SEO 101

SMX West 2010 Recap

Ross recaps his visit to SMX West 2010, and he mentions meeting with Bing representatives seeking to find tips for searching local Canadian web pages, plus how Bing will feed Yahoo with content and an organic spin to their algorithm. Our Sponsors: * Producer Brasco: As digital professionals and business owners, we understand the critical importance of a secure and high-performing website. That's why I want to talk to you about Kinsta, a managed WordPress hosting provider that delivers exceptional speed, security, and reliability. Kinsta's infrastructure is optimized for WordPress, ensuring your site loads lightning-fast and ranks well in search results. They utilize Google Cloud's premium tier network and C3D virtual machines, which significantly boost performance. In fact, Kinsta customers often experience up to a 200% increase in site speed just by migrating to their platform. Security is paramount, and Kinsta provides enterprise-grade measures to protect your valuable data. They are one of the few WordPress hosting providers with SOC2 certification, guaranteeing the highest level of security for your website. Kinsta's MyKinsta dashboard offers a user-friendly interface with a comprehensive suite of tools to manage your site efficiently. From cache control and debugging to redirects and CDN setup, MyKinsta simplifies website administration. For SEO 101 listeners, Kinsta offers specific advantages. Their platform is optimized for speed, a crucial ranking factor in search engine algorithms. Their security measures protect your site from malware and hacking attempts that could damage your online presence. And their expert support team is available 24/7 to assist with any technical issues that may arise. If you're serious about your online presence and want a hosting provider that prioritizes performance, security, and support, I highly recommend Kinsta. Visit kinsta.com today to learn more and take advantage of their limited-time offer for new customers. That's k-i-n-s-t-a dot com. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Duration:: 28m
Broadcast on:: 15 Mar 2010
Audio Format:: other

Ross recaps his visit to SMX West 2010, and he mentions meeting with Bing representatives seeking to find tips for searching local Canadian web pages, plus how Bing will feed Yahoo with content and an organic spin to their algorithm.

Our Sponsors:
* Producer Brasco: As digital professionals and business owners, we understand the critical importance of a secure and high-performing website. That's why I want to talk to you about Kinsta, a managed WordPress hosting provider that delivers exceptional speed, security, and reliability. Kinsta's infrastructure is optimized for WordPress, ensuring your site loads lightning-fast and ranks well in search results. They utilize Google Cloud's premium tier network and C3D virtual machines, which significantly boost performance. In fact, Kinsta customers often experience up to a 200% increase in site speed just by migrating to their platform. Security is paramount, and Kinsta provides enterprise-grade measures to protect your valuable data. They are one of the few WordPress hosting providers with SOC2 certification, guaranteeing the highest level of security for your website. Kinsta's MyKinsta dashboard offers a user-friendly interface with a comprehensive suite of tools to manage your site efficiently. From cache control and debugging to redirects and CDN setup, MyKinsta simplifies website administration. For SEO 101 listeners, Kinsta offers specific advantages. Their platform is optimized for speed, a crucial ranking factor in search engine algorithms. Their security measures protect your site from malware and hacking attempts that could damage your online presence. And their expert support team is available 24/7 to assist with any technical issues that may arise. If you're serious about your online presence and want a hosting provider that prioritizes performance, security, and support, I highly recommend Kinsta. Visit kinsta.com today to learn more and take advantage of their limited-time offer for new customers. That's k-i-n-s-t-a dot com.

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Hello and welcome to SEO 101. On webmasterradio.fm. This is Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing. And my co-host is John Carcutt, the SEO manager for MediaLiz. How are you doing, John? I'm doing awesome, Ross. How are you doing? Great. Sorry, everyone. We missed the last week, but my friends were hitting. Yeah, I take blame for that. That was my fault. I was incapacitated, as they say. Like my grandson. Oh, my God. I'm so glad I haven't had one of those yet. Now come wood. I think I'm going to have to go get glasses. I think it's an eye thing. I spent a lot of years in the Air Force, staring through a microscope into fluorescent tubes, doing reconnaissance analysis, and they destroyed my eyes. Who thought? Yeah. So, I just got back last week from SMX West in Santa Clara, and, you know, they're all pretty good. I mean, they're all-- my SMX is definitely, in my opinion, the best of them, just in terms of, well, frankly, the food. You can buy me. It's pretty much it. You didn't do the mile-and-a-half walk over to, what's that burger place? We did that big hike the one year. Oh, somewhere. Yeah. I did go there, but no, I did not use that. I remember getting into a ride over there just last week going, "Hmm, glad I'm not walking." We had a huge group of us walked one year. It was, like, you know, you saw this, like, little herd of, like, these SEO people walking on the street for a mile-and-a-half going after some burgers, kind of amusing. In and out burger, that's right, yes. Yeah. Yeah. Who is that memorable? Yes, it was. I remember driving by Matt McGeen, all you guys going, "Hey, when I got attacked." Exactly. I wasn't going to walk. (LAUGHTER) Andrew Green was fucking with us, too. I was like... It was warm. It was freezing and raining this time. I'm kind of bummed I didn't get to go, but I'm actually glad that we're going to cover today so you can fill me in on all the cool things that happened. Yeah. Well, and like I said, I only got a bit of the prep done. There's a lot more for other shows, so that's good. But, yeah, we're going to split this into two shows for anyone listening, and we're going to try and give you some valuable tips that manage to copy down. So let's start with Bing. (LAUGHTER) I'm Matt Bing. I had to get at them because, frankly, I'm a little peeved at Canada's, so neglected in terms of being able to get their local profiles for businesses here. The only way to get a local profile in Bing local is through yellowpages.ca, which I hate. (LAUGHTER) Really, that's the only way. In Canada's, they don't use the Axiom database like everywhere else in the world. Nope. Wow. That's news to me. I thought they did. They may supplement it or double check stuff, but really it's got the exact same error that my current one has on yellowpages.ca. And I confirmed it with them at the event. They actually, unless they change things, they don't even note this on Yahoo local. They are, sorry, Bing local. And Yahoo, because of course, being the two of them, being so tight, both of those you can't get into the local without going through yellowpages.ca. And coincidentally, now, let's say you can get a white pages listing, right? But if you need to update that, it's not necessarily the piece of cake. Second of all, if you want to add any more details, such as your hours a day and all that sort of stuff, I don't even know if you can do that, but if you could, you'd have to get a higher end package, and the only way you can do that with yellowpages.ca is print first. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah, welcome to Canada, where we're, you guys still think it was being done, but it's pretty horrible. It's just ridiculous. These people just think they can take advantage of us while they don't have enough competition. Just a little. So I have to ask that Bing have a presence on the show floor because they've been growing a bit on the different shows, but SMX West is pretty big when I thought they might step up their game a little bit. Okay. Yeah. Exactly. Well, it was next to Google. Google's always hopping. So it was pretty, pretty sleepy. Um, didn't have a lot of bling to, you know, come on, bank. I will tell you that the Bing, the Bing pens that they give out, those Bing pens, a little short ones are the best pens I've ever had. I grabbed like a half a dozen and I like to use those exclusively. I don't know why. Yeah. Those were awesome. In fact, I've got one of those little Bing pens in my pocket. I always got it there. I've got it just hanging in there because it just nicely fits. Anyway. As soon as we could get a Bing pen. Okay. So, um, anyways, they did note, I, I grilled them, um, and I did, they did note that there will be the ability to add hours and other details to Bing local for Canadians in an update. If they just, of course, never said when. All right. So did they talk at all or did you ask any questions related to the Bing, um, Yahoo merger? The new news come out of that. Let me thank not really know. I mean, even when, uh, Steve Ballmer was talking to us at the keynote, I mean, you know, these guys are professionally professional blockers. Yeah. Exactly. How was the key? Anything at all interesting come out of the keynote? Well, you know, the one thing that came, I'm not even sure this came out of the keynote, but, um, I think was asked to search engines, it was one of the events I went to, and, and the, uh, Yahoo guys, it was at the end of the table when Yahoo Google Bing and someone just got the mic and asked, uh, will Yahoo be here next year? They asked me that guy would be here. I hope so, um, the idea and this was intriguing, I don't know. I seem to get cross signals here. So I'm hoping I'm not the one with the cross signal, but from what I understood, um, Bing will be feeding algorithmically, um, Yahoo, however, uh, I wish I his name here, somewhere here, um, that the representative from Yahoo said that, uh, Yahoo may put a algorithmic spin on it. So, you know, they wanted to remain a little bit unique, right, which makes sense. I would too. I mean, you know, you don't want to completely make them exactly the same. So, so what does, does that mean basically Bing's going to do all the crawling feed them the data and they'll adjust how it's presented somewhat? So they don't have to go out and crawl. They don't have to do anything, but make a tweak to whatever Bing sends over. How does, so how does that, and then Yahoo is also going to be managing the paid search for both platforms. So basically, what does Bing get out of this? What does Bing get out of? Yeah. Out of this arrangement? Yeah. Well, they, they don't, they don't do a good job with their paid. That's true. So yeah, I was pretty much going to show them how it's done. Yeah. Um, and of course, Bing's getting what, how much more percentage of the search market now? True. But are they really, if Yahoo is going to put their own spin on the, the, the algorithm anyway? And so it'll, some, I've been planning, okay, I'm going to have a two engine world from an organic standpoint sometime this year, but if Yahoo is going to put a spin on an organically now from an organic standpoint, it's really back to 12%, 13%, 70%, you know, those kind of numbers instead of a 30%, 70% which makes it, makes it worth my time to deal with the 30%. I use the live scribe pin when I'm at these things and it's great because I can go back and listen to them, actually say this and turn or figure out where that was, but, um, Are you allowed to re-broadcast that on our show? Can you like? Probably not. I want to make sure it'll be in trouble. It might get into an easy hand. But it's very good, of course, for putting this together. Here it is. Do, do, do. Anyway, I'll see what I can find out for the next, next show. Um, anyway, so that's being, wasn't a lot other than that. I was, of course, very focused on the Canadian, from my Canadian clients and stuff. Of course, another thing was interesting in the, the being when I went to was actually a, a being sponsored one and I thought, oh man, well, I'll check it out because nothing else seemed as exciting and I went to this and, and it was great. The guy who was delivering it was hilarious. I mean, he has some stitches, um, but he got into one thing and, and that is that you can actually add your business in 3D to photosynt. He did say that it's not quite as cut and dry as you're sending in all your photos inside and making it 3D of your business. I mean, it has to have some reviews that to be tagged public, geotagged. So of course, they can figure out where each of these images are supposed to lie. And, um, yeah, so the ratings have to be fairly high quality. And that there is a backlog, but if they're filled for, for requisites, they, they will show up over time. So, so explain everybody what photosynt is. Maybe some people out there are not sure what you're talking about. Yes. Yes. Of course, no, forget them. We aren't, uh, not everyone's a geek. I forget. It takes images online and stitches them together based on their geotags so that you can be in a 3D world. I mean, it could be a thousand photos. For example, what did they first used it was the Notre Dame, right? Yeah. Yes. That was a good one. That was really cool. So what they did is they, they had, I mean, how many people take photos of Notre Dame? This is crazy. Yeah. And the first one, they pulled them off from Flickr, didn't they? They did. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, I certainly got the connection there. So, um, I don't even think they had the geotags set up at that point, but in any case, not a lot of cameras put those in at that point, but I don't think they needed it. They just needed to see anyone who mentioned Notre Dame in the picture or anything like that in the notes and they stuck them all together based on, I guess it's kind of like putting a puzzle together. They just started to see where all the pixels started to match. And as a result, hundreds upon thousands of people's pictures were stitched together and made into a 3D world. So you could walk into the Notre Dame and look at every nook and tranny as though you're in there yourself. It's pretty amazing. It's pretty amazing. If you've never been to the site, photosense.net, it's p-h-o-t-o-s-y-n-t-h.net, treat yourself and, you know, block an hour out of your day because you're going to get stuck there for a while because it's over. It's amazing. You stuck 3D. Yeah. I can't think today. Anyways. Anyway, at photosense.net, you can get the app to upload the images and hopefully it'll win out. It'd be kind of cool to be able to, you know, if you've got a neat location that's somewhat sexy, you can put it in there and there might be reasons for someone to go check it out. They mentioned that the museum in New York, what is it, the national history? No. I can't remember. I have a couple of them, the National History Museum, the, well, they are, I guess that's National History. Modern Museum of Art. No, no. Okay. Modern Museum of Art. Yeah. The Met. Yeah. It used to be one of my clients, actually. Okay. Anyways, in there they actually have this so you can go in and take a walk through and check out the actual images and paintings in there. I mean, wow. That's nice. Well, didn't they do something similar for Obama's inauguration, the big crowd for Obama's inauguration? Yes. That was crazy. Yeah. It really creeped me out, actually, because I, they could zoom right into people's faces and see where I build a mid-recognition. And they actually added a layer of tagging to that one. So if you saw somebody you recognized, you could tag them. It was, it was kind of, kind of creepy, actually. Yeah. Well, it wasn't there. Yeah. No doubt. Anyway, let's just take a quick break and we get back for going to jump into some local SEO. SEO 101 will be back right after recess. Charles, come on up and tell us about the great ROI we're getting from revenue wire. Thank you. Since I signed up with Revenue Wire, conversions have increased dramatically. Revenue Wire has an integrated shopping cart called Safecart that offers highly accurate sales tracking, boosting our conversions through the roof. 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With SEOFox.com's link-building report, you can find more links, use their search marketing services to find more links, or better yet, they could even build your own backlinks. So you think you're pretty sly with that SEOFox link-building report? Haha. Sly like a fox. Get your link-building report today at SEOFox.com, that's SEOFox.com. So you're telling me your affiliate program on the local pages affiliate network is performing as well as your handicap? Absolutely. With their top tier XML feed, I'm able to monetize all of my traffic. They handle all of my volume to anywhere in the world, plus I also get high costs per click and the most exclusive of advertisers to work with. You should join the club. Sounds good. I can't wait to join. But first, let's work on that team shop. Use the power of local pages with over 5 billion searches per month and the largest database of paid search listings. Let local pages affiliate network personalize your account and give you the search tools and solutions you need become a local pages affiliate today with localpages.com. Watch your shopping cart overflow because you've found the e-com experts, e-com experts, Mondays at 6 p.m. Eastern, 3 p.m. Pacific, or on demand anytime inside the internet marketing channel only on webmasterradio.fm. Okay, class, take your seats and no talking. Recess is over and SEO 101 is back in session, only on webmasterradio.fm. Welcome back to SEO 101 on webmasterradio.fm with John Carcutt, SEO manager for MediaWiz and myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing Inc. We're just doing a bit of a review of SMX West 2010, and I was the one that was there where John wasn't there and dismissed. Yeah, exactly, so we're just going through some of my notes here. Now local SEO, this is okay, I just thought it was worth noting, someone mentioned some frequently ignored signals in places where you can perhaps add a little more local, and one of them was employee profiles. I guess adding information about the employee, where they're located again, probably the same office space. So do you think that ties into profiles on LinkedIn where you have LinkedIn and possibly your company information on that profile as well, just makes kind of like a citation? Yeah, it's yet another signal to Google that this is in fact your address. For some reason it's escaping me, what else there was in an employee profile, I guess it was just the fact that you could make it a little more obvious where you're located. Some people like to put on their personal stuff, like I like to bike and this is where I bike or whatever, that's all a signal, right? It definitely adds some value. Events and calendars, if you've got any events, you can use the micro format, and the H card micro format, I believe it is, that's used for, actually, H calendar will actually work as well, H calendar format, and using that format, you can actually broadcast your events in a way. Google reads it and they'll know that these events are happening at what date and where. Nice. Pretty good stuff. Did anybody talk, and I know I'm kind of jumping out of your local stuff, but micro format is something that's really interesting to me recently. Was there any discussion about micro formats in the sessions you attended? I think there was one in the local, I went in the late, I heard the mentioned micro format a couple times, like they probably did a thing at the beginning. It's actually just taught advanced SEO last night, or the night before? Last night. It's Friday, right? I was up limping. Have you lost sense of all time in reality, Iran? Yeah, it seems like it, I mean, working too much, and I think it's literally microformat.com. Microformat.org, actually. Microformat.org. Thank you. Yes. And in there, they've got the H card, they've got the H calendar, the B card. But there's been some really interesting discussion about how micro formats are going to impact SEO, and just in the past few months, I've been here in bits and pieces here and there. It'd actually be worth doing a show on, just for example, one of the things that caught my recently was there's a micro format for reviews, and for some very select sites at this point, if the site is using the review micro format, you'll actually see the star ratings in the Google search results. I'm just doing it for CNET. I know it does it for CNET, and a couple other, like, ones that have a lot of good reviews, but it's very limited right now. But someday, that might roll out pretty wide, and from an SES standpoint, anything you could do to make your listing stand out in the SERPs, the better. Actually, they've got a sample. I saw a list when I was doing the research the other night, they showed who was actually using them, and let's make samples, and it was impressive. I mean, there were a lot of big companies using it. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's good to see the big companies jumping on top of this stuff, because it does add some value, it makes it easier to find these reviews. If you're an e-commerce, and you're dealing with e-commerce sites, there's micro formats specifically designed to handle product information, there's another one specifically designed to hand pricing information, and someday, that's probably going to be an avenue, a place where engines might turn to verify pricing listings for the shopping feeds and that kind of stuff. Hey, is an H-review plugin for WordPress? Nice. That's interesting. I just see it here. I don't know anything about it, but that's worth looking into, and there's actually two of them. It works with a standard page or post editor, so you can have multiple reviews in a single page or post, sex, hey. Yeah, I get it a lot. Okay. Hosted reviews to show examples that Judy's book uses them, Ning, this isn't the best one I saw. They have quite a few big ticket sites, I mean, TripAdvisor would obviously use stuff like this as well. Yeah, yeah. But there was one Yelp, if there's ratings in Yelp, a lot of times you'll get those reviews in the Yelp listings. Anyway, if you have anyone rating your products on your site, this is goal, absolute goal. Google will index the stuff, and I'm just waiting for it to be rolled out in even bigger and search results, just makes perfect sense to it. It will eventually, it has to. Some of the examples of tags is version, summary reviewer, the rating, the description of it, all really simple, it's like doing that HTML, such as simple, simple programming language. Yeah, it's really easy to do microphone, it's just a matter of taking the time to make sure it's in your build out plan. Yeah. Okay. So what was next here? Events encounters, okay, so we've covered that. Domains requiring planning, CCTLDs, that's country code, top level domains. They said what they were getting at, it was Miley Olier talking, she's a great speaker from Visual, and she was saying that it's very important to, well, she intimated that it's very important to plan which domain to get before you go ahead. Like, what are your targets? If you're in Canada, but you're not planning on targeting only Canadians, don't get a .ca, that's the root issue. A country code TLD will be automatically localized. So you'll get better results in Canada, but you don't want to be going up against competition who is, are globalized, and you're trying to go against them in top rankings in a global search with a Canadian domain. So did she mention or talk anything about the difference between, or the comparison between using a .ca domain versus having a .com domain and going into Google Webmaster Tools and assigning a local area? Because you can go into Webmaster Tools and say, this .com site, I want it to be, folks, its locations, geotag is Canada, and you actually get a little bit more specific than that. But did you mention, or did you hear anything about the difference between doing that versus doing a CCTLD? No, and from what I could tell, from what I could tell it's not an issue at all. I didn't say it's exactly the same, you know, being in on the meeting, it was, it made perfect sense that that would be the same thing. She didn't mention regional targeting, picking your regional target would be, would be that indeed. So, so, I wish I could have been there to ask these questions, because I've got some very specific issues I'm dealing with right now. I've got a site that they have, they cover six major cities in the Asian market space, and we've actually taken and created, like, they have a sub-directory for each city on the site. And we've actually created each of those sub-directories as its own website in Webmaster Tools, and then, then geotargeted them to that location, because these cities are pretty widespread. So, you know, one might be Shanghai, one might be Hong Kong, but we, on the same TLD, we've created six separate targeted areas. And it seems to be working, but I'm wondering if we're pushing any, pushing any limits, or how often that's going to, if it's going to come back and bite us, basically. I wish I could have asked that, or... Okay. Well, before we finish up here, we're already over time. The other one is, if you do have a top-level domain, like a .com, it still can be localized based on your server location, the language on your site, and Google, they love saying stuff like this. Magic signals. [laughter] I thought he just played basketball. Yes. Exactly. It's like we said, he's a chart country, and we don't have it. So, thanks very much for listening in, and what's your Twitter address there? Oh, it's @ZonCarcut. Okay. And I'm at Ross Dunn, and thanks for tuning in. Remember, we're at 2 p.m. Pacific, 5 p.m. Eastern, every Monday, WebmasterRadio.fm. And I want to hear more about this next week, Ross. [music]