SEO Survival Tips - #seopodcast 187

Hi, welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. I'm Charles Lewis, so internet marketing specialist. Hey, we could actually move up a little closer to the camera here. You have tuned in to the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes. That is because of all you all out there. You, you, you, right there. Over there and for the camera. You who watch it right now. There we go. As always, there is a tip from the previous podcast, our previous podcast. If I can enter my code here into my iPad. Our tip from 186 is, when possible, express your message in the form of stories. Yeah, last podcast we were talking about writing content. And so anytime you're writing content that you want people to read and hopefully engage them, use a story when applicable. Stories tend to keep users focused. They tend to present something that they can relate to. And it's a little bit more entertaining read. So, when possible, use a story in your content. I think that's a great idea. That's why we wrote it down as a tip. Remember, we are your friendly local neighborhood top position snatchers. Yes. Where our mantra is. Don't be a deuce. If you can, if it's possible, if you know how, you could tweet on twitter.com. What would they tweet? They would tweet hashtag SEO podcast. This is number 187. Make sure you tag us in it at eWebStyle. That way we can link up and follow back and all that good social stuff. And remember, if you are getting any value out of this podcast, and we hope you are, if you're getting any entertainment out of this podcast, and we hope you are, you could do us one of two favors. The first one has three steps. You need only go on to iTunes, create an account, write a review. Good or bad, you'll see today, we'll be reading one good and one bad. The other thing that you could do is you

could go to our G Plus local account and write a review there. Now, we don't want to give all the numbers and dashes and X's and O's involved in the URL. Like 13 digits, I think it is. So, all you have to do is go to e-webstyle.com slash Google plus or slash Google plus or slash G plus. Leave out the uh or slash G plus. Go on there, write a review. We really appreciate it. As you know, reviews on G Plus Local have an impact on search, so you would be helping us out. Uh, and only do that if we're helping you out. Yeah, if you don't find any help from this, then, you know, don't review us. Yeah, that's all right. We're comfortable with that. All right, so let's get to the reviews as, uh, we're going to do... Yeah, bad news first. This is going bad first. Yeah, just bite the bullet. Uh, literally the title is Worst Audio on iTunes. By the time you're listening to this, and apparently this guy is not listening to this, will not be listening to this particular podcast, the audio is a lot better. Uh, we finally got our act together. Uh, it's by Chad Watu. Chad Watu. And it says... Chad Watu. Been listening to this for a while, and these guys are clueless regarding producing a podcast. They've been working on their audio for months, and it gets worse and worse. There is no way in hell... He had to put a little star in. We're, uh, we don't have to. Uh, I would ever consider hiring them for any marketing services if they can't even do this right. Unsubscribe. I think I had enough emphasis in there. I think that's what he was feeling. Like, yeah, bye, sorry. You know what I'm saying? Like... You know what I... I stopped for a second. I was like, this guy was pissed. Right? Like, it reads, he's pissed. What it means is, he liked the content, he liked the podcast, he's just pissed that he

can't listen to it. And I feel bad about that. Like... Yeah. That sucks. The deuce is not for you not being able to absorb the content. That sucks on our part. Yeah. And we fixed that problem. Yeah. So, unfortunately, if you unsubscribe now, which is probably 180 was your breaking point. Yeah. It's kind of our assumption that podcast is extremely horrible in regards to audio quality. Yeah. Um, then it sucks. Because we had some great meat, great potatoes coming. And, um, and the sound has actually improved and a lot better than it was on the probably better sounding podcast. In the past. Yeah. Exactly. Absolutely. Sorry to see you go. Yeah. Understand why. We deserve that kick in the shins. All right. Now on to positive news. One of my favorite podcasts. Five stars. By the way, last one was one star. Five stars. Says, this is a freaking goldmine of a podcast. By the way. Goldmine. Goldmine being the, uh, the intro and extra music of the podcast. That's the title of the song. If you want great, valuable content and advice to help you and your website, this podcast is the one to follow and learn from. The energy and humor between Chris and Charles will keep you listening. And the actionable SEO tips will keep you coming back for more. That's what's up. Uh, signed, Mark Amay, a longtime secret listener who just now commented, punch in the face. Like uppercut. Like right across. Yeah. Superman from the sky. Ooh, temple punch. Punching. Boom. Somebody on top of the head. It's like, I'm sorry. You can't get up. Thank you for tuning in, man. Thank you for, for, for being a fan of the podcast and watching. Appreciate your comment, man. Uh, just thanks. Thanks for tuning in. Let's do just a little bit of news and then we've got a couple of questions, right? All right. We do. Uh, I just, I thought this was interesting. I eat 11. So the browser, uh, internet explorer 11 coming out. Apparently, uh, although

they've poo pooed the web GL, um, uh, uh, graphics interface, uh, they're probably going to include it in their browser. Uh, um, Facebook may be coming out with a phone. This rumor has been going on for a really long time. Yeah. Who's going to use a Facebook phone? Yeah. Like I, what, what's the value? What is the, even the value to Facebook? I just don't see, I don't see that as a path to value Google. Yes. Because they sell advertising on their phone and they have an amazing map app and people search on it. People don't search on Facebook. I guess they're, they are trying to make that happen. If your Facebook phone is going to run on Android, then, uh, don't do it. Yeah. And then it's still just an Android. Yeah. Exactly. Like, why don't you just sell Facebook stickers and then they can put Facebook on the phone? How about fix your app? Let's, let's do that. Cause, uh, Facebook app on Android sucks, dude. Like it's super slow. Um, yeah. Improve that experience. Well, even this. So, uh, and this is one of the things I was going to mention. Go on to our Facebook page. Cause we've got some paint. We, we had a, uh, a company paintball event, uh, last Saturday. Last Saturday. Um, and the way you can find our Facebook page, just go to facebook.com slash. E-webs stop. Man. We're out of context, right? Why did he stop? All I heard was dot com slash. E-webs stop. Um, go to our Facebook page. It's either that or G plus. All right, well go ahead. Check, check out the photos. Um, and the problem with Facebook is, okay, so we take the pictures with our camera. We upload, load them to Facebook. And now they're on our personal page. How do I get them onto the company page? Cause like people want to know, hey, web style had a paintball event. Oh, I got a big bruise. You can't see it. Um, yeah. Cause some little eight year

old kid, I came around the corner and this kid, and I scared the kid and he's like, from like two feet away. And I was like, oh, oh, I can't even say what I want to say to you. I can't do what I want to do to you. I'm just leaving. Poor kid felt so bad. He was like following me. I thought the ref said I was out. Get back there and shoot somebody other than your teammate. Yeah. I probably would have had one of those, uh, accidental on purpose reactions. Well, I think, uh, oh, damn. Sorry, kid. Right on the forehead. My bad. Like I, yeah. Sorry, kid. You're too short. I think we're even now though. Amazing how that works. Uh, I think actually that happened. I think, uh, Nick's wife, Maria. Yeah, she did. She got hit and said, you take me out. I'm taking you out. Yeah. We're both going to the safe tent. That's how it's going down. Um, let's see. I think, uh, I think that's it. Yes. Oh, uh, we do have 370 Facebook fans. We need more. Okay, so it's growing slightly. Slowly, slowly but surely. Um, yeah, that's one thing you can do. Go ahead and get onto our Facebook page. And, uh, there are other ways you can follow us and track us and haunt us. And they are our Facebook pages. Facebook.com slash e-withstyle. Twitter.com slash e-withstyle. YouTube.com slash e-withstyle. And, uh, you can email us. Podcast at e-withstyle. Um, yeah, so go check that out. And we got, speaking of Facebook, we got a couple questions on our Facebook page. Yeah, so people go to facebook.com slash e-withstyle. Leave us a question, um, and when we get to a situation like this, we try to answer it. This one came from, um, Guru Tim Norton. He says, guys, I need some help. Webmaster Tools is showing a crazy increase in 404 errors, which seem to be caused by a calendar program I use. I have now, in a period of two weeks, going

from zero to almost a quarter million errors. I have tried to block the pages in the robots.txt and in Google URL parameters, but it's still climbing. Then he gave an example of how the, uh, URLs look. They're kind of funky looking. Um, typical plug-in sort of WordPress URL that's generated. Um, then he displayed how he had his robots.txt file, um, um, um, written. And he went, he went, slash, calendar, slash, action, colon, agenda, with the extra that you're in, which is part of the URL that the calendar plug-in is putting out. Um, Tim, great question. Um, I think plug-ins work, um, they, they're great. They serve plenty of features, but yes, you can get problems if you use them. Um, good thing about your issue is that it's just a 404 error generated from a plug-in. So it's not harming your, your SEO, per se. Yeah, it's not going to affect your ranking or anything like that. It just looks bad. When you're in Google Webmaster Tools and it says 245,000 errors, or you're running something like a, um, um, uh, SEO modules tool, and it tells you, you know, a billion errors, then it just looks bad. But it's really not that bad. But, to fix your problem, um, adjust your meta, your robots.txt file. Um, while you have slash calendar slash action colon agenda asterisk, instead go slash calendar asterisk and then close it with another slash. And that should remove all indexing or anything from the calendar related out of your, um, out of that index. And those 404 errors related to that calendar, uh, should be removed. So, again, that was forward slash calendar asterisk forward slash. And, uh, well, of course, disallow colon in front of that. Yeah. And, um, and that should have you going. So try that out, um, and then resubmit and then, um, hit us up. Let me know how that worked out for you. Punch in the face for, uh, send us a question. Definitely. Um, second question. This one came from, uh, Michael L.

Stamps. He says, hey, guys, I love your podcast and listen regularly. Appreciate that. Uh, while I am constantly working on SEO to improve my rankings, how do you feel about using a traffic exchange to build traffic? Boo. Yeah. Um, like anything online, some say it is amazing and some say it is junk. Junk. What is your opinion? Junk. Um, I mean, at the end of the day, Mike, um, traffic exchange, you know, that's, that's an old tactic. Number one, uh, number two, it probably doesn't have any value now, frankly, with all the Panda and kind of penguin updates and things like that. Um, secondly, traffic exchange usually generates quick visits. It's like database driven is dynamic. And so those website visits tend to only be less than 30 seconds. And so what ends up happening is you end up with a super high bounce rate. Right. And the traffic coming to that site isn't really targeted. It's not relevant to whatever you're doing. Yeah. So I wouldn't recommend it, especially on your own domain name, send your own traffic like that to your site. If you're going to do it, what I would recommend doing is probably creating some sort of splash page, maybe on a different domain name. Um, that was graphic heavy, that really caught the attention of the people in that 20 seconds. Like an absolute closing page. Exactly, with, with several links back to your site where they could get more information. And so that way, if you happen to get caught up doing something like that, it's not your domain name per se, that's, uh, that's in it. And, and it won't affect the stats and things like that on your site. So let me give you an example of, of, so right now we mentioned we got 370 Facebook followers. It is so easy to go out there and buy Facebook followers. Yeah. I think there are services that'll sell you, hey, we're going to give you 500 follow-up, Facebook follow-up fans, or it's probably what they're called, fans,

uh, a month, you know, for this feed. Yeah. Likes. Or 1,000 likes a month for this feed. And we don't do that because we want the people who are actually, who have actually liked our Facebook page. Authenticity. Authentic and organic. So we want those people to actually be people interested in engaging with us, not, you know, a thousand either bogus Facebook accounts or whatever. However they are getting them, it's just probably not the, it's not the kind of traffic that we want. Yeah. I want you to really like me. Yeah. Like, you know, don't like me because you got paid to like me. Like Sally Fields style. That was a blank stare. So she has arguably one of the most famous Oscar acceptance speeches. Oh, okay. You like me. You really, really like me. Yeah, okay. I'm with you now. Yeah, I was, that was Matrix White Room for a minute. Just unrelated, Chris. Don't worry, I'm used to that. All right, so that was it. Great questions, Mike. Thank you for your question. Hope that works. At the end of the day, I would recommend don't waste your time or effort. Those are valuable resources and I wouldn't use them on a traffic exchange sort of situation. But if you're going to do it, test it on a domain name that's not your primary. And then, you know, monitor it closely. Good luck with that. Got some meat. Time for the meat. So let's get into some content. Pull the article. This one's from Search Engine Land. This one was pretty cool, though. He talked about really, well, the title is Survival Tips for Becoming an In-House SEO. But when I began looking at the article, because I've served as an in-house SEO before, and now I'm at an agency, right? And so he compares the agency versus the in-house. And I thought it was interesting because he brought up a few points from a specific sort of agency model. Okay. So he talked about, you know, more of a consulting. Okay. So one

of the differences between a typical agency and maybe an in-house SEO, the differences between them and, let's say, eWebStyle, is we're kind of like a mesh of both. Right. We're almost like your in-house SEO person. We're just not in your office. Right. We're off of 290 West 34th Street. But we operate the same way, usually because we're managing your site, we're doing your social, we're doing everything else. And so it's closely integrated. Meanwhile, most agencies usually consult. It's all billable hours, things like that. Hours is a monthly fee. You pay that. And whatever we have to do in that month to get it done, we're going to do it, regardless of how many hours it takes. Yeah. And so that's kind of the difference here. But a couple things that stand out to me was kind of goes back to what we said before. In this case here, right, if somebody built your site and your agency is helping you consult with you and drive traffic, but that traffic isn't converting, then is your problem with your in-house graphic designing people or is it with the agency you're using? Right. And so, you know, when considering how you're going to do your SEO, if you're going to hire in-house, if you're going to hire in-house, make sure you bring in both, somebody to manage the site and handle the SEO so they can work closely together. Right. Or if you're going to deal with an agency, make sure that agency can do both. So that way, when those changes need to happen because your site's probably not converting or whatnot, that agency can take advantage of that and make those changes, and you don't have to worry about that. But deeper in the article, he went on to give some pretty good SEO information. He called it the SEO arms race, and so I thought this was some pretty good info to share with you. And this is really whether you're an agency, you're in-house, you're freelance, you're someone like us or whatever. These are

just some pretty cool things you should be aware of. I like that SEO arms race. Yeah, I thought that was pretty cool too. Site optimization versus page optimization. A lot of people get that confused. Like, if it's optimization, it's optimization. What does that mean? Well, you can optimize your whole website, right, eWebstyle.com. That's our website. Site is optimized for several phrases, like SEO Houston, PPC Houston, Internet Marketing Houston. Online Marketing Houston. Exactly. And we rank first page for all of us, by the way. Anyway, but versus page optimization. So page optimization is really focusing on one particular page, right? So we have an SEO page, like eWebstyle.com slash SEO Houston, I think. And so we can optimize that page for specific terms all related to SEO Houston. And so if we do this right, when you're comparing site optimization versus page optimization, you have to understand that you cannot optimize your entire site for every one of your phrases. You have to optimize different pages for target phrases. Right. And then make sure that they're all consistent and relevant on the site together. They have to mesh well together. So keep that in mind. And you will see this a lot, especially on, like, homepages. Because on a homepage, people tend to try and capture as much information as possible. Right. And so our homepage may mention SEO, PPC, social media, email marketing. It may mention all of that, custom website design. And that's okay. Excuse me. But we understand that that page is not our target page. That's just our homepage. And a lot of people visit our homepage directly. So we need to show them that information. We need to get them down the right path quickly so they can find what they're looking for. Exactly. But the pages are optimized specifically for those phrases. Now, this is one I actually disagree with. His number two was not every page is an SEO landing page. I disagree with this because we're... We'll take it another level, but go ahead. Yeah, we're just under

the impression that if this page is going to rank and it's going to drive traffic and people are going to possibly land on this page, then why not make this page a converting page? Why not make this page a landing page? So what if it's an internal page? It still should be able to convert. And so I disagree. I think every page is, well, should be an SEO landing page. Now, is he potentially talking about, like, certainly not the Contact Us page because the Contact Us page should be, should have great CVO on it, search engine visitor optimization, what do you do after the visitor arrives? But your About Us maybe doesn't need to be as, you know, is actually informational. Your FAQ, some of those pages probably don't need to be SEO optimized for sure and then closing optimized also. So, I mean, we would recommend you still have a form. You still want to make sure your number is present. Exactly. But you don't have to be as in... I mean, we're actually changing our focus so that every page is a closing page now. Whereas a lot of companies spend a lot of time on the homepage and they make it a great closing page and a great navigation page. And then the rest of the pages are just, you know, take out the top banner and add maybe a sidebar of navigation. We just don't think that makes sense. We think if you're going to spend that much time on one page, if people are going to get to your other pages, you need to spend that kind of time on those pages. You need those pages to convert as badly as you need the homepage to convert. And FAQ, probably not so much. So, I would... Well, speaking of FAQ, right? FAQ is one of those pages that is usually generated, unfortunately, not to give the user some frequently asked questions. Although, because they rarely get visits. But it's a content-heavy page. It's usually loaded with relevant key phrases. And

it's probably optimized well, right? And all of those questions and answers, wherever you have links that are applicable to other pages on your site, those are probably cross-linked. And so, that page should have a form. That page should have a powerful CTA. That page should have impactful graphics, even if it is an FAQ page, because it's likely to rank, depending on what people are searching for. And if that page happens to show, let's say, in a second page of a SERP listing, then you definitely want that page to... I got one. To convert. Terms of service page. Yeah. It'll need to be optimized. I knew there was one. Terms of service, privacy, policy, you know, yeah. Those are pages that you don't... Get our forms. If you've got, like, a get our forms page. Yeah. That kind of stuff. Yeah. Frankly, you probably should block those. Yeah, yeah. From your robot text file. Definitely. So, I disagree with that. I think every page, every SEO landing page, every page that you've optimized should be built to potentially convert visitors. Yep. I like this one. Different types of content have different SEO strength. Different types of content have different SEO strength. What does that mean? That means you can't try to get the same sort of impact or the same sort of ranking or the same sort of results with different types of content. For example, you may create a video and blog post about that video and it goes viral. That's great. It'll get shared. It'll probably get several backlinks. People will discuss it. It'll become a topic of discussion. And that's a good deal. That's a great SEO result. But that's not the same as, let's say, an Instagram photo. Well, not an Instagram photo, but let's say an infographic. Infographic. Thank you, sir. It's going to get a different result. That infographic may get shared. It may get linked a lot more. It'll get a lot more action. The comments will likely be longer because the page on the time on site will

be longer. Things like that has a different effect. You release an e-book, totally different SEO perspective, different from the video, different from the infographic. That e-book will likely get downloaded and then they'll be gone, right? So that page will likely have a high bounce rate. Right. But it'll probably have a ton of visitors. And if the e-book is free and informative, it'll probably have tons of links coming to that page. Right. And so, which is a different sort of SEO result. So, so keep in mind when you're building your content, when you're putting these pages together, all of your efforts will likely generate a different result. And that's okay. You just gauge and make sure you're getting the right results you want. And more importantly, you're guiding people down the path you need in order for them to eventually convert. If that e-book download is a conversion for you, then great. You've got them to do that. Let's see here. Playing within your competitive footprint. This is key for a lot of, I'll say, bigger agencies. So let's say, or bigger companies. If you're, let's say, you're blogging and you have your accountant and they're blogging, you know, accounting tips about taxes or whatnot. And then you maybe have somebody in your product team blogging about some of your newest products. It's key to make sure everyone who's publishing content about your company on your site knows the keywords that they should be targeting. Because what you don't want to happen is them to be optimizing for different keywords and not really taking advantage of the whole rank your site could be getting. And so make sure that you're playing within your footprint. If you guys focus on local, then you shouldn't have someone on your team kind of blogging about national topics and things like that. Focus on your local area. Stick to what's working. Stick to your game plan. So I like that one. Playing within your competitive footprint. Last one. Optimization versus over-optimization. A fine line. Right? When we do a post,

you know, I tell our content writer, you know, I would like to see, you know, three or four paragraphs. I'd like to see an image, possibly a video. Use this header. Use this, you know, with sole set of guidelines for creating a page. And as long as the content's good, it reads well, and there's enough of it, then I think we kind of dodge an over-optimization penalty. However, if you're putting out suspect content and it's low value and it's not engaging and you have several headers, a whole bunch of videos, a whole bunch of images, and, you know, a whole bunch of keyword stuff content, then you're likely to face an over-optimization penalty and all of that effort and time that you put into that page is worthless and useless. So be careful when optimizing pages. Just make sure that you keep the user, more importantly, the reader, in mind first. Remember, as long as you're giving a good experience to the Google user, Google's going to like what you're doing. Definitely. So, yeah, keep the user in mind. So that was it. Survival Tips for Becoming an In-House SEO, I think the key takeaway here is make sure that whether you're dealing with someone in-house, if you're contemplating hiring them or an agency or you're thinking about freelancing with someone, make sure that they can handle both sides of the spectrum, the site and the marketing itself to make sure that your marketing is indeed working. All right, remember, we can, do we got any blank stare? Well, let me finish this. We can, we have a referral program, so if you want to send us some SEO clients that you don't want to take care of, send them our direction, and you can still get compensated for that. We got any blank stare today? Mm-mm. No? Not really? I don't have to think of. Good Friday. Shut up, everybody. I've been practicing my blank stare all week. All right. Okay, well, I'll give you one. Okay. I had to, I

had to, out of my peripherals, look over so I could see the blank stare. Did the fact that they all, I'm not sure yet. Got to go back and watch the video. Exactly. So this blank stare goes to all of us who watch YouTube, right? YouTube is hitting a billion views a day. Wow. Wow. That's strong. That's a lot of views. Yeah. What is the content? Content is, like, a year of content every 30 seconds now? No, what they said it was, they said it was, it was 72 hours of content uploaded every minute. Every minute. Oh, man. So three days worth of content uploaded every minute. Yeah. Wow. I guess that's how you get to a billion views a day. It's all out there. Yeah, so, You know what that is? It's a whole lot of videos that have been viewed once. All right. Thank you guys for tuning in. You have been listening to the most popular internet and SEO podcast on iTunes. That is because of all you all. We really appreciate you. Again, hit us up on Facebook. Hit us up on Twitter. Send us an email. Podcast at edeswilfstyle.com. It's Good Friday, so have a good Friday for those of you watching, for those of you listening. I hope you had a good Friday. Until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burris. Charles Burris. Bye-bye for now. Slightly raised up, eyebrow, highbrow. I think she's gonna set me free.