SEO - On Page Factors - #seopodcast 216

Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of the SEO Podcast Unowning Secrets of Internet Marketing. This is podcast number 216. 216? Which follows podcast number 215. And the tip from podcast 215 was set up, connect, and maximize GWMT and BWMT when launching a new site and doing SEO. Anytime you're launching a new site, one of the first things you should be doing once that site is active is setting up your Google Webmaster Tools and your Bing Webmaster Tools. Why? Well, not only because they're available, but because if you're going to effectively manage any SEO campaign, this is a must. Google Webmaster Tools is where you go if you want to know about any manual spam actions you may have had or any issues Google is having indexing your site or links that are coming to your site or which queries you're ranking for and your position. Google Webmaster Tools will show you all that, as well as Bing Webmaster Tools. They lay it out a little differently. Google has a lot more information, but Bing's okay, too. So definitely set up both of those anytime you're launching a new site. Yep. Please remember, we are your friendly local neighborhood top position snatchers, where our mantra is. Don't be a douche. Yeah. It's not a douche. Don't be a douche. It's not a good look. If you can, right now, tweet, hashtag whatever you call it, and what are they supposed to tweet? I'm doing hashtag SEO podcast. This is number 216. Be sure to tag us in it, at eWebStyle. That way we can link up and follow back and do all of our social stuff. If you want to do us a favor, because you appreciate the improvement in the audio, or you appreciate the content of our podcast, or you just like to, you can do a couple of things. One of them has three steps. Go onto iTunes, create an account, write a review. Yep. We will really appreciate that. The other thing you can do is you can go to our G

Plus local page, and the best and easiest, fastest, quickest, smoothest, nicest way to get to our G Plus local page is to go to e-webstyle.com slash G plus. Or slash. G plus. Or slash. Google plus. And one more slash. Google plus. There we go. And there you will have the option, assuming you have a G Plus local account. Which you do. Actually, a G Plus account. Which you do. Which you do. You may not know it, but you do. You do. You may have to click one, maybe two buttons to actually turn it on, quote unquote. Go ahead and do that, write a review. And if you could, let us know. Send us an email, podcast at e-webstyle.com. Finally, you can go to Facebook, which our page is facebook.com slash e-webstyle. And on our Facebook page, there are apparently two places to review. There's a review tab close to the top, and then right under some section off on the right bar area, not the bar, but under the right section of the main content, you can just click five stars or four stars or five stars more specifically and write a review there. Please remember, we have a referral program. If you have an SEO client, send them our direction, as long as they're paying their bill, you'll get paid. And you can get a free website analysis. In order to get your free website analysis, what you should do is go to our website, e-webstyle.com, and pretty much any page you accidentally or intentionally get to, you will request an analysis. Yeah, you'll see a free website analysis form. Did you say anything about Algo? No cataclysm today. No cataclysm today. All right, so we've got a really big punch in the face to one of our listeners. This is Kevin Scullion. He actually wrote a review on our G Plus local page, so a punch in the face. It sounded familiar. Let's see. So this is a little bit long, and I really appreciate it. It says, Great podcast. I was thinking

of sending you guys some shin pads. The number of kicks for your audio must leave you wandering around on your knees at the weekends. Great show, great content, but actually download each episode and reprocess the sound before I listen. Wow. So instead of the shin guards, I suddenly thought, why not send you a copy of the version I listened to, minus all the noise, with the sound compressed and normalized. I'm happy to drop episode 209. He's dropped it into my Dropbox, and I haven't actually seen it yet. But even, although I only have the MP3 to work with, it's night and day in terms of the original, and the implication there is actually he can do much better with a WAV file. Send me a WAV file, and I can do more with it. In fact, I like the show so much, I'd be happy to process the audio for free each week and fire it back to you. Just let me know. I'll get you both off the floor and back on your feet, Kevin. Wow. Thank you so much. Punch, like combo, right hook, left hook, straight jab, all that. Punch in the face, dude. Appreciate it. I reached right out to Kevin, and I said, hey, just give us the process, because we don't want to burden you with actually processing that. So we're working on bringing that in-house, and I may call you in on that favor in. Yeah, maybe for some initial setup or something like that. Thank you very much, Kevin. And we don't have his website, so go on to our G Plus local page, find Kevin, and say, Kevin, wow, thanks for supporting the podcast. Yeah, appreciate it. Next, this is actually on our, apparently the regular review section on our Facebook page. Again, just in general, you can contact us a number of ways, facebook.com slash ewebstyle, twitter.com slash ewebstyle, youtube.com slash ewebstyle. And you can also send us an email. You can see the voice deflection match at that time. Smooth. You can also send

us an email, podcast at e-webstyle.com. All right. A review on our Facebook page from Phil Glutting. Excellent SEO information. Very entertaining podcast. Always use them to stay up to date on the latest trends for SEO. Would highly recommend to anyone. Why try to sift through all the BS about SEO when you can get it right from the experts? Thanks, Phil. You're welcome. And thanks to you, Patif, in the face. I'm glad you realized that, Phil, because there is a lot of BS. It's a lot of kind of fictitious and inflated, you know, SEO jargon or content that's out there that really has little to no value or merit. And we parse through that. We see the fluff as well as the good stuff. We, like, step through that in our BS boots. I mean, even to the point where some things we'll even test, you know, just to see how valid this is. And then, yeah, try to present you guys with what we feel is valid info. So, I really appreciate that. Sometimes we present invalid info so that we can tell you why it's invalid and show you what's actually valid. The next one is from Bonnie Tours. Great podcast content. Kevin. Patoof. What's in the face? Appreciate it. Short and sweet. All right. We have a little bit of news. You know, you heard this week two million passwords stolen through some bots. Yahoo. Yeah. Well, no, across the board. I think it was two million Facebook and Yahoo and just all these places. It was basically a key capture worm that was installed on, you know, computers across the planet. One of the things, somebody took those, had access to them, I don't know exactly how, and did an analysis on the passwords. And apparently people are still using the password, one, two, three, four, five, six, actually, one, two, three, four, five, six, or admin or whatever. Stop it. Yeah. Change it. Come on. Alphanumeric. Symbols. Some cap. Yeah. Some lowercase. And depending on what platform you're on, spaces. Yeah.

Yeah, because a lot of them don't allow it. Some of them do. And the nice thing about spaces is you can start to write short sentences that you will always remember that are incredibly challenging to, they're easy for you to remember, maybe even easy for you to type, but because there are much more characters, you know, hard for people to break. You know, you do an alphanumeric sentence with spaces, you should be pretty good. Like, I don't know, you could do best SEO podcast. Yeah. Three spaces. Or two spaces, actually. This is also cool. You saw the package delivery from Amazon using the quadcopters. So, they're going to use drones. The intent is to use drones. So, in the Houston area, there would be, like, one Amazon, as an example, there would be one Amazon fulfillment center, right? So, they show it packaged in this little plastic box. The box slides in under the drone. The drone takes off and flies over to your house. And drop it off at your crew. And drop it off at your house. Yeah. That's kind of cool. Yeah, it is kind of cool. That's kind of cool. It's just kind of scary to be like, what is that outside? Yeah. Yeah, and people are going to mess with them. I don't know. And this is finally, I thought this was just interesting. Somebody had an article. The title of the article was, could Ashton be the next Steve Jobs? You know, because Ashton Kutcher is... He's playing him in the movie. Well, that and Lenovo just hired him as a, like, a product specialist or something for their product. So, for their companies. So, the thought process is, you know, does he have what it takes? I don't know. I mean, Ashton, when was the last time you used a digital camera? Yeah. Not. I'm just saying, you know, I used my phone. And so, he's a rebel. Although, my wife would still like to have, like, a super fancy... Well, if we was in the phone, we're

not photographers, right? We probably would. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. It couldn't hurt. I will say that. I mean, the way Apple's going right now, it's definitely been a decline in regards to, you know, innovation. Innovation, yeah. Well, and they're talking from the context that, you know, he wouldn't necessarily be involved in Apple. Just the personality, the presentation, the whole... I mean, Steve Jobs is, like, once in a 10 billion people. To have two of them on the planet at the same time would be just a little bit... Yeah. It's like, he's in that category with, you know, Michael Jordan and, you know, somebody else. Yeah. Eminem. You know, he's like Eminem, Michael Jordan. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Steve Jobs. Yeah. He's a Mick Jagger. He's, like, up there. Yeah. To be sure. Cool. That's all the news that I have. That is all of our reviews. Thank you, guys. And let's get to the meat of the podcast. Yeah. So, punch in the face to Tom Schmitz. Tom Schmitz, he's with Search Engine Land, and he posts these articles every year about an SEO playbook. And so, he recently posted the 2014 SEO playbook a few weeks ago. But recently, yesterday, matter of fact, he published the 2014... We need to do our year in review. Yeah. That's coming up. Yeah. That's, like, in two weeks. Yeah. Right after Christmas. Yeah. We're going to miss next podcast, so we start the next one. Yeah. Cool. And so, he did this one, the 2014 SEO playbook, On Page Factors. And it was pretty cool. He focused in on the things you could do on your site. And then he broke it down into, really, three main areas. And that was the content. That was HTML. And that was site architecture. And so, pretty good information. So, we'll go into it. Looks like a hefty article. Well, it was a lot of content. And so, I tried to summarize most of it. So, speaking on content, starting there, his first one is content quality.

And at the end of the day, we all know that your content must be quality. Yeah. But the thing is, the reason, one of the reasons, and not just from a conversion perspective, but from a ranking perspective. We're talking SEO, with the Panda updates and the Panda refreshes that are happening monthly, yeah, small, bad content is not going to work. So, you know, if you, you know, you can't produce, he called them short fluff articles. Yeah. You know, where you have an article with a couple sentences and maybe an image and you're trying to post it, that's going to have more harm than help. So, yeah, long gone are those days. We need quality content. Yep. And the second thing about content is keywords. And so, matter of fact, and I quote him, my advice is to make sure each page stands on its own as a topic. And I think that's a great perspective to have. Yeah. If you can't develop a full page and this content can't stand on its own, you know, then that may not be enough content you need to write. That may be a page you may want to consider combining with another page because you lack the content to support it. So, I think that the main takeaway from this is when you're writing content and you're thinking about keywords, think conversation. Don't really think keywords per se. You know, the traditional kind of SEO market, you think keywords, keywords, keywords. Start thinking about conversation because what happens is a lot of times people will search differently later. You may be, your keyword may be, you know, his example was about a jacket. You know, it may be gray jacket. But somebody searching, let's say on a mobile device or anything else, may search a little bit differently. Gray jacket with a collar that I could wear on a bike, right? Right. They will do that. They may voice search it and give you that kind of long tail phrase. And so, you want to keep that in

mind when writing your content because, you know, the way SEO works, your content should be supporting of that phrase. So, think about the conversation. The third one he has is the content engagement. And to quote him, he says, engagement is about whether visitors spend time reading your content or they bounce quickly away. And that's exactly right. Engagement is basically what that visitor does when they get to the site. You want to increase your engagement. And I think you have to create opportunities to do that, right? So, if you're presenting content, make sure that that content is presented in a way that can be absorbed. But more importantly, that the visitor would take an action. Maybe they will reply. They'll leave a form. Maybe they will click a link and download some more supportive media about that content. Maybe you've included a video that they'll begin watching and sharing. That sort of engagement. And this is not even including social engagement. Maybe they will share this on Twitter or pin it to their board. These things like that. And so, you have to create content that's, first off, that's worth me being engaged by. If the content has no, you know, the previous ones, if the content has no quality, then I probably won't be engaged with it. So, the next one here was ads. He says, you know, ads are okay. Just don't use too many of them. Which, you know, that's true. Google did say that. But I think he's really talking in context of sites that may not offer a service. So, when I talk to our core client base, right, any small businesses out there who may be watching or listening, you know, if you're a service provider or, you know, a plumber or something like that, or maybe you have a practice, like a law office or a doctor's office, you don't want ads on your site. You don't want ads at all. Ads are a distraction. Ads take people away. And frankly, if they have an agency like us managing

their campaign, I'll run ads on my competitor's site if they have AdSense going. And so, you really don't want ads. If you're in a different industry where your site is all informational and all your revenue is based on traffic and ads, then, of course. You need to run ads. You need to run ads, but be strategic on how you do them. Yeah. Don't overwhelm the user with ads. Definitely. Freshness. Content. Still talking content. You want to make sure your content's fresh. To quote him, he says, if you do not have an editorial calendar in place, you probably should create one and get the word creating content. I totally agree with this. If you're in a position to post content on a regular basis, whether that's blog posts, whether it's a newsletter being sent out, or whether it's a podcast, exactly, you should have something in place where you're not only writing and developing and creating new content, but you're doing it strategically and consistently so you can consistently post. And the problem with that is, well, the problem with not doing that is you end up with stale content, and stale content just doesn't work well in the search. Yep. So you want to do something new. You want it to be fresh, and you want it to be unique is one of the things he didn't talk about, the uniqueness of it. You know, anybody can take, you know, rest in peace to Nelson Mandela, right? That's the new news. And so there will be tons of articles about him and what he did for apartheid and things like that and being imprisoned, but my assumption is most of those articles will be 90% the same. Right. How many different times can you tell his story? Yep. But if you're going to do that, why not find something interesting that people hadn't considered and create your own version about that? So now your content is fresh, it is frequent, it is current, but it's also unique, and that has more value than being similar

to somebody else's. Mandela's impact on rugby. Exactly. And how that changed, you know, society and hope. Paralleled, yeah, exactly. Yeah, so great niche to kind of take some content and give people a different opinion about. So that was content. He had some good things about content. We'll talk HTML for a minute, titles and headers. At the end of the day, I'm actually surprised about this, that, well, I was going to say that Google hasn't changed how we have to do titles, you know, but I think what they've done, instead of making us change, they've changed. Yeah. You know, title rewrites are happening all the time. Just because what you have in your title is there, it may not be what's shown in the SERP. And so you need to make sure that... You're talking about description. I'm talking titles. Title, actual title, okay. I'm talking titles, well, titles and descriptions. Right. Meta-descriptions have always been able to be changed. And so now, depending on if you have any structured data markup or something like that, it'll definitely change. But titles are being rewritten, especially if you break the rules. So, for example, optimum title should be between 50 and 70 characters, words, right? And so if you exceed that, then they're going to rewrite your title. Yeah. And so don't exceed it, right? Follow the rules. One keyword, you know, focus. You know, if you're a brand new company and it's worth branding your name, then include that. Maybe a pipe into your name at the end or hyphen into your name. Those kind of deals. Just follow the basic rules to title optimization and you should be good there. Same thing with your meta description. It hasn't changed, right? Yeah. Keep it short, keep it unique to that page. Remember, it's your first opportunity for CVA. To sell, yes. This is likely the first thing people will see before they click on your site. This is what they're going to read that's going to entice them to click. And so keep it short, keep

it simple, include a CTA if possible, but more importantly, keep it unique to that page. You don't want duplicate meta descriptions. Structured data markup. So structured data markup. You want to make sure that take advantage of doing this when you can. All of the times it's not the right thing to do or the right opportunity to do it. Maybe not the right industry. But if you're like selling a product and you have products for sale, this is a great time to use structured data markup. Maybe you have events that happen all of the time. This is a great time to use it because Google would display those results. Maybe you have a location, right, and you're trying to get visitors to come to you. It's another great opportunity to use a structured data markup because Google would display those results in the search. Now, he proposed a question here, which is something I always thought. Right. So, and his question says, let's say you ran a zoo website. Would you want Google to show your business hours at the top of the search results or would you want people to click the website where they can learn more about your exhibits and events and things like that? Ooh. Great question. Yeah. I think it just depends on what's going to work best to get them through the door. Maybe them seeing your hours of operation, maybe that's what they came for. And now they got it and now they're on their way. I agree, though. It makes a great point because if they don't ever get to your website because maybe you want to promote the new baby panda. Exactly. Or something. Or the new baby penguin. Or the mating of a penguin and a panda. Yeah. Or the new hummingbirds they have. Then there's no, there may, you may not have that opportunity to present that. Now, that's probably branded all over your place anyway. So it's probably, I would lend, lean towards, get information that my clients want to them as quickly and

easily as possible. You know, forego my advertising opportunity in an effort to make sure the client has the easiest access to information. And I think what you do is you use a combination of this. And I almost consider structured data markup advanced SEO. And so I would take this and I would add it to site links and things like that. And so that way my structured data markup can show my hours of operation and my address. But if I have site links to, let's say, a new exhibits page that are showing there and site links to a coming events page, then those pages are now part of the SERP result as well. And that may entice the click. So now I see the date and I see the time and I'm like, oh, and here's a link to new exhibits. Yep. You know now Google, the Houston Zoo is going to have a Google section. Well, you told me about that. Penguin, Penguin, Panda. Is it, was it, was it Street View going through the zoo? Well, the last one that I read of Street View went through the canals. Okay. But that is canals. But I'm just thinking like group of Google section, Penguin, Panda, Hummingbird. They should have one. Sponsored by Google. Don't feed the hummingbirds. Back to HTML, keyword stuff and hidden elements. Won't spend too much time on there. Like, don't do it. Right, whatever you're showing the SERP, then show that to your users. Plain and simple. Let's talk architecture. He went crawl. And so really, at the end of the day, you just want to be accessible. Right. Right, you don't want to use Flash. Stay away from that when possible. Make sure you have your sitemap in place and that it's updated and that it's functional and works. Make sure you have a correctly configured robots file. I've been seeing this a lot lately, new clients we have, robots file that's somehow blocking the site from being indexed the right way. And it's usually due to somebody not

using a WordPress plugin correctly. Right. Right. They just got in and checked off some boxes and did some stuff not knowing that they were hurting themselves. And so you want to make sure your site architecture is in place. Duke content. Avoid it. Avoid it. Like, just don't use it. Site speed. This is important. And I like this here. He said, the best test of speed is to clear your cache and take your laptop to the local cafe and surf your website. If you're not waiting for your pages to load up, then you're probably okay. That's a fair assessment. Yeah. You got to clear your cache first, though, because you're going to load up fast anywhere. But, yeah, clear it and go to Starbucks and have a coffee and pull your site up. Yeah. And if you enjoy your experience on your site, then you're probably okay. But if you get frustrated that page is taking too long to load or you've got a little spinning hourglass or whatever, images, you need some work on your site. Yeah. Architecture. And this is a good one here. URLs. So, we already knew that, you know, search engine-friendly URLs was important. Right. But to quote him, he brought up something I didn't think about. Punch in the face to you, Tom. I really liked your article. He said, with today's multi-tab browsers, people are more likely to see a URL than your title tags. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Very much. I'm thinking about your computer screen, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have 50 tabs on a Chrome browser. So, there's no room in the tab for any title. So, I see the URL. You see the URL. So, it's got to be both user and Google-friendly, which is what we say all the time anyway. But, yeah, even more so. And so, now, this one here will be, we'll debate on this one, probably closing out. The last one for architecture is mobile. And to quote him, he said, Google and Bing agree that ideal configuration for websites is

to have a single set of URLs for all devices and to use responsive web design to present them accordingly. I think, at the end of the day, that's probably the best way to go. Yeah. I just believe, in certain situations, a mobile version is better. Well, and I think you can use responsive design. And so, we don't believe in responsive design across the board, meaning you've got the same design can shrink down to a 7-inch tab, but it can then shrink down to, say, a 5 or a Galaxy Note type size screen and then mobile. We really think that even the Galaxy Note up should have all the same site. And so, responsive can get into the nuance of, if it's on a mobile device and the screen is this small, then custom design that. Yeah. And it would still have the same URL. It would just, we just don't think that you need to have all of these. What looks good on a, whatever, 21-inch monitor, looks good on a 10-inch, 11-inch Apple display, looks good on a 7-inch Android or Apple Mini, down to the Galaxy tab, and then anything below that. Really does start to need a more specific. Some customization. And some of the reason of it is, is that if I'm on an Apple Mini and I'm searching, just as an example, you know, emergency room, it's a different situation, clear, possibly, certainly on a workstation, it's possibly different, than if I'm on the phone. If I'm on the phone, I need two things. I need the phone number and hopefully you've made it a button that I can click and I need the address so I can get directions. That's going to tap and open my nav up. Yeah. You know, that's what I need. That's all I need. And anything else, I have one other button that I can say, see the whole website, because maybe I already arrived there and I might as well find out what kind of emergency facility I'm at. Definitely. I think what

we've come to learn is that the experience from desktop to mobile is so different that it's worth investing the resources necessary to customize that mobile experience. Yep. And you tie it into responsive so you can take advantage of using the same set of URLs and things of that nature. But, you know, usually what I dislike about the responsive is it tends to shift everything in place. And so from a mobile perspective, it's functional. It works, but it could be better. And it's hard to... It's usually not custom designed for the mobile interface and the mobile interactions. It's not designed for the experience. It's designed to fit the screen and it's designed to look good, but it's not designed to... For a totally different purpose. Exactly. When I'm looking at the zoo at my workstation, I want information. When I'm looking at the zoo on my iPhone or my Android phone, I want to get there or call. Mm-hmm. Or, you know, call security to help me find my lost penguin. Yeah. Got pooped on by the panda. They're next... Did you check next to the panda, sir? Eating the hummingbirds. Is that it? That's it. Cool. That is awesome. So, punch in the face to you, Tom. I really like the article. We'll repost it. And I'm interested to get you guys' thoughts on it. Isn't that an article already on our Facebook page? I thought you had posted it. Well, I tweeted him earlier, so... And they probably did get the Facebook page. Cool. Excellent. Do we have any what? No. I don't know what. All right. So, we are skipping next week. So, the week after that, we'll be doing our 2013 year in review. Yeah. Another one. It just seems like yesterday we were putting the last one together. All right. Thank you guys for tuning in. Thank you guys for making us the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes. It is because of all you all and your patients through a bad sound and their sounds of timing and your

questions and everything. Thank you so much. Until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burris. Bye-bye for now.