SEO 101

SEO Topics to Watch in 2010

Ross and John ask What are the big SEO topics to watch in 2010. THey go through the various search related events, plus what are the ToDos on your 2010 SEO list? 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:: 54m
Broadcast on:: 21 Dec 2009
Audio Format:: other

Ross and John ask What are the big SEO topics to watch in 2010. THey go through the various search related events, plus what are the ToDos on your 2010 SEO list?

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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The opinions expressed on this webmasterradio.fm program are those of the hosts, guests, and callers. And do not reflect those of the staff, management, or advertisers of webmasterradio.fm. Any rebroadcast or retransmission of this program without the express written consent of webmasterradio.fm is prohibited. Welcome to SEO 101, your introductory course on search engine optimization. So turn on your computers, open your mind, grab your mouse, and get ready to get back to the basis. SEO 101 on webmasterradio.fm is now in session. 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 MediaWiz. How are you doing, John? Good, Ross, very good. Did I get in there right, or was I writing over the wall of words? I don't know. Sounds like I was getting into the music there. That's all right. I was on purpose, my friend. I mean, you know, getting back into the live thing. It's like, but I was wanting you to, like, let the music go along, let it rock, let it be, Bob, you know, and then you just jump right in. You mess with me. You would end of your mess with me. Oh, geez. It is. It's the end of the year. It's hard to believe. Definitely. And it's been a crazy year, too. I mean, the amount of things have gone on in this industry this year is just unbelievable. And I've got to feel it's going to be even nutty or next year. Every year, it seems to get nutty or my head. I don't know. I can't keep track of this stuff now. You know, I think it was this year. I thought, well, you know what? Maybe, maybe, just maybe I can do a little bit of social media and SEO. No. Well, you're going to have to do social media and SEO next year. Whether you're looking at it. I've got an expert or a couple experts I can bring in and I need them because frankly, I can't keep track. I can't keep up on it. It's just insane. SEO alone is busy enough. I know. It's just crazy. Hey, are you, are you doing all outsourcing or are you doing it? I know you do your own social media stuff, but you're just for clients is what you're doing. You're going to bring somebody to do social for yourself, too. I haven't got to the point. We're going to have anyone do our own social, but it's not something I would rule out in the future because it's getting, you know, it's like it's oncoming train. It just keeps getting faster and faster. I don't know. There's always something new coming out. And yeah, we're doing it for our clients. We're definitely outsourcing it. There's a couple clients I do it for, but just basics, really. Yeah, I'm seeing more and more where my clients will bring in a third party to do social. And it's really interesting that the first call that we have, where we have the client and the SEO firm and the social firm, all on the same call. And I'm finding it's, I haven't had any issues. It's actually been going really, really smoothly that the social firms are really trying to understand what or how, what they do works with SEO. A lot of them don't have a handle on it yet. It's really kind of just as anxious to get on those calls and talk with us as the client is. Yeah, I guess, I mean, there's certain scenarios where, you know, like Jen Lekock, who's being an SEO, who's now doing social media, where that would be a whole lot easier. But then you're right, though. There's a lot of people who are out there who are coming into this really fresh just into social media. And they just, you know, they just don't know enough about SEO to see how it can work together. Right? And it can, but there's definitely ways where it can't. I mean, depending on how you do it, it's either going to work or help SEO or it's not going to impact SEO at all. I'm not sure. I haven't seen any examples yet of social, like, hurting SEO. But I'm sure they're out there somewhere. That'd be an interesting angle, wouldn't it? Bit of a bitch to do all the writing and research for. Yeah, I would want to have to do it on one of my clients, that's for sure. So we put together a few ideas. We wanted to do a bit of a 2009 wrap-up. And I was just going through, non-sensically, just adding ideas. So there'll be no particular timeline to this, but we thought we'd rattle off a few ideas. The one that came to mind for me right off the bat was being launching this year. I just remember being at the party at the kickoff, which was kind of cool in Seattle and kind of puzzled, just sitting there gone. It seems to have been a decent endeavor for Microsoft compared to a lot of other attempts. I can say that for sure. I'm still not using it personally, though I played with it in the beginning. Like a lot of people did. There was a lot of hype about it when it first launched because everybody was trying it. It was better than what they'd seen in the past, so people thought this is it. This is it. I don't know if it's it or not. Well, it's certainly taken over search share. I mean, not Googles, but definitely. Well, yeah, he's kind of on the way out anyway, obviously, which of course leads to the other issue where Big's in the half of this year. Of course, it's the Yahoo Bing Microsoft Smoochie. Smoochie. I called it. Yeah, thanks. That's definitely the reason to keep an eye on Bing for sure, because when Bing takes over Yahoo's organic search results, whatever that happens, you only have you really only have two players in the industry anymore. Instead of having one with a lion's share, then two smaller ones, you've got one with a lion's share, then one with a pretty decent chunk, which makes a difference because you can't ignore a decent chunk, or you can kind of ignore two small pieces because it's twice the work. But now that it's just one chunk, it's going to be easier to put resources towards that. And to be fair, what I have done on Bing, I've been impressed. It seems relevant. It's just a different way of searching. And I'm, I guess, I'm a bit old school. I kind of like the old style of just, here's the answers. Let me click, whereas Bing's more third, fourth gen, whatever you want to call it. I don't know. Have you liked it using it? I've used it a little bit for, I tried to use it last time. I booked some travel because everybody kept talking about how cool the travel thing was. I played with it some, but I ended up going back to my old standard to actually book my ticket. So it was like, yeah, I played with it. It was interesting. It was neat. But I felt I wasn't comfortable enough with it yet to follow through, you know what I mean? Yeah. I don't think it was Bing's fault so much as it's my fault just being, you know, anal and when I just do what I'm used to doing. If I was new to search and new to searching for travel, it would probably would have been really cool and I'd have loved it to death. But I'm jaded. I've been doing this way too long. But for new people, I can see how it would be a really, you know, positive experience for them. Well, and it's showing up in Google Analytics now. I mean, I'm really starting to see traffic from it. Not a great deal, but it still catches me off guard sometimes to see Bing showing up as a referral. Yeah, and they're doing some neat things, I think, to try to gain community support. Like, they have that cool picture on the homepage that changes every day. They're doing contests to let people, you know, submit their photos to be on the homepage of Bing. They brought out the "real time" Twitter search long before it hit a few weeks ago on Google. It's neither one of them really hit the nail head to me, but they were ahead of the game in front of Google as far as pulling that stuff out. There's a new one. Yeah. Well, the other thing they did, too, is they launched the IAS SEO tools this year, I should say. And for those that don't know about that, it's essentially if you can actually install it, which I still maintain as a pain in the ass. But it's a system where you can literally find out, I guess you can run your own SEO analysis of your website based on how Bing would look at your site. It's kind of cool. I mean, it definitely had a lot of awesome facets to it. The point is you can't install this toolkit unless you have the latest Windows versions, a very minimum Vista, and then Server 2008, or the two main ones. I don't have that. I mean, Vista, hello, staying away. Windows 7, I'm just starting to add those to my systems. I do like it. Yeah, I'm on 7, and I don't mind it at all. It's interesting to me that they didn't push it back for as far as retroactively working on the other models. Maybe it's a technology issue or something. But I thought the concept was actually quite unique of doing, like, you know, everybody's used to peer-to-peer file sharing. This is kind of like peer-to-peer indexing of the Internet. But the peers are individual websites and individual servers. But if you're going out and you set this tool up to go out and scan other people's sites or use it for yourself, you're actually sending that data back to Microsoft as well. So they don't have to go and scan everybody with their bots. You've got your own little bot now that you're sending out and helping them out. What's that program? They look for aliens? What is that called? What is your spare setty thing? The setty thing. It's kind of like setty for search. You know, Microsoft's putting a bunch of -- letting you put a bunch of programs on your computer that you can run and help them index the web. Except -- I don't -- obviously I haven't installed it because it didn't work. It's telling it to pull out what little hair I had left. But it doesn't just index the net far as I know. It was something you had to say, "All right, I want to know more about this site." I agree, but if you're going to take all the time to install it, if you're going to use it, hopefully people will use it. I guess Microsoft's hoping people will use it for more than just their own site. That they'll go out with the competitor sites and index other portions of the web as well. But at least you're going to get your data. Yeah. Well, and to that note, there's actually a way to block the SEO toolkit from checking out your my Windows-based website, and that was the point to you. I think it's only Windows-based websites that you can actually scan. So which, of course -- I'm pretty much at -- I thought it was a straight scan. So you could set it out and go fetch me this site and it scans it. That is not just a Windows-based. I thought it was. It's only IIS-based websites. Well, I know you can only install it there, but you're saying it'll only go look at IIS too? I'm not certain now. Sorry, got me. I'm really not. It's been so long since I've looked into it. It's been a whole year that lots of stuff going on, but I understood that was the case. Okay. That makes it a little less valuable in my eyes, but still an interesting concept. Yeah, because it was supposed to -- it was an integration issue, I believe. Yeah. In any case, it's important that if you have an ASP-based site that you do, for certain, add the block to your -- I think it's just added to your robots.txt file. It's as simple as that. And it's literally a user agent you get to block. Off the top of my head, I don't know the number it was, or the code. If you go to stepforce.com, the blog there, just type in IIS SEO toolkit. Or just SEO toolkit for that matter in our search and you'll be able to find the article. And it'll actually give you the code to put in your user agent or into your robots.txt file. So, I've definitely done that with a lot of my clients, but I've been in it for all of them, not just the ones that are -- I guess so. Yes. Well, you know what? It essentially, without that block there, it's the equivalent, I would say, of -- well, not quite, but close to the equivalent of getting access to the purpose of a person's Google Webmaster Tools. I mean, it's telling all errors about the website. Any issues whatsoever this toolkit can find. I don't think it will do -- I mean, there's some things in Webmaster Tools that won't handle. It's not going to report on inbound links or anything like that. But it'll definitely report on 404 errors, robots.txt, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, it's, you know, site maps, all the different issues with the site that are internal. And that's no small feat, I can tell you. That would save me a lot of time in my competitor analysis. Oh, yeah, definitely. Hey, why make it easy for the competitors? Hopefully they make it easy for you by not including that, so. Yeah, well, you know, if your competitor don't do it, thanks. That's good. Yeah. Another thing I noticed was on another note, just -- I was going actually through my old posts this year and trying to find stuff that looked really intriguing. One thing, I mean, I know it's on a social realm, but it was interesting to see that ComScore noted kids and teens were starting to embrace Twitter more. And now it's kind of cool. And it's true. As soon as they -- it wasn't long after they posted that, I started noticing more advertising out there saying, "Uh-huh, Twitter this, Twitter that." You should be saving for the future. But savings accounts suck, and investing can be scary. We combine the ease of savings with the real returns of investing. We call it "save vesting," and it's only available in our new app, Stairs. Stairs offers four to six percent returns, no fees, and you can withdraw any time. Do your future a favor. Visit StairsApp.com today. All right, oh, you can play Twitter on your phone. They've added Twitter to Xbox now. That's a totally different realm. Well, Xbox has geared towards early 20-somethings, too, so. But you're right. Still, but... Yeah, I know kids. Sorry. But the most interesting thing about Twitter is it applies to SEO. I went on a rant sometime this year. Someone was doing a post about how to SEO Twitter. And I'm like, "No, wait a minute. You know, you can't SEO Twitter unless the guys at Twitter hire you to SEO their site." And people are talking about, "Well, how to make your tweets more SEO friendly?" And I went on a rant about it. I've since backed off a little bit on my rant because there are a few things you can do that may help from SEO standpoint with Twitter. But the interesting thing, and I read a post from rant on SEO Moz last week or a week or so ago about how it was very interesting and thought that people are not... It used to be in 2007. If you found a cool site and you were a blogger or you had some kind of way to communicate this on the internet, you would write about it and link to it. Well, now people don't do that anymore. It's more likely someone's tweet about it and put a little URL link to that site. And they're not going to go ahead and write a whole post. They're not going to really expand on that content with their own thoughts. They're going to say, "Hey, here's something cool I found." And put a link to it in Twitter or in their Facebook status or in social media in general. So, so rans post is really interesting how social and particularly Twitter is degrading or cannibalizing the entire link sphere on the internet itself. And I thought about that. And the more I think about that, the more I totally agree that sites like Twitter and Facebook are really degrading the substructure of links on the internet because people are not writing about things and they're not putting links in posts or the way they used to communicate. And they're now just doing short little snippets on Twitter, you know, which is interesting to me for a number of reasons. One, all the anchor text disappears. Twitter doesn't, you put a link in there, you don't get anchor text for your links anymore. Second, 99.9% of all the links on Twitter use a URL shortening service. And there's dozens of them out there now. I think you've mentioned recently Ross in your notes here, the Google launched one. You know, anybody who's anybody stumbled upon, got their own URL shortening service now, they all have them. And they all handle the links differently. Like there's one called Ally that's the default for a really cool application called Hootsuite. It allows you to manage multiple Twitter accounts. It's a really nice application. But the default, if the default URL shortener is something called Ally, A-W dot L-Y. And what it does is it creates a frame set with a little bar at the top that allows you to do some other promotion and puts the page in the frame set. That's going to be useless for SEO. Bitly, which is the default one in Twitter. If you actually sign in and have an account on Bitly, instead of just let Twitter make one itself, you can actually customize the short URL and stick a keyword in there. So you can get a little bit of keyword relevancy. But it does a 301 redirect from that short URL to your page. So if you look at it from that kind of detail and that depth, you can better optimize how you're using Twitter. But still, I mean, you're going to be losing anchor text. You're going to be losing weight. It's a 301 redirect at best, which is not as good as the direct link. So it's an interesting situation from an SEO standpoint. Yeah, it's a very good point. And I'd like to touch more a little on that when we get back. We're just going to take a quick break. SEO 101 will be back right after recess. Hey, this is Danny Sullivan to talk to you about Bruce Clay Incorporated. They've made ink magazines list of growing private businesses and have exhibited and sponsored my conferences since the very beginning. You've seen their search engine relationship chart, or you've read their SEO code of ethics, seen other SEO experts. But did you know they can help you with PBC, web analytics, web design, marketing strategy, promotion and branding? Yep, get everything you need for success in the online marketplace. You can check it out from the professionals at Bruce Clay Incorporated for over 10 years of offices worldwide and got the answers you need. Check them out today at BruceClay.com. Are you happy with your landing page performance? 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It's interesting to think of Bitly and all these different things cannibalizing the Internet's interlinking structure. It's a good point. It also frustrates me too that all of these social quick fix information tools like Twitter and stuff have really taken a lot of time out of all the really good quality writing we were doing. Yeah, without a doubt. Personally, I had lost the time to do writing, so it's easier for me to tweet. I'm sure it's that way for a lot of people. And I don't even tweet as much as I want to. But you're right. There's a lot of good thought leadership that may just disappear into nowhere because people didn't sit down and take the time to think about a topic that were interested in them. Instead, they just wrote 140 characters and sent it off and forgot about it. And the value isn't there, not even remotely, not compared to a really good blog post. Oh, yeah, no doubt. And a lot of the stuff that I see that interests me on Twitter is usually links to other good content. So I think the good content is still really, really valuable. It's just now there's not nearly as much of it because people aren't writing as much. I don't know. It's been such a good thing and such a blessing and such a curse in a lot of ways. But I still think we're obviously on a route that's important. So there's just something to it. Well, part of that also, Ross, is I think if you look at the bright side of that is now there's not as much clutter. Because you remember two years ago when everybody was writing about everything, you'd find four articles on link bait saying four completely different things. If you were new into the industry, you had no clue what was right. And now you're probably only going to find one, maybe two on the same topic at any given time. And most likely it's people that are more dedicated to the craft that are going to take the time to write that out than someone who is just trying to get some links or trying to get some publicity. More likely they're going to be working on Twitter now pointing to the other good articles. So there's just kind of a give and take there. That's true. Or scraping. Yeah. Or spamming or whatever you want. Good. And blocking up those Twitter spammers though, they usually don't last more in a couple hours anymore. Thank God. I'm just ruthless now. I actually sent him a nasty note and then block him. I got the funniest response. I followed a local guy down here last week. And basically he DM'd me after I followed him. And I thought for a minute that it was like, you know, this is an auto DM. I'm going to have to just unfollow this guy. So basically he's like, hey, I'm glad you followed me. I'm sure you're going to enjoy it. Make sure you stick around. Or basically he was like, you know, damn straight, you better follow me kind of thing. And I showed it to some friends. I said, what is this? I'll delete this guy. And like, no, no, he's pretty cool. He's a good guy. So it was quite interesting. Sometimes the spam is getting hard to tell from the real people because the personalities have a tendency to come out on Twitter. I've seen. Yeah. And auto, you know, I don't like any of that auto stuff. I mean, obviously if it's auto posting something you want to do in like a kind of press concept, like you've got some tweets you want to put out for the day and you've got a busy day. No problem. But when we're talking about someone following you in that auto, thank you for following me. I just find it weak. It's a waste of time. Yeah. Well, it kind of brings up something else. You know, it's technically still 2009 for a wrap up is the Google's real time search that came out recently. What's it, two weeks ago? And apparently people are, I haven't tried it myself and I've read a little bit about it. But people are able to gain this thing like crazy. I mean, I think Danny Sullivan compared it to search results from Altavista in 1997. So. Ouch. Yeah. But the only real way I can even see that being even worth your time is if you automatically did the tweets and stuff. You have to do some kind of automated software. And because I mean, it's real time. It's there for 90 seconds. And if it's a hot topic, your thing's gone after two minutes anyway. So it's like, a lot of this automation stuff for real time searches is tying in together as well. Yeah. We're going to definitely touch on that in a few minutes when we do our future of search for 2010. You've got some really good notes on it. God, we're going to have to save some time for that. One thing I just spotted here and I'm a bit of disbelief. Did it actually happen in 2009? Was that when the canonical tag was released? It looks like it because I see a video here explaining it. Definitely. The contact was just this year. Actually, as a matter of fact, I remember you talking with Jen Lakeock. It was like in March. And I remember she had the funniest thing trying to say the word canonical. I'm sorry. I'm going back through like old clips all this week. So I've been hearing and I heard canonical. There you go. Pinpoint. Touch. You know, you could just call me to hear my voice though. Yeah. You could just ask him to say canonical. Yeah, so I'm all over that. I love that tag. It's the best thing. It's made life a lot easier for a few of my clients. If you're on WordPress, WordPress 2.9 just came out last week. Actually, just the end of last week and it's got the canonical tag built into it. It's standard now. I mean, it's that mainstream already within a year. Wicked. I didn't know that. I actually haven't upgraded mine since the last one, which was it like last week. They're already on 2.9.1. And 2.9 just came out literally like Thursday or Friday. No. Thank you. Thank you. Thank God. It's an easy upgrade. Oh. They're on top of it though. That's for sure. Yeah. Well, and the other thing that happened this year, which was real. Well, it really got some hires up was the. Did I notice here? I thought I did. Yeah. I believe it was SMX advanced. I am. I'm not sure. That was when the no follow was publicly. I've lost by Matt cuts. Are you sure it was advanced? Yeah. That's advanced. Oh. That was quite an interesting meeting. Yeah. So a lot of debate about that though. There still is? Yeah, somewhat. There's still people trying to claim that there's, you know, it's a valuable tool. I don't agree with them, but I mean, it's still out there. People are still saying, yes, use no follows if you can, especially for link sculpting. To me at this point, worrying about no follows is a complete waste of time. I don't know if you agree or not, Ross, but. I still have it in some places, frankly, and it doesn't seem to make a difference. Either positively or negatively. I guess that was the point. It doesn't do either. Every day, thousands of hackers try to steal your crypto, but Archulus uses air-gapped technology by forming a protective barrier that insulates you from hackers and secures your crypto. Order yours at getarchulus.com. It's a good way to block something you don't want Google to associate with you, and that's as simple as that. Now, it brings me back to a wicked show we did this year with Stefan Spencer, who mentioned that there's definitely a way to use it, but it's more of a backwards. It seemed like he was talking, it was a backwards way of approaching it. It's like more of what's coming into your site. I don't know. It was interesting how to use link relationships. You have to listen to it again, because frankly, I'm still, I think, mentally trying to figure out what he was talking about, but he says there's a way to use it, I believe him. He's always on the cutting edge of this stuff, so he's more into the detail, or is I more into, "Okay, fine, I don't have to use it." It was never that big a tool for me anyway. I'm not dealing with optimizingmicrosoft.com, something crazy large. Page sculpting would have been amazing for, just not. Small business sites just don't seem to require that kind of intensity. I just thought it was really valuable, was like blog commenting, or forums, where people can go in, and they do, on a regular basis, go in and spam these places. The no-follow is a really good tool for people to use, to deter that type of activity. Well, apparently now it doesn't matter. For the no-follow standpoint, I do believe that the engines are looking at places like the comment areas of blogs, or forums, and treating those sections of a page a lot different than they do the rest of the page, as far as how links are concerned and weight is concerned. Well, no-follow works, it certainly works. It's still a good thing to have in the comments section. Unless you're seeing otherwise, I don't see any issue with that. I still use it. It's a great way to block any link to any of these spammers in the beginning, or wish they were getting, but the stuff I get through my blog, and some of it doesn't get caught by a kiss, but, oh, well, it's pretty good. Even just the same, I still get the people going, "Oh, you got an excellent blog. Let's obviously cookie cutter." But I'm seeing Ross, I'm seeing occasionally, even in a comment area of a blog, those links giving weight, and those links passing some juice, even if they're not for the little dinky blogs, but if you've got a pretty powerful site that has a lot of authority, it's still going to pass some weight, even through a new follow-up. Okay. Well, let's take a quick break, and when we get back, we've got a couple more things to touch on, and then we're going to move into 2010. Wow. SEO 101 will be back right after recess. How do you choose the right affiliate network to partner with? The answer is simple, MarketHealth.com, where health and wealth connect. Established in 1998, the MarketHealth.com affiliate network allows you to market and promote the world's leading health and beauty offers on the net. Start making recurring income and the highest payouts in our industry. 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From your friends at webmasterradio.f&, the best radio.f&.com, please be responsible. Did you know 99 Designs is a leading marketplace for graphic design on the Internet. Did you know 99 Designs connects you to a community of over 35,000 designers who compete to do the best work for you. Did you know 99 Designs allows you to post projects for low-level design, web page design, t-shirt design, and more. Did you know 99 Designs projects give average of over 70 different design options for a price that you set. 99 Designs when designers compete you win. It's time to start jamming and spamming again with the Princess of Age Rank, the Heroes of HTML, the Sultans of Cirque. SEO rock stars Tuesdays at 4 p.m. Eastern, 1 p.m. Pacific, only on webmasterradio.f&.com. Ok class, take your seats and no talking. Recess is over and SEO 101 is back in session, only on webmasterradio.f&. Welcome back to SEO 101 on webmasterradio.f& with John Carcutt, SEO Manager for MediaWiz and myself, Rastan, CEO of Step 4th Web Marketing, Inc. Well, we're going to try and wrap up 2009 here because we got lost for 2010 and the one that's, there's a couple here, but one that would definitely be worth mentioning is the Google Caffeine Update. It's not officially launched but, you know, it was announced in 2009. Frankly, I was surprised it took this long that they're really saying it's going to be January, they're going to be really bringing it out. But I think many were. It hasn't really blown me away by looking at the sandbox. What about you, John? No, not really. I mean, most of what caffeine is a backend architecture update. And I really believe this architecture update is what's allowing them to do a lot of this other stuff we're seeing now. The personal search stuff, the real-time search, a lot of things that are happening now, I think are because of that backend architecture update. But I will say that Mr. Cutts himself mentioned that caffeine update has a bigger impact than the Florida update. Way back in 2007, 2006. The Florida update took everybody by surprise and had a huge impact. If you weren't around in that timeframe to experience it, you get a taste of what it was like this coming January. But at least now they've given us some warning. They've given us a chance to prepare when the Florida update hit, it was like, boom, I don't know where. Yeah, and actually that interview I saw was it with Web Pro News? I think it was saying. He literally said, you know what, we just wanted to get people a bit of a break and let them worry over their Christmas holidays. Because that's true. I mean, Florida update was... I got many, many bad words for it. It was a really bad timing for... I mean, I was fortunate. Maybe one of our clients felt something from that. Didn't it hit in November? It was because I remember it was right before the Christmas shopping season online. Yeah, it was November and it just... You're literally estimated a lot of businesses. Yeah, I can't even imagine how many actually went down the toilet, thanks to that thing. It was a bad, bad, bad scene. And that brings up another note, though. You mentioned personalized. I don't mean to jump past it because it's a big topic, but we've got to get moving. Personalized search in 2010. Yeah, personalized search. Huge. They've now made it not optional. I mean, you can't get out of it. Oh, yeah. That's a little creepy to me, but that was launched this year as well. We wanted to go. Of course, Google Wave was announced as well. That really hasn't affected anyone in the SEO community, but I have to mention it. Because that's what we're using to do our show. And people are complaining about Google Wave saying it's useless, can't do anything with it, and they're right most of the time. Because it's not even in beta yet. It's still in a preview mode. I mean, most of the functionality is not even there. For anybody that's on it, don't worry, it's going to get better. Oh, totally. I mean, not even half the functionality they mentioned. They showed in the preview, isn't it? Oh, really? The launch thing. I mean, no, that stuff looked amazing. So, yeah. It's yet to be seen. But, well, you did a lot of work here for 2010. Let's launch it. Alright. So, if I had to break it down, and this is probably not the full list, but I'd say there's probably six major things and a couple minor things that really keep your eyes on for 2010. And I'm just going to, just real quick, Ross, just hit the topics and then we go back and discuss them a little more depth. I just want to share what he hears what they are. It's really, we talked about it some about, it happened in 2009, but the Yahoo Bing merger is going to be huge all across the board for SEO. That's without a doubt. That's major landscape change for search period is going to impact us. Google Personal Search, Ross just mentioned it. It's definitely going to make an impact as well over the next year. Right now, it's only about, not even a month old. And as it keeps collecting data and as it gets better and better, it's going to have more and more of an impact throughout 2010. Caffeine's going to launch in January. We just talked about that as well. That adds a big thing to keep your eye out on 2010. Real-time search. I don't think that the real-time results that we're going to be, they're seeing in your real search right now are going to be a big game changer. However, real-time search in general in 2000 is definitely on the horizon. In many other ways, specifically in a search results as a search. When we talked about this a little bit too with the Twitter, normally you have your three main focal points of SEO. The architecture of a site, content and links will now social buzz. And how are you being playing in social media? How are you playing in social media? It's probably going to start having a major impact on SEO. I personally think that 2010 will be the year of universal search. It's getting more and more prevalent as we go. They're adding more and more types. It's going to be a big deal next year. Universal search should be in your SEO plans if it's not already. And something to keep in mind is page load time. It's definitely going to be added to. Well, not definitely. It's like 90% chance it's going to be added to the algorithm in 2010 and have an impact on your rankings. So those are the things I think you should be aware of throughout the bat. And Ross, if you want to go back and talk a little more detail about those if you like. But keep those, you know, take notes on that. Start doing some research on those things because they're going to make a difference next year for you. Oh, sorry. We can just wrap up now. There's a lot there. That's our six shows for next year. Yeah, down to two major engines. So, wow, where do we begin with that? I mean, Bing, good. You know, we talked a little bit about this already. But driving Yahoo, organic results. I mean, Yahoo's still V portal. I mean, really, is there anything that competes against Yahoo and it comes to an actual portal for people who have to check their finances and all that kind of stuff? I think it is. Yeah, I think you're right. The only competitor had of any weight in the past few years was AOL, but AOL's kind of tanked over the few. It hasn't been nearly what it was in its heyday quite a while. So Yahoo's it, I think. Wow. Well, you know, when Bing does get in there, that's going to be an absolute massive kick. Now, refresh my memory because I'm feeling a little sketchy today. Yahoo guys are taking over the paid marketing stuff, right? They're actually handling all that while Google or Microsoft does the organic. Right. So, here's how it's going to work from what I understand. Who knows how it's going to be when they finalize it, but this is what they've announced. Bing is going to take over the organic search results for both engines. Yahoo is going to manage paid advertising. The ad center is going to be the platform. So, there will no longer be Yahoo paid advertising. It'll be Microsoft's ad center platform, but the people at Yahoo are going to manage all that advertising. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, totally. That's what I thought. I just wanted to be sure. And it makes sense. It is the one area that they, well, I've heard people say otherwise, but yeah, who did an okay job on their system? I know there were some major issues with it, but they did a pretty good job on it, and I believe they've got lots they can work with. What's your experience with their pay-per-click system? I don't have a lot of experience directly. We have a pay-per-click team here that works very closely with our SEO team, and the biggest complaint I hear out of them about Microsoft is not that the system, it's the customer service. So, hopefully that'll be fixed, because Yahoo has always had great customer service on the paid side. So, if they're taking over that part of it, that's a win-win. Yeah, well, would Yahoo be using their own systems? Because they'd already built that pretty big platform, didn't they? No, Yahoo is going to be using the ad center systems, but their people are going to be managing. So, the customer service side, from that perspective, they're much more responsive, and I've always had better experience with them. Wow, well, it will be... Don't envy them, it's going to be a hell of a merge. Oh, yeah, without a doubt. Two things to note for that merger from an SEO perspective. If you're using paid inclusion at all, that goes away. Paid inclusion, you're not able to sign up for... You're not able to add anything into it now at all. They turned it off a week or so ago, but at the end of the year, January 1st, they're pulled out of the search... I mean, it's done, it's gone, it's done and gone. So, you know, beginning of the year, paid inclusion is history. I'm pretty sure Yahoo is the only one still doing it anyway, so it'll be one of our museum relics in the SEO Hall of Fame Museum someday. Well, it was for a while, and they brought it back, so who knows? And the other key thing is Site Explorer. Apparently, hopefully they changed their mind. Apparently, Site Explorer is going away as well. So, that really just leaves us Webmaster Tools and the Bing Webmaster Tools to get in there and really look and see how the engines are looking at our sites from linking data and indexing data. That really bites. Yeah. I just love Yahoo Site Explorer for link stuff. I'm hoping Bing does a good job of that. I must admit, I haven't done a lot of work with their Webmaster Tools. I've used it a couple of times, but nothing in depth. Have you found their link reporting pretty good? It's not nearly as extensive, I don't think, as the Google stuff, but Google is a little bit vague. Yeah. Bing is, I think, giving us a little more detail, but not as much. Well, what about for people who don't actually own the sites? Like, I used to, yeah, who's Site Explorer all the time for competitors. Yeah, you're on luck. Don't! That's not the term I wanted to use. That's active in there, but no. We could give Brask a little warning. You can bleep us, that'd be great. Isn't the internet cable though? Aren't we allowed to cast if we really want to? I guess so. So, Google Personal Search Gone Wild, yeah. Active for everyone is, and so what that means to me, and I tell you, I think I mentioned it last time, I just love it because it's like, actually, I can tell my clients that, I mean, I admittedly can't get away without giving reports sometimes, but now we have to use the analytics reports, which have a pretty decent, or actually not analytics. Google Webmaster Tools reports for Google Rank Kings. It's great. It shows you where your most impressions are and which ones are actually clicked on. Two different beautiful columns. It's a great way of doing the rank tracking. What are your thoughts? Well, that's not a bad idea. My problem with that is, if I want to start ranking for new terms, so I can't set benchmarks. Yeah. So, I mean, if there's terms, your site's already ranking for it, that's awesome. But if you're building new content, you want to set benchmarks for those content to really show that your link building activity, whatever is having an impact, it's hard to do that. Unless you're tracking absolutely everything coming into your site. All right. And the URL shorteners are a good way to do that. Especially once they have an API that can sort of merge with Google, which unfortunately I guess will not happen now since Google has its own. Google.gl. Google just has to be looking at all the other URL shorteners too. There's no way they can just use theirs. I mean, you can't even sign up for theirs. At least when I tried last week, it was still in the light only. Yeah. What is with that? Oh, here's our URL shortener, and there's nothing you can do with it. Right. So, I don't know. I think it's mostly for developers at this point, so they can build it into applications. I don't know if even, you know, from what I'm reading, it's, you know, they haven't even really announced that it'll be for public consumption where you can go to the site and do it. It's mostly for developers to build that into their, into applications. No. I tell you, it's definitely long-and-coming to have some sort of API integration to Google Analytics, because I use BitLeed a lot. And I would love to see that kind of connection. It would effectively do a way better job of connecting social media with SEO and website statistics. I think it'd be amazing. And I do have one other issue with using the Webmaster Tools for ranking reports. Is, you know, yes, we can say this is the baseline. This is where Google sees you. You know, however, it's not where the customers are going to see you, which is really what's most important. It's not where your potential, you know, conversions are. You know, if people are getting their personal searches, it's changing all over the place, that data, to me, is much more valuable. Where are they seeing you is more valuable than the baseline. I mean, the baseline is valuable. Don't get me wrong. But to me, it's almost, I really don't think rankings, you know, I never have for a while now thought that rankings were a very good metric to begin with at all. But now specifically, you know, because of personal search, because they're doing a lot of geo-targeting for search terms, whether you are logged in or not as well, not just personal search. If I search for like pizza place, not logged in, they will give me a local one box for Fort Lauderdale, where I happen to be at right now, whether I'm logged in or not. All this data is changing on a regular basis because of not only personal search, but geo-targeted and who knows what else they're throwing into the mix now. The you and I are definitely not going to see the same results for every term. Now, there are plenty of terms where we are going to see the same result. I think it's really highly searched, high volume terms are going to have a lot more fluctuation than, you know, long tail stuff. But, you know, I'm still leaning towards, you know, at this point, trying to convince the clients that rankings are not as important anymore because they're not reliable, lean towards analytic data or, you know, conversion data as your real metric for success. Maybe you'll have a better chance of doing that. I've got to do a soft approach. I can't just. Oh, it's not easy. I mean, I'm not saying that they can't. They certainly could. It's just, it's a harder sell. Like everyone's gotten so used to a ranking report. Everyone thinks of rankings. And fair enough, that's really been what's pitched. I've always stressed analytics because frankly what comes to your site is the best thing. I mean, and what they do there is even better. But that's a different thing altogether. The thing I do like is, the one thing I really like about that reporting, Google is impressions versus actual click-throughs. That's kind of... That is true. I do like that too because that's something you're not going to get anywhere else. No. And, you know, Bing and, well, I guess Bing's going to have a lot on their shoulders. Microsoft's going to have to up the ante and make their tool set even better. When I talked to the developers at the, I think it was just to make it advanced. I talked with the lead developer actually for that. And I was just saying, they have to have sort of a sandbox, or not a sandbox, but somewhere you can be sign up and you don't have to have a Windows system. I mean, I realize it's totally on Microsoft. But the fact is, if they want to get a search share, hello, they're going to deal with a lot more people than just Windows users. And they can use the SEO toolkit. They can use the whole bunch of these amazing tools they're making, but only for Windows users. Hey, did you hear the Chrome? Chrome actually surpassed Safari and browser share already? Wow. Yeah. So they can't focus on just around stuff because, you know, it's a very short sighted. Well, not that they haven't been short sighted in the past, but. Can we count? I'm not sure I can count that. Especially today. One thing that I, well, God, we got so much to go through here. I think we're going to have to do another session. We'll have to continue this next, well, in the new year. Wow. 2010. We've got the Olympics coming here. It's going to be pretty crazy. Yeah. And Vancouver. Yeah. It's going to be quite cool. I'm not going to get anywhere near it and certainly can't afford any of the passes, but it'll be fun to watch from afar. I can take a press pass and cover it for Webmaster Radio. Hey. That's a great idea. The, the, the, the, the, the whole pedal game. Yeah. Sorry, guys. You just brought it up. I had to like deliver for you. You made the order. I just served it up. Rasta and reporting at the lose. Yes. All I care about is the gold cup hockey game. I don't care who's playing in the end. That's going to be a wicked game. So I, I, Brasko mentioned some of the sort of a trade show outlook for 2010. One thing I am going to be looking forward to is the keynote at SMX West coming up. I think that's March 2nd of 4th. I'm looking for that. I'll be there. Is that right? Yes. I believe it is March 2nd of the 4th. And yeah, like you said, Steve bomber. Yeah. Steve. It is the first time he's ever given a keynote, isn't it? Yeah. For, for search. Anyway, in the search, or is it period? I don't think he's been out in public like that very much at all. He's going to have a glass bubble around him or something. Yeah. He'll, he'll write it into the potable deal. They're going to check to make sure everyone's shoelaces are tied on so they don't show any shoes at him or anything. Yeah. It's actually Monday, March 2nd. It's a fireside chat with Steve bomber and Danny Sullivan's going to be tossing questions to him. Nice. Well, I hope it's more effective than the one for Yahoo. Jerry Yang. That was just a waste of time. Yeah. They don't answer anything. They're politicians practically. So it's a waste of time. Speaking of out West, you know what I'm really bummed about? No more Google dance. Google dance is gone. They've definitely said that last year. Well, they're moving the show to San Francisco instead of, so they didn't say it was any more. So there's no way they can. They want to bust everybody an hour and a half. I guess they could, but well, it'll be worth it to be in San Francisco. I missed the Google dance a lot to you already, but oh, well, things move on. They just better throw a good party there. Yeah, that's true. I would, I would literally probably fly around trip to go to find somewhere in San Francisco. I've got the best crabs I've ever had in my life, and there's a place I've gone on Pier 39. I think it is called the crab house. It's just give them a plug because if you're in San Francisco, you guys need to hit that place. Unbelievable. It's making me hungry here. All right. What else is going on here? Yeah, it's leaving San Jose will be in San Francisco in the summer, and there's no more Chicago in the winter. I wonder why? Yeah. I'll tell you what, I spoke in Chicago a couple of years ago, two or three years ago, and I don't even submit for Chicago anymore because I didn't want to go back in the winter. So maybe I'll start. I try to stick out West, that big Eastern trip is too much so, and I know that's sort of midway, but I don't know. I'm looking forward to these Western ones. I'm looking to be getting some good ones, but on that note, seasons and screens to everyone. Absolutely. It's been a good year. And on behalf of myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of the 4th Web Marketing and Johnny Perkut, SEO Manager for MediaWiz. Thank you for listening to us and suffering through us since our year. Happy holidays. Yeah, looking forward to a great 2010. I hope you keep stopping by, talking with us, visiting us. Happy holidays. And happy new year, everyone. Thank you. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO]