Submission, Content Is King - Unknown Secrets of SEO E-Webstyle Number 4

Hi, welcome to the eWebStyle podcast. Hey, happy new year and welcome back. Thank you for joining us here at eWebStyle. This is Paul Hanson, a sales manager from eWebStyle. And this is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. I hope you guys had a great new year. I know I did. I got a chance to go. To Jersey, right? Yeah, up to New Jersey. We got to play in some snow, made a huge snowman, which you can imagine, Houstonians don't get to do that very often. Don't get a lot of snow. I was hanging out with the family in 70-degree weather where you were battling out in the snow. But I had a wonderful Christmas. Happy new year. Welcome back, everybody. And I'm glad to be back, ready for another podcast. There was a bit of irony, though. What's that? It snowed in Houston before it snowed in New Jersey. It did. And, boy, that was an interesting time in Houston, Texas. If anyone that's listening lives in the south, I'm sure you can imagine what it would be like to have, you know, two to three inches of snow fall in the south. Yeah, I believe it was like 70 degrees, 60, 70 degrees about two days prior. And then it's, you know, look up and it snows. I think the day before it was one degree off of the record high. The record high for that day. And the next day it snowed. Interesting times in Houston, Texas. That's how Houston is. Anyway, welcome to our podcast. We're really excited about 2009. We've got lots of great things planned. We're glad you can join us. We caught a little error on our last blog, and I just got to bring it up. Metrics. Metrics. Doesn't have an X in it. Oops. It sounds like it, but it doesn't. Anyway, we know it. We don't need any email from you guys telling us that there's no X in metrics. Just go with it. It's part of the adventure. As always, we'd like to recap. We'd like

to recap what we covered in the last podcast. Third Coast Comedy was one of them, and what we discussed with Third Coast Comedy, that is one of our clients, is also actually a place where I perform improv. And that particular client we discussed because they are on Google Local. So we did discuss Google Local and the benefits of that. And we also discussed how once you get good search engine placement or you get good placement on Google Local and you're starting to drive traffic to your website, how important it is to take a step back and look at, okay, now when somebody types in Comedy Houston and they end up on Third Coast Comedy or on Joe the Plumber's website because they typed in Plumbing Houston. What do they see? In the case of Third Coast Comedy, it was searching for Comedy Houston and going on the first page and that company was more about corporations, about training corporations. They also do improv comedy. It was more about corporations, and so I had them put a link pretty high on the page for the comedy improv show. So it would be safe to say that their landing page information just wasn't relative to what the searcher was searching for. Exactly. Okay. Exactly. And so that's where we here at eWebStyle go a little step beyond just getting you targeted traffic. When somebody types in a certain collection of keywords and they end up on your website, we have a policy where we look at that information on a quarterly basis and say, okay, now that we have you great traffic and you can picture how good we are at doing that, once we get you that great traffic, where's that traffic going? And how do we actually turn it into what's called ROI, return on investment? I believe that's even included in some of the descriptions of our podcast now. Oh, yeah. That's right. ROI. ROI. So we take it to the next level, which is great. We've got great search engine optimization. We've got

great traffic coming to your website. What are we doing with that traffic to make sure it's benefiting your business the most? Another thing we discussed was Google Local and Yahoo Local, which is part of our search engine optimization package. We covered Google Analytics and really, We kind of ended up on analytics and what it is, how it helps, and things like that. What are analytics? So Google Analytics is metrics without an X that you would want to monitor on your website. So I mentioned one already today, which is bounce rate. So when somebody comes to your website, how often do they just bounce off of your website? Do they come, they find nothing that they want, and they leave, or they accidentally get there and they leave, or whatever it may be? You're always trying to keep your bounce rate low because you want most of the people who come to your website to stay on your website until they purchase something, until they pick up the phone and call you, or until they email you, which is actually, each one of those is called a call to action. There you go. Which is something that we like to have on each and every page. Got to have a call to action. Absolutely. Google Analytics is so sophisticated, so complex, we could cover it in a number of podcasts, and we'll probably come back and visit in more detail the things that you can do, the things that you can understand with Google Analytics because it is such a, it's an integral part of what we do here at eWebStyle. Oh, yeah. And I, and you correct me if I, I pretty much explain to clients, and I understand Google Analytics, any analytics program, it's a way to gauge your website and see what's happening. Who's coming to your website? How are they getting there? Who's, how long are they staying? What pages are they going to? It's like who's coming and what are they doing for, it's

everything, not everything, but it can give you a ton of valuable information about what's happening on your website once people get there. Exactly right. And one of the things that's really nice about Google Analytics, and this is, it's not just Google Analytics. It's actually the medium that we're using, which is the web, and specifically utilizing Google Analytics to capture this particular information. But when you put an ad in a newspaper or you put an ad in, say, oh, the Yellow Pages. Yellow Pages. When you put an ad in the Yellow Pages, you don't have any idea of how many people see your ad. Nope. You don't have any idea, unless you're consciously and specifically tracking the information when they call, how they got to you. But that's just for a phone call. That's for a phone call. You have no idea how many people see it like you just said. Exactly. So, and again, if you're tracking it, and we do that here. We do, of course, still have a Yellow Pages ad. And we, you know, part of our policy when somebody has called for services is we find out how they found us. Did they find us through web searches? Did they find us through Yellow Pages? Was it a referral? Whatever the case may be. If you don't have that particular policy in place in your company, then you just don't know where calls are coming from. With Google Analytics and with the medium, the Internet, your website has the ability to see how many people have seen it, how many people ended up going and submitting a form. You're able to track the traffic. It's one of the only forms of advertising. Say you put a radio ad out or a television ad out. How do you know how many people saw it? Well, whatever the company that sold it to me tells me. Exactly. Exactly. And we know that they're not including the guy happened to be getting some ice cream or popping his popcorn.

There you go. Went to the restaurant. Exactly. Same thing with the radio. So, the Internet is one of the great ways to advertise and actually be able to track customer for customer where that traffic's coming, going, and how it ebbs and flows towards generating more income for your business. Now, I think the very last thing that we talked about last time was the famous phrase... Content is king. Not queen. King. Not jack. The king. The king. And if you've been doing any research on search engine optimization, you have undoubtedly come across this phrase, content is king. It's very easy to say, rolls off the tongue nice and easily. And it's true. And it's... It's true. Content is what I am searching for. If I'm searching for Joe the plumber, I'm obviously searching for a guy by the name of Joe who happens to be a plumber. So, I'm searching for some content on his site that relates to him being a plumber. That's what I'm looking for. And when Google spiders or crawls your website... And let me take a step back because I don't think we've covered exactly what that is. All of the search engines have software that are called spiders. And those spiders will actually go and surf the internet kind of like you and I would. Of course, those robots, those software robots don't have the ability to see the images and see the layouts and stuff. But they see the text on the website. And they record. That's what Google and Yahoo and MSN, that's what they're doing when they're crawling a particular website. And they keep track of what is in the content. They store that in the database so that later, when you search for Joe the plumber, it goes, Okay, well, what website did I find the text Joe the plumber on? Now, that's a very complex algorithm. That's not the only thing it looks for. But let's just say Joe the plumber happened to do his website. Actually, his cousin, Billy Joe, did his website. And

the text that they had on his single-page website was, you know, Joe the plumber, which was an image. And it said, I'm a great guy. I've been in this industry for 20 years. I'm the best. I have a long list of references, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Everything that I just said didn't mention plumbing, didn't mention Joe, except for in the image, which text in an image, Google is not able to parse. It's not able to see that text in the image. And so that website would never show up if you type in Joe the plumber. Because it's not relevant content. Because the content is insufficient. And because content is king. King. Because content is king, the text on his one-page needs to have, you know, I am Joe. You know, if that's his advertising, the thing that he's trying to present to the public in general, Joe the plumber. So, my name is Joe. My name is Joe whatever. I am a plumber in the Houston area. You can always find me at joetheplumber.com or whatever it may be. We've mentioned Joe a couple times. We've mentioned plumbing a couple times. We've mentioned Houston. So, now we're looking at Joe the plumber Houston as being at least possible, depending on what other, the other tools for search engine optimization that you have used in order to get him on the first page. Did that make sense? That makes perfect sense. Okay. That's what we mean by content is king. And the example I gave was, you know, two, three sentences. The second set of sentences is a million times infinitely better than the first example that I gave. But in general, on the internet, you need more content. Yes. You want dynamically changing content. And it has to be relevant content. So, your content is king. Yes. It has to be changing, which means dynamic. And it has to be sufficient content for Google to give it, you know, a particular amount of credibility. I think that the content is king and how

changing dynamic content is good for a website, that kind of dovetails into our next, or maybe I'm just... Into one of our next... Maybe I'm stretching out here. I'm stretching and trying to find a... The link here. Yeah. Here it is. The link... So, one of the things that I mentioned in content being king is that it be dynamic content. And one of the ways that we like to use to generate dynamic content is to use RSS feeds. An RSS feed. I'm sure I've seen these all over the internet before I actually knew what it was. Explain, what is an RSS feed? Now, I think the image that you probably saw for an RSS feed is a little orange image with like a broadcast kind of thing. It says RSS feed. Saw it everywhere. Had no idea what it was. It stands for Real Simple Syndication. Okay, we all know that syndication is when you make available some particular copyrightable material available to a larger batch. For instance, I don't know if anybody here happens to be a Rush Limbaugh listener. He is a syndicated radio program. There's a lot of syndicated programs on TV. They often talk about when a really popular TV show goes to syndication. So, that's when it's no longer just broadcast at the 7 p.m. You know, Friends was at 7.30 Houston time once a week. And when it goes to syndication, they run it in the afternoons or earlier or whatever. 8 p.m. and 3 p.m. again at 3.30 all the time. So, Real Simple Syndication RSS feeds are usually they're text. Interestingly enough, the iTunes. So, if you are listening to this as a podcast and you've added it to your iTunes program so that it's automatically downloaded and put on your iPod, what we used to get that information to iTunes and then to you is actually a Real Simple Syndication. So, it just has a brief description of what it was, you know, the title of our podcast, some background description, and then also a link

to the individual MP3 files which make up our podcast. So, I think a lot of people probably don't realize that iTunes is just using an industry standard Real Simple Syndication. Now, they do have some required tags that are a little outside of standard RSS and that's okay because the RSS is designed to be liberal enough to allow those things to happen. So, I've got a question for you. Okay, now I understand that dynamic and changing content is good for my website and I understand that an RSS feed is a good way to bring new information to a larger audience, but connect them for me. Tell me how that RSS feed is going to bring dynamically changing content. How do they link together is what I'm asking. That's great for not letting us skip that because we could have just said dynamic content is good, RSS feeds are this, next. So, how do those tie together? Well, with a real simple syndication, by utilizing an RSS feed, you're actually able to put dynamic content on your website. So, we'll go back to Joe the Plumber and we'll say, okay, Joe the Plumber, not only is he on a regular basis, weekly, maybe bi-weekly, is he going to go in and add a little bit of information about how his business is going, maybe some just content about plumbing, about whatever, and he's doing that because he wants to use his website to generate significant traffic and great search engine placement. As he's doing that, it would also be beneficial for him to utilize an RSS feed. So, he can put an RSS feed, the content from an RSS feed, on his webpage. Now, say you go to a lot of news agencies, a lot of newspapers, they allow you to actually create specific RSS feeds. So, he might create an RSS feed from, I don't know, we'll say CNN. Okay. And anytime, and it will be based on a search that includes the word plumbing. So, anytime the word plumbing shows up in a CNN article,

that will end up on this RSS feed, and a brief snippet about that particular article will end up on Joe the Plumber's webpage because he's included that RSS feed on that page. So, as day by day goes, as days pass and CNN happens to have another article that mentions plumbing, boom, he's only showing three or five of those. One of them falls off the list and the brand new one shows up on the top. You now have dynamic content that's relevant to the website because it includes plumbing. And Google loves it. Google, he's changing his content. His content that is adding to the site is relevant. And Google's going to love that. I mean, any search engine is going to love that. And a customer or a potential customer or a visitor that's visiting your site is going to love that new, changing content. So, it's good for you. It's good for your search engine. It's good for everybody. It's good for everybody. So, I think we've covered that? Yeah. We're good with RSS. So, our next thing on the list here is called SEO copywriting. SEO copywriting. What is SEO copywriting? Guess what it's related to and it's not the queen. I'm going to say content is related to your content. Content is king. So, in our brief example, we mentioned how potentially Joe the Plumber could put a website together and not mention his name, not mention plumbing, not mention Houston. And it would be disastrous for search engine optimization. So, the second example that I gave you where we mentioned, you know, I am Joe the Plumber. I am in Houston, Texas. I've been in the plumbing industry for 20 years. That is what we would call SEO copywriting. Because the first one gave the information. Am I right? Yeah, yeah. The first one gave the right information. I mean, I'm a guy. Everyone loves me. I've got lots of things. I've been in this industry forever. And it was good information about Joe himself. It might be really good in a

brochure, right? Of course. And it doesn't work for search engine optimization. So, that second example I gave you was an example of search engine optimization copywriting. And that's where you just kind of understand all of these things that we're going to be going over in our podcast. How to use them. When to use them. And you incorporate those into the text that you actually write to put on your website. And I'm going to use a short example. Or maybe not an example. Just, I'm going to give examples of what I run into a lot. Since I deal with lots of customers. I deal with clients. I mean, very small clients to medium to large. Big corporations. And many of the clients or potential clients that I run into. They are, they may, their website is probably the very first website that they published. They haven't done any revisions. And they most likely developed all of that content for their website. Not really understanding SEO copywriting. Not really understanding how web crawlers work. How the search engine works. So they have, maybe they were in, I don't want to say they were in a rush. But they were, they needed a, they needed content. And they put up content. They put up something kind of related to what they do. And often I, when I look at websites and I, one of the first things that I see is, oh man, this site could really use copywritten content because it's going to be directly related to what they do. It's going to be, the content is going to be 100% a dead match. Targeted for search engines. Yeah. So, I mean, I often see that. And I definitely tell anyone listening, take a look at your, your site. You know, if your content could use a, maybe a tune up here and there, definitely consider a search engine, SEO copywriting for your site. And have it, definitely consider having it done professionally by a company that does SEO copywriting. Excellent. I think that's a, it's great,

that's a, it's great to hear these examples because a lot of the times people are out there and, you know, people may be wondering, am I the only guy who's doing this wrong? Am I the only guy? And, and the reality is, is that most people, I would say over 90% of the people out there who are doing websites are creating their websites from the perspective of a brochure, which is great. And, you know, we always, in the past, used to sell websites from the concept, okay, now you can give a business card and they can get a brochure for free. So you're not having to, you're, you're able to forego the cost of printing a brochure because they can just visit your website and get all that information. Yeah. Well, now how do we take that online brochure and take it to the next level? So it can online generate traffic, generate income, generate return on investment, ROI. Yes. And so copywriting, just to add one more point, copywriting, it's, it's very important. Um, it's not, um, I would say the majority of, of clients or potential clients that I run into are not doing, they, they don't have copywritten content. And most of them, like I said before, are writing their own content. Not that that's a bad thing that you're writing your own content, but I, we definitely recommend you leave it up to a professional who is trained in doing these things. Um, as like an analogy, I'd say, you know, I don't, I don't fix my own car. I take it to my mechanic because he's a professional, you know, why not have a, a professional content writer write that content because they know how search engines operate. They know what they're looking for. So definitely consider having a professional copy, copywritten content. Excellent. Excellent. I'm off my, uh, my SEO copywriting soapbox. All right. Um, so the next thing we have on the list is, uh, directory submissions. So we've got, um, this is part of a big, something

that you'll find on a regular basis on the web. You'll find, you'll get a, you know, an email or you'll find some link. We'll submit your website to 1,000 search engines. And what they're really talking are about are a number, a number of search engines and a whole lot of directories. And most of those directories, you know, we always bump into directories. In fact, directories tend to frustrate me when I do a search on Google. Paul and I were talking about this the other day. When we do a search on Google, we end up with this list and we wish that list to be a list of companies or, or whatever information relevant to what we search. And then we click one of them and we end up on a directory, which is just another list. That's just another list. Well, that's what Google's supposed to do. I don't want a directory. I heard someone say this phrase once and I'm going to steal it. He says, man, it's, it's almost like it's a search engine as a directory of directories because you do a search for something and it gives you 10 results and they're all directories. And I'm looking for Joe. Straight. I just want to get straight to Joe the Plumber. I'm looking for Joe the Plumber. I don't want to go to Google and then a directory of plumbers and then a directory of plumbers in Houston. Exactly. I'm looking for plumbers. Yeah. Exactly. I'm looking for plumbers. So directories for us are a little frustrating. And that's typically what those, those companies are marketing when they say, we'll put you on a thousand search engines. Let's be frank. You really need to be on Google. You really need to be on Yahoo and you really need to be on MSN and anything beyond that is okay. It doesn't hurt. Don't worry about it. Not a big deal. I have a question to someone that maybe is just kind of learning SEO. What is directory submission? Like what exactly, why do

you need to submit to a directory? Well, I guess in general we're saying, you know, you don't really need to. As long as you get on Google and as long as you get on Yahoo and you get on MSN or live search now, you're going to be fine. If you choose to get on some directories, and there actually are some directories that are good out there, and we may cover that in another podcast. If you do want to get in some directories, then you want to, you know, all of that searching you want to do by hand. You want to do it yourself. You know your business the best. When you're doing a directory submission, you typically need to select the category that your business is going to show up in, potentially subcategories. And really, you don't want to leave that to some other party. I promise you the people who are submitting you to a thousand search engines are doing it with some automated software. Even the search engines prefer to have manually submitted websites. So say you finish your website, you've worked on your SEO copywriting, you've worked on your internal link building, you've got your keywords, you know, are the foundation of your copywriting. You've got landing pages for different keywords, you've got a site map, your meta tags are all set up, and everything's done just right, and you go live. You want to go to Google and submit that website yourself, because Google can tell when it's been submitted by another robot, or if it's been submitted manually. And you definitely want it to be submitted manually, because they typically don't like it to be submitted by a robot. Here's a question to kind of go along the same topic. So first we started with directory submissions, and then we kind of got into search engine submissions. So, and here's, I guess, a rhetorical question. Is it necessary that I submit my website to a search engine? It is actually not necessary. Okay. Now, for somebody new, like I just

described, who's kind of all out there on their own, and they've just done it, done their website, then they're going to want to. Our clients, we typically don't manually submit them to Google, because what we do is we add them to our portfolio page. And you can view our portfolio page at e-webstyle, that's w-e-b-s-t-y-l-e dot com slash portfolio. And you'll notice that we have a lot of clients there, and as soon as we add our clients to that page, because Google and MSN and Yahoo crawl us on a regular basis, those websites end up being crawled pretty quickly. So there's no real need for us to submit them manually. If we find, you know, a couple weeks later that they're not in the search engines, then, you know, we'll happily do it, do it, submit it manually. It's typically not necessary if you've got a website, if you're working with a company who's going to add you to their portfolio page. So if I'm Joe the Plumber and I built a brand new website myself, I did everything by myself, and I'm not linked, I don't have any links anywhere else, and e-webstyle didn't build mine, so they don't have a link to my site on theirs. So would I have to submit my website to a search engine in that scenario? Two comments. Okay. First one, hire us, because you're going to need search engine optimization, because part of search engine optimization is what are called inbound links, and we're going to cover that. And to really just bluntly answer your question, absolutely, you need to submit your website to the search engine so that they can find you, because it will be until you have other websites that link to you, and then until the search engine crawlers crawl those websites that link to you, it's until then that those search engines will be aware that you even exist, unless you submit it manually. And I'm going to go, and your first answer to hire us, if you are building your website by

yourself, you're doing everything hands-on, these are little tricks of the trade that, you know, like a professional company are going to know and understand, because they've done this over and over and over again, and you just being Joe the Plumber, building your website at night, after work, you may not understand that, oh, if I don't have, you know, other links to my website out there, it's not going to get put into the search engine, into their directory, or into their, it's not going to get crawled. So that's another reason, you might want to hire a professional company to learn, they know all the secrets and the hints and the little tricks of the trade that can help and make, help get your website recognized. Well, I see the next thing, a couple things we've got, have on our list are article submissions and page rank, I think we've come to our time, though, so... Already? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it goes by fast. So, again, if you have any questions, then please feel free to send us questions, you can send those to podcast or podcasts at e-webstyle.com. Next time we'll be covering article submission and page rank, and probably a bunch more things on our list here, so please tune in, please subscribe to us, so you can get these podcasts on a regular basis. And we'll be back next week, right? Same time, same bat time, same bat channel, same bat pod channel. Wait, wait, same pod time, same pod channel. I was trying to find a way to work that in. This is Chris Burris, owner of e-webstyle, signing out. Paul Hanson, sales manager of e-webstyle. Thanks for listening to the podcast. See you next week.