SERP and SEVO - #seopodcast 163

Welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name's Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. I'm Charles Little Show, internet marketing specialist. Welcome back to another fun-filled edition. This is podcast number 163. You are listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. That is because of you, you, you over there. You right there who just not logged on. Thank you for tuning in. 7,000 downloads a week, 76 different countries. You, again, you're turning into the best, just the best damn internet podcasting overall. Remember, we are your friendly local neighborhood top position snatchers, where our mantra is Don't be a deuce. And if you are in front of some sort of device right now where you can tweet, you should do that right now. And Charles will tell you how to do that. Yeah, you should go tweet hashtag SEO podcast. One word, hashtag SEO podcast. Then tag us at eWebStyle. That way we'll know you're watching. We're going to do a big favor. Include a link to it. eWebStyle.com slash SEO podcast. And all that way we can link up and network and then all of the good things that go with being social. Other things you could do is you could go to our Facebook page, facebook.com slash eWebStyle. And you could actually follow us there. You could also follow us on Twitter, twitter.com slash eWebStyle. And you can go to our YouTube page, youtube.com slash eWebStyle. And you could email us at eWebStyle podcast at e-webStyle.com. All right. As always, there is a tip from a previous podcast. And that tip is start your SEVO process at the SERP by crafting a great meta description. Yeah, definitely want to make sure that you handle one of the... That's a lot of acronyms. Oh, SEVO. SEVO podcast at the SERP. SEVO. So search engine visitor optimization, what do you do with a visitor after you get their attention? SERP, search engine results page. And then now by crafting a great meta description. Yeah, what I was saying was that you want to

make sure you take care of one of the ultimate basics in regards to SEO, and that is meta tags and meta descriptions. Meta description is what's seen on a search engine results page, that's SERP. And so that's your first chance to really tell about your company, to give an offer. So take advantage of that space, take advantage of the character limit, and use that to, you know, go fishing. Have a good pitch there. Definitely. No tier today. We have a review. I think this is from the UK. This is Kyle Pierce, August 28th, recent. I've been tuning in on my iPhone at the gym or on lawn trips in the car. Each episode is an easy listen and always offers new information as well as refreshers on previously discussed content, which is always good to drill in. I just submitted one of my websites for a review, but have a few others that could be good for comparison's sakes. Here they are. He's got HomeMortgageOntario.ca for Canada. He's got CanadaBuySouth.ca. And he's got TapInto... Oh, TapIntoTeenMinds.com. TeenMinds? TeenMinds. I'd love to check that one out. So you guys go check those out. We'll get a chance to look at them eventually. We'll continue listening, and if I see value in talking about any of my sites, please do if we see it. He knows number two and number three need a lot of time and love, so we won't take offense if we butcher them. And again, Kyle Pierce, thanks for reaching out to us, and you got a little bit of link love. Come your way, punch in the face. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for the support, and I appreciate it. And you know, what he did is very valuable to us and costs you nothing. All you need to do are three things. Go to iTunes, create an account, write a review. And then if you choose to, go ahead and send us an email about that review so that we can make sure we see it and give you

some link love. Before you get to your news, let me give you some Twitter love real quick to David Christensen. He hit us up, said he's been watching the podcast. He loves what he's looking at. Very entertaining. And he's from Thailand. Oh, cool. Yeah. Follow him at at ChristensenDD. That's his Twitter handle, at ChristensenDD. Ali Broad, which is a guy. I thought I should drop that in. He also hit us up on Twitter, said he's been watching it. He loves what he's seen. He was on 162. Wow. He's caught up. Yeah, he's caught up. So follow him on Twitter. He's O Broady. The last one was Mark. Shout out to Mark Paxton. Punch in the face to him. Punch in the face to Mark Paxton. He's from Kicking Lizard. Oh, yeah, yeah. And so, yeah, he hit us with a response video to our video of them sending us the salsa. Right, right. And so his video said that he watched the podcast. He liked what he was seeing. It was very informative. We talked about SEO and content on that particular one. Right. He said he needed that information. So, Punch in the Face for you here. It's from a different Twitter handle, at IMC4TM. So, thank you all for tuning in. Appreciate the support. And that is definitely not a... Yeah, it's not a kick in the chin. Kick in the chin. Kick in the chin. Punch in the... Well, if you're going to punch him in the face, might as well kick him in the shin. I mean chin. All right, a little bit of news. We skipped the podcast last week, so I've got some carryover news. The Kindle Fire HD is out with the Retina display. That's kind of cool. A little almost blank stare in that the new version of Android, Jelly Bean is the new version, is not going to support Flash. And obviously Nexus has Jelly Bean, so the new Nexus tab doesn't support Flash. Also has no rear camera. You know, whatever. The first iPhone... This

was pretty funny. So, this was before they announced it last week. The first iPhone 5 knockoff was available. Not only was it available, the people who made the iPhone knockoff actually had copyrighted the design, so Apple may have some issues going into China off of the knockoff, because they've actually copyrighted the design. Wow. Quantum teleportation. I just read an article about that. How do you knock off an iPhone? Before it's out. What I'm saying, though, is it like a white phone? It's on a... I don't think it's... It may be a Windows device, or it's on Android or something, so it looks exactly the same. Oh, but the look and feel. Yeah. Okay, gotcha. Quantum teleportation is just super cool stuff. Basically, you take some particles that are magically aware of each other, and you can actually take those particles to two separate points. At this particular example, it was 89 miles apart. You change the state of one of the particles, and the other particle changes state instantaneously, so you really have the ability to transfer... You're not even transferring information. You have the ability to be aware of information on the other side instantly. And a great example of where that would be good, there's seven minutes of lag between Mars and Earth when they're trying to drive that Mars rover. Imagine trying to drive your car. Yeah, seven minutes of lag. Like, grandma, child, dog. With quantum communications, they could actually do it instantaneously. They would have instant images. I mean, it's just kind of phenomenal. Right here, it makes me think of Mario Brothers. Super Mario Brothers. Yeah, you go through the sewer tunnel, and... And now you went from cold winter climate to the hot desert. Just like that. Stargate or something. The other huge news this week. I think, I mean, most of the news that I looked up today was about the iPhone 5 being released. It's a little taller. Same width. I'm not buying it. I'll have to get it and play with it, and who knows.

I know Javi's been thinking about getting... He's been debating. He's got his contracts coming up. And he's at that fork road. You know, your Android device, you love it, and it's time to upgrade, and iPhone's calling. And the Galaxy S3, they've been hitting the ads hard, and it just looks sexy. It looks really good. All right, that is the potatoes. Let's get to the meat. Yeah, so we'll go through this. I have put an article today from a guy, Leroy. This is his last name. I'm sorry, that's all I have for some reason. He printed, covered his name up. But anyway, article's called, Auditing Your Website's SEO Can Increase Your Rankings. I thought this was a pretty good article. I began reading it, and he basically listed out 15 SEO elements that you have complete control of that you can do. They're relatively easy. One of the main reasons I like the articles, because as I've been going through the SEO elements he's about to get into, it was similar to our kind of basic SEO checklist. You know, after we build a site and publish that site and dive into the SEO, we got a checklist, you know, of things that we must get done first. Kind of basic. And a lot of those basics were included in here. Our list was a little different, but anyway, I thought it was worth going over. So the first one he talked about on here is website content. This is definitely something you have control over. Want to make sure that the content you put, hopefully, I know, right? We were just dealing with a client yesterday. He was like, I can't get anything done on my website. Yeah, that sucks. Yeah. But hopefully. If you happen to have control. Hopefully you have that option to go in and make the sort of changes you need to make, keep your content fresh, keep it updated. On podcast 162, we were talking about content, about how it needed to be relevant, how it needed to be current

to what's going on in your industry. And that it needed to have enough information to make it usable and valuable. So keep that in mind when dealing with your website content. Number two, he put on C word, canonicalization. And this is a server-related stuff that you just need to make sure happens. One of the things that's different on here than from our list is take it a step further and figure out what pages that current site may already be ranking for. And so more than just making sure that the domain name is launched and that, you know, you're non-www-forged to the www and things like that. We want to make sure that we're also redirecting to any pages you may have had that ranked really well. So no need to lose that ranking with the sake of launching a new website. And so we kind of include that process there. Another thing, number three on here is title tags. It goes without saying. If you're, when you're building a site and producing that site, you're in kind of a production mode. When you're adding content, that's a great time to go ahead and get most of these things done, including the title tags. What's the biggest mistake people make with title tags? The biggest mistake, don't use them. Company name, like every title tag. Company name or even page name. Yeah. Right? It'll say services hyphen company name, you know, and that shouldn't be your title. It should be that main service you're talking about, you know, water heater repair slash Joe Blow plumbing, you know, should be that title tag. So number four on here is URL structure. This kind of goes back to the canonicalization issue. You want to make sure that however you structure the URLs is consistent. The best way, in my opinion and others, is use hyphens instead of underscores between words in your URL string. Have a keyword rich domain name, if possible, you know, and yeah, and keep it simple. Keep it, well, I won't say keep it

simple because it depends on the phrase, but you don't want underscores or a whole bunch of numbers and letter combinations and things like that. It just makes for not a very good URL. Number five on here is internal linking. I think this is key because as important as it is for SEO, it's also just as important for user experience. Experience, I'm going to say friendliness, but also to help them navigate through the site easier to see which pages may be related to other pages, to help them maybe find pages that you don't necessarily have in the navigation. And so the internal linking, what y'all throw in here is the links you have going out to other sites that may not be part of the domain name you're working on. That could also go in here with internal linking. Make sure that you give credit to resources. Show some link love. Let's see here. Number six was site architecture. Architecture. Architecture and navigation. Feels really nice. Yeah. Yeah, make sure your navigation is on point. Make sure that it's easy, that people know exactly where to go, how to find a page that they're looking for, that they won't get lost. I'll add some extra stuff to this. Include breadcrumbs if you can. Yeah. So help people can get back to where they came from. If you have drop downs, use small arrows, things like that. Let people know that if you hover over this or click, then there's a second set of pages you'll have access to. Make sure that it's not, you know, just some of the basics. You know, if this is a blog site, then most categories on the left side don't, you know, trick everybody by putting them at the bottom. Right. Things like that. You know, home, about us, services, they kind of go together. Contact us usually at the upper right. I mean, follow some of those basics so that way people have the best experience possible. And that's, again, goes back to user experience. Definitely. Let's see. Recurring

content. I like this one because this is more of an ongoing deal. So this is, you know, month three, month four, and you have a new site, right? But your content needs to change through to your industry. Maybe you're in entertainment or the health industry or something like that that has updated information. Maybe you were blogging about the Olympics recently, and so every day you needed new information. Recurring content is great on the homepage, but my suggestion is recurring content should be supplemented with existing content or static content that stays. So if you have a blog site and maybe you're featuring your latest post on the homepage, then you should also have maybe a paragraph below that to the side of it and even below it somewhere that stays the same, that's consistent, that's kind of very introductory content. Well, and keyword rich. It's hard to come up with continuous new content that's relevant and keyword rich. So you really kind of want to have some optimized text and then have that ongoing updated information. Definitely. Number eight, site speed optimization. So this is key. No one likes a slow site. I won't spend too much time on here. If your site takes longer than a few seconds to come up, then I'll probably bounce. And we were talking about this. So with other people. We were talking about this again yesterday where a lot of clients are clamoring actually. I want to be able to upload to my website and control my website and make content changes. We're like, great. We like WordPress. It's easy for you to use. Here you go. You use it. Next thing you know, they upload a 1.5 meg file that's, you know, about. Yeah, they're 50 by 50 pixels. And it's still 1.5 meg. So you're like, okay, so there's a little rule here. Give us the images. You know, we don't need to do the billing. You, we just need your website to work right. And so do you. So, um, yeah. Yeah. Because unfortunately, most clients

don't have a Photoshop or, you know, some editing program. Photoshop is good. But they can resize the images. But Smart Draw or even, you know, there's some cheaper things out there that they're just not aware of and don't need. Luckily, WordPress will crunch it and try to resize it some. But, yeah, if you can resize it prior to uploading, then the better. Let me see here. Number nine, social integration. Yeah, this is key. You know, everyone should have at least, at the very least, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. If you do something, a lot of video stuff, then you should have YouTube. Either way it goes, all of these links to your profiles need to be integrated on your site, preferably in a prominent location. What I'm seeing and the kind of trend I'm noticing is that usually upper right corners, like next to Contact Us, people are including, you know, LinkedIn, Twitter icons. And so do that if you have a sidebar area, and that sidebar area is a great place to really embed, you know, your Facebook likes or Google Plus follows and things like that. Footer area is also a great place to include social profile logos that link to your profile page. So definitely integrate. If you're blogging, let me say this. If you're blogging and you're producing posts, like, consistently and frequently, maybe every week or something like that, or two or three times a week, then you want to include sharing options at the bottom of your blog post. So after people read it, they can share on Twitter or share on, you know, Reddit or wherever they want to share it at. So give people that option. Make it easy for people to share and be social with your content. Number ten, image alt attribute. This is still very important. A lot of people kind of look over this. I'll do my alt tag later. No. If you're working on a site and you've just added an image, especially in WordPress, take four seconds and put a keyword rich

alt tag in there. You'd be glad you did it. And it has tremendous value. How many people search Google for images? Yeah. You know. I've started using the search Google for images of images I have. Oh, yeah. So we have a client who comes to us. They've got some clip art. And they're like, oh, I really like this clip art. I think I'm going to use it to get the URL. It doesn't work on Firefox or IE. Maybe one or the other. It's a Chrome thing. Well, it does work on, it's not just Chrome because I don't even have Chrome working on my PC. And I've got some, so I think it works in Firefox and it doesn't in IE or something like that. But basically you go to Google Images search, you Google that, and you end up on the Google Image search. And it allows you to either put in a URL or upload an image. And it'll go find images that are similar. And so in this case, we found this particular clip art in tens of thousands of websites. Let me tell you the easiest way to do that. Same process. If you go to Google.com, click the images and get to the image search. If you have an image in your file, you can drag it and drop it onto the search bar and it'll upload it and then display tons of images that resemble that one. Yeah. So a pretty cool feature. It's powerful. I've been using it lately. Let's see here. Number 11, custom 404 pages. This is crucial because especially during a site launch process, if you are, let's say, hired a new web marketing firm and they've redesigned your site, kind of reconstructed your pages, then you may have had some long-tail ranking for some other pages that may have got dropped or got overlooked or something. It's good to have a custom 404 page so people won't end up on a page that can't be displayed or something like that. They'll end up on a

page that's still on your site, still has the look and feel with the message you can put there. Sorry, page you're looking for is not here. You may want to try here, here, or here, you know, something like that. We take it one step farther. We'll actually put code in the custom 404 that fires an email to us. So if we get lots of emails, wow, this was a long-tail phrase that was ranking well. We forgot it in a redesign. We need to get a page up there ASAP and we'll get a page up there ASAP. Number 12, we talked about this earlier on 162, meta descriptions. Just handle the metadata. It's kind of like outtakes. You know, you're working on a site, you're adding content. Take a few minutes because hopefully you've done your keyword research already and kind of outlined which pages will be optimizing for what phrases. And so you have that list there. So once you get to this page and you're adding the content, you know, take a few moments and go ahead and plug in your description, plug in your meta keywords, do your title, and you'll be glad you did. Number 13, and we're almost done, the XML sitemap. That is key. Yeah. You know, go ahead and get that done. If you're using WordPress, there are plenty of plug-ins to take care of it for you. But get it done and more importantly, submit it to Google Webmaster Tools after you get it done. That way they can be received a new update and they can index you the way you want to be indexed. Last one on here was the robots text files. Kind of go without saying. Basically, that's a thumbs up to the Googlebot, the yes, my site order. And you list out the pages you want them to index and how you want them to do it. And a little tip, if you get a new web project, it's good to glance at the robot text file and make sure that the previous

designer has not chosen to exclude the entire website from Google's index. Oh, yeah. Because that happened. Because that happened. We took over an account and their website ranking just started plummeting and we finally got to the robot text file and sure enough, he had excluded everything from the Googlebot. Yeah. Wow. That was rough. Yeah, no blank stare today. No blank stare. All right. Cool. You guys have been listening to podcast number 163. We are the most popular internet marketing SEO podcast on iTunes. That's because of all of you. We really appreciate all of you. Again, you can tell you what. Go to e-webstyle.com slash SEO podcast. Scroll down just under the video boxes and you'll see a Google Places listing. Click there and write a review there, too. That has a lot of value for us, too, if you're getting any value out of this. If you're not, send us an email. Tell us why. Tell us what you don't like. Yeah. What would you do about it? What would you do about it? What would you do about it? What would you like to do? Yeah. And that's at podcast at e-webstyle.com. And until the next podcast, my name is Chris. Bye-bye for now. Slightly raised up eyebrow. How?