Twitter and the Latest Social Technologies, be carefull Google accounts can screw up your search results DUH - Unknown Secrets of SEO E-Webstyle Number 21

Hi, and welcome to the Unknown Secrets of SEO Podcast. Yes, welcome back, and thank you for joining us for another fun-filled edition of our SEO Podcast. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. And this is Paul Hanson, the sales manager of eWebStyle. So this is going to be our moonwalk podcast. I will ee-hee. And moonwalk all over the place. Why are we moonwalking today? All right, well, you know, Paul, I've got a really important question for you. You're a man of color. Okay. Really? What? That's why you have rhythm. So what is the deal here? This is totally racist. Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson die on the same day. Do you hear anything about Farrah Fawcett? That's a very good point. No. Arguably, my first grown-up moment, if you follow what I'm saying, was with Farrah Fawcett. Farrah Fawcett. Not with Michael Jackson. Yeah, I think Farrah Fawcett's a lot hotter than Michael Jackson. That's a good point. I didn't think about that. And you know the answer? What's that? Because Michael's white, too. Yeah, there you go. There you go. Good point. Very, very good point. She got no press. I didn't even know that until Rob said something about it. Yeah. She got no press. Man, that sucks. Rob's another business partner here in the office. So, yeah, we're, you know, I have to tell you, when Michael Jackson died, I was, you know, sitting around watching MTV last night and, you know, okay, whatever, he was great and everything. And then one of the VJs on MTV pointed out, you know, like a lot of people's, you know, grew up and had some experience or whatever with Michael. Hopefully not in that way. Hopefully not in the way that put them in court. And it dawned on me that one of, you know, I love dancing and I've danced, you know, for my entire life and all types of music. And I always remember, you know, people ask, you know, how did I become a good dancer? Because I'm reasonably good.

And I always tell them that my mother was a ballerina and I grew up, like, dancing in our living room. And the story I always say is, you know, one time our neighbors called the cops on us because the music was so loud and, you know, there I was dancing with my brother and my mom in the living room. Well, we were dancing to Michael Jackson. Oh, weren't you, like, teaching your brother how to moonwalk and teaching your mom? My mom, yeah. And my mom was always interested in learning those kinds of steps and my brother was much better than I and I was reasonable. And so we were always trying to teach my mom those steps. But my first, you know, dance, which has been a passion through my whole life, you know, my first moment in dance with Michael Jackson. I have to be honest, I was a little emotional in the car today. I was kind of bummed. I was really bummed that Michael Jackson died. And I love, I'm a big fan. I actually have a Michael Jackson CD in my car right now. Not because he just died, but I just like Michael Jackson. Which one? I have Off the Wall in my car right now. It's a great CD. I was kind of bummed. You know, he had a lot of issues, you know, going on. He was actually going through court right now. But I just remember Michael Jackson for the music, for Thriller and The Making of Thriller, which I still have on VHS from when I was a kid. Watching The Making of Thriller was an awesome video and an awesome movie. Yeah. So it's a sad day. He was an amazing performer. I have a lot of appreciation for his ability. I remember I saw an interview with him. I think it was with Oprah, where she just kind of said, you know, give us a little something. And he was in this, you know, he was always a very quiet guy. That's what you

keep hearing. But he just busted out into a song and a little dance, just like right there. And it wasn't, you know, a song that he was working, you know, an album or anything. It was just, he just busted out into a freestyle song. That's pretty sweet. With the rhythm and the clicks and dance. And, you know, he was just an amazing performer. And I feel, you know, I feel for, I imagine that he was still in a lot of pain from his childhood. And, you know, no one, I listened to the radio on the way in this morning. No one said anything about, and I always thought it was kind of funny. Maybe it's not so the best thing to say because he did pass, but no one said anything about that Pepsi commercial. No, the hair on fire. The hair on fire, man. I think that's hilarious. But, you know, I just, I was hoping, no one said anything about that. That's a big thing. I remember Michael Jackson before his hair caught on fire. But, oh well. We also like to talk about what we did in the last podcast. And frankly, I have, pull up our notes right there. It was an incredibly good and powerful podcast. No, that wasn't, Chastity Bono wasn't the last one. Splash page. Yeah. We gave away, that's it. Oh, the sister. Here's our teaser. Yeah, we gave away the unknown secret to SEO. So, if you're interested in knowing the unknown secret to SEO, so why are we still doing a podcast? I thought they would have shut us down if we gave all our secrets away. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. We'll keep going. If somebody tells us that we're done, then that'll be great. So, what's on the menu for today? Well, I wanted to talk about, well, this is interesting. I thought, okay, there's, believe it or not, there's actually a tie-in with Michael Jackson and technology and marketing as we move forward. And I thought this, you know, they kind of

alluded to it on MTV last night without this kind of perspective. I had a good conference call last night with a gentleman in Australia who's going to start doing some specific marketing for one of our clients. So, we're partnering with him. So, we're taking care of the web and SEO, and he's going to be taking care of social media and a lot of copywriting and stuff like that and come up with some very powerful programs that should generate some significant revenue, which is always exciting. Yes. And one of the points he made, he knows, and I don't know the guy's name, I didn't write it down, I probably should have, one of the guys who is, you know, is a leader on Twitter. So, he's one of the top, whatever, let's say top ten guys on Twitter. And when I mean top, he's got, like, the largest following. And the point was made that this guy has people pursuing him, you know, and offering him hundreds of thousands of dollars. Not tens, hundreds of thousands of dollars, excuse me, to start promoting their products. Because that's how valuable being number one, being top ten on Twitter is. And I started drawing this parallel when Michael, you know, Michael Jackson, you mentioned Thriller. Yeah. Which, I don't know if that was one of the most expensive, but certainly one of the most memorable videos. Definitely. I think Scream was one of the most expensive. I think that was a seven million dollar video. You know, seven million dollars. They were breaking three hundred dollar vases or vases, whatever you call them, for fun. Wow. I forgot about that. Yeah. For fun. Man, they were three hundred bucks a piece and they were busting like fifty, sixty of them just for fun. Wow. Yeah. Well, so, there's, you know, seven million dollars. This is unheard of. They don't do that even today, you know, and we're, however many years past, prices have gone up. And those vases now cost five hundred dollars and no one's willing to

do that for a video. Michael Jackson was on the forefront of taking advantage of videos. It was, you know, relatively new technology, just like Twitter and Facebook. And he just took it, understood it, and ran with it like a bat out of hell and really understood it and made it happen. And so that's, you know, that's exciting. That has a parallel in Twitter and Facebook and whatever the next Facebook is going to be. You know, there's so many different social media things. There's Dig, there's Delicious, there's Reddit, Stumbled Upon. I love Stumbled Upon. There's Ziggs, Ploxo. Well, Ploxo is just kind of boring. I am a member. We do have to stay on top of social media here. That's kind of our job. We don't market it. We use it to market our business. When we feel that we're world-class experts at that, then we'll actually start marketing specific categories. So right now our focus is web design development, search engine marketing. And we all know that there's all this cross-platform stuff that goes on between social media and search engine marketing. And if we don't all know that, now all you guys know that. So we're working our own on a Facebook page for us, on a Twitter page for us. Is it called a Twitter page? Or just a Twitter account? I don't know. That's a good one. Profile? A twit seat? A tweet? Anyway. Yeah, profile. There we go. We're working on a Twitter profile for us and what we really want to do with that to kind of guide our customers. You know, things that we can do is let them know that there's a podcast, which can drive them to our site. Let them know we're about to do This is Exciting. What are we going to do later today? A video cast. All right. So people get to see our handsome face. And we're also going to try our hand at a viral video. Yeah. That's going to be funny. I think it's going to be funny. And, you

know, sometimes viral videos, they're either really good or lame or whatever. We don't know what it's going to be. That's great. We're going to have a lot of fun with it. Probably by the time this podcast comes out, we'll have that video up somewhere. So if you're listening to this, go ahead and look for that. You might find it. Also, if you have some sort of concept for a viral SEO video that you'd like to see us do, you know, Paul and I are pretty much game for anything. Just about anything. Please do send it to us. Yeah. Please. I'd love to hear it. Send it our direction. We'll certainly give you credit for sending it to us. We'll put the video together. We'll send it out there. So there's, you know, there's an example. We're working with videos. Are we ready to approach a client right now and say, look, you need to be doing videos and we're going to help you? Not yet. Because this is just our first and second video. When we get a good hang of it, when we get a good hang of not just doing the videos but also marketing the videos, then we're going to, you know, that'll become another service that we offer. Yes. Because it's a technology that we're comfortable with and a technology that we are world-class experts at. Oh, now I got a humbling moment now. Okay. So you were with me on this journey, Paul, this week, part of last week. Oh, yeah. This is totally embarrassing and I love to throw embarrassing moments out there so that, one, I never do it again because I don't want to look so foolish. It's kind of like, you know, the monks who whip themselves. Oh, yeah. Except not religious. Not really whipping. Yeah. It's not like that. Not an actual whip. And I also like to put it out there because probably somebody else will make the same mistake and hopefully we can avoid that. Now, we, of course, have lots of Google

accounts here and I have a Google account. And I noticed that what appeared to be on IE, the results for OneSearch, very favorable results for one of our pet projects here, and the results on Firefox and Opera and even Chrome were different. And I was like, and it was all on the Google search engine, but the results were different on the different search engines. And so I start researching why are they different and I'm showing Paul and sometimes they're different, sometimes they're the same, and, you know, this doesn't make sense. And the research out there, you know, says sometimes there's some discrepancies, don't worry about that. But we were looking at a discrepancy of first position on Google to, you know, not even on the third page. And so finally I figured it out. What was the glitch? Why were they so different? So the issue apparently is when you're signed in to Google, it changes the search result listings for you. Now, I kind of knew this, but I hadn't really experienced it, so it wasn't the first thing that popped into my mind. So I am literally saying that, and this is interesting, you can do this maybe for some terms related to pages that you visit, you know, often. Of course, I visit the page that is our pet project on a regular basis. So Google sees the search results, Google sees that that page that I'm signed in and that page is a page I've visited before and thinks that I probably want to see that page again. I'll be flat out honest, and Paul and I discussed this, I totally disagree. So do I. So do I. So it's going to change their search results depending on what accounts, like if you have this particular account in your Google account watching them on analytics, and you search for something related to them, they're going to pull up that account in your search results. And that's, I mean, that's kind of skewed. Well, it's skewed, and it's also, I mean, the

premise is, I think, fundamentally flawed, which is to say, okay, I'm aware of this website already. Yeah. Usually when I'm searching, I'm trying to find new information, right? Maybe I'm trying to go back to old information, but I have my history, unless it's a really bad browser. Yes. And I've never heard of a bad browser that doesn't have a history. So that's not an option. So, you know, it's clouding the results. Again, I'm so tuned in to skipping the first page, I mean, not going past the first page or changing my results, if what I find on the first page is not right. So here I find, and in this case, I actually had two of the websites, and the top ten were not top ten result websites. They were just websites that I'd visited before. And this, you know, I understand, I appreciate what I think they were trying to do. I just think it's totally wrong. Yeah, so do I. When I'm searching again, I'm not looking for what I found before. I'm trying to find new information. So, anyway. What I would say, if you're out there and you have an analytics account and you're signed into it, and for a particular keyword search, if your website comes up first, log out of your account. Yeah, and you literally only have to click the log out button, and immediately it will return the same results for that search as if you weren't logged in. And then you'll see the true position. Yeah. So. You might be saying, oh, I'm on the first page. Well, and here's, I was like, I had all sorts of doubts, and I had all sorts of theories. They were all really brilliant theories. Given my fundamentally flawed premise. You know, theories about, oh, well, maybe they're using different servers and, you know, it's going to propagate because this page is on the first page. I also knew that if that page were on the first page, we should see significant, not minor, not reasonably, not a slight

increase, significant increase in traffic because the search term is so popular, and we weren't seeing that. And so there was an absolute disconnect, which is, of course, the reason I kept pursuing it because if it's on the first page, great. I just let it go, and a month later, we're going to see great results. No, that's not how we attack things here. We want to make sure that everything makes sense. And at the end of the day, you know, we finally figure it out. So if you do have something that's in the first page, you can literally hit the logout button, and it'll log you out and show you the actual results for your website. So hopefully that's helpful. Hopefully you guys don't bump into the same thing. It drove me nuts. I need to do a blog on it. I think that would be a good one. Because I went and did, I actually searched, like, why are my results different? Well, I'm going to put that example out there. So by the time you're hearing this, you'll probably see a blog entry on, you know, why are my results different in different browsers? Because that's what I was assuming. Why are they different when I'm logged in and not logged in? Which is obvious. If you figure that out, then at least you know you're on the right page, unlike me. So. It's a good learning experience for us. Yes, yes. And we're very happy to share with you guys. If you have similar experiences, again, if you've got any questions that you'd like to bring to us, please let us know. We're very happy to put you on air. So, excellent. That was awesome. So what do we got next? Let's talk more social media. I had a question that popped into my head. Really why we want to talk about social media. It's so big right now. If you have seen CNN and you have heard Twitter and Facebook and, you know, all these different social media networking sites and you're

probably thinking, should my business be on a social networking site? Well, first, let's make sure we have a website. A website should be your very first order of business. I would even recommend it before a social media site because you've got to have somewhere to bring all this traffic back to. And you can control the calls to action better on your own website. Yeah, so one, do you have a website first? So what would they do if they needed a website? Well, you could call the best website company ever. Oh, us. Yeah, that's right. We do websites. And that's the truth because I found that on the Internet. And it was the first page result. Never mind that I wrote it. So, yeah, should you be on a social networking site? And this is a, there's a very fine line. Well, you know, while we're talking about that, we did mention we do do websites. We do do SEO. I want to throw out our email address real quick. You can contact us at podcast at e-webstyle.com. That's W-E-B-S-T-Y-L-E.com. You can also give us a call at 713-592-6724. Yes. And we'll be happy to talk to you, answer some questions, keep giving them on. You know, we had a guy, our last podcast, that's what it was. Our last podcast was on video and video submission. And it was thanks to a gentleman by the name of John Pavlikos. And he said the last time I pronounced it was the closest, Pavlikos. And one of the things that I didn't do is actually give, like, props to his company and, you know, tell you guys where you could find him. And I think that's certainly worth doing. So his company is called DRTV Productions. And you can find him at drtvproductions.com. And when we get this podcast transcribed, I'll make sure to put a link in there. John, thanks again. He did put some final comments thanking us. He's actually heard the podcast already because I sent him a direct link immediately.

And he sent some comments back and those will be posted with the transcription of this podcast. So when you're listening to this, it means that our podcast has already been transcribed and is already available on our blog. And you can go on the first, we usually break it up into three segments on our blog entries. And you can go to the comments on the first one and you'll be able to see John's comments. He had some good things to say. And actually, interestingly enough, he liked the idea of transcribing the podcast because it's really, really, very valuable. So I want to just interject that, you know, when you do send comments to us, we're, you know, we're happy to give your company a shout-out. Yeah, I was trying to use some other word here. That's the best way to say it. Yeah, I'm with a shout-out. Everybody gets a shout-out. To my peeps. Thanks again, John. We really appreciate that. So you were talking about social media. I'm going to say yes. You should have social media, but should you have a social media profile just for the sake of having it? To that, I'll say no. You know, and I say it's a fine line because, okay, here's an example. I read an article in, what magazine is this? In Website Magazine. I'm not sure which issue it is. In the July 2009 article. And it was a great article about using social media to boost your business. And this one particular company, And specifically Twitter. Yeah, yeah, specifically Twitter. This one company put on a, Did I say Twitter? Yeah. This one company, a burrito company, actually a Utah-based Mexican restaurant chain called Costa Vida. They sent a one-day offer for a free burrito to its 80 Twitter followers as a part of a promotion to kind of bring business in the door. And it was a huge success. They're thinking, okay, we're going to get 80 free burritos max. What they didn't realize is that they sent

it to their followers, they sent it to their friends, and they sent it to their friends. And more than 2,500 people walked in the door with this free burrito coupon. 2,500? More than 2,500. Wow. They sent it to 80 people. Wow. This was a great example of using social networking. Good thing they didn't have 2,500 people on their Twitter account. Yeah, tell me about it. Tell me about it. They would have, I mean, that would have put them out of business. It was a great example of using a social network to promote your business. And so this is a, yes. Should you have it? Yes. If you can use a social network as a way to promote your business, to offer promotions, to do newsletters, yes, do it. You know, and that really highlights one of the incredibly powerful things of Twitter. One, and I believe this, I didn't start using Facebook until my mobile phone had reasonable access to my Facebook account, right? Because, you know, when I'm at the office, when I'm at my computer, I'm just working hardcore. But when I'm waiting at a bus stop, when I'm, you know, waiting for a free burrito, when, you know, whatever it may be, I've got time to, you know, open up my phone and type in, you know, whatever I'm doing. And same thing with Twitter. It's kind of the success of it and the success of that particular campaign is, and the testament to Twitter is how easy it is to pass information. So now, you know, one of our business partners here, Rob, is an incredibly thrifty guy. And that's awesome. And he'll, you know, if he gets a free offer, we get the free offer. Oh, yes, we definitely do. He emails it to us, even when it doesn't work. Because he emailed us a free offer for a BMW, a USB jump drive, and we get in and we're like, oh, cool, we're going to get one of those. Did it not work? This offer

has already been taken. Ah, that sucks. Because the number that he's already got it. Oh, okay. But he shares. And it's even harder with that. Now, with mobile, you can actually see the Twitter. So if the only venue to promote this was, okay, let's say that burrito company had 83 people on their email list. And they sent this free offer to all 83 people and they forwarded it to all their friends. But it's good the same day only. What's the likelihood of all those people reading their emails in time to adjust their lunch plans and go to the burrito place? Of course. But when it comes to their phone and they get it instantaneously. I know where I'm going to lunch today. Yeah, boom, you're done. That's where lunch is. You don't have to check your email. You don't have to be at your computer. It's the fact that it's on the cell phone, which is really cool. We're finally catching up to places like China who have been glued to their phones for like 10 years. And we think we're this hotbed of technology, but they're so much further ahead in terms of using it in these social ways. So, yeah, I think that's a great testament to Twitter and that technology. And these guys, they built a social profile and they're actually using it. They're sending things to their customers, sending newsletters, sending free offers. And that's when I say yes, it's a great idea to use a social network. What about someone that wants to do a social network but doesn't have time to be on it? I guess I don't want to say no, don't do it. But I think when it comes to social networking, you've got to stay relevant. You've got to stay current. Yeah, you have to be social. You have to, if you're going to be on Twitter, let's tweet something. Like if twit, whatever. Yeah. You've got to tweet. Yeah. You know, if you want people to follow you, then you have to tweet.

If you want people to follow your business, you need to tweet. If you want people to follow your Facebook, And it needs to be, you know, it can't be I'm going to lunch. Yeah, exactly. You know, so it has to also be relevant. Which, you know, if you're passionate about your business, that shouldn't be hard at all. There should be no problem with that. It's just, you know, if you're not really, you know, keyed in with Twitter, then you can end up, you know, you'll lose audience that way as well. Exactly. And that's what I'm saying. Like you will, if you're not on it, you're going to lose your audience. Your Facebook, your Twitter, your dig. If you're not staying on it, doing things with it, sending cool links and articles and offering free stuff, you're going to lose your following and they'll just go with someone else. So if you're not, I would say if you're not going to be on it, find someone, find a company to help you do it. You probably want to do Facebook, but Twitter is so much more interactive you probably don't want to do Twitter. Yeah, exactly. So you can have a static Facebook. But remember, in terms of having a static presence online, you should already have that. That's your website. I.e., a website. Exactly. So if your intention is, look, I'm a small business. I don't really have time to do this whole online thing. I need just a static presence because I got to be, you know, I got to get back to sales and work and product and service, then you got a website. You need to have a website. That's kind of the, what it's become is now this is the standard. The bog standard is you have to have a website. And if you have the capability and the infrastructure to do it, then you have Facebook and Twitter and you actually work those mediums so that you can support your business. Yeah. So those

are just great, great marketing tools. You know, there's no way we can talk about social media without talking about hammer pants. It goes one and the same. And you introduced me to this. Hammer pants dance. Hammer pants dance, yeah. If you go onto YouTube and type in hammer pants, and I don't know. We don't know if the, do we know if the guy, the store is called Live on Sunset, and it must have been 50, 80, 50, at least. It's probably 50 people in, isn't it, like gold LeMay pants? These gold MC Hammer pants, and I mean shiny gold, like screaming gold. So you've got a bunch of, imagine, let me paint the scene before you actually go and watch it. You've got a bunch of shoppers in this Live on Sunset strip store, or Live on Sunset may be the store name, and they're always just all chilling, buying stuff. And I think over the internal speakers comes MC Hammer's, Can't touch this. Can't touch this. No, no, no, no. And 50 people in gold LeMay pants come running in the door and start dancing, and they were pretty good. They were. They're running and screaming, yeah! And they all, Someone will get up like on the, On the tables. On the tables, and they're all dancing. They're dancing in sync. And then, you know, stop, and they all stick their hand out. They do like a five-second count, and then they all go running out. And they all run out the door. Now, this is some brilliant marketing. I thought it was a great marketing tool because it was, I mean, one, it was funny, and that was something that Luis Carlos sent to me. I sent to you. I sent to my friends. My wife has seen it. Yeah, and now it gets spread out. And to me, that was an awesome way this guy used YouTube to market his website with a viral video. I thought it was awesome. Now, should everybody run

out and do a hammer pants dance? Video? No. Not quite. You don't want to see me in gold hammer pants. I don't want to see me in hammer pants. You know what? Maybe they do. We are doing a video podcast now. I'm going to have to get a hell of a lot of emails for some requests or put on some gold hammer pants. Did you hear that? All we need is five emails of requests to see Paul in gold LeMay hammer pants. I don't know if LeMay is right. It just sounds cool. It sounds funny. Gold LeMay hammer pants. And we'll see it. And doing the hammer dance. Yeah, I think we owe it to our audience and fans and groupies. I don't think they're groupies. We're not at that level yet. But we do have a whole lot of fun. We are at the end of our podcast. So let's see. Let's just kind of recap. MJ was on top of technology just like the current people are on top of, say, Twitter and Facebook. It's cool. They're using it the right way. It's interesting and it's sad that Michael Jackson has passed. I'm an idiot. And I've helped you to not be an idiot. And, yeah, probably your company should be on Facebook. And maybe your company should be on Twitter. That depends entirely on what kind of effort you're able to look to spend. And go see some Gold LeMay hammer pants. Go see some hammer pants. Hammer pants video or hammer pants dance on YouTube. And send five. We need five emails from people. And we'll get Paul in some Gold LeMay. I'll even buy them. Hell, I'll make them. I was about to say, I don't know where we can buy them. Hey, real quick before we go. I've read this article. If you're interested in social sites, here's where I found a great article. If you Google 50 social sites that every business needs a presence on and then make your own judgment from there. But it's just a

great way to find a ton of social sites. In fact, I saw one that I hadn't even seen. I saw about 45 that I hadn't even heard of. Let's see, 50, 45. So you're aware of five of them. Yeah. I'm being liberal with that. But it was a cool article. I got a lot out of it. And so check it out. Excellent. Well, that's our podcast for now. Until our next podcast, this is Chris Burris. And this is Paul Hanson. And we got Luis Carlos here. Say hello, Luis. What's up, guys? All right. And that's Luis Carlos. So bye-bye for now. Bye, guys.