Webmaster Tools and SEO - #seopdocast 116

Hi, and welcome to the SEO podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. Yeah. Welcome back to another fun, I think I did. Welcome back to another fun field edition. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. I'm Charles Lewis, your internet marketing specialist here. How you doing? We're, man, we got a lot of information to cover. We got an exciting show. As usual, we want to talk about what we talked about last time. We have a tip from last time. That tip is include videos in your pages and posts. Yeah. Why? It has the highest impact on universal search. And if you're wondering what universal search is, then you need to go back and listen to podcast number 115, because we talk about universal search there and in a bunch of other places, actually. We love it when you guys stalk us. You can stalk us at twitter.com slash eWebStyle, facebook.com slash eWebStyle, youtube.com slash eWebStyle. You can send us an email at podcast at eWebStyle.com. With a dash between the e and the e. Yeah, e-WebStyle. Let's see. What do we got? We got reviews. We got news. What do we want to do first? Let's get some reviews. Let's do the tweet first and then the review. Yeah, we'll do this tweet. So I found this tweet. I don't remember how old it is. It's pretty cool, though. It says, just found you guys and I've been trying to catch up on old podcasts. Remember when you used to say, send a tweet and bling. Hmm. Wow. I forget the bling. I remember bing. That was always good. And then our review. This was on iTunes. We love it when you go to iTunes, create an account. In fact, the last review said, hey, look, if you're listening and you're getting any information from these guys, you know, at least do what they're asking. Go to iTunes, create an account, post a review, and then let us know so that we can give you a punch in the face. Yeah, four steps, less than

two minutes. Go ahead, Let. Great title is, great podcast could be longer. Four stars again, you know. Yeah, we'd like to get five. I enjoy the podcast. I'm trying to get a job in SEO and social media marketing. I have a good time listening to everyone having a good time. I would like some interviews with other experts in the industry. Not undermining your authority in the subject. Yeah, I don't know, man. I don't know. What, you think we're not good enough? Yeah. But a different voice would be nice. I'm going to just pause right there. We are reactive. I can change my voice. What kind of voice do you want to know? We are reactive to all of the needs of our clients. So we will do a old lady voice for the rest of this show. That's an old lady. Is it? Did that sound like a hip teenage girl? No, I didn't sound like that. Dude, old man. I'm going to keep that to myself. Okay. We actually are going to interview somebody on our next podcast. So make sure you tune in for that. Continuing with the review. Also on the technical side, some sort of compressor limiter on the microphone would be great. Some of the real quiet. Some of you are really quiet. Others are louder. When I turn up the headphones to hear the quiet ones, someone will laugh really loud and kill my ears. We're really, we are sorry. We're glad that we're having a good time and laughing. We're sorry that's killing your ears. We have kind of in process. We're going to work on getting some better mics. Yeah, 1-800-HOUR-BAD. Our-BAD. 1-800-DONATE-SOME-MICS. Keep up the good work. I'm looking forward to more punches in the face and blank stares. So, yeah, that was good. That was from Kevin Noreen. And he didn't give us any more information. Maybe he'll go to facebook.com slash you web style. Give us his website. Although he says he's looking for a job. Yeah, hit us up, Kevin, man. And we'd

like to, you know, show you some link love and follow you on Twitter and all that. Appreciate the review, too. All right. So, a little bit of news. We've got, hey, don't forget. I have to write this down because sometimes I forget. But you can't forget. We are your friendly. That's how you write it down. Yeah, you write it down. That's how you don't forget. We are your friendly local top position snatchers where our mantra is, don't be a douche. Don't be a douche. And we, I want to mention this time, we are doing another podcast. It's actually a video podcast also. Although this podcast that you're listening to right now is primarily audio. The video is available. You can get the video at our YouTube page. You can get the video at our YouTube. That's slash e-webs though. Exactly. You're all over that. And on our Ustream page. We have another podcast on our Ustream page. It is our servo, unknown secrets to Civo. I'm in like motor mode. Search engine visitor optimization. Basically, what do people do when they land to your site? Do they bounce or do they take action? Do they convert? Do they convert? And so the whole purpose of that podcast is to help you figure out what you can do to your site to turn traffic into paying clients. So how does that work? It sounds like it would be great. I'd love to have an analysis of my website. How would I do that? Go to e-webs.com. Pretty simple. Right column. There's a form. Give me your name. You email your phone. Put your web address in there. Fill out the code. Hit submit. I'll get this email personally. Chris will get it. And when we do our podcast, we'll review your site live. And that's the Unknown Secrets of Search Website Analysis podcast. Yeah. It's not an official podcast, so you do need to go to the Ustream page and find it over there. We've got a lot of good responses from the analysis that we

have done. The analysis. Is it? I don't need to know. We're going to have to look that up. Somebody Google that somewhere. Someone. And we've gotten some great response. So, we have a lot of fun with it. We're not, like, brutal. We're not trying to hurt anybody's opinion. If it's a really well-done website, we point out what's actually good about it. Yeah. So that maybe you can even focus on that a little bit more. And we've got some great feedback from... A lot of great feedback. The New York Park guy wrote back. Central Park. Central Park guy. 70% increase in video watches, wasn't it? Yeah. Yeah. For something we did. I mean, and truthfully, it's a great deal. If you're a business owner and you just want some feedback on your site, fill it out. It's not, you know, heavily sales pitched. We're not, you know, call us, call us, call us. Although, if you do, great. You know, but that's not really the focus. The focus is to help you, really. Exactly. We love giving back to the web community. All right. A little bit of news. I'll go... I'll blow through this because we're time... You know, Gino time limit is... Pushing it. Pushing it. Apple topples Nokia as largest smartphone provider. I thought that was an interesting thing of note. Apple topple Nokia. So Nokia used to be, because they had so many, and especially in foreign countries, and remember Apple, you know, China has four times the population and two stores. So, by the way, there's actually three. One of them is a fake store. I was reading, like, they have fake Apple stores in China. At least one. It's called Cran Apple. Cran Apple. Who was the dude who... Johnny Appleseed. He's spreading little Apple stores everywhere. That's how the story's going to change, right? There was Johnny Appleseed. And he realized that there were no... There was not enough ways for people to purchase apples. So he started... All right. This, I thought, was cool. Clearwire, you know, the

wireless web, wireless internet provider. They're going to join up and utilize the LTE Advanced Ready technology. So they've already got 4G. They're going to go to LTE Advanced Ready. Guess what download speeds this wireless connection gets? It sounds like a loaded question. Only because... I'll give you a guess, but then I'll tell you why I say that. My guess is probably over 100. Yeah. Good guess. Okay, what's the number? 120. All right, stop that. 120 MIPS download. Like, offices don't have 120 MIPS download, and you can get it on your wireless communications. The only thing is, I know a few people with that, and they all complain that it's too slow. Oh, really? Yeah. Well, maybe that's related to the device they use. I mean, that's a possibility, right? Yeah, it's a strong possibility. Yeah. And then the other news today is Google Crawl. So this is really spot on, right, what we do. It's SEO related. You know, have you ever finished a website? And this is, you know, less true in our situation. When we finish a website, we usually add them to our portfolio. Google indexes our portfolio or crawls our portfolio again. And then, boom, that website shows up in the index. If you just finish a website and you don't have a portfolio or you don't have a page that's already been indexed, how do you get indexed? You submit it. You submit it. The old way you used to be able to go, and you still can't. I don't want to say you used to be able to. You go to Google Webmaster Tools, log in, submit your URL, right, over and over and over again. And so now they've released several new ways to do that. You were talking about crawl. Yeah. In Google Webmaster Tools, you can also create a sitemap and submit the whole sitemap, which has a lot of value. And now Google's come out with Google Crawl, which is apparently available in Webmaster Tools somewhere. We haven't looked to try and find it yet.

Excuse me. They do recommend using sitemaps. Yeah. There is just public requests in general. So, you know, I tend to use that sometimes if I don't feel like logging into Webmaster Tools and, you know, going through that whole process. It's just like, ah, let me just resubmit this particular URL. And so what you want to make sure you do, I mean, for all webmasters out there or people doing SEO especially, you know, make sure you have your sitemap on your site. Go ahead and submit your HTML map. Submit your XML map. Submit to Google Crawl. You know, all of this stuff will probably take you, you know, less than a day to do. So you might as well do it. And this is an example of where maybe you've got latest and greatest news with SEO and you're going to get some sort of coup. That's not the right term. There's a newspaper term where you actually get, you're the first one to report it. Oh, breaking news. Breaking news. There's some other. Yeah, something else. Almost exclusive, but it's still not exclusive. Anyway, so when you log into Webmaster Tools, you know, you've already defined your website in Webmaster Tools typically. And you can actually submit, it allows you to submit one page in that domain. So, again, if you updated that page and you want that information out there quickly, you think people might be searching for it soon or immediately, then, you know, that's a great way to make sure that that happens really quickly. Yes, and one more thing about the crawl. Google, Google, I say Google. Google. Grr. Google did put a limit on there. Like 50 submissions. The angrier, meaner twin of Google. Grrugle. Let me make a graphic about that. Yeah. Grr. Yeah, but 50 submissions. That's it. And I think it's 50 per day, though. And so if you need more than that, you might as well use the site map tool. No, wait till tomorrow. Wait till tomorrow. 50 more. Start doing it, I don't know,

11.45, and then you get 50 and 50, depending on when their cutover is. All right, so we've got content. We've covered that. We've covered that. We've got content. I liked this one. So this is great. You know, we were just talking about our CVO website analysis, and we found a couple of articles. Here's an article. The title of the article, this is from Search Engine Journal, and it says, Applying landing page best practices to boost conversions. Yeah. So, again, this is the principle of CVO, Search Engine Visitor Optimization. You get the traffic to your website. That's easy. What do you do with that traffic? That's why it's so, we believe it's so important to have your internet marketing company have the capability to do both the web design and the internet marketing in terms of driving traffic to that website. Because you've got to be able to iterate with that traffic and know, you know, do A-B variant testing, figure out what's working, what's not, you know, what works for particular clients. And this is talking about landing pages. So I think this one is more Search Engine marketing related, you know, pay-per-click and pay-for-exposure type budgets where you're actually sending traffic to a particular page and you're paying for that traffic. Then, you know, in those cases, you need that landing page to convert with as many people as it can. And so this is, you know, how to apply the certain practices to these landing pages when you're driving traffic to them. So one of the things that, the first thing it says is make it short and logical. And this is an interesting one because really, it depends. Yeah. It depends. We did short and logical and we did the long way. Yeah. Right. I think it depends on the client. If this is a short sale where it's not a lot of information involved in making this decision, you know, you're coming here and you're submitting a form, you know, to have something that costs less than 50 bucks, then, yeah,

short and logical is the way to go. But if this is hardy plank siding. Yeah. Right. Exactly. That's a great example. If this is a hardy plank siding, you know, an investment to your home, something that costs a couple thousand bucks and people need to see colors. They need to read information. They might want to see before and after pics. And therefore, short and logical doesn't work in this case for a landing page. You need content. You need images. You need a little bit more information to help that user convert. And so that was my, that is my first reaction and I'm 100% on that. I also think even in more content, you want to kind of design it so that it's condensed. Yeah. Right? So it's not that you have less content because there are clearly products and services that need, it's a bigger sale. You know, one's going to go out and buy, I was going to say a car, but that's not a good example. You know, I think siding for your home. Right? This is going to totally redo your house. You're not going to go out and buy siding for your home based on a postcard. It's like, oh, wow. You know, 25% off, you know, 10 years experience, and we do everything. And you're like, okay, get these guys out. I'm ready to give them a check. No, you want to see what are my options. What are the color options? You know, you've covered some of this already. So you need more text. You need to build more credibility for, in that case, it's not just the price point because it's interesting, right? Because the car is the same price point and you don't need half as much. Why? Because it's a car. Like, everybody knows it, you've seen it, you've driven it possibly. Whereas a house, you've never, how often have people changed the entire siding of their house, the look and feel of their house? Yeah, it's not an emotional,

the gooey of their house. How often do you change the gooey of your house? It's not an emotional decision, you know, kind of check online, oh, let me buy that type of decision. It's a research, do some competitive research. They'll look at this landing page and hopefully see enough information that after they check your competitors, because they will, they'll come back and make that decision. One thing he did point out in this section, which I actually believe is worthy of, well, there's two things. Fundamentally, we believe every page is a landing page. So we really don't believe in landing pages per se. When we end up doing landing pages is when somebody has what we call an aesthetically outdated website. They're not willing to invest and redoing the website, and they're about to start a pay-per-click campaign or, and actually, we dissuade them from an SEO campaign until the website's done. But in particular, if they want to generate revenue immediately, they can start a pay-per-click campaign, and you've got to drive that pay-per-click campaign to a particular page that has a high probability of closing business since you're paying for that traffic. In that case, we'll make a landing page. Typically, when we redo that website, that landing page actually fits right into the website. It's not a separate page. In the case of a home siting, that's going to be the home siting page. It's not going to be we have a home siting page and we have a landing page. Yeah, that'll be the home siting page. And once the whole site gets redone, like, they may do doors and windows, you know, so then there will be a windows page that will be optimized, but it will also be formatted to convert. And so it will, in turn, be a landing page as well for two reasons. One, if someone searches windows, we want that page to show in the organic results. And two, if we decide to do some sort of pay-per-click campaign for windows, we have that

page to send them to. And roofing is another example of similar price point and totally different sales process, in my opinion, because most roofing gets done with insurance, right? There's been, at least in Houston, you've had hail damage to your roof or hurricane damage to your roof, and you end up bringing out insurance and it gets paid. So now you're just looking for somebody to take care of the job. Who can do it fast, who's available, and who can come today. So that page isn't about, oh, the colors and textures and stuff we can do. We're insured, we work with insurance, we've been doing it for 40 years, give us a call and let's give you a quote. That's a much simpler sell than a siding, even though it has similar impact. So he says generic landing pages are a serious faux pas. Now this is an interesting one because if a product, if a particular customer has a lot of products, their home page, and again we consider every page a landing page, has to quickly funnel people to the right page. So it's a general page and it has to be designed incredibly well. It still is a landing page of sorts because we all know, although we'd love to send traffic directly to the roofing page or directly to the home siding page, often Google gives a lot more precedence to the home page. And so if that's how they organically found you by typing siding, then when they get to your home page, you've got to be able to direct them to siding and windows or roofing equally well, equally quickly. So in general, yes, landing pages shouldn't be generic, and your home page is a great example of a generic landing page, if you will. Next is talking about layout. Yeah, so layout, and in the article he mentions that he prefers a single column. I think, I'm not sure, maybe, I'm not sure the sites he was testing, but I think personally. Well, you know, this is interesting because

this is one of my criticisms of this article is, he says, the most popular landing page layout is. Well, does that mean it works? You tend to have that feeling that it does. I also think it depends on the product. Yeah, it depends on the product or the service, for that matter. A single page, I think, is great. Most single page, when I think single page landing page, I think long sales letters. Super long, right. CTA at the bottom. Very emotional, yeah. And, personally, I run from those. I don't have time to read all that. No, I just know that I'm about to get sold. And I know. And so, I hit my back button. And I think the two columns, or even three columns, they give the appearance that it's an actual website you're visiting, and not just a landing page. And so, the clients tend to stay a little bit longer, especially if there's some sort of navigation, not necessarily the full site navigation, but at least some similar navigation to other pages on that site. I think the client won't feel like they're getting sold. They're prone to search and look for more information, and that conversion will be higher. Yep. And one of the, this is, there are some interesting stats that he gave here. Again, these are stats of what do landing pages look like. There's a big difference in landing pages between B2B and B2C, so business to business and business to consumer. 50% of B2B landing pages are set up in boxes, as compared to only 15% of B2C layouts. Postcards are more common in B2C landing pages. I'll tell you, my belief is a lot of this has to do with web designers actually not, again, not what I was talking about, not having the experience of actually driving traffic there. Postcard layouts can work with air conditioning, right? They can work with plumbing. Roofing. Roofing, you know, where you're just looking to get somebody out there. They will not work, and this is from experience, with

the longer, broader sale, like siding. Roofing, I think even landscaping. If you're really looking for landscaping and not just a dude to cut your lawn, you know, you're going to spend some time. You want to see some of the work that they've done, maybe some before and after pictures. Certainly what you want to see on siding. Kitchen remodeling, you know, another example where you definitely want to see before and after pictures. You want to build some credibility. Yeah, see what you've done, who you've worked with, how long you've been doing it, all of that. So, you know, postcard is not going to work. And to be honest here, that's from experience. Yeah. From a bad experience. So we've redone that. Minimize the number of links. Links, I, yeah, I mean, links, I think it really depends. You know, I think the marketing takeaway here is understand who your market is and the type of people visiting your site. And what it takes to sell your product or service. Yeah, what it takes to sell them. If it requires a lot of information, then it's worth having more than a couple links because you don't want to cloud this landing page up full of content. You'd rather link to different content. Right. If it doesn't require a lot of information and you can convey your message pretty quickly, graphically, then reduce the amount of links you have and go right for the close. You know, one study that I love to refer to, there was a study they did on a campus where they were selling jams. And so on a couple different days, they did the experiment differently. One day they had like three selections of jams and another day they had like 20 selections of jams. And your intuition is like, well, if they've got 20, then they've got something for everyone. Their sales probably went up. And that's actually the reverse of what happened. When you have so many decisions to make, it's either what boils down to is buy something, make a

decision and buy something, or don't. And when the decision gets bigger, the don't gets more appealing. Like, I don't know if I want the Apple or the Grapple or Gruple or whatever. Or you end up just saying, you know what, I don't want anything because I can't make that decision. So that's where. Or you end up getting what you always get. Yeah, the same. I'll just take the same. Yeah. We went to a restaurant and it's like a five-page menu. I mean, we're flipping, flipping. The waiter came over. This is me and Kent. The waiter came over three times. Y'all ready to order it? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. The end of the night, it was like, I'm going to get the chicken frosting. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. I just got to go with the chicken pretzel. Yeah. You were in the mood for something different. You couldn't find anything that really worked. And so if you're not going to work, you might as well. But I know it's going to work. Yeah. Yeah. So that applies in this situation. If there's too many links to click, then, you know. And we really believe staying focused. That's like one of the great examples of this is we don't believe that you should put Google ads on your website if you sell something. Yeah. If you're a blogger, then, yeah, you have it on there so that you can actually make money. If you're actually selling product, why do you want to drive people to another website? By the way, the way those are written, I mean, I know you can do negative words or whatever. But you've got to stay on top of it. But you probably sell ads to your competitors. Exactly. Exactly. And that's, you know, that's the nightmare scenario that you don't, that you definitely don't want. Keep above the fold. You know, again, this boils down to if you're on a postcard page, it's going to be above the fold, obviously, or hopefully, obviously. If it's a longer page,

really, you do want your calls to action right at the top. Because I think if somebody starts boiling down and they're reading something and finally they're sold, then they know to go to the top. Just make sure that your CTAs, calls to actions, are really prominent. And potentially, if it's a really, really long page, you want to have it a couple times. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And also keep in mind, you know, with newer devices out, like your site may be being viewed on a, you know, on a Galaxy tab, right, or an Evo, for example. Or even, you know, the 19-inch widescreen monitor. And so your fold is different from my fold. Yep. You see what I'm saying? So, you know, just keep all of that in mind. I think we don't really have time. We'll save that next article. I got Blake Sterey quick. All right, Blake Sterey. All right, let's roll this out. Yeah, that was good, Blake. Hat was on point. My collar folded a little bit, but Blake Sterey at Google and Microsoft. Google and Microsoft. Yeah, for the public going back and forth about the patents. This is like a public dis-slapping contest, right? It's a swinging contest. Oh. It's a swinging contest, and it's going to come down to who has the most money at the end of the day. And they're going to spend a lot of money proving who has the most. Yeah. And so, yeah, y'all get it together. It should probably be handled in courtrooms and not on the Internet. Not on, yeah, not on. But then, you know, it's two tech companies, so maybe it should be handled. Well, you know, I was thinking about that. In terms of popularity, you know, how much value is there in winning that popularity contest? I have to say, you know, the fact that Bing was effectively stealing Google's results, I don't think Google capitalized on that nearly enough. Yeah. I assume. Google is well known for not marketing their stuff well. So maybe they're like, look,

we need to start marketing. We need to start pleading our case to the public. They just need, it sounds like, to have a little more rock solid. Like, don't blame them for going to buy patents that you need when they actually offered you to go buy them together. Well, then they said that the reason they declined that offer was because they know that eventually they would have been paying for it and then it would have been used against them because they would have been sharing it with them. So instead, they didn't want it. You keep it. They should have just gone and bought it themselves then if they knew it was going to be held against them. Yeah, they got a lot to work out. So, yeah, blank state, y'all. Y'all handle that. You know, it's kind of entertaining, though. Yeah, it is. So I don't want to say don't do it because I enjoy reading about it. Yeah, it reminds me, I was once at a symposium. So this is, it's a conference for fullerene researchers. So it's our parent company, at the time, manufactured fullerenes. It's a carbon nanomaterial. So you've got PhDs that actually have a future Nobel Prize winner in this room. And listening to them bicker, like you have this picture of science being so pristine and business being so pristine and really somebody's, you know, attitude gets involved and then boom, it's all, it's on. Now you've got Twitter. You're like tweeting about patents. Yeah, they're tweeting back and forth. That's what makes it work. That's just not great. I'm waiting on the Microsoft dude to plus them now. Yeah. Thanks for tweeting back and forth. This has been fun. Could you plus me? Yeah. Plus one me? Adding me to his circle of haters. All right. You guys have been listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. That is because of you. We really appreciate you guys. We do broadcast the video on Friday mornings. Actually, next week it's going to be Wednesday because I'm going

to be out of town Thursday, Friday. So next week on Wednesday we will be having our podcast in the morning. That will actually start at 10 o'clock a.m. sharp. So make sure you tune in. You can find our podcast. The best way to find podcasts and information, you've probably found it. If you go to our page e-website.com slash SEO podcast, you will find all sorts of links to how to listen to our podcast, how to subscribe to our podcast, how to view our Ustream podcast, all of that stuff. So we really appreciate you. Go ahead and make a review. In fact, you can also go to podomatic.com, find us there and like us there and make an account and all sorts of stuff. We'd appreciate that as well. Yeah. Search SEO. Do this for me. Do this for me because I'm running some tests. Oh, yeah. Doing analytics. Go to Google. Search SEO podcast. When we show up on the first page, because we should, plus one us. Yeah. Plus one us. Let's see what happens. Yeah. I'm doing some testing, some analytics and stuff like that. So just, yeah, help me out. We'll get the results to you guys later. All right. This has been a great podcast. We'll see you guys next time. Until then, my name is Chris Burris. Bye-bye for now. Bye-bye.