That would be awesome. See if he can write us an E-Web style rap. He's here in Houston, so that would be awesome. He is here in Houston. That would be really cool. Hopefully, yeah, hopefully we can get him to, to come on the show and do something. But it was very cool. Everybody check it out. Um. He's got more than one, too, right? I mean. He's got a link building, uh, a video. I think it's just kind of him in a training session at his company. He's got a social media video and one other, uh, and a PPC video. Social media, PPC, and link building. They're all, uh, I've only seen link building, but it was really good. And I assume that the others are on par with the first one. Really good information. It's actually a rap. It makes sense. You can understand what he's saying. And you can actually hear, like you said, he's enunciating pretty well. So, good job on that, Most Serious. Yep, and hopefully we'll get you on. That's, that's pretty awesome. Yeah, I almost kind of sucks, because I wish I had that idea first. Yeah, we don't have the persona, I don't think. He's a big guy. He's got the big rapper look. We'd be like the skinny white guy. I wouldn't be the skinny white guy. No, I would be. Yeah. I'd be the skinny black dude. When I say weed, it's the royal weed. It's like the owners. That's the owner weed. I'd give you

a hard time about that. And what about, what else? So, our last thing is actually a tool, and you guys might be able to get some good things out of it, might not. It's a really important idea. I was reading through the Google Webmaster concepts, you know, what's important, what you can do. And one of the things that they say is, you should look at your website from a text browser's perspective. Why? What would you think a text browser means? I'd say a browser that would, you could take any website and remove all of the images off of it and just text. So, it would just show you, okay, this is exactly what is there in terms of text. You're exactly right. But what good does it do, okay, as me, the end user, why do I want to see my website in text? Well, it'd be pretty good. Say, for instance, and this would be a really quick indicator. If you had all images and you hadn't been listening to our podcast and you didn't know that you shouldn't have all images because Google can't see it, you could pull up your website in a text browser and you would see nothing, right? Okay. And when you see nothing, you would then process this. Google's robots see what a text browser sees. Ah, okay. Right? So, if you see nothing, and it wouldn't be nothing, nothing, but it would effectively be nothing relevant to the content that maybe you had in text and images, certainly. But when you see nothing, it might trigger you and go, hmm, if Googlebot sees this and this is nothing, then that would explain why I'm not getting indexed. That would explain why when I do searches for my own company name, I don't come up. Good. And that's an awesome tool to know. So, now you can tell. You can kind of look and see, hey, what does the search engine see when they pull up my website? Because, you know, obviously, we optimize our website to convert

traffic, but you got to get the traffic first. You got to get Google and Binghoo to actually find your website. So, I think that's an awesome tool. Binghoo. I'm still working on that tone. I'm getting closer. Yeah, you can find them. Google gave a link to a search using the Google search engine, which I thought was weird. Which brought you to their search results, not the actual website of the thing. But the search was Lynx Browser. Then that's L-Y-N-X Browser. Do a search for that. The first one is actually somebody who's made it so you can put your website in and it'll actually show you the results of a Lynx Browser, or you can actually go and get a Lynx Browser. I didn't do this myself, so if there are any problems with this, somebody let us know and we'll get it corrected. But if you go to lynx.isc.org, and I'll spell that for you, L-Y-N-X dot I-S-C, and that's I as in isosceles, S as in Sam, and C as in Capricorn.org. So if you go there, you can actually download a browser and kind of browse, you can actually browse the web and see how it actually works from a text browser. That reminds me of something, somebody goes like, to me, it was a while back, he goes, you know, H as in Hermeneutics. And I was like, what? Like, I don't know how to spell that. I don't even know if Hermeneutics has an H on the end of it. I was like. I don't even believe you. Yeah. And I don't have access to Google, so I can't find out. So I can't find it. But I could optimize it for you. There you go. Yeah, K as a knife. Yeah, there you go. I'm like, dude, Hermeneutics, I don't even know what that is, man. How are you going to use that as a word? Was that your lawyer friend? It probably was. Probably. Fool. They're going to use those words. Average Joes don't say. Somebody email me and

tell me what Hermeneutics means. Hermeneutics. Tell me how to spell it first. Yeah. We don't even, we're so lazy, we're not even going to Google it. We're going to wait for an email. That is lazy, too. Hermeneutics. All right, well, that's all of our information for today. This is a little bit of a short podcast, but that's all right. We've been making up for our previous podcast. Yeah, we think we went over last. Next show is going to be, obviously, another amazing show. Again, please, if you get any useful information or entertainment or something positive out of this, stress the positive, please. Go to iTunes and write a review or write a review someplace. Or give us a link back from your website or something, please. Yeah, and we're not going to be like the other guys out here and go do our own ratings and reviews. I think there are some people on iTunes that do their own ratings and reviews. There's one in particular that has, like, what, 98? 98 reviews and, like, 95 of them are five stars. And I'm like, come on, man. I like to think I'm pretty awesome, but, man. Most of them have, like, 10 reviews tops. Yeah, and he's got, like, 98 five-star reviews. So give us a review. We want honest reviews. We're not going to cheat and put them up ourselves. So give us a review. We'd really appreciate it. Excellent. And, again, you can follow us on Twitter, twitter.com slash eWebStyle. On Facebook, you can find us. Just go to our simple website, e-webStyle.com slash Facebook, and that will automatically forward you to our Facebook company page. And, finally, send us an email at podcast at e-webStyle.com. And call us at? 713-592-6724. And don't follow us. Stalk us. Stalk us. Yes. Yes. I like what you said earlier. Yeah, in fact, I think it was Moe Sirius' website. At the bottom, it says, Stalk us. That's cool. Right there. Stalk us on Facebook, Twitter, and then some other stuff. Delicious. I don't know what

that is. Yeah, I don't know. And then YouTube. Two dots. It looks like a button. I don't know. Anyway, what a great podcast. We'll see you next time. It's going to be even better. Until the next podcast. This is Paul Hanson. I'm Chris Burris. Bye-bye for now. I'm a brow. I think she's a good one.