SEO 101

Tips on Hiring a SEO Company

Ross and John discusses some tips that you should follow when hiring a SEO company for service, plus they discuss Droid, the next wave of Android-powered smartphones will include free turn-by-turn navigation software powered by Google Maps and Google Street View. 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:: 37m
Broadcast on:: 02 Nov 2009
Audio Format:: other

Ross and John discusses some tips that you should follow when hiring a SEO company for service, plus they discuss Droid, the next wave of Android-powered smartphones will include free turn-by-turn navigation software powered by Google Maps and Google Street View.

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

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 minds, grab your mouse and get ready to get back to the basics. SEO 10101 on webmasterradio.fm is now in session. Hello and welcome to SEO 101 on webmasterradio.fm. This is Ross Dunn, CEO of Step 4th Web Marketing and my co-host is John Carca, the SEO Manager for MediaWiz. Hey John, how you doing? Hey, Ross. Long time no speak. Okay. Well, maybe last week. And a bit of chatting today on instant messenger. Exactly. Some interesting stuff happening today, too, isn't it? It's this week. I'm actually putting together pretty excited because I've been so, so bad with my blog. I'm putting together a week in review kind of post and it's amazing how much happened this week. I got a feeling it's not going to slow down. I think things are starting or not starting to, but continuing to pick up as far as people introducing new products, modifying products, launching stuff. It's a crazy time we live in. Yeah. You know, I never thought of looking at it, but is this kind of a trend, is it this time of year that they do the launches or is it just happens to be this way? I wonder. I wouldn't be surprised. I haven't looked at it either, but you've got to figure out coming to the end of the year budget means they don't want to finish projects so they get new budget for next year. I'm really surprised if that's not a good point. There's a one thing that I thought was really cool because frankly, I love the stuff is the Google Maps navigation. Yeah. That is so sweet. I mean, do you remember seeing that this week? I know you were poking so damn busy, but I saw that they didn't something but have not dug into it. What did they do to it? Well, essentially they've taken Google Maps and added full on turn by turn navigation and everything by voice and all. Oh, so they're going after the car stuff. Yeah, like I said, in this post year, they've single-handedly decimated the consumer GPS nav industry. That's what I think. I already used my iPhone and Google Maps for GPS when I'm in the car already. So it's like if they just make that easier, then more power to it because I'll continue to use it. Yeah, and then they're going to have, you know, from prospective listeners, you know, they're going to have your local sites online, you know, they're going to be able to say, go find the nearest Starbucks and it'll find the nearest Starbucks, you know. Yeah. I mean, there's some pretty sweet stuff. The best part, I thought, well, this just from your geek's perspective, is you just press the button and say, take me to, in our case, the Royal BC Museum and it plots the Royal BC Museum. It's all voice. Oh, nice. That's excellent. Yeah. It's time to play with on the way home today. Yeah. I don't know whether or not it's going to be only released in Android. I think it's Android 2.0 only right now. Oh, OK. So it's a boss part of your iPhone. All right. All right. Yeah. Another reason to get an Android phone. Speaking of Android, did you see the somebody had put me to Google site this week and basically spoofed the launch of the Google Android OS and it looked like it was Google. It was on Google's domain because it was sites.google.com and they asked you to download a bunch of stuff. It was, if you got caught up in that, don't download the stuff because it's not Google, but there's someone's, it's probably down by now, actually, but they had it up earlier this week. It was very interesting. Someone was trying to use Google to, you know, to make themselves look like Google and they got away with it. That's sneaky. Oh my god. You know, there's always something going out there. We just thought we'd go through the news a bit here today. So let's see. What else did we go here? Google Music Search. Someone said that's 2.0. I think it was Matt Mangy's that in this title. I don't think there's been a music search of any kind before, has there? There has been. I mean, there's been music search in the past, but it's, it was hard to find. It wasn't easy to get to. It wasn't integrated into universal search at all, but there was dedicated music. And I don't think you could preview the songs in it before either. It was more like strictly an MP3 style search engine where you go and you go up that information about artists, kind of like they do with some other verticals. This one definitely is 2.0 version because you can preview songs. I don't know. Can you purchase music off of this one yet? Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. And it's interesting because for all us Canadians, I don't think it's actually going to show up in our results because you can feel, I've got to hunt just because the purchase is just in power, it can only be done in the States, it can only purchase through the States at this time. Anyway, I haven't seen it in any results yet, but you guys are getting the benefit of it. It sounds really interesting. I mean, if you do any kind of search, even a search for a song lyric, it'll bring up the song. Yeah. You can preview it and stuff. And I've seen examples of including it, excuse me, in universal search, which is brand new too, which is great. Well, I'm waiting, and I almost guarantee it'll happen one of these days, but Google will come out with a Hulu type service as well. They'll make the agreement with Google TV and it'll be the same kind of deal. Yeah. Especially with Hulu announcing that they're going to start charging for the service next year. So Google will jump all over that. Yeah. Was it you I was saying that to Scott yesterday when I heard about this coming out, my senior CEO, he laughed, he says, he can't wait to can't wait for Google burger to open up down the street. Nice. It's true. I mean, what next? Do you feel like Google fries with that? Exactly. But it's yeah, I think my next mark was Google TV. It's got to be coming. Oh, yeah. I've thought it out, especially since Windows 7 just launched with free Internet TV built into the operating system, you know, that's a slap in the face to Google if they don't do their own version of TV. I didn't know that either. Yeah. It sounds pretty cool though. Another thing today actually was being added new some new functionality to Bing mobile. And see if I can just bring this up because of course I forget all about the details as I'm on the radio. You know, it's got some searches so you can see what kind of stats and scores are happening in your games and stuff on the fly. It's like it's live, I'll keep updating it at times, the actual game play and stuff. Nice. Another one is you can enter the airline in flight number of a flight to get the status, which is kind of cool. And it's got some-- Haven't you been able to do that at Google for a while now? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Okay. So they're catching up. You've got to give them credit. They're trying. Definitely. Yeah. And they're winning over some people because it is a different look and it's a very clean look. I kind of like it. So I can't say I've used it a lot. I actually made it my default on my laptop, but I realized I didn't do a lot of searching on it because I haven't actually searched it. So anyway, what else have you heard about this week? Twitter, just-- and I know this is not super search-related, SEO-related, but since it's kind of tied in with the whole thing. Twitter just launched lists publicly available. It was Friday. Yeah. So how's that work? I haven't had a chance to look into that. Well, see, I'm a little scared. I was in the beta in Twitter lists, and what you do is you basically-- you create a list. So I'm going to make a list about SEO people, and then I go into my people that I'm following, and I select which ones I want to add to this list. And then at the end of my Twitter ID, it's like on Twitter/JohnCarca/SEOpeople. And then if I go to that URL after my Twitter ID, it just shows me the people that I put on that list. So I don't have to listen to the people that are doing the auto-twits of what song I listen to at the moment. I can filter all that stuff out by just following a list, watching a list. But it also is a great place. A lot of people are using it to find other people to follow. It's a resource. So if you go find a bunch of lists on SEO, you're going to end up-- and you want to follow these SEOs, you know, you just go follow everybody that's on that list, and you're good to go. Right. Okay. Yeah, I just want to go. I do have a potential issue with this, and I tweeted about it today. I think because this launched, we are seeing the birth of-- that's something I'm going to call Twit-clicks. So what's going to happen is you're going to have these people that want to appear super popular, like the jocks and cheerleaders in high school, they're super popular, so they're going to follow tens of thousands of people, and they get tens of thousands of people to follow them. But in reality, they're going to be on this little list that has like 20 or 30 of their best friends, and that's the only-- it's the only twits they're ever going to see. They're just going to stay in this little click to interact on Twitter, but they're still going to look super popular because they're following tens of thousands of people. So that could be an interesting twist, unexpected twist to this whole list of things. Don't get me wrong. I think lists are great. I think the best thing Twitter has done in quite some time, but it can have some repercussions. Yeah, they've been a bit sedentary, in my opinion, mostly, I guess, they've been trying to catch up and trying to keep it stable. Right. I don't know. The other one that I haven't had a chance to look much into, but I thought it was pretty cool, Google Social Search launched on Monday. Social Lab area only, I think you can pretty much engage it and just-- it will add social search. I can't speak today. Social search to results at the footer of your results page, and then from there you can-- Is it only at the footer because I've seen screenshots where it's like on the side where you would normally see advertising at some time. Oh, OK. Yeah, I don't-- because it might be a screenshot I saw I thought was in the footer, but it's probably in both or either or or, I don't know. But the intriguing part is, of course, it's personalized so you get to see what your other friends are saying that might be in relation to what you just searched. Yeah, I think the funniest thing about the Google Social Search is when you go to sign up for it, they pick the picture of Matt Cutts. So he's apparently the most social person at Google because they used his picture in the social search. That's interesting. Isn't it? Makes sense. They're quite the clique, but anyway, it's pretty intriguing. Anyway, let's take a break, and when we come back, we'll talk a little more, probably start answering some questions we got here. SEO 101 will be back right after recess. Hey, this is Danny Sullivan to talk to you about the Bruce Clay Incorporated. They've made Inc Magazine's list of growing private businesses, and have exhibited and sponsored on my conferences since the very beginning. You've seen their search engine relationship chart, or you've read their SEO code of ethics, so you know they're 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 with offices worldwide. They've got the answers you need. Check them out today at BruceClay.com. Are you happy with your landing page performance? Discover how to improve your landing page performance with conversioncredit.com, brought to you by Engine Ready. Turn your underperforming landing pages into cost-effective sales-producing machines. Be sure you're not wasting your precious PPC budget. Conversion credit tools give you the ingredients to create high converting landing pages. You don't have to be an expert to use Engine Ready's conversion credit tools, but you'll feel like a landing page pro. Take the guesswork out of increasing your conversion rate, visit conversioncredit.com, and boost your conversion rate for free. That's www.conversioncredit.com. Want to learn the biggest asset to driving online success? Let me introduce you to my expert advisor. Pixel Silk is a robust content management system built on a foundation to create online marketing success. It's the only content management system that offers keyword-specific SEO advice, can integrate with your shopping cart system, and offer multi-site management. Pixel Silk frees my time while making my company's website easy to manage and promote. Even better, Pixel Silk has been embraced by the SEO community. I'm Bruce Clay, and Pixel Silk is the first CMS I've ever felt good about recommending. With this winning combination, we have all the tools we need, PixelSilk.com, the ultimate in SEO-driven CMS. Press this, Tuesdays at 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific, or on demand anytime inside the internet marketing channel, only on webmasterradio.fm. Welcome back to SEO 101 on webmasterradio.fm, with John Carca, SEO manager for MediaWiz, and myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing Inc. We're joined today by no one, so we're going to actually answer some questions. Well, I'm joining you. Yeah, that's true. Probably not. We are joined by no one. Oh, good point. So I'm going to try and bring up my questions here. Have you got any that popped up this week for you? Nothing really new. Some of the stuff that we've had on the list that people have asked in the past, here's a good one, that you actually get quite a bit. It's a general question for SEOs, I think, in general, and it's one that most of us have been asked over and over again, but what do you do when you actually SEO a website? Have you been asked that, Ross? Never. Never. Maybe about three, four times a day, which is fair enough, you know, it's certainly, you know what I hate when people say it's black magic, it's not as easy. It's really quite simple. It's just that it's technical at times and more complex sites and more competitive sites require a finer touch and perhaps a few even more technical tips and stuff. But you know, it's not difficult. It's a concept. I mean, it's based on, to me, it's based on the simple fact that search spiders, which are determining where you're going to rank, are very logical. And they look at your site, they're looking for logical standout points that state what your article is about, your page is about, what your site's about. You know, to me, that logic is so easy to apply, but it does work. You do have to apply it to the code. You do have to apply it to the title and all these different things that definitely scares some people off and fair enough, you know, it is in the code and some people look at code and just go blank. What do you usually say? Obviously not what I don't want to say. Right. Actually, the first thing that comes to mind when someone asked me that question is, how do you SEO website? And I've said this for years and then I came to work here at MediaWiz and one of my coworkers phrased it a little bit differently, but it's the same kind of thing is I tell them you don't SEO websites. You do not SEO a website. SEO is part of your website. It's part of your whole process of building and marketing websites. Not something you do to a website. It's part of your business model. I used to say, yeah, it's definitely affects your website quite a bit. But if you look at it as something that only impacts your website, you're looking at it wrong. So that's totally great. And, you know, I had a talk today with a new client that wants me to help them with their design from square one, which is really exciting. I love it when they think far ahead like that, right? In this case, though, I ran into one thing, which was sort of a segue, but was blogging. And they said, you know, we really don't have any interest in blogging. We don't have the time. And I said, okay, well, what kind of rankings do you want to get? And they picked these phrases that were really, really, like totally competitive and like, you know what, there are other ways to do it, but, you know, I know you don't have a huge budget. So blog, blog, blog, blog, it doesn't mean you can just do two a month. That's it. Just make it good. And I tell you, it was a good half an hour and I still hadn't quite convinced them. I mean, I gave them some good points and stuff, but, you know, a lot of people ring that up as a question, blogging, what, you know, why should I blog? I mean, how can I blog? And what am I going to write about? What do you like to talk about, you know, like, you must render that too and you talk to people. And let's try it out. And I don't think there's a single topic that you couldn't find something to write about. I mean, it can be the driest, most boring topic in the world, but somebody wants some information on it. If there's information in your head about it, you can put it down, you know, in words. I think the key to using blogging specifically as a tactic to generate content is personality. If you have a personality, you can make the driest subject in the world interesting. And if you can get that personality out of your person onto a web page, that much better. Yeah. And an editor. An editor. Yeah. I think one of those works. Sure. Yeah. So, and but actually, so to go kind of back to the meat of that question, what's a person was really asking, I think was, was, you know, what are some of the things to focus on or what, what do you really look at when you're looking at optimizing a site? You know, again, backing up something that's just part of what SEO is, but it's a big part of what SEO is, you know, optimizing a website. And I personally break it down into three basic sections. One, you're going to look at the technology behind the site. You're going to look to see if the technology allows the engines to access all the pages of the site to access the content that are on those pages and in very many, many different things that technology can impact when it comes to your site. The second thing you look at is the content. Is your content targeted? Are you talking about the right things related to your goals for your website? Do you have enough content? Are you continuing to add content, those kind of things targeting your content? And the last one is your market and your offsite stuff. Are you building links? Are you getting, you know, social with your site? Are you getting people to become, build a community on your site or offsite? So those are the three things, basically technology, content, and marketing or linking. Yeah, and something to consider too is fair enough. Some people think, well, social media why would I bother? And sometimes they're right. There is no point. You're a small business. You don't need to create a community around your site, quote unquote, like at least an online social community. There's to be people interested to build a community. Yeah. But, you know, it's just a different mindset. You don't need to go for all the stuff. But if you're going competitive, any kind of competitive phrase, you're going to need as many, you're going to need as much as you can in your, in your war chest. And I think you're right. You've got to do social. You've got to do some blogging. I actually had a client yesterday, says, I hate when people say to me, oh, when I hear people say, you have to have a blog to succeed. And I said, well, that's true. I mean, you don't have to, but it's just going to help you and a lot. Yeah. I mean, a lot of SEO now from the offset marketing is making your site the authority in your market. And right now, the best, one of the best ways to spread authority is through social networks and through social activity that goes on in a lot of these places. If you can get involved there and build your authority in these social networks for your particular niche, that trickles down to your site via links, via comments. And that helps build the authority of your site as well. So as you build authority out there, it strengthens your site, you know, peripherally. Yeah. Totally agree. Okay. We're going to take a quick break and we come back. We're going to talk about, uh, wow, this, this is one question. What question should I ask an SEO company before hiring them? I like that one, this is a good one. SEO 101 will be back right after recess. This is a test of the PR web content and news delivery system from PR web and PR web author .com. If this was a real release date, your story would reach more than 30,000 journalists, 250,000 RSS subscribers and just over 30,000 unique websites. PR web can reach your target audience online, drive traffic to your website, achieve high rankings on search engines and get your content on top news sites like Yahoo News. Editors are available 24/7 to help you optimize your content for maximum exposure to over 70 million people in the US alone. If this were a real PR web release date, your website would have so much traffic, you'd be tempted to duck and cover. If you have an online marketing emergency, go to PR web author .com for 25% off. PR web, the premier online news release and content distribution service, friend finder, friend finder, the world's largest online dating network featuring over 100 million profiles. At hot sites such as passion.com and fastcubit.com represents enormous profit-making opportunities for webmasters with friend finder's ability to geo-target and provide billing solutions in most languages and currencies. You are sure to find our comprehensive network to be a good friend. So you're telling me your affiliate program on the local pages affiliate network is performing as well as your handicap? Absolutely. Thanks to 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 cost 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. Ecom experts. Mondays at 6 p.m. Eastern 3 p.m. Pacific or on demand anytime inside the internet marketing channel only on webmaster radio dot FM. Okay class. Take your seats and no talking. Recess is over and SEO 101 is back in session. Only on webmaster radio dot FM. I'm back to SEO 101 on webmaster radio dot FM with John Carcutt, SEO manager for MediaWiz and myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Step 4th Web Marketing Inc. So before the break we had a good question. That was, what question should I ask an SEO company before hiring them? Essentially I don't want to get ripped off and you know what? We obviously don't get that question to us because we're SEO companies. But through the great find I get that. I get it indirectly from people. What should I ask an SEO? What do you look for? That's for stuff. Do you want to start down? It's pretty interesting to look at it this way from the other side. Looking from the other side what I would ask a company and again from my perspective I know I'm a little more educated than a standard business person would be in this so I might ask different questions myself. But if I was going to tell someone my sister for example is going to hire somebody things I would recommend her to ask references. Number one off top is just like with any service oriented you want to get some references. So I mean that didn't have to be the first question you asked them but if you're dealing with someone don't just look at what they show you about you know I did this and I did this. Get the references get the name and the phone number of the clients they've worked with if possible and call them and ask them hey was this company good to work with did they you know did they meet your goals did they help you set goals those kind of things but check references that would be the first thing I'd recommend my sister to do. From that alone you can get the majority of the answers you need too. Were they straightforward did they have good communication did they follow through what they said they do. One thing that I like to do as well is do a little bit of background searching on them online. If I'm hiring anyone I do that. I type in their company name and look for I do a reputation search and see if there's any complaints on them on there about them. And you know if there are I mean most companies have something just make sure it was addressed and that obviously there's certain deal breakers but if it's a general complaint then it was addressed by a person and it seems like they did a jibbe's and job of handling it. Well consider that. But there sure are some flags out there though. The question I would ask is what kind of reporting do they provide. You know you're going to spend a lot of money in some cases on these type of services you want to know what they're doing and how they're doing it. I mean the day of them saying well we can't tell you exactly what we do is over. If someone tells you that turn and just walk out the door that's that's not true at all. If they can't tell you then they're probably doing something that they shouldn't be doing. That's my opinion anyway. I mean a client can come to me and I will tell them everything that I'm doing anytime they want. If they have questions about something to do them you know come ask me I'm more I'm a I'm an open book you can see through me I'm so transparent. So don't let them give you the line of you know we can't really tell you exactly what we're doing and even if it doesn't and take it up to like a lesser direct thing. If they're not showing you and they're reporting they're not giving you reporting about the activity that's going on you know what they've done to your site or for your site that's an issue in my mind. You want to see that they've got good clear, concise transparency and reporting. I quite agree and you know they say oh what you don't trust me? Run. You don't trust me? Not anymore. The other thing I guess is you know with the reporting I guess it's sort of tied into that but you know after they're done or completed the initial optimization if that's indeed how they work you know the fact is a lot of us we do the bulk of our work at the beginning which is going to the site and doing the full optimization. We're seeing this as an existing site. After that's complete you know what's considered ongoing services if in fact they do offer them. What exactly are you going to get for that money? I think that's a very key question. There's a lot of companies out there that will just give you a report with no detail. They won't provide any commentary you know if another thing I can't stand and I know it's probably more common and even for even good companies is when you call and they're charging you permitted on the phone. No you know that should include a couple hours or something to talk you know just a little bit of commentary from us. That's a good point too. You know right up front be real sure you know what their billing processes are. If they're one of those companies that bill you by the hour make sure that they tell you what they're going to be doing and how much time each process is going to take because you know I personally like to work on a project basis so you say this is what the project is going to cost and you know at that point I know that I'll have to worry about watching the clock I can just do what it takes to get the job done and leave agreed on a process to get the job done so make sure you understand their billing right off the bat as well. Quite agreed. I think we covered a few good ones there. We've got time for one more question here. Is there one that stands out for you? Are you going to make me look for another question? All right hold on. Okay here's one. Did we we may have talked about this maybe not but I don't think so because it's not marked in our list. It's pretty generic but it's causes a lot of anxiety for SEOs and clients alike. What is PageRank and how do I increase it? We could do like a whole week's worth of shows on this alone so do you want to tell you when we go Ross? I go for it. You enjoy that one. So what is PageRank? You hear that term in this industry all the time. If you've been doing SEO for a while you know this is a good time to go get a drink or something because you know what PageRank is. But PageRank is basically what differentiated Google from the rest of the search engines when they first launched. So when the other search engines were out it was pretty easy to to spam the search engines by putting keyword stuffing and getting a bunch of keywords on your page and your meditags and ranking well. What the Larry Page is actually the guy came up with PageRank and a little bit of trivia PageRank is named after Larry Page. That's why it's PageRank. The name doesn't have anything to do with your page on your website. Just a little bit trivia there. So Larry Page came up with this idea of if other people are linking to your site that means they must think your site's important and if they think it's important it's more important to us than a page that doesn't have any links to it. So the more links you've got to a page the more votes that page received basically for importance. So if I had 10 links and you had 100 links your page is more important than mine. So Larry devised his way to create a ranking around that theory and it became PageRank. PageRank has evolved a lot since then to the point almost where it's not nearly as important as it was when Google first introduced it and it was huge when they first introduced it. So what do you think is the best way to go about describing how PageRank impacts today Ross? We know what it did and how it came about but how's it do today? I considered a few things. One thing it's a great example if you've done something wrong. First of all people can see their PageRank in the Google toolbar. I don't really know any other way to see it. I'm sure there's other ways but that's the one I always do so it's only one I think of. You can actually see this a bar of the little green. Hopefully it's maxed in your site probably not. It's out of 10 and a PR6, PR5, PR4 are all pretty average numbers. If you have a PR3 or below let's say you went from a PR7 down to a PR3 something happened. You did something wrong in my opinion. There's something going on there. So there's a nice indicator about it but you don't want to go back in the old days if it went down one. You're like oh jeez what did I do wrong? It's not a big deal. It's just not a big deal anymore. But it is a good indicator if you find a site that's a PR7 or above. Wow that site's got some serious trust. It's not as finely tuned in terms of, well we're not as finely tuned to it. I should put it that way. And I think one of the reasons for that is the separation of the toolbar PageRank from your actual page is PageRank. So a year or so ago they was discovered or they announced or we figured out somehow that there's actually two PageRank. There's your toolbar PageRank. That's the one that Ross was talking about that they show you in a little green bar and a toolbar. But then there's your actual PageRank which is they'll never tell you might not even be on a scale one to 10 for all we know but it's not the same PageRank that you see in that toolbar. And the difference is the toolbar is updated maybe quarterly. I've seen it sometimes a couple of months in a row it might update but it doesn't update that often. Your actual PageRank we understand is something that updates dynamically all the time. So if you're building links on a regular basis your PageRank is going to change on a regular basis. If you're adding or dropping links or someone drops links it's going to change constantly. Your toolbar is not. So keep in mind that's relevant links. Correct. And we've just seen that. Yes. Good point. Good point. So and that's a good point too Ross. So back when PageRank was first introduced any link was good. Now the links you want are links that are very relevant to your sites or pages content and from other trusted sources. So the site that's linking to you needs to be the more trusted it is the more trusted can pass to you basically. And again it gets very convoluted right because you get the links. See if you really want to get in the PageRank it gets pretty insane. In fact I don't even bother anymore. But if you wanted to you can get into it and think okay so honey links you have to put out from your page but it is a factor too right because you're leaking quote unquote PageRank. But if you link to a good site that is that bad like flint to a site with a high PageRank. It gets overwhelming. There's so much you could get totally over your head thinking about it. And frankly this just doesn't matter that much. Right. And the second part of the question is how do you increase your PageRank ties right into there Ross. Don't worry about increasing your PageRank. If you're worried about adding good content and you know building links through PageRank is going to take care of itself. If you're doing the proper SEO stuff as far as you know marketing your site well and building good content then PageRank is going to take care of itself like I said. All right great well I think that's a couple knocked off on our list. There are our great expanding list questions. And like I say every time we would love your questions send them on in. You can send them to my email rossetstepforth.com or John or even through our Twitter. Steve John what's your Twitter? Oh I'm @JohnCarcut. Right and I'm at Ross done and we also have a forum at webmasterradio.fm. You can go in there anytime you'd like and drop in some questions and either Brascal will capture them or someone will. Hey if you follow one of us on Twitter let us know you got us from the radio show and I'm going to build a list off of my account with the new Twitter list for SEO 101 listeners. So we'll put you on the list. Great. Hey good idea I just might follow you. Okay well thanks very much for joining us today. New our new episodes are Monday at 5 p.m. Eastern or 2 p.m. Pacific. You can catch episodes of SEO 101 on iTunes and on the webmasterradio.fm archive. Thanks for listening. [Music]