Website Launch Tips - #seopodcast 215

Welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. Marketing. There's a name in there. Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. I am Charles Lewis, your internet marketing specialist. Thank you, and welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our podcast. This is podcast number 215, and our previous podcast is number 214, as you might imagine, and we have a tip from our previous podcast. I have totally lost my place in my sheets here, so we'll flip there. The tip is, be sure to have your tip ready to go when you start the podcast. The tip is, be sure to have continuity from search to click to landing page. Yeah, you definitely want to make sure that whatever you're marketing for, especially from, let's say, a paid search perspective, if you're bidding on a certain key phrase, then when people search and they click, then the page that they land on should have that continuity. It should reference the phrase they searched, frankly, the ad that they saw when they clicked should be represented on that landing page, and so that way they'll know they're in the right spot, and you increase your likelihood of actually getting the conversion. Yes, please remember, we are your friendly local neighborhood top position snatchers. Yes. Where our mantra is. Don't be a deuce. It's not a good look. That is not good. And if that makes you concerned and worried about this particular podcast, you just need to go back and listen to all 215 editions and figure out the one where we start talking about not being a douche, and you'll understand. Yeah, it's probably somewhere between 40 and 110. Yeah, I think that's a good range. That's only, what, 70 podcasts that you've got to listen to? 35 hours of great information. Great information, and you can also learn about the Gino time limit. Yeah. All right, if you can, if you have a device in front of you, if you are in front of a device that can tweet, please tweet now. What

should they tweet, Chuck? Man, hashtag SEOpodcast. This is number 215. Be sure to tag us in an at-e-webstyle. That way we can link up and network and do all of our social stuff. Cool. You can do us a small favor. If you get value out of this, and by the way, we do no tear tattoo. I noticed that. I saw that. No tear tattoo, because we do have a review, and if you get value, in fact, the reason we got the review that we do have is because somebody got value from us. If you get value from this podcast, you can do just three things. One of three things, or all three of three things. All three of three things. All three of three things. I don't know if that's nine things. That sounds like a lot. You can. Three things cubed. So really, you could write a review in three places. How about that? One thing in three places. And the best way to do that for us is to get onto our G Plus local page. We don't have a vanity URL yet. We didn't even discuss that this week. It wasn't a priority. So right now, the easiest way to get to that page and write us a review is to go to... Plus, I think ours is still better. Yeah. E-webstyle.com slash G plus and slash G plus and slash Google plus and finally slash Google plus. Right there, that'll take you to our G Plus local page. You can write a review. And here's those three things you can do. Write a review, put us in a circle, and give us a plus one. All right. Give us a plus one. By the way, I actually wrote G Plus today, and I commented immediately. This is on our Facebook page, commenting to Manny, who wrote the review. Even when I write G Plus, I hear you saying G Plus. You could also write a review at iTunes. That's only three steps. Go onto iTunes, create an account, write a review.

When you do that, if you choose to, send us an email, which you could send to podcast at E-webstyle.com. And let us know you wrote that review. We do have a reviews tab on our Facebook page. Our Facebook page is Facebook.com slash E-webstyle. And go there, click the reviews tab, become the second person to write a review, and we're working on our Yelp. Maybe. I know. Maybe after the last results. We have a referral program. If you have an SEO client, send them our direction. As long as they're paying their bills, we'll be paying you. Something like that, yeah. Nice and simple, right? As long as they're paying their bills, we'll be paying you. You just said it differently. Yeah, it's the same thing. All right. Got to change it. Yeah, what he said. Get a free website analysis. Yeah. If you've got any questions about what's going on with your website, whatever, go to E-webstyle.com. And on the right side, you'll see a place for submitting. Free website analysis. If your site's not ranking well, or maybe you're getting traffic and it's not converting, or you just think it's great, but it's not performing well. Or if your bounce rate goes from 70% to 2% to 4%, let us know. And we'll talk that here in a little bit. And any algo? Not right now. No algo. All right. A little bit of news. Should we jump into the news, or do we want to do our review? You know, I feel like doing the review. All right. Let's do the review. All right. So this is from Manny. He actually called us today. We helped him out, and you'll hear that in his review. He wrote this review on our G-plus page. That's where I heard you say G-plus. I've been listening to the E-webstyle podcast for the past couple of years. Chris and Charles present great content in a fun and informative way that has helped me with my website and digital marketing. Today, I needed help and actually called E-webstyle, and

wow, within five minutes, they figured out what was causing my problem and told me exactly how to fix it. And I'm not even a client yet. I like it. I like that. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction, and the extra SEO and Sivo tips, too. You went above and beyond, and that's why you are the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. Patoof. Patoof. Yeah. Love that. Top right hooks. All it. It's an interesting problem worth mentioning. A while back, he had about a 70% bounce rate, and all of a sudden, it went to 2% to 4%. So, really low. And we knew that it was, that's not real. That's not real. Like I was explaining to Steve, I was like, even people who type American Idol bounce more often, even if that's where they want to go, than 2% to 4%. So, what we did, we looked up, and we noticed there was a pop-up, and what I believed happened, we didn't get it, we didn't look at his code, is that that pop-up had an additional Google Analytics code in it. So, when the page came up, and the pop-up came up, immediately that was perceived as... It counted as a page view, and therefore, no bounce rate. No bounce rate. So, and we noticed that that jump, that they were getting, so something like 4,000 visitors were getting 9,000 views in the first 10 seconds. Because of the pop-up. Yep, because of that pop-up. So... The pop-ups suck. Yeah. Sometimes. Yeah, we use them every now and then. So, Manny, thanks for... I posted on Facebook, thanks for being a listener, thanks for reaching out to us, and hopefully that dot, dot, dot becomes not a dot, dot, dot on January 1. Next, we got an email. This is a question. So, hey guys, love the podcast. P-I-M-F. P-I-M-F? Pimp. Pimp. Punching my face. That's cool. Pimp. Anyway, so... I can dig it. Did you just give yourself a shout-out? Yeah. Punching my face. Anyway, I was wondering... I'm doing it

in public, though. Yeah, it's odd looks. We know. Anyway, I was wondering what the best Google Plus practice is when it comes to promoting your own personal page or your business page. Should I be trying to promote my own personal page and therefore taking advantage of the relative author authority, or should I be trying to boost my business page? By the way, this is just a phenomenal question. Yep. I've only been using Google Plus for just over a month and just got my local business verification done today. Looking forward to hearing from either of you. By the way, he's got a really cool name. His name is Chris. His name is Chris. Chris, first off, great question. You know, Google Plus is kind of my thing. I love it. So, to answer your question is both, right? But there's two ways you can use Google Plus. So, unfortunately, most of us, probably including yourself, would love to use your company profile, that branding for the sake of publishing content and things like that. The problem is you can't. You can't claim authorship with a business profile. It has to be a personal profile. That's why I said both. So, use your personal profile. Set up authorship. Real equals author. I think you mentioned that. That's correct. And claim all your posts. Claim your videos. Claim all the content and media that you publish using your personal profile. Now, what you do in regards to your business profile is instead of real equals author, use real equals publisher, and now your business page becomes the publisher of said content. And so, even though your authorship, your personal profile or show, credit will be given to your business as the publisher of this content. And another way to make that even more effective is to make sure you list yourself as an employee of the business. Yep. That makes sense. Now, one of the reasons that you're just doing that relative author is because, remember, your image may or may not show up depending on your activity.

Definitely. Definitely. So, in the search engine result page. So, make sure that you're, if you only had time to do only one, I would do my personal. Yeah, definitely. You want to set up the personal one because you're probably posting content, you're probably sharing things, and so you want to, you want your personal avatar to show for authorship purposes. Absolutely. So, definitely do that. All right. A little bit of news. Cheryl Sandberg, she's the COO of Facebook, says that teens are not dumping Facebook despite what the CTO said just last week or something. Yeah, they are. Yeah. They are. We've done a survey of Charles, and none of his teens are on Facebook. Yeah, I got several teens in the house, and they all have one statement in common. They only use Facebook to communicate with grandma. Yeah. Wow. Isn't that the tagline Facebook was shooting for? The best way to communicate with grandma. Yeah. Zuckerberg's vision has arrived. Yeah, so. All right. Next, Samsung pays Apple. Yeah. I mean, just think about the fact that Facebook is becoming a more viable tool for small businesses, especially those businesses who attract clients who may be baby boomers or in that age between 35 and 60. Facebook works in getting them. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't work in attracting a younger clientele. Yeah. And so, I mean, there's the validity to that statement. Absolutely. Samsung pays Apple in coins, 20 billion coins. Did you hear about this? Mm-hmm. Or nickels or something, wasn't it? Yep. The response was, I'm not going to be intimidated. This is supposedly from the Samsung CEO. So, I'm not going to be intimidated by geeks with style, and you can buy refreshments with the coins, or you can melt them down and turn them into computers. It's a hoax. Yeah, you are. I did a snoops, and actually, when I Googled it, there were snoops on, like, position three. It's a hoax. It's actually a really cool hoax, though. Yeah. I like the idea of paying somebody. You know, important note for

lawyer, include payment terms in contract in case you weren't doing that. To follow that up, though, Samsung has just been ordered to pay another $290 million. Oh, because of the hoax? Not because of that. $290 million. No, it's, like, it didn't happen. Mm-hmm. Yeah, snoops says they did not receive 20 million coins. Okay. Yeah, that didn't happen. And, in fact, it started back in 2012 or something like that. I had heard of it before. Mm-hmm. Yeah. But, um, and a jury has just awarded $290 million that Samsung has to pay to Apple for, you know, on, I mean, these guys are, I think they're going to be suing forever. They probably have, like, the sue, Apple has the sue Samsung division, and Samsung has the counter sue Apple division. I mean, Google, I mean, even last year, we reported that Google had put, you know, like, $500 million or $500 billion, some crazy amount aside, just for lawyer fees. And so, they're, like, they're, like, double-dudging. Yeah. They're waiting to jump in and do something. So, the only people who win are the attorneys. Yeah. That sucks. Can you imagine being on a job interview? And you're, like, yeah, you're going to work with our sue Apple division. Wow. Just what I always wanted to do. Sue Apple. Your iPhone tweet. Right. All right. That is the potatoes of the podcast. Time to get to the meat. I hear we have a good article that we're going to discuss about launching new websites. So, I pulled this article, and I thought it was pretty good. It was from Search Engine Journal. Punch in the face to Steve McDonald. He created a pretty thorough list, and I liked it because we've just been launching a lot of websites lately. We just had a great launch this morning. Well, yesterday, this morning kind of deal. And so, as I was going through the article, a lot of the steps he covered were steps that are in our production process. And so... And I believe one reminded you

of one that... Yeah. Well, one, you know, and we'll get to that. The one that I was about to do, I just, you know, when I began reading this article, it reminded me that I hadn't done it yet. So, it was pretty cool. So, let's get right into it. Number one, and I think this is key for anybody who's watching, and it happened to be an agency or anything like that, benchmark your current site stats. Yeah. Right? So, whatever... Know where you're at. Yeah. Know where you're at. And whatever tool you're using to, let's say, track reporting or traffic and things like that, go ahead and run a report prior to making that change. That way, you can... And then document that. So, you know, the time you ran it, the date you ran it. And so, that way, you'll have something to compare to as the time progresses. I'm going to make a comment on that. It's worth it, even if you pitch a client on redoing a website, to go ahead and, if they don't have it already, put Google Analytics on the old website during your development time. Because, you know, sometimes development times can get stretched out. Maybe even if they're really quick, that data can be very useful to compare and contrast. And we know from particular examples that we have that just a redesign can improve sales by 30%. Yeah. Just a redesign. And usually, let's say your redesign also included a platform change, right? From something static to, let's say, WordPress. That sort of coding change can also improve your ranking once the site has been recrawled. And so, definitely add the analytics on the old site if they didn't have it. Number two, communicate the launch internally. I think this is key, especially for an agency. If you're an individual, you're a freelancer, you're doing everything yourself, right? But let's say you have a team. Then you need to make sure everyone on the team knows that this launch is going to happen. Yeah. SEO people know.

So, they can prepare URLs and 301s and things like that. And whoever IT people need to know, whoever's configuring servers and setting up hosting, you know, maybe key personnel for that client need to know so they can be aware of potential email downtime. But whatever it is, make sure you communicate that the new site launch is happening, at least internally. Number three, which is my step, register the new website in WMT, in Webmaster Tools. You just have to do that, right? Because that makes the steps that come later, like submitting a sitemap and checking for errors, and that makes it possible to do all that. Usually, Google Webmaster Tools is going to have to take 24 to 48 hours anyway before it begins reporting data. And so, why not add that as soon as you can? Of number four, he has, well, let me stop here and say, Bing Webmaster Tools as well, right? Not just GMT, GWMT, but make sure you submit and take care of Bing Webmaster Tools as well. Pretty good tools over there, laid out a little differently, but, you know, it works. Number four, he says, choose your domain. And so, yeah, of course. I mean, that probably should have been number one if you're launching a new site. Or on some list prior to launching site, yeah. So, but let's look at it from, let's say, a redesign perspective, right? If, let's say, you're a new client, and I'm an agency, and we're trying to improve your ranking, excuse me, and I noticed that prior to coming up, you had a conicalization issue. Right. Right. So, that, though, this is a great time to start working on the solution to that, making a decision. Are you going to go dub, dub, dub? Are you not? Are you going to have .index? Are you going to have .home? Are you going to have anything there? You know, this is a good time to make those decisions. Yep. So, number five, he says, upload a coming soon page. And so, this

is, again, if this is, let's say, a new website, then it makes sense to do that. But I wouldn't stop there, right? One thing I added over here is that page could be a great page that maybe captures some potential leads. Yeah. If people are visiting this page and they happen to find it and it's not launched, that means they're looking for you. And so, why not capture that information, some sort of lead form where they could name, email, phone, and the reason why they were here, right? And then maybe even something social. Maybe your site's not up, but maybe you are posting pictures of some previous events or whatnot on Facebook and Instagram. Use that page on that coming soon to tell people that. Hey, keep in contact on Facebook, right? That's a great message for a coming soon page. I like two things on coming soon pages. One of them is a countdown. You know, so even if you don't know if it's a five-day countdown, you know, that's your target. You always have a target for when that's going to get launched. So, put that out there. So, then, and have it actively countdown. Because, you know, so often when you see a coming soon page, you're like, these guys are never going to get a site. Yeah. That kind of thing. And that at least has some motion, some activity. And with the form, another reason to grab information is so that you can reach back out to them and tell them when you're going to site's live. Yeah. Yeah. The site's live, share it with people you know, and now they're in your system, in your database. Maybe that site's live is probably your first newsletter, right? And now you've begun capturing people for that. Number six, and I'll start breezing through these as we run out of time, inbound links and referrals. So, he's basically saying that check on these. I think more than just check on them, I think this is a good time, especially if this is

a redesign, especially if you're trying to improve the SEO on a certain client, this is a good time to not only check the links, but check the status of these links. Like, log into Webmaster Tools, export that link report, and see on the table what kind of links you have coming to you. This is a great time to disavow any links that may be harmful or provide some kind of link profile cleanup because you are redesigning, because you are trying to improve SEO placement. So, this is a good time to do that. So, that way, once you resubmit it, Google has a fresh site to crawl with a cleaner link profile. So, take care of that. Number seven, map your current URLs to new site. Part of our process involves a spreadsheet, right? So, anytime we launch a new site, I'll send over a spreadsheet that has all of the old URLs and what pages they rank on, and then the next column has the new URL page structure, and so the 301 redirects can be done. That's a step that you really need to start prior to the launch, because once the launch is done, then the new URLs are inactive anyway. And so, you definitely need to document those before changing the domain name. And then, during the production process of the new site, this is a great time to create the new URLs, so you have to create them anyway. And so, this is one of those steps that really should be done way before you get to site launch. Upload your content, duh, right? Yeah. But not only upload it, but one of the things we try to do is knock out most of your on-page SEO stuff at that time. Yeah. If you can. If you're uploading a page of content, why not go ahead and get your H1s right? Why not go ahead and do some internal linking? Why not create some strong tags or, you know, things like that? Why not check the keyword density you have? Why

not optimize your images and alt tags and things like that, since you're already on that page? That's just a tip from us. Yep. Number nine, create unique title and meta information. Duh. Part of SEO. Yeah. I mean, that really could have worked with them. Well, I was just saying do that, right, while adding that content. Number 10, implement Google Analytics. This is key. This is key. I will say this about Google Analytics. I like some of the changes, like the whole universal analytics deal. It's a lot more information. But, at the same time, I think they've, I don't want to say complicated it some, but it's just not as easy to use. To navigate. As it was. Yeah. You have to, the information's there. Just got to go dig for it and find it. Dig for it more. Yeah, so. Boom. But, Analytics is by far still the best website traffic tracking tool. Yeah, that I can think of right now. I know there's some other ones, and I know that they have some features. There are a whole bunch of other ones. Mm-hmm. And I just, I haven't found, you know, Google Analytics lacking for anything other than not provided, which other tools don't have access to either, so. Exactly. No reason to switch. I'm sticking with it. Mm-hmm. Sticking with it. Number 12, change your address in Google Webmaster Tools. So this is, let's say, if you happen to change your URL, which I wouldn't recommend unless your domain name was blacklisted or just had some bad situations with it. Yeah. But make sure you do that. I will say, be sure to just maximize Google Webmaster Tools. It's more than changing your domain name. You can go in there and geotarget, you know, where you're located and where you're trying to get traffic from, you submit sitemaps in there, your robots text file is in there, meaning messages from Google about how your site is performing is in there. So definitely maximize Webmaster Tools. So let's say after the launch, post-launch, make

sure you have, all the things I just said, make sure you have a robots file. Webmaster Tools is set up while you're missing title tags. Run through your conversions, right? Fill out all of the forms on the site. Make sure that they can actually submit. Make sure that there isn't an error page being generated after that submission. Make sure you're getting the lead or whatever software you're using, Salesforce or whatever, that needs to capture that lead and make sure that's functional. These are things that you have to do. Make sure you listen to previous podcasts to know what to do on the thank you page. Exactly. Definitely. Number 14, and this is important. I'll put the exclamation point here. Check for broken links. That's my exclamation point. Okay. That is an exclamation point. Check for broken links. Broken links can kill you. I mean, you can launch a new site and you can have great content. We're going to talk about credibility loss. Man, broken links. People click on links that go to a 404 page or go to a page that can't be displayed. That's a user experience credibility loss, right? That's the feeling, yeah. That's the UX credibility loss. From an SEO credibility loss, there's like all those votes, links, all those votes are now like, don't vote for them. Yeah. Ooh, they talk about a penguin smackdown, you know. Yeah. Submit your site with a whole bunch of broken links, see what happens to your ranking. So check broken links. That's important. Submit your site maps. Launch any search engine marketing campaigns you have. Claim your local citations. This is a good one. This is another one of those steps that should be done prior to your site launch. I mean, at the end of the day, the domain name isn't changing. And so you can go ahead and claim your G+. You can claim Yelp and Foursquare and CitySearch and all these other profiles because your web address is still the same. Can do that. Promote the launch on social media.

Test your site speed. This is key. And number 21, which probably should have been closer to the beginning as well, is check your mobile website, right? Is your site responsive or do you have a mobile version? Make sure that you're getting the look and feel from a mobile device that you want. Yeah. Because we were talking about it a few podcasts ago. I think it was, I can't take it a percentage, but a very high percentage of mobile users now compared to desktop users. And so, you know, got to make sure you're working mobile. And that was it. That was it. Cool. So pretty good article. This was the complete guide to launching a new website. I think it's an awesome article. McDonald's did a great job on that. Punch in the face to you. And so I'll link to it. We'll post it online so you guys can see it. Hey, we don't have any what? All we have is come on. Really? Really? Oh, there we go. Yeah. I don't know how that's different than what, but it is. It is. Yeah. Really? Yeah. This really goes to Yelp, right? So we've been Yelped. I know, literally, been Yelped. Got a client. Got a client. Client has like seven reviews on Yelp, right? Six reviews are great. Five star, real legit reviews, right? And one of the reviews is negative. Guy had a bad experience and he posted a negative review. Yelp is only showing the negative review. Only the negative review. Yeah, they're not, they're refusing to show the other six reviews and the logic behind it is because those other six reviews, the people who posted them haven't posted other reviews. Right. And so the guy who posted the negative review has other negative reviews. So I would be very interested to see a list of people who have one positive review showing and lots of negative reviews in the queue, if you will, being filtered, right? They're being filtered. They call it filtered. Because, you know, it's well documented, repeatedly

documented on the web that you want to get those out of the filter, start paying Yelp. That's a, come on. Yeah, really? Really? That's not right. All right, so I don't know what the solution is. Yeah, I mean, you know, because it's hard to... I know the solution. G Plus reviews. They're better anyway. Yeah. Right? Don't focus on your Yelp account. Focus on your G Plus reviews. And I think eventually, if you keep a practice up like this, eventually people are going to catch on and they're going to find a better review source at the end of the day. Called G Plus. That was out of tune. I don't even know what note that was. Or what notes that was. All right. Anything else? I hear. You have just listened to the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes. We have about 9,000 downloads per week. We've been downloaded in about 76 different countries. Thanks to you guys in the Philippines and India and Pakistan and Romania. Everywhere. Especially if you're in some country other than, and we'll just give a short list, other than the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia. Mm-hmm. Write a review. Do us a favor. The more reviews we get in countries that tend not to review us, we really appreciate that. We will give you a punch in the face. And again, send us an email, podcast at edesworthstyle.com. And one thing we did not cover, one of our links that we did not cover was Twitter. You can always find us on twitter.com slash eworthstyle. And youtube.com slash eworthstyle. All right. Until the next podcast, my name's Chris Burris. I'm Charles Lewis. Bye-bye for now.