SEO 101

KMLs and Sitemaps

Martijn Beijk is a local search engine optimization pro and SEO Consultant at Onetomarket. He just spoke at SMX Stockholm and he discusses his SEMMY nominated article on KMLs and Sitemaps. 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:: 29m
Broadcast on:: 26 Oct 2009
Audio Format:: other

Martijn Beijk is a local search engine optimization pro and SEO Consultant at Onetomarket. He just spoke at SMX Stockholm and he discusses his SEMMY nominated article on KMLs and Sitemaps.

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 SCO101, 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 basis. SCO101 on webmasterradio.fm is now in session. Hello, and welcome to SCO101 on webmasterradio.fm. This is Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforce Web Marketing, and my cohost is John Carcutt, the SCO Manager for MediaWiz. Hey, John. Hey, Ross. Hey, everybody. How are you doing today? I am doing outstanding, busy day, but I'd love to take a break to do the show whenever we can. It's awesome. It's nice when we get in front of you live, you know, schedules don't necessarily permit all the time. Very true. Very true. Yeah. So, today we have a great guest on the show, and Martin, thank you for being nice and giving us a very English way of snatching your name. It's the name of Martin Bike, an SEO consultant from OneToMarket.com. And Martin is on the show tonight with us from the Netherlands. And what time is it over there right now? Hi. Thanks for having me at first. There at the moment, 5 or 10 p.m., so a bit late, but usually the time has been working on the project. See, now if I was doing the show that late, Ross, we'd have trouble because I'd have a free couple of classes of wine I mean by now, so... Wine. Oh, you're a softcore. You could go hardcore. You could like just have a little rum or a rye or... Well, Martin has been, well, he's made a name for himself over the last while, and one of the things that Ross, you would draw me to him was a awesome article that has been nominated for SME, called, let me see here, where's my notes, it is called KML and Site Maps for SEO. I read the article. It's kind of so good that it's new, I had to have you on the show, man. Can you give our listeners a sort of a general overview of the article? The article is about KML, KML is a bit like XML, it's a document format designed to contain geo information, so information about your business or anything it has to do with a location. And KML is very interesting from an SEO perspective as it is a preferred standard by Google. So real quick, what's the difference from a, I know this is a beginning show, but really what makes a difference between XML and KML? I mean, you said it's based on location, is that the tags in the feed or can you do this a little more color on that? Yeah, exactly. It's the tags in the feed, it's the header information and it contains information about placemarks. Placemarks are places and it can contain all kinds of information, not just places, but also rectangular areas, but those are all too advanced for this subject at the moment. Okay. Okay. Well, so KML, essentially if a person were to add this to their site, first of all, everyone knows, I've been doing a little bit of work with this myself. Mostly thanks to this article that gave me a bit of a kick in the butt and got my butt in gear and learning a bit more about it. KMLs are essentially downloadable files, aren't they? This is something you can actually get created within Google Earth. Earth, exactly. And also within Google Maps itself, with the My Maps feature, there you can design your own maps. For example, if you were on a hunt trip, you can plot your route and then it will be stored online as a KML. Okay. And now this KML, how does it help someone if they put it on their website? Well, first of all, the KML needs to be embedded in a site map, just like a regular site map. And the site map can then be uploaded to Google Webmaster Tools, and because Google Webmaster Tools is, well, you have to verify your website in Google Webmaster Tools to get full advantage of it. So in that way, you're given Google an indication of that you're a verified or trusted source and uploading, for example, the KML file with your business information. And that's why it's important for Google Maps having your business there. So does Google take that more seriously than just say, like, the geotags you would normally find? Yes, exactly. KML is a preferred standard by Google, and not only because, well, they bought keyhole and the KML stands for keyhole. So what a company that designed the KML standard. Okay. It's just for our listeners and just so everybody's on the same page. Can you kind of explain the difference between the KML and it's the tag? Sorry? The geotags, the difference between geotags and the KML within the site map? Yeah, I think with geotags, you're meaning the tags in the meta header of the-- Yes. Yes. Yeah, exactly. Well, those are often used for location-based targeting. For example, if your website is-- or if your company is located somewhere in the Netherlands or if your website is in the Netherlands, Google finds the geo header information important, for example, for targeting, geo-targeting of AdWords or AdSense campaigns. So does this-- the KML and the same apps, do they work with in conjunction with or override when you set your location and like webmaster tools you go in and you say, "I've verified my site and my site is in the Netherlands." How do those work together? To be honest, in the tools you could define the location of your website, but for example, if you run a corporate business and you have many storefronts of your business, those are not really related to the geo-settings of your website. It might-- for example, if you have an international company, which is based, for example, in Netherlands, it's logical to have the settings of the website and the geo-reference just to set to the Netherlands. Okay, let me-- for the best version of the website, of course. So when it comes to geo tags, and then just so anyone knows, and you want to know more about what a geo-tag is, that's the one that was in the header, my associate Scott Vanack has a article right now on our site about that, just a bit of an overview of what it is on stepport.com, but the question I have is, with these geo tags, I read that one of the Google employees said it was actually pretty much ignored, I assume he meant in terms of organic search. So really, is the geo-tag going to have any benefit in terms of a citation for a local business ranking, or is it all geo-site map files? Well, a citation is a bit something different, I'll explain that a bit later. But to be honest, I never use the geo tag in the header, so because of-- to me, it's not of any use in Google. And the reason why I'm saying in Google is that here in the Netherlands, Google has a market share of 95%, and the geo-header tag might be working in Bing or Yahoo, but it's not very an important factor to focus for me. Okay, and sorry about the citation. What I was trying to get at was whether or not the geo tag had any impact on reinforcing your location, so that you perhaps got a better ranking in the local 10-pack. But people see when they do a search in their local area. Yeah, well, no, from my perspective, no. Okay, so the geo-- the KML, the geo-site map file, would that have-- that would help, though? Well, not admitted by Google, but they say it's a very important thing and, well, as it is being uploaded to Webmaster Tools, it is a verified source. And as a spam, for example, is a big problem in Google Maps, well, it's just doing the map and they might think of using it as an authenticated source instead of the wiki-like editing in Google Maps. Okay, great. Well, before we get into another question, we're going to take a quick break, and when we get back, we're going to talk a little more about geo-site maps and then answer any questions John has. SEO 101 will be back right after recess. 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. 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. 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Watch your shopping cart overflow because you've found the e-com experts. e-com experts, Mondays at 6 p.m. Eastern, 3 p.m. Pacific, or on demand any time inside the internet marketing channel only on webmasterradio.fm. [MUSIC] Okay, class, take your seats, and no talking. Recess is over, and SEO 101 is back in session only on webmasterradio.fm. Welcome back to SEO 101 on webmasterradio.fm. With John Hercarcut, SEO manager for MediaWiz, and myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Step Forward Web Marketing Inc. We're joined today by Martin Bike, an SEO consultant from 1tomarket.com. Before the break, we were discussing geosight maps, and Martin's semi-nominated article, which is just awesome. And I believe, John, you were just about to have a question. Well, I do have a question, but I don't want to take all our time with Martin talking about geosight maps. It's a great topic, but Martin knows a lot about local search in general. I just want to kind of pick his brain a little bit on some other aspects as well, if I could. Martin, just from a local search perspective, I got a lot of people come and ask me about local search. They have 10 or 12 locations, 100 locations, but I also have the people come to me. They've got just one brick and mortar store in their neighborhood, and they want to know if local search will do anything for them. How do you approach, what's the difference between those? I mean, you've got a brand that has 100 locations versus a mom and pop shop. How do you approach those? Do you do it differently, or is it the same approach either way? No. I'd approach them differently, but if it's just one store front, and if you're a travel agency with just one store front, it's almost impossible to get it ranking in the local search spot, because that's a very competitive business. But if you're just, like I said, a brick and mortar store selling hardware, or anything, I just registered myself, that's the first and most important step, your business with the local business center from Google. And then choose for phone verification, and then almost instantly you're added to Google Maps. And opposed to when you have many store fronts, you can upload a feed of all your businesses to business locations to the Google business center, and they will get activated over time. There's only one disadvantage with a book upload feed, and that they're not as a trusted source as with manual verification. But there is the option to apply for a whitelisting so that your feed gets accepted by Google right away. Excellent. I'm just wondering if you will have to follow the Google guidelines. Of course. So how do you apply for that whitelisting? Is it an obvious process? Yeah, I think nowadays there is a link in the local business center to upload the feed, and there must be a link somewhere in the Help Center to apply for the whitelisting. Otherwise, I can put up the link on my blog for people to look it up in the community. And normally that link doesn't appear unless you do have hundreds of locations. Wouldn't appear for a mom-and-pop shop, would it? Well, I think the link is always there in the Help Center anyway. I'm not sure, but anyway. Now, was it just last week you spoke at SMX.com? Yes, exactly. Yeah, how was the conference? The conference was great, was cool, and also in Stockholm was very nice, well organized by the media company. I've forgotten the name, sorry. No problem, I was just wondering. So I know you made a presentation. Can you give some of our listeners a couple of the highlights? Yes. It was a case study in the advanced rack of SMX, and it was about both company lovers in Amsterdam, and actually it might sound a bit dull, but the boat company, Camel Cruise Business in Amsterdam is the second most touristic attraction in the Netherlands. There's quite some revenue involved, and we have multiple stores or ticket boxes where people can buy their tickets, and also they sell a lot of tickets online nowadays. So what we did was register all those ticket box locations in the local business center. That's the most important step, as I said earlier, and what is also very important is to track how your campaign is actually performing. So it's easy to set up Google URL parameters if you're using Google Analytics. Any other tracking software might do the trick as well, but you might choose a different approach. Important is to have a vanity URL. For example, if you have location 1, choose, for example, www.wetsight.com/location1, and use a 301 redirect to let it redirect to the website with the campaign parameters attached. If you don't use a vanity URL with a 301 redirect, Google might accept the URL with campaign parameters, but I've seen in many cases that the listing gets deactivated or loses ranking after about one or two months. There's a glitch in the system there. A glitch at Google, really? Never admitted, I'm sure. Never admitted, exactly. And when you have some data available in your campaign, in your analytics software, it is important to know what your visitors are doing, because we're talking about local search here, and local search shares tend to have a really different approach and websites. Their browsing behavior is different. Most of the time they're looking for location information. So it is important to know where your visitors are navigating, and most often that is a contact page or some description of how to get to your business. Or it might as well be an online conversion as well, but just get into your web analytics software and determine what is the right landing page for the local search campaign, and steer your visitors in the right direction. So to get the best conversion rate out of it, or phone calls, well, phone calls, you can really track phone calls here in the Netherlands, so it's possible in the US and Canada. So you mentioned Google Analytics a couple of times, and I know personally I've had some battles with universal search and trying to pull data out of organic listing when someone comes in through either news, or one of those universal search add-ons in the organic search. Do you have any ways that we can track from the one box or the 10-pack off of organic through Google Analytics? Yeah, exactly. Well, adding the Euro parameters in your business listing automatically adds the parameters to the local listings in regular organic, I mean in the maps listing in organic. So in that way you always know what traffic is coming from search. For other universal search options, I've written a tutorial on searchcowboys.com explaining how to do that in Google Analytics setting up filters, so you can measure if traffic has come from a new source or an image source or Google-based product feeds. There's some trick going underwater with Google parameters in the Euro route to know where what the origin was in the search and result basis. So to recap your answer about local search though, when you set up your listing in your local business center, you want to add some type of parameter to your URL so that you can track it through Analytics in the one box or the 10-pack. That's a good tip. Very good tip. Listen, everybody, that's a good tip. I wrote it. If you type in tracking local in Google, the post gets post and my Google talks will pop up and it explains thoroughly how to do it in even three different ways. Perfect. Well, we're going to take a quick break and we come back. We're going to tie up the show. I've got a couple more questions and hopefully we can whip off here and we'll be done. So thank you. I see a one-on-one will be back right after recess. Your company's website sucks. You know it. Everybody knows it. So get a to-do list to fix it. On target, a subscription service from Future Now and Brian Eisenberg monitors your website 24/7, analyzing the actions of every potential customer. It gives you a to-do list. It tells you exactly what to fix and how to fix it. So that more of your visitors do what you need them to do. On target pricing starts at $1,000 a month. See more at futurenowaid.com/ontarget. Want to learn the biggest asset to driving online success? Let me introduce you to my expert advisor, Pixel Silk. 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With over 6 billion quality searches a month and did starting as low as one set get connected with local consumers at the exact moment they're looking for you. San Francisco, Green Bay, London. I told you. Localpages.com. List your business on localpages.com now and get $100 in free local advertising. Localpages.com. Bringing your neighborhood to you. Search engine marketing formulated for Web 2.0. SEM synergy. Live broadcast Wednesdays at 3 p.m. Eastern, Nun Pacific or on demand any time inside the search engine optimization channel only on webmasterradio.fm. Okay, class. Take your seats and no talking. Recess is over and SEO 101 is back in session. Only on webmasterradio.fm. Welcome back to SEO 101 on webmasterradio.fm with John Perkut, SEO manager for MediaWiz and myself, Rothstein, CEO of Step 4th Web Marketing Inc. We are joined today by Martin Vike and SEO consultant from 1tomarkfit.com. Before the break we were discussing how whole myriad of things and I've already moved on in my mind to the next few questions so I'll just jump right to it. Quick recap. It was about actually tracking URLs through the one box and such. Martin, if someone already, just for the small businesses out there, someone already has a map listing. Can they change that URL and add tracking parameters? Yes, of course. Well, if someone is already in Google Maps first thing to make sure is that they actually have verified that listing because the listing available might have been something Google has put there by aggregating all kinds of information about your business. For example, the yellow pages or other portals. While you might think your business is there, you might have not actually claimed it and verified it. That is very important. Once you have verified it, you can just change the URL and add your tracking parameters. Real quick, I know one of the most important things in local search is to make sure all your information is the same throughout all the different variations of local search, yellow pages, city search. You want your information to be the same. If you add a tracking URL to say the Google one and you add a different tracking URL to city search and a different tracking URL to Yahoo, so you know where all this traffic is coming from, is that going to impact your listings at all? No, if you said that tracking parameter correctly using a hash sign, it should be ignored. In that way, the URL would just be, make sure the part before the parameters are the same. If you add location one, make sure you add location one of all sites in the same way. But tracking parameters should be ignored or even better set them up by using a 301 read, so they are not visible to search or yellow pages. Now for the good tip. How complex? One of the things I've heard about, I think is that one of the SMX conferences I've recently, was that how you write your address is very important. It seems to me that's very simplistic. So for example, my address is, I used to type in 101, that was our suite, Dash, and then the building, so 26 Bastion Square, whereas now I'm doing it, 26 Bastion Square, Suite 101. I would hope that the search packages or the search engines are smart enough to see that that's the same address, but I've heard otherwise that you've got to stick to the same syntax. What are your thoughts on that? Well, what comes in mind to me is a quote I've heard on SMX in Stockholm is, "Don't ever let the stupid computers at the search engines determine what's right or wrong." So the best way is to write it in the correct way and do that across all your business listings because what Google is doing is merging all of information. And as soon as they're picking up something that is different, they think it might be just another listing. And it's more like a snowball adding data all the time, but adding snow all the time, and the bigger the ball gets, the stronger it gets. But yeah, if the address information, for example, across verticals is wrong, it might get messy in Google Maps. And you're using strength of your business listing in a ranking perspective as well. So I have to make a quick comment here. Ross, are you telling me that you really are SEO 101? Your address is 1012. I didn't even realize that. You're right, I am too. Okay, just had to bring that out. It's the little things we just don't notice, you know? Well, Martin, I've got oodles of questions left. I think we're going to have to get you back on the show here if you're willing. Yeah, sure. That'd be great. John, you probably do too, I'm just joking, Martin. Thank you so much. Well, if people have any questions, I'm also on Twitter, of course. And there's a lot of information on my blog. So can you give us a URL to your blog? So everybody can write it down to my very difficult name. I think I've put up a redirect to local SEO.mo which should be working, actually. So if you just type in local SEO.mo, that would be my website. VocalSCO.nl. Got it. Thank you very much. On behalf of myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing, and John Carca, SEO Manager for MediaWiz. We'd like to add Twitter IDs here. So first of all, Martin, what was your Twitter ID again? Sign back. Sorry, I'm running. He's got it on his website. He does. I got one on my website badly. Well, thank you very much for coming again. And John, thanks a lot. Thank you for joining us today on SEO 101 on webmaster radio.fm. It's on every Monday at 2 p.m. Pacific 5 p.m. Eastern. And we hope you tune in next week for our next show. Thanks for having me. [MUSIC PLAYING] (upbeat music)