Producing Great Content for SEO - #seopodcast 144

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I was even multitasking in the middle of that, huh? That's why I'm laughing, because I was just looking at those, like, okay. Those are probably in the way. My name is Chris Burris, owner of E-WebStyle. I'm Charles Lewis, your internet marketing specialist. Thank you guys for tuning in to podcast number 144. As always, tip from previous podcast. Every word will begin with a P today. Opposite to what the article, so last time we covered the details of this article by Melissa, something, the name got cut off, and the article title was, How to Maintain a Good Relationship with Your SEO and Web, something got cut off. Was that called printing? Yeah, that was Firefox printing sucks. Oh, that's Firefox printing sucks. Yeah, that was how to maintain a good relationship between your SEO and your web design firms. And you, the client, yeah. And so we're saying, opposite to what this article said, you should expect to be treated with respect by your SEO company. Yeah, that's just our fundamental principle here. Let's get into news, news for today. There's some kind of cool stuff going on. Do not forget, we are your friendly, local, neighborhood, top position snatchers. Yes. And our mantra is, don't be a douche. And if you are sitting down in front of some electric device or you have one in your pocket, pull it out of your pocket and tweet Facebook, G+, right now. And what are you going to look at? This portion of the program is sponsored by Google Nexus. Google Nexus and Twitter. And Twitter. Yeah, tweet right now, hashtag SEOpodcast144. Tag us that you're watching it. Tag us at eWebStyle so we'll know you checked it out. I can retweet it. We can interact. Kind of get your thoughts on it. No dash on that eWebStyle. No dash. News. Mac Flashback. Mac Trojan affects 600,000 users. Mac Flashback. Wow. It's a Trojan. Yeah, 600,000 users. So this is kind of, at least as far

as I remember, the first Trojan malware or whatever that's really gone after Mac and had an impact that's newsworthy. I think Apple's released two updates for it to try and fix it. So I didn't know that, but I did just get an update. I did on my MacBook. I did just get an update. In fact, I just probably just finished restarting. Now you're safe from Flashback, which is apparently a Flash. There's a hole created in the Apple OS by Flash. Wow. Steve Jobs' favorite friend. Yeah, of course. That almost makes sense. Like, there should be a hole. Yeah. In the Flash. Exactly. That was the whole purpose of that entire company now called Adobe. Google Glasses. Have you seen anything about this? I saw it on the news this morning. Looks cool. Yeah. Looks not safe. Yeah. I mean, because we saw the lady who fell into the fountain. Exactly. There'll be a lot more ladies. We have a lot of time walking and texting. And so now, all of a sudden, I got tweets and pop-ups and a map and, you know, kind of vanilla sky-ish. Yes, right? But I think, you know, I think we're heading that direction and maybe when, if they release, then we'll probably be somewhat prepared for it. Yeah. But it looked cool. Yeah. Yeah. It did. And there was a picture of Sergey Brin, one of the founders, owners of Google, standing next to it. I can't remember the actor's name. Good actor. And the actor tweeted later. He's like, yeah, he wouldn't let me try him on. But he could see that information was flashing. Yeah. That's, I just don't know how, you know. So maybe I'd be looking. You probably can't drive with them on. So maybe I'd be looking at you and it would, you know, pull up SEO Rapper and, you know. And just give him my whole profile. Yeah. Serious.com, SEO Rapper, poetic profit, works at any one style. Ooh, do we want that? You know, everybody out there can't just look. Yeah,

I think you, exactly. I think you and I are okay with it. There's a lot of people who would not be happy with it. She's like, you're a pedophile. Yeah. I'm really, we're done. Yeah. No, meeting adjourned. Yeah. I don't know how you got past the receptionist. Although she's quivering in the corner. Just doing my tweet. Hashtag SEO Podcast 144. Wikipedia dumps Google Maps and selects Open Street Map, which is like an open source, mapping system. And I don't know the difference between Open Street Map. I might have to, I don't know if there was even an app to download it and try it versus Google Maps. Really? Apparently Google started charging for server hits. You know, 400 bucks for whatever, 1,000 server hits or something. And so Wikipedia dropped them and Foursquare dropped them recently. So they're over on Open Street Maps. I just thought that was interesting. I guess that comes from having probably the best map system. You know that it gets a lot of traffic. People use it. Yep. You got to try and, you know, at least pay for it somehow. How about this? You hear Yahoo? Blank stare. Okay, we'll skip that one then. I wanted to bring up, we've talked about this recently, the last couple of podcasts, BlackBerry. Have you been seeing ads? I have. They've been doing a good job, right? They're trying to do something. I was glad they got away from the whole push they were trying to do. Right. They were trying to mix fun and incorporate. And so they had all the business people with the BlackBerry curves or the BlackBerry bowls on roller coasters. And it was like, okay, I see it, but it's not working. I've actually done that. Tried to answer an email on a roller coaster. I broke my BlackBerry on a roller coaster. I was in chemo riding the bullet. And then I got off the phone. My whole screen was crap. Oh. So, yeah. But anyway, I've seen some of the new ads and, you know,

they're okay. Good luck with that room. Yeah, I think it's cool. They're like, it just works is kind of the, which is if they use that tagline, they should pay me. Because there's something else that does that, isn't it? It just works. It's probably a few people. Yeah. I saw this article. This is on SEO. In this bright SEO future, don't forget the basics. I had to read this first. We finally made it to April, folks. I'm just going to read the first paragraph. Apparently, Charles is going to read the remaining part. And I say, with more than joy than usual, since March was a crazy month for SEO, if you made it through March without an email from Google or a penalty from Google or a drop in Google organic search traffic due to Panda updates or paid link related issues, you should give yourself a high five. Boom. That's us giving us a high five because we have just not seen any of those issues. We're going to cover that. As a matter of fact, our reeking got better. Yeah. We're going to cover the rest of that article because it's got some really good back to basics. I've got, these are really long. I'm going to blow through them. Darren Bowie, long time listener. Excellent fan. Punch in the face. Is that right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Punch in the face to Darren Bowie. I'm an experienced website design consultant at DarrenBowie.eu. That's B-O-O-Y.eu. With a PhD and over 10 years experience in website design, website accessibility, and SEO. However, the more podcasts I listen to from eWebStyle, the more I progressively learn my ignorance of SEO. It doesn't matter how much you think you know, these guys are world class at what they do and can guarantee that it will be a significant learning experience for anyone. He can guarantee that. The content is clear but detailed and the presenters are friendly, relaxed, and make something which is typically boring, interesting, and accessible to people at all levels. They also cover not

only SEO, but internet marketing insights to enrichen your website. Quite simply, if you value progression and enrichment, you will listen to these guys, past and future. I just found this last night because it's stored on iTunes under the Netherlands section. Punch in the face to Darren. Yeah, face to Darren. And, you know, the title, and this was back in 2009, December 2009, Don't Let a Blind Butcher Do a Skill Surgeon's Job. Yeah. That's a famous, famous... It's the vision of the blind butcher. Yeah. Yeah. Which way is he? Yeah. Like Jordan in the... In the pinata. Charles tells a good story about his son and letting him loose on a pinata. Oh, man. Man. People need to follow instructions. This is my child. I told y'all to back up further. You are not backed up far enough yet. People running, tripping over people, stepping on small children. Man, he took a thousand swings and did not hit the pinata once. All right. Everybody. We are the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes because of you. You guys can follow us, chase us, stalk us, annoy us at a couple of locations. Facebook.com slash... E-Web Stop. Twitter.com slash... E-Web Stop. YouTube.com slash... E-Web Stop. And you can contact us at podcast at... E-Web Stop. That's a hyphen. Web Stop. Web Stop.com. And reach out to us. And we really appreciate it. There was no new review, although I did find these, so that prevented me from stopping by the tattoo parlor. And so all you need to do is go on to iTunes. Three steps. Create an account. Step number two. Step number three. Write a review. And if you want to, optional step number four is send us an email, podcast at E-WebStyle.com. And let us know that you submitted a review. We'll look for it. We'll read it on air. We'll give you a punch in the face. We'll say... And then we'll move on. Cool thing about P-T-F is it spelled P-T-I-F. Well, P-I-T-F. Yeah. P-I-T-F. Yeah. P-T-F. Which is punch in the

face. Yeah. P-T-F. How cool is it that our shtick has a sound effect? That's spelled the same. That's awesome. Yeah. That's really cool. Was there anything else that I wanted to cover? I was thinking that... Oh. Another place that you could write a view. You could go to our podcast page. And that's E-WebStyle.com slash SEO podcast. Just under the second set of video images, because we've got some video images under there, there's a G+, no, Google Places page link. Go there. Submit a review about our podcast. We really appreciate it. You know what? And don't do that unless you're getting good value out of this podcast. If you appreciate this podcast, do it. Thank you. We need to probably make that easy to find. Yeah. Probably. It should be on the right section. Well, under the iTunes. Oh, but that's... Once you get into our blog. Once we redesign our website. Yeah, redesign comes soon, so... Yeah. Never mind. It'll be easier then. I'll adjust it then. Yeah. All right. Well, let's dive into the content. It's Good Friday. Don't plan on being here long. But you did bring up the article. And so I also read that article. And the article really talked about, you know, moving forward past March, right? All of the Panda changes and linking changes and all of the algorithm changes Google has put in place. If you survive, great. But either way, make sure you don't forget your basics. Yeah. Right? And not only not forgetting the basics, but it goes into some other stuff about things that people tend to overlook. And so we'll talk about those briefly. And, you know, going into the second quarter of the year. And hopefully you can attack this stuff. I like his little note about, so all these changes and everything is going crazy. You know, what we really have to do, we have no other recourse than to, and this list. And the list is, one, build an awesome website. Two, build brand recognition, authority, and trust. And trust. Three,

produce great content. All the time. That's key right there. Great content. Four, implement SEO basics and advanced strategies on site. Five, I'm looking over here. Build links. Avoid paid link networks. Because Google just banned another one. Buildyourrank.com, which is a paid link deal. Huge company. I had heard of them years ago. And now they've been eliminated. So, yeah. Wow. Sex. Track everything. Speaking of that, shout out to Bill. Punch in the face to Bill Hamburg. He sent me a P-W-I-K. P-I-W-I-K. P-W-I-K. P-I-W-I-K. P-I-W-I-K. P-I-W-I-K. P-I-W-I-K. P-I-W-I-K. P-I-W-I-K. P-I-W-I-K. P-I-W-I-K. P-I-W-I-K. P-I-W-I-K. P-I-W-I-K. Or get to open source analytics for your site. So, who's ever watching, go try that out. I'm going to put it on SEOrapper.com and let it run for a month or two, see how it works. I'm going to be honest, I asked my Google Plus people and I asked some people on Facebook and only two people responded, but their reviews weren't all that positive. Oh, okay. And so, and then the install, it's not complicated, but it's not as easy as Google Analytics. So, it takes a little server level stuff, it seems, yeah. Which is not my lane. And so, but yeah, so if you've tried it, hit us up, let us know what you think about it. If you haven't tried it and you can, give it a shot. I'd like to, you know, get your thoughts on it. So, yeah, track everything. Number seven. It was a test to optimize conversion and implement changes as necessary. Test is what that means. And especially if you're optimizing, especially if you provide a service and you're optimizing pages that are meant for a conversion, then you want to test maybe different landing pages. You want to optimize these pages differently. Maybe target similar keywords, but not the same keyword on different pages. See which one ranks. See which one converts more. See which one generates a better respond. You know, does this form submission generate questions? Does this form submission generate clicks or sales or potential leads? And so,

you know, definitely test. Frankly, he's talking SEO here, but that goes with pay-per-click as well. And in any marketing, you know, always test what's your control, what's working against other things, and then, you know, tweak as necessary. And number eight is repeat. Well, number one, you kind of breeze through, build an awesome website. That's always the start of any internet marketing campaign because that website becomes the foundation. I was literally on the phone last night with a potential client who desperately needs a redesign, doesn't necessarily have the budget. And, you know, I shared a story of, you know, a recent client who was running PPC with another company, was going to switch the PPC over to us. We said, we didn't want the PPC until we had a chance to redesign the website because we didn't want that liability, if you will, of sending lots of... Traffic to the site. Yeah. So we redesigned the website. There was a little overlap after we redesigned the website where it was still running with the old pay-per-click company. And they called us and let us know that their sales went up because of that website redesign. That's how important the redesign is. Because I literally told the guy, I said, I'm going to go back and I'm going to talk to Charles about this particular account. And he is literally going to say, okay, great, Chris. I looked at the website. As soon as we finish the redesign, we will start this part, this kind of campaign. And then I will have to explain to Charles that there's no budget for a redesign that we're going to have to... In this case, it's a full e-commerce site. So we'll end up doing mock-ups and mock-ups that will be great landing pages. And interestingly enough, in this particular product, it's not a landing page. It's landing pages. And we'll turn those over to their guys and they'll implement just those few pages rather than redesign the whole website. But anyway, that's how important it is. Yeah. I mean,

the last thing you want to do is drive traffic to a page that... Will never convert. Yeah. Especially on a page search. And, you know, just cut me the check, you know, because you're just going to waste your money. Yeah. I mean, for the optimized site, it takes a lot to get to the first page, you know. And the last thing you want to do is get there and your site doesn't convert. Yeah. You know, so build an awesome website. Building the brand recognition, authority, and trust is huge. I was just reading another article which kind of gave me an insight, something I already knew, but it kind of hammered it down on a different way to build brand recognition. Comment on your YouTube videos. The one place where I just choose not to... I don't say choose not to, where I stopped. Right. Replying to comments. You know, we're always quick as internet marketers to, you know, make sure you follow up on Facebook if somebody says something, you know, or somebody posts a comment on your blog, you comment that immediately. Somebody, you know, mentions you in a tweet, you retweet that, you reply. We address those immediately. Right. However, YouTube gets tons of comments and we kind of brush those off to the side. Yeah, we don't think about them. Well, the article I was reading from Search Engine Land, I'll post it later. He was saying that, you know, Google likes YouTube, which we know. They like videos, which we know. And if the creator, the profile, the YouTube profile is replying to comments with information about the video, it gives you more authority. Right. Your comments get placed to the top of the comment box and it tends to show up more in the Search Engine rankings. Interesting. Yeah. So, I immediately went and looked at my latest SEO rapper video, which is like, you know. And replied to comments. No, I got discouraged. Oh, yeah. Because there's a thousand comments. Like, oh, no. Just do one. Yeah. No, back.

Just later. Put this on that list of stuff I need to do that will eventually get done when I hire somebody. We have a collection of lists around here. That was just one of them. One of them. We have a list for lists. So, yeah, produce great content was another one. All the time, every day. I think this kind of, take that with a grain of salt. You know, if you're in, you know, some industry that. Plumbing. Plumbing. Yeah, we talk about regularly. How much content can you create a day? I mean, you. Unless you're journaling your daily experiences. Or if you're a product base. So, if you're selling to plumbers, then, you know, there's a new product all the time. Okay, maybe. You know, it depends on where you're at. If you're a one-man operation, you know, that's probably not in your best interest to spend that time doing that. If you're, you know, an ARS, which isn't, they outsource typically or they hire contractors or whatever, then they've got, it's a big enough company where they really should be doing that. Doing content every day. And I remember I did a presentation before and I was talking about content. And content should be informative and it should also be captivating and, if possible, entertaining. Yeah. Because what happens is if it's entertaining, people will pay attention, it'll captivate them and then they'll learn something. And they might actually, you know. Oh, they become shareable at that point. People share what's funny to them. They share what helped them. If your content doesn't help them, then they won't share it. Or worse, with Google's new deal they have, this is another algorithm change, I need to figure out what they called it. But, you know, on the search engine result page, if you click a link, whether it's paved or natural or a local listing, if you click it and then you bounce using your back button, you know, Google pops up a message that says, do you want to block ads from this

post? And so, um, I just know that if you get enough of those, you will be blocked permanently, you know, not just from me, but from everyone. Yeah. And so, good content prevents that. Yeah. You know, one thing you don't want to do is have people bouncing off your site. Um, so those were some of the things he talked about. So, then he went in later to talk about, um, some, some basics that, that people tend to forget, um, that's necessary to do. Like, uh, for example, your robots file. You know, we still get webinars every day and we do website analysis, CVO website analysis, um, you know. That's our other podcast. Yeah. You can find it, Unknown Secrets of CVO website analysis. We do those every day and, and people still don't have a robots file, you know, and so do that. Let, let, let Google bot and the rest of the search bots know, yes, index this site and, and more importantly, you know, index these pages. You may have some pages you don't want indexed and that's where you list that at. Um, alt tags on, on product pages and images and things like that. People tend to overlook it. Uh, go back and do it. If you're using the CMS, take that extra time. You know, when you add an image to WordPress, for example, there's a field for that. Don't just hurry up. You know, if you're rushing, yeah, you just save and you keep it moving. No, go ahead and at least, at least copy the image title and paste it in the alt tag. Yeah. And hopefully that's a keyword, you know, so at least you can have something there. Um, another thing he mentioned on here was, uh, updated XML sitemaps. Update your sitemap. I mean, you've, you've, you know, you, you build your site, you submit it to webmaster tools, which is XML sitemap on the first. And then by the 15th, you've, uh, changed your navigation, added new pages, because it's a new site. So

you're still changing it and making updates. Send the updated sitemap. Yep. I mean, you know, use correct 301 redirects is another one he has on here. Um, which is what we'll actually have to be careful to do about the redesign of the site. Yep. We have, uh, several internal pages that rank first page. And we'll, you know, go by the rules and use the same URL structure and everything else. Yeah, if we don't use the same URL structure, which actually we probably won't, because we're switching from .asp to WordPress, which is .php or just index.php. Um, then we, we will have to, on a page by page basis, do a 301 redirect to the new .php page. Definitely. Uh, possible duplication of title tags and meta tags and keyword tags. So, um, this, this is, again, basics, but I think most of these, this sorts of things happen when you rush. Right. You know, we're rushing to get a site launched. And so you tell yourself, you know, I'll, I'll go back and do that. But in the meantime, you know, home about us, product services, contact us. And FAQ, they all have the same title. Right. And they all have the same meta information. Uh, fix that. You know, title should be, um, uh, keyword rich. Keyword rich about that particular page. Content relevant, yeah. You know, this is a water heater repair page. Your title should say water heater repair. It shouldn't say, uh, tankless water heater installation. Different page, different topic, different keyword. So, um, that was about it. You know, so I thought, I thought the basics were cool. You know, uh, have a great website and really cover your basics. And then don't overlook, you know, some of the other things that really come into play. It was interesting because it, because it was, it was funny, you know, talking about adding humor to, uh, you know, a dry subject. You know, given all these radical changes, remember the only thing that we could possibly do is this one through

ten. And then it was like, oh, wait, that's the same list that it's been for the last four or five years. Yeah. Yeah, we just. It's not the first time hearing this. Exactly. Just keep doing those things. And, you know, we always kind of roll back to the fundamental, the basic, which is if whatever you're doing is going to provide a good experience to the Google user, then Google's going to like what you're doing, uh, and, and going to, you know, reward you for that. And if what you do isn't a good experience for the Google user, Google's going to be aware of that and they're going to penalize you for, uh, you know, not doing well. So people like to see videos. People like to see, um, images. So all of our, uh, blog posts have images. All of our Facebook, uh, entries have images. Because it's not just Google that, well, it's people that like to see them and so therefore Google likes to see them. Uh, you know, there's some statistics. If you've got an image on your post on Facebook, I don't remember what the number is. It's got to be something about 80%. You're 80% more likely to get that thing viewed and shared and whatever, uh, than if you just, you know, say, you know, I'm at the pizza store. Right. You say I'm at the pizza store and you take a picture and people are like, oh yeah, that looks good, whatever. Or then I see it and I do this. I pin it to my food pin board. Right. Right. Which includes a link back to your post, which is awesome about Pinterest. And so, um. I don't have an account yet. I don't know what's going on. Yeah. So yeah, definitely do that. One of the things, um, I read earlier, uh, and we'll close in a minute, uh, kind of advanced SEO stuff, but really about the coding. Remember Google did the top heavy algorithm change. And so stuff that's really the top portion of

your code, they're placing the most relevance on. It was saying use, um, uh, absolute position in your CSS to position the coding. Right. In the right, you know, so it may be below, but you positioned it here. So Google will see it, they'll say, okay, this is positioned at the top. This is the most important content. And hopefully it's keyword rich. So what you're talking about is in the code, it comes first. Yeah. But when it's displayed on the browser, because of the position, the CSS position, it actually could be at the very bottom. It could be in the sidebar, it could be at the bottom, it could be anywhere. Yep. And so, and it's not black hat. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, it's not even gray hat. Yeah. Because remember, that gets into black, it gets into black hat when what you show to Google is different than what you show to a user. Yeah, if I'm showing Google, you know, water heater repair content, that's just keyword stuff, but then the content on the site actually reads pretty well. Right. But it doesn't have the key phrase in there enough. That's not good. But this is the exact same content that's on the site. Yeah. You are literally showing the same thing, it's just Google interprets it different than the user. So that's okay. Yeah. All right. Well, you have listened to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. This is podcast number 144. We are only popular because of you, so we really do appreciate you guys. Hopefully, you got a lot of valuable information. If you got one tidbit out of this, make sure you like us, tweet us, fan us. All that. And plus us. Yeah. There you go. Plus us. And plus us. Add us to your circle. Thanks for anything else. Oh, we got blank stare? We do have blank stare. Yeah. Hold on. Yeah. I blanked. Other than the blank, it was good. The blank blank stare. Yeah. Was that Yahoo? You're right. 2,000 employees.

Out of there. Sarah Nara. You know what I'm saying? Out of there. 2,000 employees laid off from Yahoo. But the interesting thing about it was that was only a small percentage of the force. It's tiny. Yeah. Yeah, so, like, how many employees do they have? Yeah, yeah. And what are they doing? Yeah. Because I'm not doing that well. Yeah. What are they doing at the office? We almost have like a, you know, a subplot of our podcast is the deterioration of Yahoo. Because we're constantly talking about, you know, the CEO meltdown of Yahoo. Yeah, they went through four CEOs in two quarters. Yeah. Yeah. That just does not speak well. Every other month, I quit. Yeah. Not just I quit, but the top of the ladder. Yeah. He quits. Yeah. Sayonara. Good luck. Yeah, so, you know, Yahoo is waiting on football season to start. I get that bit. They get the most traffic in their fantasy football. Yeah. Because that'll be the only time I'll log back into Yahoo. Yahoo. Your Yahoo account almost goes dormant. And immediately after week 14, when my fantasy season ends, then, yeah. Done. All right. Thank you guys for listening. Again, my name is Chris Burris. Charles Lewis. Bye-bye for now.