SEO Australia, SEO UK - #seopodcast 136

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. Yes, sir. You are watching, I'm not even sure I did that right. Yes, you got it right. You are watching the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. That is because of you, you, and you over there. You over there, and you who are looking at us right now, who just logged on. Thank you very much for tuning in live. We do broadcast on Friday mornings about 9, 15, 9, 30, 45. 10 o'clock. 10 o'clock. Oh, yeah. Exactly at 10 o'clock. So the way you find us so that you can actually tune in and watch the video live is go to ewebstyle.com slash SEO podcast. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. I am Charles Lewis Show Internet Marketing Specialist. We have a great show today, as always. We have a tip from our previous podcast, and the tip from the previous podcast is always remember, with SEO, step one is keyword research. Yes, yes. Definitely do your keyword research because the last thing you want to do is optimized for the wrong keywords or, frankly, target phrases that don't bring you any value. It's almost like you need to have a good keyword strategy versus tactics. That'll be coming up. We are your friendly, local, neighborhood, top position snatchers where a mantra is... Don't be a douche. And that's just a leftover from a podcast from long ago. Actually, I was chatting with a potential new client. He's getting his website built. We'll be making contact with us after his website's done. And he's like, oh, yeah, I'm going to go back and listen to all your podcasts. And I was like, wow, that's a pretty lofty goal because there's 135 of them already. That's 30 minutes apiece. Somebody can do the math to figure out how many hours. That's a lot. Yeah, that's like, yeah, probably three weeks straight. Yeah, just keep going. Remember, if you are sitting now, if you're listening to the podcast, if you're watching the podcast, if

you're listening to the podcast, I think I covered them all, go ahead and you're next to some sort of electronical device, go ahead and tweet right now. What do they tweet? They tweet hashtag SEOpodcast136. Tag us at eWebStyle. We'll punch you in the face. Thank you for watching. And we appreciate it. Thank you very much. Look, you see, no tears anymore. Yeah, I actually got the other tattoos removed. They're all removed, erased. I'm going to add invisible, I don't know, the reverse. What's a reverse of a tear tattoo? A star maybe? I don't know. Yeah, an earring. I'm going to have to get an earring. I don't know how that's the reverse of a tear tattoo. It turns out, so we just got a new client. He's in Australia and he was telling us that there's 17 reviews on his iTunes. And it turns out that their iTunes is nationalized or regionalized is a better term. So at the very bottom of iTunes, way down at the right, there's a little circle with a map in it. You click that and you can actually change the regionalization of your current iTunes experience. And by going into Australia, by going into UK, by going into, I went into Spain. That was a mistake. Yeah. Our review in Spain, our one review in, we are not the most popular SEO podcast. In Spain? In iTunes in Spain. I believe he used the word redneck. Wow. Yeah. I'll read that a little bit later. You say that in Spanish? Yeah. It's amazing. All the reviews from Spain were actually in, well, the one review was in English. I wonder if they, I don't know if they're translating or, well, obviously anyone listening to our podcast is at least speaking English. And he wrote pretty well too. I didn't like what he wrote. It was just well written. So I was able to find a ton of reviews. I mean, we got pages and pages, so we're going to slowly go through these. We're not going to bog this

podcast down with one whole podcast of review reading. Here we go. Great stuff. This is from Martine. This is just what you need for an SEO podcast when you're finding your way around. Good content and a lively style makes it really listenable. Punch in the face. Get straight to the content, please. Too much random chat at the start of each podcast. Please just get to the content within two minutes. Now we got a time frame. I didn't realize it was two exact minutes. What was our previous genome time limit? That was just principle, right? Now we got an actual two. Two minutes. Well, we've too late. Proceeded that. Sorry. Sorry, Mr. MGen200. You should probably be tuning out. I was fast forwarding for over ten minutes just to get past the casual chat and self-promotion. By the way, we don't self-promote that much. It's one of the compliments that we get. So, you know, the people who love our podcast love that part. People who hate our podcast, that's the only complaint they have. There is real good information in here. We'll try to maybe find a happy medium. Was that blank stare news already? And let's just do one more. Really enjoyable. This is from Chris Distant Cloud. Love listening to this and have learned a lot from it. I enjoy the chat and banter too. But remember, content is king. I like that. That's a good comment. And we also have a little bit of news, which I don't know if that counts as fluff or is it actually news. Stick to the script. Yeah, stick to the script. Facebook IPO. They had their big IPO this week. People were talking about it being a $20 billion company. Mark Zuckerberg's shares is $16 billion. He's a $16 billion man. That's crazy. Yeah. Kid, really, right? Wow. A couple notes that I got out of it. They're filing. One, Facebook's really big. They're huge. If you didn't know that. They have no path to profit for mobile. So right now they don't show ads.

Yeah, they don't show ads on the mobile. So people may be checking in. They may be uploading photos. I do that regularly. In fact, I think mobile is part of the reason Facebook really has grown, right? And Google is their biggest threat. That's something that came out in their IPO filings. Firefox, I mentioned it last week. I'm having another problem with Firefox. It's upgrade. You refused to upgrade. Yeah, I'm not going to Firefox 10. Maybe I shouldn't say that publicly. Maybe that leaves me open to some sort of security. But yeah. Oh, we know Chuck is actually on Firefox 9. Yeah. Well, I just have several plug-ins that I use for research and work purposes that don't work with 10 yet. They work with 9. So Aardvark being one of them. Aardvark is a key one. By the way, Firebug actually has the ability to do what you're doing with Aardvark. I'm not going to show you that. That's interesting. So what we'll do is when you turn Aardvark on and you hover over to the different parts of a web page, it'll tell you is it an H1 tag, is it a div, is it a whatever, H2 tag. So it can be really useful to know how well people are optimizing their website. I saw this. AOL sales still sliding, but the clients are slowing. What does AOL do? So they're sliding slower. Yeah, they're sliding slower. They're plummeting. What do they do? You know, every now and then we get clients with an AOL.com email. Yeah, that's not too recently. And we're like, why do you, what happened to you? Did you use that? Yeah. If it works? Does it still say, you've got mail? Probably. That would be the only reason to use it. New York Times did an article on the work. That was awesome when it first came out. Oh, yeah. I was like, dude, did you, I got mail. My mailbox doesn't do that. Man, I get, you know, seem like a thousand emails a day. Nah, I

would hate that. Oh, yeah. You got mail. You got mail. You got ten mails. New York Times did an article on the working conditions at Foxtron, which is the company that's in China making the iPads, the iPhones, and all that stuff. Perry was talking about, you know, you don't do an article on how wonderful the working conditions are in China. You don't ever see that article. So, the article was obviously about how bad the working conditions are. And some of them, kind of the premise of the article that I saw was, which was a comment on the New York Times article, was, should we boycott? Like, are the working conditions so bad that we should boycott? Or, you know, is it over there? And I'm like, I'm not giving up my iPad. Yeah, yeah, he's reading from an iPad. Yeah. That means I would have to go back to paper. And this was interesting also. This is the last piece of news. Twitter stayed live during all the SOPA protests. And I thought this was just a really cool quote. The CEO of Twitter said, you do not pull the battery on the microphone when you're giving a speech. Right? So, Twitter was one of the microphones to promote the SOPA. So, if you pull that off, then how do people communicate and say they're all pissed off about SOPA? So, yeah, I just thought that was a really cool quote. All right. That is all that I have for news. Perfect. Right at two minutes. Okay. Well, I pulled an article today. I thought it was an interesting article. You know what? Let me interrupt you because I did have one email. Oh, about the email we got. Yeah. So, we got this email. Again, this is also from Paul in Australia. And he's the one who turned us on to the fact that there are other reviews. And he asked this question. He had actually attached a couple screenshots. And his question is, how do you set up the website so that when

someone searches, on Google, they don't just get your one-liner, they actually get the site links. The site links, yeah. And it used to be 12, and now they come back to six. And so, what that is is, you know, if you type in, in his case, he typed in Monica's dog rescue. And it's M-O-N-I-K-A-S. And then, Monica's dog rescue was the first result. And it has, see the dogs, contact us, about us, volunteer job list, foster a dog, and five steps to adoption. And when you do his particular domain name, it does show up first, but it doesn't have the site links. So, his question is, how do you get those site links to show up? Yeah, and I think it's several things. One, it's, first off, the site links is, it was an algorithm change that came last year with Google, even displaying those. And so, I think all sites prior to that change either may or may not have had the right structure. I think it has a lot to do with link sculpting in regards to your navigation. I didn't research, but I wouldn't be surprised if the site links that showed from her came from either a top nav or maybe the first few in the sub nav. And so, I think it's also, it's all SEO related. Those are probably the most content-heavy pages that are on her site that were relative to the search term. And so, therefore, Google searched those. I think it also has to do with, in the case of Paul, I don't, I'm not 100% on this. I think he didn't have that much, he may not even have had six pages of content, right? Possibly, yeah. So, it was pretty lean. Or, some of the content was more on the blog side. And so, it seemed a little less relevant. I also think Google probably weighs things like, it should have a contact us and it should have an about us. Yeah. Because that's just kind of standard. Those are the kind of standard

things people are looking for. And those were probably static pages, which I didn't think about. Yeah. You know, you mentioned he probably had a ton of blog pages, which probably won't show in site links because they were so prone to change. Yep. But these are, you know, about us. Contact us. Those are static pages that are, that frankly won't change. Five steps to adoption, they're not going to change. Volunteer job list, that may be changing, but it's not, it's not, you're just not continually adding, it's not growing. So, I thought that was a really good question and worth bringing up. Did I, I thought I had one other. I guess not. That's it. All right. That's it. Okay. Great questions. Still at two minutes. Isn't that awesome? I'm going to dig more into site links because it's definitely a key area in regards to SEO. The more links you can get up there, of course, the better. And it's probably pretty straightforward. I mean, you know, we haven't messed around and targeted it. Typically, the webpages we design, and we don't know exactly why, we're just kind of using conventional design techniques that those site links show up, so it's not a problem. So, how do you, maybe somebody, how could we just tell, in this case, Paul, you know, here's the three steps you need to do. If you add one more page of content, make sure you've got an about us, and add a contact us, then you'll get site links. You know, we'd like to have that information. Yeah, maybe we'll kind of, I'll go back through our process. Yeah. And figure out, you know, every step during the SEO process and the design process, what is, what's maybe enhancing our opportunities to get site links. Right. Because if you Google the, we're doing something, right, and the site links there for all of the clients, so, yeah, we have to be doing it, we just don't know we're doing it. Yeah, exactly. That's awesome. And so, you know you're smart when

you're smarter than you thought you were. No. You know you're smart when you're smarter than you know. There you go. I'm going to tweak that. But, all right, anyway, so I pulled this article today from an SEO journal, search engine journal, called, Because Most SEOs Don't Know What Strategy Means. So, it caught my eye because I do SEO, and, you know, I was almost offended. It's like, no, I know what it is. I know what strategy is. But the article, he goes into talking about the difference between strategy and tactics. Yep. And so, my thought, okay, I can kind of see the direction he's going. Then, being an SEO person, my first logic was, okay, this article is a tactic in his strategy to build some links. Yep. And it worked. I got my attention, and I'll post it later. Yeah. So, kudos to you. But he did cover some different steps in strategy and tactics, and we'll talk about those briefly. So, what is SEO strategy? He says, your strategy is the basic way you're going to accomplish something. So, if you were an army and your objective was to conquer Iraq, then your strategy might be to communicate and bomb cities and blah, blah, blah. Wow. Cut communication, bomb cities. Exactly. Tear down statute. And so, in regards to SEO, your strategy should be, number one, assess how search-friendly your site is. First step is to find out where you stand. You know, my first reaction to that was like, well, no, we just make a site search engine friendly. Like, we don't even really assess it. Inherent in that process is a little bit of assessment. Usually, when websites come to us, they just haven't had much SEO, if any. And so, it's less about assessing how search engine friendly it is and more about erasing and starting from scratch and making it search engine friendly. What I'm realizing is our assessment really comes prior to the production of the site. Yeah. I mean, it's during the design process. This is how

it's going to go. This is going to be laid out. This is where content is going to go. You know, and during the production phase, it's usually in WordPress, and we're assessing how this is going to be built. And so, when it is built, it's already searching your friendly. Yeah. Yeah. Number two is evaluate your competitors. Look at your competition. Who are they? Who you think they are? And figure out, you know, some of the things they're doing. And I agree with that. You definitely have to do a competitive analysis, especially for people who are ranking for the same terms you're targeting. Yeah. Definitely do the basics. Check their meta information out, right? And that's even, that's almost part of each step. You know, step one, assess keywords. Exactly. So, you type in a couple keywords. You see who's on the first page. Then you actually go into those sites and see what are other kind of auxiliary keywords that it's clear they're targeting. Are they relevant to this particular project? Read their content. Yep. Open up Site Explorer. See who's linking to them, which I think is coming up next. Well, no, that's part of the tactics. No. Not a strategy. This is a strategy. Number three, generate profiles on your target audience. So, basically, he wants to figure out who your audience is. You know, are they white? Are they black? Are they male? Are they female? Are they mobile users only? Or are they, you know, desktop users? You know, figure out who they are so you can determine your plan of action to attack them in a good way. Go! He said, what is this, war? Attack? It is strategy. Did you ever play the game Stratego? No. That was a good game. That was... I can't say that I have. Never heard of it. Generate seed keywords. Develop an extensive list of keywords and put them into a spreadsheet. Typical keyword research. I usually start off with, you know, we did a whole podcast on that probably in the 90,

between 90 and 99 area. Podcast 90, not here. Yeah, podcast 90, 399. We've been podcasting since 1990. Before there were podcasts. Did they have microphones back then? You know what? But do your keyword research. He said, use a spreadsheet. I concur. I'll fill up a spreadsheet full of different sheets for each phase of keyword research. Start off with your seed phrases. Then I'll do another sheet with competitive phrases. Then I'll do another sheet with my target phrases. And then do some more research and come up with other key phrases. Then long tail key phrases. So, definitely do your keyword research. And step five, as part of the SEO strategy, is become a great writer. You can't become a great SEO unless you recognize that content is king. Yeah. I concur. Yeah. Content is king. And therefore, keywords. What is it? I thought you was on me. Keywords, keywords, keywords. Okay. I didn't give you the right segue. Oh, yeah. What's the important? Go. Cut. Go again. We'll edit this out. So, content is king. And so, what is the second most important thing? Second most important thing? The first and most important thing is keywords, keywords, keywords. Yeah. What he said. But definitely become a great writer. And the whole point is to when you become a great writer or not hire a great writer. You know, if you're going to be, you know, because here he is, you know, debating the difference between strategy and tactics. And tactics. And I, you know, if we're going to get nitpicky, it's not become a great writer, right? Because there are great writers who can write content that will be utterly useless for SEO. Being a great writer has almost nothing to do with it. You've got to be a great SEO writer, right? So, your pros may not get published, you know, by Rand and whatever, but you can write content that will actually place well and keep customers who decide to read it engaged. That's a great SEO writer. And that's, I think, it's a

totally different skill set. Yeah, totally different. Yeah. Totally different. If we're going to get nitpicky about tactics and strategies, you better call it a great SEO writer, not just a great writer. Yeah, an SEO writer doesn't mean a person who writes strictly for the search engines. Yeah. Because that's a no-no. Because then you'll have content that mentions the word keyword, and then it mentions the word keyword, and then it mentions the word keyword. And after that, it mentions the word keyword. Keyword again. Yeah, and it won't make any sense. And so, become a great SEO writer. That's a great point. So, speaking of tactics, some of the tactics he listed, and we'll try to brief through these. Number one was collect and share content. You can accomplish this by creating a site that does nothing but aggregate content. Frankly, I think it's a little, I won't say too late for that, but the examples he gave were like Huffington Post or Mashable and things like that. And those sites are out there. And so, rather than create those sites, I would say use those sites. Right. Participate on those sites. Comment on those sites. Share those sites. And then that way you can kind of reap from, you know, some of those benefits. Number two was business and institutional links. The little investment of time. You can get links from businesses like your local chamber of commerce, library colleges, governments. This is huge. These are more kind of link building tactics. And any links you can get from, you know, .gov, .edu, or your library. These are great links. Four plus PR places, yeah. Plus, yeah. Higher page rank. These are great for link building. And it's a great pat on the back as Google sees it. Yeah. It's harder to get. It takes more, you know, there's a lot more effort involved in that. So, number three, testimonials or opinions for an article. You can get links to your site by putting up testimonials. Hopefully, the people will link to them, which creates an

inbound link to you to show off their testimonial. Maybe. Interview big bloggers. Yeah. Interview me. I'll interview for you. Actually, it reminded me, that reminded me that we need to, that should be one of our goals this year for our podcast is to start doing some interviews. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Convincing big bloggers to interview you is not hard. Most of them don't mind. And they'll link to it. Right? So, it's always good to kind of have a guess. Number five, good CSS design for your website. This worked for me, personally. If you have a beautiful design site using CSS, you submit it to a CSS gallery. If you get accepted, you'll get a link back to your site. With the first SEO wrapper. Right. Design layout. WordPress liked it so much. They featured my, it was a custom theme. They featured it. And they got a link back to my site, which was like a PR8 link. Wow. And so, that boosted my rank to six. Yeah. Wow. And so, I concur with that. Submit to places that judge. What is a PR6 stud? Is that what you said in your video? In your rap retort to the PPCMC? Mm-hmm. Let's see here. Contest. Create a contest that encourages competition based on entering information. They have a chance to win something or they have to produce something. For instance, you could give away seats to a conference for a winning essay on some sort of topic. That's really a tactic to generate some, create some user-generated content that not only people will generate and submit on your site, but that they'll probably link to to show other people what they did. Yeah. So, it's kind of a win, win, win, win, win. Yeah, definitely. The trick is creating a contest that people want to win. Yeah, yeah. You know. You want to work hard and put together good content to win. Yeah. Exactly. Number seven, competitor link data. One of the most common tactics in good SEO is making a list of all the links coming

to your competition. Like I said earlier, using Site Explorer is a great tool just to figure out who's linking to them, what phrases are they using to link, what pages are they linking to. And so, that way, you can, you know, if it works for them, you should probably target those same links. Yep. Moving along, number eight is social media. There are, he almost scared me, there are so many signals coming from Google that they suggest that they're using social media to rank content. So, building links to your content through social media is critical. Yeah, yeah. Matter of fact, y'all check me out on Pinterest. I've got that account. What? Pinterest? Yes, sir. I'm on there today. Pinterest.com slash most serious. So, I'm new to it, but I'm there. Cool. Put me in the game, coach. Number nine, repurposing your content. Which is something we do here. Right. Build links back to your site can be done if you turn it into other products. So, like, one of the things we do here is this exact podcast will go up as video. Hey, Robert. On Ustream. It'll go into a YouTube video. It'll get transcripted and put out as a blog post. And soon, it'll come to your inbox in the form of a newsletter. Yeah. Around the corner, man. Yeah, so, that's four different ways we're using this exact content we're creating right now. Yeah. So, and then, of course, it'll get shared and hopefully you'll share it. And so, definitely repurpose your content if you can. And lastly, number 10, he says, social bookmarking. A worthy post. So, use sites like TechMeme or Google Trends. See what's trending. And then, you know, if you create a post, right, that's worth, you can't just create any old, you know, post and think people will share it. But create a post that people will actually find beneficial. Right. Submit it and then encourage others to dig it or stumble it, plus one it, like it, Pinterest it, you know, things like that. And that way,

that will, those social signals will bring back maybe indirect link juice back to your site. Yep. That trust factor. Exactly. All right. That's it from there. It's a good article. Yeah, I'll post this article or I'll tweet it in a minute and we'll post it on the Facebook page too and comment on it. Let us know what you think. By the way, you can actually follow us on facebook.com slash ewebstyle. Twitter.com slash ewebstyle. YouTube.com slash ewebstyle. Podcast at e-webstyle.com. I think that's it. That's it. That's all the ways to follow us. You got any blank stare today? No blank stare. No blank stare. I mean, I was going to go into the IPO with Facebook, but, you know, it wasn't surprising that the, you know, $16 billion. Yeah. The $16 billion man. That's a pretty blank stare. I think it's pretty impressive. All right. So, you have been listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. That is because of you. You do. Something that you can do if you're in Australia, something that you can do if you're in Australia, UK, any place around the world, because we know we have international listeners. Go to iTunes, create an account, submit a review, and then let us know. And if you're in a different country, let us know what country you're in so that I can actually pull up that review. Well, I'll say this, if you're having a problem with iTunes, hit us up, ewebstar.com slash SEO podcast, and post a Google review, frankly. Yeah. I love to get your Google reviews. Everybody knows reviews. Help your places page, and help us out. Yeah. All right. Thank you very much. Until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burris. I'm Charles Lewis. Bye-bye for now. Bye-bye for now. Bye-bye for now. Bye-bye for now. Bye-bye for now. Bye-bye for now. Bye-bye for now.