Switching Domain Names and Site Credibility - #seopodcast 137

Welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. That was right that time. Boom! My name's Chris Burst, owner of eWebStyle. Charles Lewis, your internet marketing specialist. Here at eWebStyle, where we are your friendly local neighborhood top position snatchers with a mantra. What's our mantra? Don't be a douche. Don't be a douche. Yeah, because it's not a good look. Being douchey is bad. We, as always, have a tip from our previous podcast. Plan out your SEO strategy before you start using your SEO tactics. Yeah, definitely. Want to make sure that you have a plan of action. You know, you plan on targeting this keyword to accomplish this goal to get this ranking and hopefully bring in these sorts of clients out before diving into SEO because you may do it wrong and, frankly, won't get those type of clients, won't get this keyword, and won't land on the page you want. So, definitely make a action. For the gist cast last 36, they're tacked in a direction. If you got sittings in your pocket, sort of devils you to Facebook or G+, what do you do on G+. You, you, you, you, you. Update. Update. Update. Update on G+. Go ahead and do that right now. What information do they need included? Hashtag SEOpodcast137. And then tag us at eWebStyle. We need to get the G+, account set up. Right. Tag us at eWebStyle. And on that one, we can track back and, you know, punch you in the face for shouting us out. And also, let us know what you think about this podcast here. Please do. You can also follow us not just when we're on air. We are on air at more like 945 Central Standard Time on Friday mornings. You can catch us live at e-web style slash SEOpodcast. Other ways you can stay in contact with us are facebook.com slash eWebStyle. Twitter.com slash eWebStyle. YouTube.com slash eWebStyle. Ustream.com slash eWebStyle. Yeah. I think it works. I hope it works. And you can always send us an email, podcast at

e-wolfstyle.com. Excellent. A little bit of news. Then we got a question, and then we got some great information. It's actually really, really good information. Content. Get ready. Content questions. Hopefully we'll answer those today. So a little bit of news. I saw, it's funny, one of the guys at the office here yesterday got his iPad 2, received it in the mail. Blank stare at him. That was Blank stare at our partner for buying an iPad 2 the day before the iPad 3 drops, right? Almost, right? Like, I come in today to pull up the news, and everything is iPad 3. iPad 3, they're looking for apps to show in their commercials. It's going to drop in March, you know, for early March, if not March 1. So it's all over the place. I saw this. I thought this was cool. You know Tesla, the auto company? Mm-hmm. Right? They're the electric auto company. Yeah. They have a new SUV out, which looks pretty cool. It's not a big SUV. It looks small. Like a crossover? Maybe like a, yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm. It's got some cool features. Gold wing doors. Front, well, at least the back. I saw that in the image. Okay. Because it doesn't have a transmission drivetrain underneath. Mm-hmm. And because... It sits lower. Well, it sits lower, and they said that they had a dude stand up in it. Wow. So it's about the height of my Odyssey. I've got a Honda Odyssey, and you can stand up in it. Because it drops down. It's kind of cool. I'm not sure if that's going to ever be necessary. Yeah. But, no. That's pretty cool. Well, you know, if one of your rap songs comes on, and you want to start doing the page rank... How do I... I don't even know how to do the page rank. That was the sprinkler. That's the sprinkler, right? I think I got that wrong. Then, you know, you've got to stand up and dance. Get your dance on. The other thing I thought was just ultra

cool, the first company I started was a carbon nanomaterial company, and they now have nano lasers. They are one micron in diameter, this laser. I have no clue what that means. The human hair is 600 microns. Okay, so what's the purpose of having a laser that small? Why are you asking such ridiculous questions? They say that they can use it for data transfer and things like that. So, maybe your, you know, your system bus could be replaced by, you know, lasers smaller than the human hair. 600 times smaller than the human hair. Crazy. Anyway, we have a question. For those of you who check out our Facebook page from time to time, you can come, you can go there, find questions. We actually post about our podcast. We post interesting things that we saw, interesting things that we heard this week. One of the things... You saw that image about the social media. Oh, that's awesome. That's powerful. And one thing I posted this week was a quote that I heard. I was watching Mobbed with Howie Mondale. You know that show? Yeah. Kind of cool show. And they were playing a prank on somebody, and the quote was, your dancing is so bad, you do not deserve to meet your father. Wow. Wow. It's just like, it's so bizarre. It's so bizarre, right? Like, that's really bad dancing. Wow. All right, here's a question from Facebook. I've had a website for two years at websitesandthings.co.uk, and recently, websitesandthings.com came available. Got that backwards. I bought this domain from a different provider to where the site is hosted and to where the .co.uk address is registered. How do I change my site from the .co.uk to the .com? Just forwarding the URL? What else do I need to think about in terms of SEO? I think that's just a phenomenal question. It's a great question, but I think what you have to consider, number one, is where your target is, right? Because if you were using the .co.uk domain name, then it indicates you are

in the UK, and that may be where your target clientele is. If that's the case, and you're already ranking there, then I probably wouldn't consider even changing my domain name to the .com. I would probably forward it. If, on the other hand, you're trying to rank with your .com name, and you don't want to use the UK name, then, yeah, I would switch them. And GoDaddy, I'm not sure who the host is. He did say he was using a different host from a different register. Each one, yeah. It was pretty simple in GoDaddy. I mean, for the most part, it's probably pretty simple across the board, but definitely add the .com name to the UK site, and then once it's propagated and it's active, then remove the UK. Yeah, and, well, I think you want to leave your UK up for a little while with 301 redirects. Definitely. Take care of any ranking you have or anything like that. And, frankly, the thing to be careful for is how that kind of domain change is going to affect the content management system you might be using. Yeah, there's a number of things it can bump into. In general, the principle is move an exact copy of your website over there, and then 301 redirect each and every page on the .co.uk over to the other one. And I think Charles makes a great point. If you've got .co.uk for a reason and your target is UK, then you may not want to make that change. If you're trying to go a little more global or even target a U.S. audience, there is value in .com. Also, I don't know the mindset of Brits. Are they happier at a .com? Yeah. Do they feel more comfortable? Do they not care? I don't know. Maybe Darren Bowie can hit us up and let us know what it is. Because he actually won a $10 gift card on our Facebook page. That's another reason to be a fan of our Facebook page and follow. We give a $10

gift card away every week. He won it once. I'm trying to get it to him. And he actually won it at Amazon.com. I go to Amazon.com to try and purchase this gift card. And it says, these are not useful in .co.uk, Amazon.co.uk. And I'm like, okay. So, I go to Amazon.co.uk. I don't have an account over there. And now I've got to make an account. So, Darren Bowie, hit me up. Let me know if you know you can use it. I didn't even buy it yet. I'm like, can you use .amazon.com? I don't know. Whatever. Maybe people in the UK can't even. They won't let them buy from .com. That seems stupid. Yeah. If that's the case, then yeah, definitely. Figure a way for us to get you your $10 gift card. Right. That's what we need to do. So, I think that's a great question. It's a big concern that people have. We have clients come here in more competitive industries. And if their domain name doesn't match, and we think we're going to have a hard time, we'll ask them to switch their domains. And then so we've got to coordinate that, make sure we don't lose any. I mean, their first question is, if I'm going to switch my domain name, am I going to lose my good rank? And usually our answer is, first off, you don't have good rank. There's really nothing to worry about. And second, if you did, no, you're not going to lose it. Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, it's your name. So, you should be okay with that. I don't see no tattoo tears? No, no. Oh, right. Reviews. Quick, stall. Tell them what they're about to see. Let's see. Got them. All right. So, yeah, content for today is about content. And I pulled a great article. Okay, that's enough. I pulled a good article. We're going to talk about content. So, get ready. We'll go into some things that talk about good content, bad content, poor quality content, great quality

content. So, hopefully, this will be of some assistance to you guys. Okay, I'm going to read two reviews. We'll keep it short. First one is title. Very enjoyable. Four stars. Boo. Kevin Gallagher. It's a shame this podcast hasn't got more reviews. So, you potential listeners get a true reading of how enjoyable the podcast really is. Don't let the seemingly lightheartedness of this podcast put you off the fact that these guys know their stuff. As a SEO manager here in Scotland at Movin' On Up in Edinburgh, shameless plug. So, everyone go out right now and Google Movin' with no G, On Up in Edinburgh. I really enjoy this podcast. Even if sometimes their time to get to the point takes a while, keep up the good work, guys. And who says SEO has to be boring? We don't say it has to be boring. And punched in the face to you, Mr. Gallagher. Kevin, that name sounds familiar. Yeah. I don't know. I can't pinpoint it, but I've heard that name before. Next one. Title is useful help. By the way, obviously, this is the UK collection of reviews from iTunes. Useful help to small businesses by Webby in the UK. Very helpful content on all aspects of internet marketing. The hosts don't take themselves too seriously. That's for damn sure. And explain the content so that us mere mortals can understand it. Their podcasts are the main reason why we have seen huge increases in traffic to our website. Oh, yeah. What's up? Woo! Let me pat myself on the back there. These guys have taken a bland but very important topic and made it fun and interesting. The guy who gave one star is either a jealous competitor or a douchebag. Wow. Don't be a douche. Who is that? This is right here. I'm talking about the one star guy. Oh, yeah. That one star is MGen200. Yeah. That's crazy. And that was Neil Webb, UK. Excellent man. Appreciate you, Neil. Wow. Punch in the face. That's an over-the-pond punch in the face. That's

awesome. Over the seas. Yeah. In the UK. All the way over there. Long distance punch in the face. That's what's up. All right. So, let's dig in since, you know, even our four-star one said we, well, I think we beat our Geno time limit. Today, we're just cranking. This is fast. So, it's a pretty long article. I pulled it from Bo Blog. I actually got the link off SEO Moz. And I read through it. And it has some pretty interesting points. It's a kind of lengthy article. So, I went in and I wanted to highlight some things that I think would not only help you, but also help us. And so, and really the whole reason for the article was how to deal with Panda. If your site has been affected by the recent Google Panda updates, like you maybe lost your rank or you probably just not showing any more content, traffic's down, conversions are down, then this article, these are going to give you some changes, some things you could do to your site to help improve that. This article folks mostly on content, but I wanted to also include some CVO stuff because they kind of go hand in hand with us. So, the first thing it says, I like the first line. And it says, shallow content provides little value to users and offers low quality based on the intent of the query. And I totally agree with that. I hate coming across sites when I'm looking for something and the content is shallow. It may rank well, frankly, but there's no value to me. And the problem that curates is a high balance. Because after I'm reading the first two or three lines and I haven't seen an inkling of what I was searching for, I'm out of there. So, that's kind of even two things. That's relevancy, what we often call relevancy, and shallow. Like, what are examples of some things that would be shallow or things that you could do to make sure it's not shallow content? Well,

I think it depends on the search. So, if you're searching for a, let's say, a product, right? Then make sure on that product page that should rank, give me a great description. Give me great pricing. Give me shipping information. Give me user reviews. Specs. Specs. Technical information. That makes this content worth it. How about the price? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, the price, I think I said that. Oh, okay. Yeah, because there are, I mean, you go to websites every now and then and you're just like, what were these people thinking? They missed some key components of either a product or if you're looking, if it's an informative website, you know, one of the things that we really stress is you got to have bullet points. You know, people just don't have time or patience or generation XYZ, can't read or can only read bullet. Bullet points are just a great way. You got to have a good image. You know, that's a way, when you start seeing bullet points and an image and maybe a chart, that's when you start knowing that you've hit good content. Mm-hmm. Definitely. Last thing, or worst case scenario, you search for a product and all there is is a price. Yeah. Add to cart. Yeah. Why should I add this to the cart? And so, you know, that's a pretty good example. Another thing about content, this is kind of goes into if you're publishing articles and blog posts and things like that, newsletters, content authority. Who's the author of this content? And I'll use our site for an example. A great way to identify that is by links. Link to your Twitter page. Link to your G Plus page. Link to your Facebook page. Link to a bio page about yourself. So that way, people can see who authored this content. They could also see your background. You know, what makes you credible. What gives you the authority to write about this particular subject. Whatever that subject is. By the way, straight up, we need to, I

need to incorporate, you know, I've got a kind of template for our transcription of our podcast. We take this podcast. The audio goes out onto iTunes and then we transcribe it. The transcription goes onto our blog for content. Highly recommend it. When I put in the transcription, I don't really identify the author. Yeah. Right? I mean, it's us, clearly. But, you know, they're looking for that, you know, authored by or by tag and then a link to our bio so that can start creating credibility. So that's something we will be adding to the next podcast upgrade. Yeah. Frankly, we should author it, buy, and tag it with hashtag SEO podcast 137. Yep. Another one they talked about on here was site credibility. And I like the line I read on here. Credible websites have a high percentage of uptime, are easy to use, easy to navigate, and have a high page speed. They look professional based on the purpose of the site. And they make verifying content accuracy easy and provide physical contact information. This is basic SIVO stuff to me. You know, make sure your site is up, right? Don't go with Joe Blow hosting and your site's down most of the time. When you said that, I have that picture of that commercial of the credit card service with the Russian guys and all the phones. Oh, this is piggy. Yeah. It's like, don't go with Peggy's hosting service. Yeah. Definitely. Make sure it's easy to use. Easy navigation. Easy to figure out where you need to go throughout the site. Definitely include maybe text nav and image nav, if applicable. A high page speed. Make your site load fast. Don't use those heavy images. Kind of one of the reasons why we don't really like handing over the keys to a website to clients. They can, we just don't recommend it because they'll like to go take brand new pictures, make good pictures. Off of their 10 megapixel camera. Yeah. And upload them and compress them. Not actually shrink, not actually compress

them. They just shrink them. And so now they've got, you know, a 1.5 megapixel image that's got to be downloaded for their website to show properly. Yeah. And, you know, it sucks. So, that can affect your site credibility. Another good line here, what is credibility? Site credibility is the sum of expertise plus trustworthiness. That was awesome. Right. Expertise plus trustworthiness equals your site credibility. So, prove that you're an expert. That's how, with the authority links and with the different links coming to you, and show your site is trustworthy, good nav, good layout, great information, good links coming in, and that improves your site cred. Frankly, that probably improves your page rank. Yep. That one just hit me. I'm feeling it right now. Let's see. Now, content purpose was the next section they talked about. And, we said, it is critical for content to fulfill a unique purpose. Definitely. Don't just write about anything that doesn't help anyone. There's a lot of that already out there. Yeah. If you want your content to be shared, or for people to link to it, or for it to even have some value, then give it a purpose. Fulfill a need. Our content. You go through our website, we write about our blog post, or about SEO. This podcast is content about SEO, and the purpose is to help you guys who are watching and or listening to with your SEO efforts. I did a blog post yesterday because I had a challenge. We're trying to get a customer switched over onto Google Apps. They wanted to make sure that all their emails could get migrated from where they were to where they're at to Google Apps before they flipped the switch, which is great. There was a little challenge with Google and getting the emails imported. I figured a workaround. I posted the workaround on the blog. So we're actually providing good, valuable content, not just for SEO, but for all the things necessary for hosting, which involves email, et cetera. And then just for the sake of

helping us, in regards to SEO and generating links, I'm pretty confident in saying we weren't the only people who have experienced their problem. And so as people begin to search for it, the article he posted should come up and, you know, provide some assistance to some people. And hopefully they'll subscribe to our podcast. Exactly. Poor quality content. Pages with lots of words saying little. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Keyword. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Keyword. Keyword. Blah, blah, blah. Keyword. Don't, you know, that's a page with no purpose. Or I like this one. Pages whose sole purpose is advertising. Yeah. Boo. Yeah. No punch in the face for you. Kicking the shins. Kicking lizard in the shins. Ouch. Shout out punch in the face to kicking lizard, man. Hey, where's our red salsa? Yeah, where's our red salsa? Come on. Where's our red? Content reliability. Uptime, accessibility, and functionality can all be quality indicators of reliability. That kind of goes back to your credibility statement. You know, as long as your site's up, it's accessible, and it functions well, then that makes you reliable. You touched on this earlier, content relevancy. And so I think some of the things here really talk about SEO, like using click here as anchor text. It's not relevant. Take advantage of that. If you're still doing that, shame on you. Just to roll back. The text that is in the section that you can click when you take it to another page, that text is called anchor text. That text should be keyword rich, and the keywords that are rich in that text should be the same keywords that you're targeting on the page that you're sending them to. Definitely. So, for example, on our page, on our site, we have an SEO page, right? And on our SEO page, we talk about how we do white hat SEO, how we, you know, follow the guidelines, how we understand great content. And then we quickly talk about the difference between SEO and pay-per-click. And our pay-per-click text in that paragraph

is a link to our pay-per-click page. And so, rather than say, click here to learn about PPC, it says SEO is different from pay-per-click, which is the link. So, definitely take advantage of using keywords in your anchor text. It just makes sense. You know, you've got to think of it from Google's algorithm standpoint. The information at the end of this is going to be about either click here or pay-per-click. Exactly. You decide. We've seen it so many times. Another one to probably get rid of is more info or learn more. A lot of times we use a plug-in for our other podcast called SEO Quake. And SEO Quake allows us to see the content, you know, in the back end, how many times a certain keyword is in the text. And most of the time it pulls up, you know, 12 iterations of more info or learn more or click here, frankly, and when it could be keywords. And so, you know, there's a plug-in on WordPress that we use so that it doesn't, so that you can control that more info. Instead of more info, we, you know, put in a keyword-rich phrase. Yeah, yeah. No, give me all that. Scratch that. We'll edit that out as soon as we start editing. Which we don't do. So, we'll have that one for free. Another one here I liked was content recency. First statement said, a frequently updated site encourages people to return as long as your content remains relevant and engaging. I totally agree with that statement. And I think this is more in line with sites who provide information that changes frequently, like news sites. And maybe sites that focus on the health industry or entertainment even, where the homepage probably changes frequently and it needs to because there's a lot of stuff happening. So, tech industry, sites like TechCrunch and those who need to have. Like five articles a day, five new articles a day or something, yeah. And so, the key to making your content recent is not only keep it

up to date, but make sure that, you know, all of the copyright dates are correct. Keep your site maps up to date. Don't have any expired product fees if you're doing a merchant. Yeah, that would suck. So, don't do that. We'll keep it moving. And, um, content format, which is a pretty good one. Visual elements set a line with the purpose of a site and not interfere with content. Ever been to a site and the first thing you see is an image that shows up and that image has nothing to do with what you searched or the rest of the content that's on the page? Yeah, let me think. What did I do when that happened? I think I, uh, I think I bounced. And I got a new bounce. Now, I got a new mouse, y'all, with my arrows. You can bounce without even having to move. I call it the thumb bounce. It's like, it's the, oh, you should just call it the reject button. Ooh, out, the reject button. Yeah, so, yeah, I'm new, I'm click, click, back to my search engine results page. So, definitely make your images, um, uh, relevant, relevant to, to the content that's on the page. Um, and this kind of goes back in the, in the, they called it poor, poor quality content. I called it bad SEO and bad CVO. Yeah. And, you know, some quick examples of that would be, uh, page layouts with, with excessive advertisements, um, ads placements that are in the way. Now you get deemed. Now you get deemed anyway. Yeah, if you have too many ads, which is interesting, quick, I read an article yesterday that said, um, it talked about the, the algorithm change Google made, calling it top heavy in regards to people having too many ads above the fold. Now, I think the article was a stretch because they said, so how does Google rank in this? Because if you search on Google, the top three are paid ads, right? They're sponsored ads. And so, technically,

these are ads above the fold. Yeah, there's a hundred stories of how Google has violated its own kind of policies. Like, as an example, you're not allowed, you're not supposed to buy links. Well, that's all Google does is sell links. That's their whole business model. Uh, well, they provide them free in, in, in the organic section and then they sell them in the paid section. So, um, it's, you know, people try and draw that hypocritical perspective and like, come on, you know, they are the search engine that you want to be on. Just follow their rules. Just, yeah, bad titles, poor quality code, that sucks. If your code is bad, uh, revisit that. It, it really has a huge effect. Um, uh, keyword stuff, footers, which is, you know, plan it close. Sometimes you have to do what you have to do. Um, just do it wisely and, and so in a way, in a, in a way that it makes sense, you know, I've, I've came across the site, uh, uh, last week and literally there were probably 200 words in the footer that were just keywords. Wow. They weren't linked. And so, yeah, uh, work on that. Uh, duplicate stock photos. One I hate. They all had the same stock photos, especially with the chick with the black hair and the, and, and, uh, and the headset. Yeah. Like, come on. She, she got a lot of jobs. Yeah, she does not work for you. She works for everybody. Uh, let's see. Uh, content arrangement. And we're almost done here. Um, users know good content when they see it and will likely want to direct the users to it. I think that that's, that's talking about link bait. Yeah. And so if you have, um, great, uh, infographics, create great link bait. Uh, videos or just free content that's, that's, that's, that's, that's unique and needed, right? People, content that people are looking for that they can't find anywhere. If you create it and you publish it in a way that's easy to

share, it will get shared. Uh, bad content, poor spelling, bad grammar, um, bias, or, you know, uh, factual errors. Yeah. Yeah. Get, that's not right. Eject. Yeah. And that's, that's back button, possibly spam. And depending on where I read it at, determine my action. I read it on Twitter, block and follow, leave me alone. Right? I read it on Facebook. Unlike, I read it on G plus, get out of my circle. You know? And so, um, definitely don't put the wrong information up. Um, that's it. All right. Well, that was, that was good. Yeah. So that was about content. I posted this article on Facebook so you guys could check it out. Pretty good information in here. I thought it was cool. The name of Panda came from one of the guys who was involved in that, uh, in that project was named Panda. Wow. That's what it said. So, um, what did we say? We said the great Chinese restaurant should be called the two, two angry, two fat pandas. I think that's good. Somebody has to say, there's probably like a hundred of them already in the country. Um, all right. So that's it. Thank you guys for listening. You guys have been listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. That is because of you all around out there, punching the face to all of our listeners. Please do us a favor. Go to iTunes, create an account, submit a review, and then hit us up somehow, Facebook, Twitter, uh, email, uh, and let us know that you've done that. Yeah. And if you couldn't do it on iTunes for the people who have difficulty, then, um, hit us up on Google, uh, frankly, e-wip style, go to Google, pull up our places page, give us a review there. Yeah. We've covered Google places plenty of times here, and we all know the value of having reviews there. Yeah, and a couple people have already done that, so, uh, punch in the face to you guys and we'll read those reviews

on air as well. Um, we really appreciate you guys. I think that's all. That's it. That's it. All right. Um, until the next podcast, my name's Chris Burris. Charles Lewis. Bye-bye for now. Set me free.