Using the Microsoft SEO toolkit - Unknown Secrets of SEO E-Webstyle Number 50

Hi, and welcome to the Unknown Secrets of SEO Podcast. Hi, welcome back to our Unknown Secrets of SEO Podcast. Thank you for joining us. We have another fun-filled edition and informative podcast for you today. You are listening to and potentially watching the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes, and don't you forget it. That's what's up. This is podcast number 50. As with every podcast, we like to cover a little bit of information about the previous podcast. Last time, we talked about CMS SEO. That'll work. CMS is a content management solution, and we talked about different things that you should have in your content management solution, actually, system, so that you can actually perform good search engine optimization. And it's interesting. After that, I actually met a gentleman on this Tuesday, and we were actually talking about the different nuances of different CMS systems, and what you can and can't do in terms of SEO with those. Exciting conversation. Yeah. CMS? I can't say that it was as much fun as the podcast. Speaking of which, I haven't even shown you this. This is another review on iTunes. That's what's up, man. Thanks, guys. Man, you guys are just showing up and performing. We really appreciate that. Here it is. It's from John Brownkey. So it may be John Brown from Kentucky, possibly. I don't know. John, if you're listening to this, go ahead and send us your information. We'd love to give you some link love. We're all about that. And here's what he says. I have been listening now for a few months, and I really enjoy the podcast. I find I learn at least one thing. Only one thing per episode? One thing per episode. All right. We'll take it. We'll take it. We can do better than that. Come on. John, this one learned too. They are fun and entertaining as well as educational. And I don't know if he put that in a particular order. I look forward to a new episode. Awesome. Thank you so much, John. We really appreciate

that. We really actually appreciate those people who do stalk us. Yes. On Facebook, Twitter. Ustream. Ustream. Oh, we have a Ustream follower. Nicholas Fabin. Nicholas Fabin. I found him a couple weeks ago. I meant to shout out to you, Nicholas. All right. Thanks. He's one of the followers on Ustream. Cool. Hey, Nicholas. How you doing? So if you want to stalk us on Twitter, you just need to go to twitter.com slash ewebstyle. If you want to stalk us on Facebook, the easiest way to find us is to go to ewebstyle.com slash Facebook. That takes you to our company Facebook page. There's probably a group. It's not a group, though. But you can become a fan on that page. Okay. The best way to find the Ustream is to go to ewebstyle.com slash Ustream. Our goal is to actually start our podcast and our broadcast at 915 Central Standard Time. We've been running a little late. I just realized my clock on my computer in my office is odd. It's wrong. So, yeah. We're going to have to call the IT guys on that one. We also have a YouTube account, and I think I promised you last time that I was going to give you a link for that. It's not up yet, but it's going to be e-webstyle.com slash YouTube, and that will take you directly to our YouTube page, and you'll be able to look up. We cut up this podcast in little pieces. If you don't really want to sit and watch it on Ustream, you can do that. Are we approaching the Gino time limit? One of the things I was thinking last night, I was going to bed and really preparing for this podcast, because we do, well, let's not lie. We don't really. All right. But I was thinking last night. Well, people give us awesome suggestions about what to talk about, which is very appreciated. So, keep your emails coming, and you can email us at podcast at e-webstyle.com. We'll get those, and we'll include them on the

air if we think they're relevant. We're getting more and more. You know, we're just, this is, it's awesome. You go look at the maps of where people are listening to our podcast. It is all around the world. We really appreciate, we really appreciate all of you. Remember, we had somebody write in, and they said, well, you guys are pretty funny for Americans. For Americans. John, I think, in West Australia, Western Australia, which apparently is like a province. So, I was thinking, hey, if we got that right, John, send us like a link to what you consider like classic Australian humor, right? And I'm hoping it's not like Yahoo serious about Einstein, because I'm not doing my hair like that. That's just not going to happen. But if you send that, maybe we'll have like an Australian humor day. Our attempt at an Australian humor day. Of course, the Americans won't understand any of it, because they're all so slow. I mean, we're all so slow. But, you know, it might be fun. So, plus, you know, I like to just learn different humors and different music and everything international. It's very cool. The next thing, you know, I wrote this down, and I can't remember, like, we came up with it. It's absolutely brilliant. Perception protection. I do remember that. Perception protection. And it's a great phrase. And when we remember what it means, well, kind of like brand management. Well, yeah, I think it was along the lines of, you know, if somebody has a website out there and they've got some bad reviews, you need that perception protection, and there are companies out there that can help you with that. You know, we've got lots of ideas on that if you're interested in having a conversation about perception protection. And the more that websites like Yelp and CitySearch become popular, the more you're going to need that. The larger your website grows. And people want to see, oh, they're going to want to write reviews about you, and that affects the perception of

your company and your website. So that's going to become ever increasingly important as the web grows. And I just want to be clear. We're not suggesting that if you pay us, we can get a review, a bad review off. Well, you can pay me, and I'll write you whatever you want. Seriously. And that's phansen at e-webstyle.com. Send checks to, you want them actually made out to you this time? Made out to me. That's funny. You've got to listen to a previous podcast. All right. So did you, I know you were researching. Did you find any news? I did. No, I didn't find any news today. There's nothing happened. Don't worry. Nothing ever happened to any news today. I actually got news. This is pretty interesting. JetBlue used Twitter to give away JetBlue, the airlines. They used Twitter to give away 1,000 tickets in New York. So they just put the announcement out there, and there was a location, and everybody showed up there. So if you're thinking about getting a Twitter account, if JetBlue does it, I don't even know what that means, but you should have one. Panda Express did that. Rob said that to us. That actually came from a Twitter. Oh, I remember. That came from a Twitter feed. I was poking around and actually found that. Panda Express gave some free food away last Wednesday. So one of the guys in the office sent an email to everyone else in the office saying, hey, go get free food at Panda Express. Did we ever figure out where? I actually drove by one yesterday because I was way down south, but there's nothing close. Yeah, there's not one close to here. Well, there's one at I-10. But somebody let me know if they went and tried the honey walnut chicken. That sounds kind of good. They put something that good. Something else that's in the news, Carlos Slim is now the richest man on the planet. That's what's up. Yeah, Carlos Slim, he's a media mogul in Mexico. And it kind of

begs the question, is he going to do like what Bill Gates does? Oh, that's good. Give all his money away. Well, he won by default, though, because Bill keeps giving all of his money. If you give away half your fortune, that shouldn't count. Yeah, it doesn't count, man. That's true, though. I didn't even think about that. He gave some more Bill Gates away not too long ago. That's awesome. That's interesting. And there was just a quick little note. I thought it was pretty interesting about information exhibitionism. I have no idea what that is. It sounds dirty, though, so we should talk about it. It was just making the point that with Google coming out with buzz and, you know, there were a lot of people making a hoopla about all this information being shared so readily. And they were uncomfortable and all of these things. And that hoopla died so quickly. And people were so in favor of buzz that now there's, like, a movement against the movement. They're like, quit talking to us about, you know, all this privacy concerns. We're used to it because we've had Facebook accounts for years now. We're used to having that information just go readily and rambitly everywhere. So that would be information exhibitionism. So if you don't like it, don't get on the Internet. Hey, Marty, how's there? What's up, Marty? What's up? Say hello to the people. Hello, everybody. So, and there is the personification of information exhibitionism right there. That's right. We just put them on the Internet without his permission. That's right. Ta-ta. We don't have to sign any documents for that. Why? So last time you spoke about Microsoft SEO Toolkit. It's Darren Bowie of DarrenBowie.eu, I believe. So far, he's probably put us to work the most. For real. They're like, come on, you're a brother of breaking. Oh, yeah. He was a break. When you think about Microsoft SEO Toolkit, I was like, thanks. I'm glad you asked that because I have no idea what that is. Apparently, Microsoft has an

SEO Toolkit you can download and you can enter in a URL. It will give you information about that particular website. One thing I do not like about it is that it requires you to download something called the Microsoft IIS Website Platform. So you have to download this first and then you have to download the actual toolkit to use it. And I don't use the ISS web platform. So I didn't really like that. And basically, I feel like it's a really good toolkit and it puts things together that I found on, whatchamacallit, Google Analytics, things that you can find on, like, Google Analytics, things you can find on other web development platforms. And it kind of puts them together in a cool little area. I think it's really good. I think it's very, very detailed. So it's another one of those things, like analytics, where you can spend a buttload of time on and probably too much time on it if you want. I'm going to go over a couple of different things. But overall, I felt it was pretty good. And I got some pretty good. I got some good reviews and I got some that it's like, oh, it's kind of, it's not as good as Google's because Google actually has a website optimizer. And you can Google Google Website Optimizer and it'll be one of the first things that comes up. All right. Not the person? Honestly, I don't even know. Hey, Google, you need a little bit of SEO on your. I think that's the second one because that's the one I clicked on. Give us a call. You can do a few different things. And I'm going to talk about the website analysis part of it now. No, this is not like the website analysis that we give. It's something a little, it's a little different. It doesn't go into, it doesn't cover the same things, but they're both really good. You can not only create a website analysis. Wait, wait, wait, wait, we do an analysis? We do a free

website analysis. And it's free. It's still free. And it is free. Wow. For the time being, because y'all keep putting me to work, I'm going to start charging y'all here in a minute. Isn't that like a five point or? It's a six point website analysis where we will cover things like links. I'm not going to give them all out. I'm just going to let you fill it out and I will return it to you. So the way to do that, to get that free analysis is just go to our website, ewebstyle.com. And then you'll see in the upper right, you'll see SEO. Go ahead and click SEO. And I think there's a form right there or there's a button shortly there. A link to it. Oh, yeah. And then you fill it out and just give us, hey, what's your website, what's your email, what's your phone number? And send it to us and we will get it back to you within a reasonable amount of time, depending on how many we get. So load it up and we're getting and we're definitely getting more. So I tell people when I when I get them, I say, hey, thanks for this request. We're getting busy, so I can't get this to you tomorrow like I usually do. But I want you will have it within a few days so that you can do a few things on the toolkit. You can get asked for a website analysis. You can build a sitemap and you can also manage the content of your robot.txt file, which is like 30 podcasts ago. I'm going to talk about just the website analysis. So you download the ISS platform, you download the SEO toolkit and then you enter in your URL and then it will spider your URL just like a search engine would, a search engine robot would. And it'll give you back all this information. And if you look down the left hand side, there's a bunch of little tabs and there's some tabs for links. There's a

tab for validations, a tab for content, a tab for performance. And I'll give you like some quick information about what it is. You can actually say, hey, I want you to spider my whole URL. I want you to go 10 pages deep. And that's a little bit more probably than I should cover. But if you look at your links and your validations, all right, so it'll tell you how many links your website has. Now, this is why I thought it was cool because Google does not give you that information anymore. If you go back a couple more podcasts, it won't give you inbound links. So this will find, we thought Google stole our links. That's what we would like. Well, they did. We split it up and our links are all gone. I'm like, Google stole our links. It took all of our links. But they have our links, but they're just not displaying them. Now, with the Microsoft SEO Toolkit, it will tell you how many links you have on your site. And it doesn't use the same thing. It doesn't use Google to find it. Well, obviously not because they're a competitor. And because it actually shows you links. Yeah, exactly. So it'll tell you how many links you have. It'll tell you if there's any issues or problems with any links that are coming through or things you should watch out for. It'll tell you about validations. What I thought was cool was that you can actually create your own validations on here. It'll tell you about specific validations. Like you have an H1 tag that's missing. Excuse me. Violations. Violations. Violations. You validate by displaying the violation. Like you have a header tag missing. Your image tag doesn't have an alt tag. Like your link text, your anchor text is not relevant to what it's linking to. It'll tell you all the thing validations like that. There is a little certain irony in getting, you know, HTML validation information from Microsoft, who is arguably one of the, you know, in their

browsers, the ones that don't follow the HTML. Specification to a T. A little irony there, but yeah. But I thought this was really cool about links and violations and potential violations. And it'll separate your violations into like green, yellow. Like green is kind of okay. Yellow, like, eh, you know, you might want to watch it. Red is like, you have a serious issue. You need to watch that. It'll tell you the page. There's a validations tab. It'll tell you the pages with the most validations. You click on that particular page and it'll list them all for you. I don't even know if you want to read all of that. And this is all from an SEO perspective, right? So you may not care that an underlying tag is dead, but if you're missing a header tag, you know. And you can set that up. You can say, hey, I want to check this. You can set up your own validations. And whenever this happens, I want you to notify me. It might just be something that's particularly your website that you don't want there. I thought that was really cool that you can customize it. What else? Oh, here's another cool thing. It will explain your violation errors in plain English. Ooh. Because, like, I've seen violations before and I really don't know what they mean. Each one missing? Yeah. And I can actually go through these things and read them. And it gives them, like, a couple sentences. Hey, this is exactly what's wrong. And I didn't see where it would tell you where to find it. Actually, no, it didn't tell you where to find it. It just took me a while to find that. But it will also give you, like, a recommended fix to fix this particular violation. And I was like, okay, that's pretty cool. Because not everyone that downloads this might be, you know, understanding how to read code. Me. Like, you know, I can kind of figure it out. But if I went and I go through this,

I'm like, I don't know what that means. Because I don't read code like a coder or a programmer does. So I thought that was really cool for someone that just want to download it and they can actually, you know, walk you through exactly how to fix some stuff. Kind of the same vein as this podcast. You know, let us, you know, they're giving you the information so that if you really want to take care of it yourself, which we don't necessarily recommend and we understand people are going to do that, then they're giving you the tools to do that. Because this can be really, really complicated. Like, you know, you've got to understand reading code and, like, what code is, like, right and what's, like, questionable code. You know, even some of those things I'm still kind of learning on. Another thing that I thought was cool was there's a content tab that will tell you about the pages of content in your website. And it'll check for duplicate content, which is something that we probably had, like, five or six podcasts on out of our 50. It'll check for duplicate content, duplicate titles, links, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I thought that was really cool. And then there was a performance tab. And it'll say, this is your performance of all of these pages. And it'll say, this page is loading slowly. This page is loading quickly. Here's why this page is loading slowly. And possibly give you some recommendations on, okay, maybe you have too many images or maybe you're hosting a large file or a large audio file on this particular page. It takes a while to load. And so I thought that was really cool. And then that's pretty much it that I went over for website analysis part. There's also a sitemap part of the Google, excuse me, the Microsoft SEO Toolkit and a Manager Robot TXT part. And those are also very important, but I'm not going to cover those all in today. But I thought it

was really cool. And that's from Darren Bowie. Thanks, Darren. Darren Bowie at DarrenBowie.eu. .eu. That's his website. And he asked me about it. I said, hey, Darren, next week we're going to give some info on the Microsoft SEO Toolkit. And if anybody has any particular experience, want to make some comments, we'd love to put those on air here. That was another thing I was thinking last night. The phrase on air. Right? Does that mean we're on air? Well, it's like, because it used to be the radio through the air, right? And it just totally doesn't align. So we'll put it on the internet? We'll put it on the wire. We'll put it on the wire. There you go. We'll put your information out there without your permission. Readily. Just send it to us. No, I tell everyone, if they send an email, I say, I'm going to give you some link love. I'm going to throw you out on the podcast. So don't sue us. Please. So, yeah, I have no idea what I was saying. You know what? Here's one thing that I was thinking. You know, this is podcast 50. Okay. We've been doing this quite a bit more than a year, right? I mean, we're about at a year and four months. Yeah. I don't feel like we've missed that many. How come we haven't hit 52, podcast 52? We do it once a week. And we had a couple podcasts where we did two at a time. Anyway. Oh, that's a good question. I have no idea. Did we lose some podcasts anywhere? I don't know. Anyway, this is podcast number 50. We are the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. On the internet. Anywhere. On the wire. On the wire. On the wire. So, that's great information. We'll have to check that out to spend a little bit more time with it. We've got tools that do everything that that does already, and it's always good to have other tools available. The big thing that I saw is that it

takes tools that you can find that I've seen in a bunch of different places, and it kind of puts them together on one particular area. Like, some of these things I've seen on Google Analytics. Some of them I've seen just like I know that are on like code validation and violation. You can do on your web design software, and so I was like, it kind of puts them together in a really cool one little area. And it's free. Yeah, and it's free. Google also has one, and it's kind of pretty much the, I don't want to say pretty much the same, but it does have some of the same and similar features. And just from out of habit, I tend to gravitate towards Google's products just because. Just because, man. And there's really no reason. I have no reason to explain it. We actually have a good reason now to even look, to utilize it, and that's the links, you know, because you can't get that information from Google anymore. Just like they've started hiding the PR rating from the Webmaster Toolkit, which is a good podcast. You should go back and look that one up, where you have the ability to modify and watch things that are going on on your website from Google Webmaster. Wow, I'm just having problems here. Google Webmaster Toolkit. So, yeah, that's a great tool. What else? In the vein, you had mentioned that we were going to talk about that. So, I just pulled up something. I found an article. It's a little old, and it's talking about Microsoft Live, but we know most of that's going to apply now to Bing. And so, I thought I'd just go. It's just five quick little points, and we could kind of bring them up and elaborate on a couple of them. We really only have about five more minutes. So, let's go ahead and knock this out. From Microsoft's perception, and this is what it takes to get on the first page, and this is actually a Microsoft document.

So, this isn't us pontificating about what we think Google finds valuable. This is Microsoft's document saying, look, this is what's valuable. And the author of this article makes the point that this is James' SEO blog by James Harrison. He makes the point that Bing, or at that point, Live, and now Bing has always been a little bit easier to get on the first page. And I think we find that to be the truth. We really target Google, and typically Yahoo and Bing, or now Bing, whoo, fall in line at the same, you know, they just end up following the same path that Google does. Sometimes a little quicker, actually. You'll end up earlier on those search engines. Microsoft says, let's just blow through these, because most of these we've heard before, but this is just an actual Microsoft document. Good content is number one for Microsoft. We've always talked about, you know, in real estate, it's location, location, location. In SEO, it's keyword, keyword, keyword, and immediately followed by that is content. Content is king. Content is king. Set up a logical URL website structure. So, this is about navigation. This also really brings in some fundamental CVO principles. CVO is Search Engine Visitor Optimization. That's something that we focus here on a regular basis. And it's, okay, once they've come to your website, what are they going to do? What are you going to have them do? How are you going to convert them into a customer or somebody who subscribes to your newsletter? Or what are they going to do? And a key part of that is, if they're looking for some information that you're providing, you've got to make it easy. You know, they can't have to, you know, you don't want them to click the home button from whatever way they got in so that they can get to, you know, whatever, the blue one-armed widgets page. You know, you want to make, if that's why you think they got there, that blue one-armed widgets page has to be, you know,

readily available. So, that's part of having a logical URL structure. I love this one. Microsoft recommends that you embrace an HTML standard. And it actually says un-HTML standard. Un-HTML standard. I don't, apparently there's multiple ones and Microsoft has chosen one. And you should choose one as well. Like, what else would you choose? I really... Well, the fact that it's un, like, I don't know what that means. Like, I don't know there was another option, like... Well, and he does go on and he mentions, okay, JavaScript, right? So, there's some issues with whenever we do JavaScript. And, you know, JavaScript really helps for some nice pull-down menus and stuff. Although, there are other ways to do it. You know, make sure you have an HTML pathway on the website. And a lot of people do that. And we typically do that at the bottom of the page. So, if you've got either a Flash or a JavaScript and you're not 100% sure that the search engine spiders can actually crawl it, then you want to make sure you have a simple text menu structure on the bottom of the page. Oh, okay. I can answer my own question. I said, what else is a way to do it? Flash would be another way, right? Yeah, you're right. You're right. If you're still doing Flash, stop listening to the podcast. At this point, I just, like... If you're building websites entirely of Flash, just stop. Dude, I can't help you no more. Yeah, I had a new acquaintance and he's a photographer and his website is absolutely beautiful. And we started talking about, you know, what we do and I do SEO and I looked at his website. I'm like, well, you just, you need to change it. You need to change your entire website or you need to have parent pages or you need, you know, because Google just can't parse. Well, we say Google, search engines just can't parse Flash. Maybe they'll get there. Maybe they're trying to get there. And right now, it's just

not happening. So, we do recommend, don't take us wrong, we typically incorporate Flash components and basically every website we do. But we never do a... And literally, I'm using the word never do a website entirely in Flash. Now, if we had a customer who came to us and said, that's what I want. Yeah, we'll do it. We would, you know, in a professional way, urge them a lot not to and then we would do it for them. Because, you know, the customer is always right, even when they're wrong. MSN says, so Microsoft says, you've got to submit your content, don't just let people find you. We don't find that to be the case and we still put together sitemaps and we still submit them. What we really find is just by adding them to our portfolio, they end up getting, you know, getting traffic and the spiders crawl them. Or the crawlers spider them. I don't know which way that goes. And no keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing. Wow, this is a little older article because you don't even hear that that much anymore. And in case you're wondering, keyword stuffing is where you, you know, you take your target keywords and you put it way too much in an article. So that it becomes obvious that you're keyword stuffing. And none of the search engines appreciate that. You really want to stay away from that actually borderline black hat technique. And people know it. Like, I've read pages before and I'm like, okay, I get the point. You're a plumber. Duh. Like, all right. So what I've seen around the internet is, you know, you want to stick between 1 to 3% keyword density. So for every 100 words of text, you want to have your keyword 1 to 3 times per 100 words. John Brown, did you get that? That's your one piece of information today. There you go, John. 1 to 3%. Was that right? 1 to 3% keyword density. You owe me a dollar. First one's free. I'll see if I can

find another one. But, yeah, so you want to stick there and you want to provide value. You know, we've always said to provide value to what you're doing. Provide value to the customer. Don't just write something stupid with your keywords all over it. You know, if I'm going to read this, teach me something, you know. Provide value to the visitor. Give back. Like we do with our SEO podcast. Give back. Yeah. It's a good message. Give back. Good message. Give back. Give often. Well, you are listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. This is the end of Podcast 50. We can't explain why we've been doing it for more than a year and we're only on 50. Well, we probably could, but we're not going to. Thank you guys for listening. Thank you, whoever's out there, for watching. Please remember, send us information. Just go in, create an iTunes account, and submit a review. We really appreciate that. You know, we really think it, you know, it makes us, it actually really makes us feel really good. You know, that we understand. We remember when we didn't have any listeners. Yeah. And we were just telling each other stupid jokes. We were just talking, we were just talking to the wire. All right. Thank you guys so much for listening. My name is Chris Perez. This is Paul Haze. Bye-bye for now. Mr. Eyebrow House.