SEO 2009 Year In Review - Value of Social media and Anchor Text - #seopodcast 44

Hi, and welcome to the Unknown Secrets of SEO Podcast. Welcome back. Happy New Year, everybody. Welcome to 2010. It's going to be another banner year, 2010. 2009 was pretty awesome. We're going to kind of cover that here. 2009 was definitely an awesome year. How was your New Year celebration? It was cool. You know, kind of low-key, hung out with the family, went to a party, brought my 16-year-old nephew. That's just wrong. You had a great time, though. It was cool. Nothing crazy. How about yourself? Cool. I was up in New Jersey. You're in Cali? No, actually, I was actually up in New Jersey for two weeks. This is the first podcast in a long time, so your listeners will have noticed a dead spot, and then now we're picking back up again. I was in New Jersey for two weeks through Christmas. I actually spent New Year's here in Houston at a Panamanian party. My wife is Panamanian, so those are always a good time. I bet that was an awesome time. And then I was out in two weeks on a particular project in California, so I'm actually back this week because it's pissing down rain in California. Oh, that's right. My sister, I have a sister, Robin, hey, Robin, in Los Angeles, and I talked about two days ago, she says the power is out. And I'm like, why is the power out? Well, because it's raining. I don't get it. It's in L.A., and when it rains, everybody freaks out. Yeah, it's kind of like when it snows here. Yeah, like when it snows here in Houston. All right. Well, remember, you are listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. In fact, we now have five. We've got four reviews on iTunes. And five ratings. And five ratings. So we actually have an average, so we look even more official than we did last year. Yes. Thank you. To everyone that took time out of their schedule, we appreciate that. And thank you. We really do appreciate it. We love

doing this podcast. We love the feedback, even the negative feedback, and I will get into that. We did get some. I'll get into that here shortly. You can stalk us. Everybody wants to stalk us. We're actually, you know, our Facebook page, we're getting more and more fans of eWebStyle there. Thank you guys for that. Anyone who's not already stalking us, you can find us at twitter.com slash eWebStyle. You can stalk us on Facebook. The easiest way to get to that Facebook page is e-webStyle.com slash Facebook, because the Facebook URL is frankly... You won't remember it. It's ridiculous. Yeah. I think. Yeah. I haven't checked in one. They were making some changes a while back. Also, if you do not know, if you are not watching us live right now, it's because you don't know that we broadcast our podcast usually at 9.15. Today is at 9.45. I had a little issue. My bad. I was late. We're going to try and stick to that schedule so that you guys can kind of bank on Friday mornings joining us, because we really love to have you guys watching. Looks like there's a couple people watching right there, right now. Hey. What's up, guys? Thanks for watching. And, of course, these podcasts are then put onto iTunes, onto different podcast services, just as the audio podcasts. I'm thinking now that we're going to put these up actually on as video podcasts. How's that sound? So, we'll have an audio podcast on iTunes and a video podcast. That's very cool. A lot more video stuff. That's cool. We'll try. We'll try. It goes into something new and exciting. Yeah. So, that'll probably happen. And, we're going to start having these videos on our YouTube page. So, YouTube has a 10-minute limit, so each thing will be broken down, et cetera, et cetera. But, you'll be able to just kind of go in and watch us on YouTube. Or, all of our old stuff, all of our old videos is available on Ustream. So, go check that out. Do

we have any news for today? You know, I have a little bit of news. I went around and was searching for news, and it was just the same old, you know, Google, China. If you haven't seen this, Google and China are fighting right now, because China hacked Google, or blah, blah, blah, or whatever. So, it wasn't that great, so I decided to jump on the Haiti bandwagon. I thought this would be a perfect time. What I did last night, I sent a text message. I don't know if you've seen that. You can text message 90999. I text message Haiti, the word Haiti, to 90999, and it'll ask you, do you reply yes if you want to donate $10? And, I did. So, if you haven't done something to help out the people in Haiti, this is my plug for the telethon or whatever. There's going to be a huge telethon tonight. So, you know, send a text message, send $1, $5, $10. I did. I felt good about it. I kept saying I was going to do it, and I finally did it last night. So, if you haven't done that, you know, help the people out in Haiti. Is that the Wycliffe telethon or something? Tonight is, I don't know, tonight is the big multi-network. Including, like, Larry King. MTV, ABC, NBC, it's going to be everywhere. So, take this time. Because our client, Patrick Wanus, they were trying to get him involved. Because he actually put together, also, if you're, you know, suffering some loss or trauma from the experience of Haiti, there is a free audio file that our hypnotherapist client made. Oh, that's sweet. It's actually two files. So, you can go in there. You know, the biggest part, if you're contributing, we're finding that a lot of the people who are actually volunteering feel like they're not volunteering enough. And they're feeling distress and sadness and, you know, all of these things like survival guilt. These audio files, one of the big things is it just allows you to take

20 minutes. You know what? You deserve 20 minutes. Take 20 minutes for yourself. Listen to these audio files. They've got some great visualizations. You can actually find that at patrickwanus.com slash Haiti. And that is H-A-I-T-I. I think at least everyone will now know how to spell Haiti in that country. I think most people. It took me a while, actually, when I was trying to send that. It's really confusing when people who speak Spanish say it because it's Haiti. Oh, yeah. And you're like, what? I work in Haiti. I don't really know what you're talking about. So, yeah, our thoughts and prayers go out to the people in Haiti. And hopefully, yeah, do something about it. That's awesome. And then so I really don't, the whole Google China thing, I really don't know too much about what's going on in China. You know, I hacked them and a couple other people. You know, I read a little bit about it and I kind of stopped. I was like, yeah, whatever. It's just that Google got hacked in China somewhere. They don't know where exactly it came from. The last thing I read this morning was, they don't say it was the government, but they're saying the government is not doing anything about it. So, Hillary Clinton is really urging China to do something about Google getting hacked. And China was like, shut up. You know, like she called over there and they refused the phone call or something. So, they're like, hey, whatever, leave us alone. We're going to do our own thing. So, right now, Google is kind of going head to head with China, the government, about not cracking down and finding out who hacked them, why they got hacked and punishing those people. So, it's a possibility they're saying, okay, should we even stay in this market? I've heard that they're saying they're going to pull out, but right now, that's kind of like, what should we do? Should we, you know, investigate this further? Should we stay here? What's it going to

cost? Or should we just pull out of it? Because, last time I read, they have a serious competitor over there called Baidu. Yeah, Baidu. B-A-I-D-U is the Yahoo of China. It's the second largest search engine in the world, actually, or excuse me. There's a lot of people in China, like Google just pulling out of that market is, doesn't make a lot. Yeah, so I don't think they're like, well, let's really think about this before we pull out. We're thinking about pulling out, not really. Yeah. All right. So, a little viewer and listener mail, Gino Svagi, and I'm sorry, I may be butchering that name. It is S-V-A-G-H-I, he's from Australia, and he says, come on, guys, the first ten minutes of your show is just, well, he's Australian, so I know what he's really saying. The first ten minutes of your show is just crap, right? Let's just get all the BS out of the way, because Australian is one of the things I really appreciate. Patrick Wanis is also a friend of mine. He is from Australia. They just tell it like it is. Like, if they don't like you. Patrick definitely tells it like it is. They're just like, I don't like you. Yeah, I don't like you. I really, you know, I'm having my beer here, you're sitting in the chair next to me, I don't like you, you really should move, or I'm going to. Or I'm going to. You know, in America, we don't do that so much. We just maybe turn our back and snicker or whatever. We'll talk behind your back. Yeah. Yeah. Australian is just right up there. So, Gino, we really appreciate your input. We're going to absolutely weigh it with all of the other good input that we're getting. Well, cool, but thanks. Thanks for being honest. And we're going to have maybe a Gino time limit. Okay. Right, so I think we met the Gino time limit. Okay. All right, back. Here we go. Here's the real podcast. Let's go. What are we covering

today? Today is the year in review. We're going to do 2009, the year in review. Just to recap what we did last time, remember John Reynolds of southwest of Western Australia, which is actually not in the Pacific Ocean. It is actually a province called Western Australia. Go back and listen to the last podcast if that sounded even remotely confusing, which I'm sure it did. He said, Google admits there's 200 signals or factors that they weigh in when they're determining the rank of a particular website. And he said, I know content, keywords, and links. What are the other 197? And this was such a great question. Last time we found out a 25-page article. It's a really good article published by CMOs, SEOmos, not CMOs, SEOmos, and just tons and tons of other SEO techniques that you probably did not or had not heard about. And so we started covering that, which is kind of our attempt at addressing John Reynolds' question, and we're going to cover that next time. Now we want to do the year in review. And we've got a couple things. This was a great year for our podcast. Our listenership is way up. We really do appreciate you guys. Please keep the e-mails coming in. I didn't mention that. You can e-mail us at podcast at e-webstyle.com. Send them in. Just like Gino, you're going to get on the air. By the way, Gino is at least the domain name with his e-mail is etrack.net.au, which is, of course, an Australian domain name, and it's just a coming soon page. He doesn't have anything up yet. So that will be in our blog. So, Gino, you're going to get some backlink traffic for that. Anybody who wants to write to us, we're going to bring you up, and you're going to end up getting some backlink traffic. So you get some backlink love from e-webstyle. Backlink love from e-webstyle. Which is important. It's very important. Which is very important. It's actually the most important thing. There you go. Yeah. There you

go. So we thought, let's cover, you know, we talk continuously. We talk about different clients. We talk about the things that you need to be doing on a regular basis. And we think we do a pretty good job of stressing those things that are very important. And here in our 2009 year in review, we wanted just to kind of reiterate, re-emphasize those things. And, you know, frankly, some of us were, like, a little surprised at how important some of these ratings factors were. And we'll discuss why they are so important. We also want to talk a little bit about, you know, the other huge thing, probably through 2009, starting in 2008, was social media. And all the different forms and venues and access and stalking and everything that you can do with social media, why and how should you be doing it, what should you be doing. And so we want to talk about that a little bit. So you've got, what, top five ranking factors. Here on my wall, you know, and we've covered tons of topics. We've probably covered 50 different SEO concepts or techniques. And we wanted to break it down into, hey, what should you be doing at the absolute minimum for your website? Because we talk, I mean, we talk about so many different things. You'll probably get confused. At the absolute minimum, here's what I say. So if you're going to do nothing else, focus on these five things. Exactly. And, by the way, we do have podcasts, I think, on all of them but one. This is a list of, actually, of all our podcasts. Oh, wow. This is podcast number 44. Podcast 44. 44. So, yeah. That's awesome. That's really good. So, at the minimum, out of all the things that we talked about, here's five things that everybody should be doing. We'll probably even get into a few more. Number one, keyword-focused anchor text from your external links. I, myself, knew this was very important. Wait, wait. Say that. That's confusing. What was that again? Keyword-focused

anchor text from your external links. So not internal. Okay. Not from your own pages. From JohnDoe.com is going to give you a link. So, JohnDoe.com is going to give you a backlink from their website onto your website. The anchor text are the actual words that JohnDoe.com places on their website that will bring you back. So, for all of your Blue One-Arm Widget needs, go to BlueOneArmWidgets.com. And then Blue One-Arm Widgets would be in the anchor text. If you need a Blue One-Arm Widget, you're going to get it here at BlueOneArmWidgets.com. And this is one of the ones that surprised you. I knew it was a good factor. We talk about it all the time. I didn't know it was, like, one of the top five factors. And this was listed as number one. So even I was surprised about this. So, and we, the example that we often use is in relation to internal links. You have the text. Most people use the text home to get you to the home page. And remember that in this example, your home page is not about home, right? It's not about homes. It's not about the word home. So better anchor text, and we're not suggesting you don't have home because that's actually kind of user-friendly. But better anchor text back to your home page would be Blue One-Arm Widgets if that's what you sell. So that Google says, hey, at the end of this link is information about this text. And it's Blue One-Arm Widgets, boom. So that's internal. When you go external, then Google will see more value in that because it's an unbiased source, right? So it's a situation where, okay, again, John Doe has a website. He loves Blue One-Arm Widgets, is maybe going to try the Red One-Arm Widgets. But if you want a Blue One-Arm Widget, go here because that's where he got it. So it's an unbiased source. Google gives a lot more weight to that. In fact, we figure it's the number one. Now what about, let's say you're

like a buddy John Pavlakos out there. Hey, John, that's a nice plug for you. And you're like, okay, how do I determine anchor text that goes on somebody else's website? Because that's the first thing that comes into my mind. He's going to put anchor text on his website. How do I influence that? Because he's going to put up whatever he wants. What would you say to, John Doe, I'm doing my own link building. I mean, can you suggest it? Hey, can you put me up on the gear? So here, this really boils down to one of the jobs that we have as an SEO company, which is because there's so much value in external links, we want to make sure that those external links that we're providing for your website have that value. So you end up working on building relationships, and you end up building new relationships. So if it's John Doe who's done it, make some sort of tit-for-tat arrangement. Maybe I can give you a link back if you just change that text. Or, you know what, hey, I really appreciate that you appreciate my business. You could really help my business. And you send this in an email or you make a phone call. You could really help my business if instead of just saying widgets and linking back, that you actually specifically say blue one-arm widgets. Because that's the only thing I sell, and that's going to have more relevancy for my business. The other thing is if your business was, you know, B-O-W, and he said, oh, find blue one-arm widgets at B-O-W. And B-O-W was the actual link, hopefully that made sense, then it's better, actually, to have the blue one-arm widgets as the actual link. So you can, you know, give them a call, send them an email, say, look, I really appreciate your back link. Could you, you know, make it a little more effective for me? And, you know, maybe you offer them a discount or something. Could you use keyword-focused anchor text? On your

external links. That's not spelling it out. So that's a great question, and that's how you do it. I mean, this is, you know, ironically in all of this, electronic age, it's about relationships. It's about, you know, making that personal connection and that, the plead, the begging to make it happen. So that's number one. Number two, external link popularity. Explain external. Everybody at this point, I want to explain external links. I think everybody knows what they are. So external link popularity is just going to be about the population of external links that you have. Okay. So, again, that's one of the big deals that we do. This is one of the reasons that we're in business, because building external link popularity is a, it's not rocket science, right? Sending an email to a guy or, you know, posting on certain forums, that's not rocket science. It's just incredibly time-consuming. And if you're doing it and you're doing it wrong, you're wasting your time. So spending a lot of time, because it's time-consuming, and wasting all of that time is why you hire a company like eWebStyle or any other SEO company or just link building companies. There you go. And also, you want to watch who you're linking to. And we've talked about that before. Or you want to go after people with a high page rank or high search engine score. I mean, different browsers or tools call it, Alexa calls it Alexa rank or whatever. Yeah. You want to go after people with a quality search engine score. Right. Because that could, you know, it could harm you. How you link, remember, it could help you or it could harm you. So make sure you're doing that properly. And so what that really means is kind of like, as opposed to getting a nice link on John Doe's website, you'd like it on MSN. There you go. Oh, hey, there you go. MSN homepage, linking to blue one-armed widgets to your website, significantly more valuable to Google than John Doe linking back. And if

you get a link from MSN, I need a phone call. Yeah. ASAP. If you've got that hookup. Seriously, though. We need to talk. And this kind of goes into the next topic, which would be diversity of link sources. You know, where you get all of your links coming from the same... Domain. There you go. Yeah. The same domain. And this kind of makes sense because, you know, if we know that external links are valuable, how hard is it to set up a new website designed to have some sort of information on it and its main goal to link back to your website. And Google recognizes this. So if you've only got, you know, one or two websites that are linking back to you, then there's not much value in that. Exactly. And then why... We've talked about this before. Watch out for link farms. You should know this by now. You know, you don't want to get involved with a link farm. A website would just link, link, link, link, link, link, link, link, link, link. They're not related. Stay away from it. That can definitely hurt you. It's annoying to customers and it's annoying to Google. I don't see them too much, but every so often I will see one. They used to be just prevalent all across the Internet. I had a good quote for what SEO's responsibility is, and I think it was last time. And as an SEO, the efforts that you're making for SEO, your responsibility is to provide a good experience to the Google user. Okay. So if a link farm is something that you're trying and you know you don't like them and no Google user is going to like them, then don't mess with them. If you're going to put some sort of link with, you know, maybe you're using blue one-arm widgets but you're selling something else, you know, that's not a good experience for Google. So if you're out there creating bad experiences for Internet users, you're creating bad experiences for Google users and you're

not going to do well. Yeah, and remember, I like you brought that up because, remember, you have to balance. SEO is kind of like you have to please the user and you have to please the Google bot, for example. You know, you've got to get the search engine to return your website. The search engine has to like it, but if you're on the first page, first position, and your website sucks and you have no content, which happens, then the visitor is going to bounce. So remember that. You've got to kind of balance that. And that's what we call it, SEVO. SEVO. SEVO. That's Search Engine Visitor Optimization. So how can you turn your website into something that is actually a good experience for the search engine visitor? Okay, what's up next? Number four, keyword use anywhere in the title tag. Okay, this is another one. I was a little bit shocked. I knew it was a factor. I did not know it was this important of a factor. I think it's pretty straightforward, keyword use, use keywords. Well, if it is your, and now here's the classic mistake. You're making your own website. It's your own business. It's the BOW business. And you put welcome to BOW as the title of every one of your pages, right, which seems to make sense, except the title of the page, you know, in the classic sense, a title of an article isn't, you know, about the business that wrote the article. It's actually the title of the article and the information in the article. So that's what Google sees it. So take the time. And this can make, this one simple thing can make a big difference in your search engine placement. And that is, you know, what's relevant? What's the information that's going to be available on this article, on this web page? Put that in the title. So if it's about blue one-armed widgets, then, you know, blue one-armed widgets. In fact, people, SEO, people will argue that it needs to

be early on in the title. So you don't want a bunch of text and then blue one-armed widgets. You want blue one-armed widgets, you know, available now or something. Okay. So if we could use it first, it would be better than having it as one of the last things. And that goes to, you know, we talk sometimes about density and prevalence. So how early is it shown in the text and how dense? You know, maybe you mentioned blue one-armed widgets twice. You want to make sure that you're not stuffing it because that's not good either. But make sure, you know, yes. Having it more than once is good. Don't keyword stuff anywhere, not in your title tags, anchor text, nowhere. Yep. And another one, the number five, trustworthiness of the domain based on link distance from trusted domains. One more time. The number five, trustworthiness of the domain based on link distance from trusted domains. This just goes back to the external links coming in. If you've got MSN, who is clearly a trusted domain, linking to your website, then you're one step away from a very trusted domain name. If it's MSN and then John Doe and then Bill Smith and then you, you're a couple steps further away. And then, of course, there's lots more longer paths that you could be away from a trusted domain. You want to be close to a trusted domain. And basically, that's saying those websites with good PR rankings or good Alexa rankings that get good traffic that are quality that people respect, you know, the closer you can be linked to them, the better. Yeah. And, you know, that's factor five. So, it looks like, what, three of the factors of the top five are actually related to links, right? So, I would say links. Link building is one of the biggest things that we do. So, to John Reynolds in Southwest Australia, that's, there you go. Like, link, and I know most people only know three or four, maybe five SEO techniques, but that's

proof positive why links is one of the most important and popular SEO techniques or anything involving links is very popular. There's other things that are good, but links are way to go. I think, you know, this kind of, even this starts to answer, you know, John Reynolds' question. You know, I know of three, content, links, and something else, and keywords. But, really, links are not just links. So, there's internal links. There's external links. There's the page rank of the link coming in. There's the keyword anchor text of the link as it's coming in. You know, there's so many, you know, it's not, links is not just one of the 200. Yeah, I got you. It's like 10 or 20 of the 200 based on all the different kind of factors, different ways to look at links. So, it's a great question, and we're actually going to continue that. Let's add our own to it because there's more than this, this, that we think you should be doing. Remember, we're going after what you should be doing at the absolute, absolute minimum because most of you out there, our listeners, are, you know, running your own website and trying to do this piece, you know, piece it together by yourself. So, what can we add to this? I know we think there's more than this. Well, I think that's a good list. First, I think, let's kind of stick to our kind of year in review. Okay. Right? So, the next thing. I thought we were going to add social media. That's what we're going to do. Okay. Yeah. So, the year in review is, yeah, the other thing that you do want to do is social media. You're exactly right. Okay. So, we're on the same way path, just speaking in different languages. Just speaking in a different way. Okay. And, hopefully, you know, this is a language that Gino over in Australia appreciates. Yeah. So, the next thing is, you know, social media. Now, frankly, when we started in 2009, we were doing one

social media thing, and that was the podcast, right? We started that in the latter part of 2008, all through 2009, and then now we've evolved. So, here's what we're doing social media-wise, Twitter, Facebook, podcasts, Ustream, live Ustream. YouTube. YouTube, and then we're going to go into a video podcast. So, all of those are social media, and, you know, the SEO rapper said it best, right? He's like, if they're not finding you at your website, and they happen to be finding you at Facebook, it can only happen if you're on Facebook. There you go. And, at least, they're finding you. There you go. So, it really is not, should I be doing Facebook, or social media in general. It is, you've got to come up with some sort of program and make that happen. Okay. It's got to happen. I like that. And, one thing is, when you said, should I be doing Facebook that I just thought of, actually, when you were talking about all the different social media that we're doing, social media is more than Facebook. And, even my, myself will forget that. It's more than Facebook and Twitter. Well, we were looking at a website the other day that had this row of, like, 8x5, so over 40 different, you know, ways to be socially connected to a particular article. Dig. StumbleUpon. LinkedIn. LinkedIn. Delicious. Delicious. I mean, there are so many different things to be involved in. So, you really want to, you know, Facebook's huge right now. Twitter's huge right now. So, if you're really going to do anything, you kind of want to be doing some of those. Remember, as a business, and this is something that we're really working towards as part of the reasons that we do this podcast, is you want to establish yourself. I mean, there's lots of talented people in whatever business you're in, but you want to establish yourself as the expert, as at least one of the experts, or as an expert in that industry. You know, and this iTunes podcast, the

most popular SEO podcast on iTunes, it works to do that. So, people start to understand eWebStyle as experts in search engine optimization. You want to do the same thing for your business. So, maybe it's starting a podcast. Maybe it's, I don't know, maybe it's just, you know, being consistently active on your Facebook page or your Twitter, so that the more, you know, when people start thinking about blue one-armed widgets, they think about you, if that's what you did. Or, you know, in our case, if people think about search engine optimization, they think about eWebStyle. So, you know, those are kind of the reasons. And, you know, in all of this electronic age and all of this, it still boils down to people. Like, people want to know that, you know, eWebStyle can be a big company that is a machine at cranking out high rankings. But people don't really want to deal, you know, there's this, they kind of want to deal with it, but they really want to know, you know, the people behind the mask, the people behind the curtain from... They want a personal relationship with who they're going to do business with. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, that's what we recommend you to do. That's what social media is all about. And it works really well. So, I think we're actually, our time's up. So, this is another great podcast. The end of 2009. Now we're on to 2010. We're going to keep covering John Reynolds' question and some more details about the things that affect page ranking. And I have a couple people I'd like to say hello to, to John Pablacos. I gave him a shout out earlier. He sent me an email in Christmas, say thank you for the email, for the holiday, well wishes. John was actually the very first person that ever sent us an email. Oh, cool. I can't remember his website, but I remember he sent us a, he gave us an iTunes review, doctor video. Thank you very much, John. To Jignesh and

to Todd at Costa Rica Real Estate, thank you for the analysis. I got those to you. And thank you for everyone that listens to the podcast, man. You mentioned analysis. Yeah. If you want a free analysis of your website from a search engine optimization perspective or from a web design and development perspective, we really kind of blend them both. Yeah. But go ahead and go to our website. Go to e-webstyle.com. When you get there, click SEO. And at the top, there'll be a place where you can give us a call. Go ahead and give us a call. That's fine. Or a little bit farther down, there's a kind of a smaller link. We'd rather you call us. But there's a smaller link that links to a form that you can submit if you don't really want to hop on the phone or whatever. Or if you're in another country, because a lot of our listeners are in another country. Ooh, hang on. One person. Two more. Personalgrowth.com. Scott and Leanne, thank you very much for your listenership. They did contact us about a week and a half, two weeks ago. So thank you for your listenership, and we're looking forward to speaking with you guys again. All right. Well, you are listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. This is the end of podcast number 44, the beginning of 2010. Thank you guys very much for listening. Until the next podcast, I'm Chris Burris. And this is Paul Hanson. Bye-bye for now. Bye-bye.