SEO 101

SEO Performance Guarantees

Ross and John answer questions on search ranking and optimization, rank position goals, web ranking reports, SEO performance guarantees and more. 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:: 12 Oct 2009
Audio Format:: other

Ross and John answer questions on search ranking and optimization, rank position goals, web ranking reports, SEO performance guarantees and more.

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

Sure, you may be able to hear just how crispy the McDonald's crispy juicy tender chicken sandwich is. But that's just the beginning. The full crispy juicy tender experience comes after you take your first bite. But why stop there? Order ahead on the app and get medium fries and soft drink for free. Now that's a deal that tastes even better than it sounds. About 8.30 to 9.19, 10.11 to 10.31 and 11.22 to 12.21, valid one time per week. McDonald's app download and registration required. The opinions expressed on this webmasterradio.fm program are those of the host, guest 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 basis. 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 cohost is John Carca, the SEO manager for MediaWiz. Hey John, how are you? I'm doing great, Ross, man. How are you? It's Thanksgiving. It's looking like a month ago for I get to do the turkey Thanksgiving thing. I think we got a little better because then I think I might get turkeyed out in December. Like you guys get November and then you get December. I don't know. It's nice having a look. Yeah, but we get to do Halloween first. So, you get the candy, you get the candy rice and then the turkey, like, you make your sleep turkey and then you get Christmas. So, it all works out. That's true. So, I get turkey and then I get sugar rush and then I get a nice break to make myself feel all cleansed and everything. And then I destroy it all at Christmas. And you don't forget the New Year's hangover, so. Yeah. No, I've got kids. Remember, I'm a baby. I don't go anywhere. You know what they're doing? There's a totally off topic from the show, but in Halloween around my house, when I take the kids around, the people that are passing out candy have jello shots and beer for the parents. So, you take your kids around and you get drunk by the time you're done. It's great. Oh my God. Pretty soon, every costume's good. Yes. Well, look at that one. That's cute. That's your wife. Oh, sorry. Excuse me, everyone. I've got a bit of a cold stills, but doing much better, thankfully. Then cold seasons have been pretty nasty. But, well, let's stick to our trade and just get going here. I like getting into the questions. What we're going to do today was, John and I talked about it. Do more of these SEO questions. We have a heck of a list, so why not? You figure it's probably helping you guys. We haven't heard otherwise. Why don't you leave, John? I know you had a question you wanted to get into first, Ralph. Yeah. There's always some fun ones in here. This actually came up to me with a client today. What position goals is my site is well optimized, but I don't have any rankings. What's going on? Well, first of all, you're using a position goal. That's not a good idea to begin with. For a number of reasons, excuse me, I have to cough as well. One, web position goal is specifically called out by Google and possibly the other engines as a program not to use in their guidelines. They say, "Don't use automated programs such as web position goal." That's a big red flag for me right there. Second, about six, eight months, maybe a little bit longer ago, a lot of people started complaining that web position goal wasn't working for them. Apparently, Google in particular found a way to keep web position goal off of their IPs and off their servers. If you're using web position goal, you're probably not able to access Google very well at all anymore. Not the choice. It doesn't have fun. And then lastly, this particular question is, web position goal has a feature where they'll tell you if your site is optimized. The automated optimization rules are very sketchy to begin with, but if their tool is not allowed to access Google, how are they going to go in and see how well your site is optimized for those engines? The fact that using that tool is bad. I think we covered this last time as well, Ross. Automated tools for SEO. No matter what, you have to do some custom work. You have to look at it yourself. A tool such as web position goal is not going to tell you if your site is optimized because there's so many things that can't even analyze. Frankly, what it's looking at is so basic you could do it yourself anyway and do it much better. I mean, even the days when perhaps it might have helped a little bit because it did make things a little easier and this is a long time ago. You still could have done it better yourself. So just don't worry about it. And you know, when it comes down to the web ranking reports, the way Google is doing GLIPing, in other words, essentially they are saying where you do a search, you're going to get different results than someone who's in a different locale. It doesn't always happen that way, but it's happening enough now that the ranking reports from web position are getting a little bit useless. Unfortunately, we still have to use them occasionally against Google's interventions. But we've had to for some clients who do need the tracking reports and the ranking reports. And they're very content, even though we've told them that this is something that isn't necessarily 100% accurate. And for myself, I try really hard at the beginning to make sure that people understand that the rankings are not necessarily the best measurement of how well you're doing. And for that personalized search is one way they change rankings, but they change rankings based on where you're at. You can see different rankings depending on which data center at Google you happen to be hitting at the time. So there's a number of reasons why rankings can be different from place to place, which means they're not a really good metric to determine success. There's much better ways to determine whether your SEO is being valuable. I mean, look at the amount of traffic you're bringing in, look at the conversions you're getting from organic traffic. Those are the real measurements of success, based on whatever the goals of your site are. Rankings are great. It's nice to have as fast as I say, look, I'm number one for this, but you might be number one for you, but you might not be number one for me. Breeze has an interesting point that I've actually been debating with a number of people. I think we even talked about it at one point. Guarantees. And I'm not talking about the standard. I'll guarantee you talk to top one ranking. Well, number one ranking. Well, that's crazy anyway. I mean, most of the time, especially when they're saying two or three days, they're paying for it. If they're not, they're just, well, full of it. But what I'm actually talking about is from a web marketing company's point of view. I mean, I don't know about you, but I'm always asking you to provide a guarantee. Always asked about that. And I struggle with it because I want it. I wish I could. A lot of times I can't. In some cases, they've got such a low requirement that, okay, I can do something for you. But really, that's maybe one percent. Now, what I'm getting to here is one thing that we had considered off your guarantee for. We're considering it. And I think it might be where things are going is, all right, we're going to guarantee that we can increase these particular metrics on your site. So we're more analytics based than ranking based. Because frankly, my statement is to clients, do you really care what ranking you're going to get if we increase your sales? I mean, does a ranking matter? It doesn't. Mostly, it's the ego. I mean, really, they see their competitors above them. They get furious and under some degree, understandably. But if we're getting the rankings, same price. There's no difference. I'm not getting rankings. We're getting the sales for them. Well, that's a good thing. A lot of stuff just tied into that. Have you ever considered anything like that? Or do you do anything like that yourself, John? It's amazing that you brought this up because literally yesterday I finished a report for our CEO. He had asked me the question is, is there a way we can do performance based pricing for SEO? So which is technically saying we get paid if we perform, which is kind of like a guarantee. It's like, okay, you know, you'll get paid if you do X, Y, Z. And the final analysis that I came up with was twofold. One, you know, basically I said no, we should not do that. I mean, the reasons were, excuse me, one is that, and he was talking basically rankings. So again, I went over the same thing that you just discussed where rankings are not necessarily best metric. They're fluctuating due to personal search and geo-targeting or geo-targeting results. There's a lot of things that make rankings not a good performance metric. And the other thing I told him was that, you know, with a higher end client or even with smaller clients, they have business decisions that they have to make that override SEO. And I understand that and all good SEOs will understand that business decisions most of the time should and will trump SEO if, you know, if the client understands the results of that decision. So in a lot of cases, if let's say I want to do X, Y, and Z to the site, but the client says no, we can't do X, Y, Z because it has impact in our brand and how we're trying to structure our brand. Okay, okay, that's fine. That's a business decision. And I understand that. But now that impacts my ability to get paid because now I know I'm not going to perform as well and search because I can't do X, Y, and Z because of their brand. Now I'm not going to get paid as much or I'm not going to have the performance that I know I could get. So the performance based pricing is impacted by things out of my control. So that's the reason I pretty much recommend it. We don't do that kind of thing. And it's the same thing with guarantees. If you offer some kind of guarantee, you've got to have it in your mind that the client's going to do something that's going to impact that guarantee whether you want them to or not. I was going to say, I did hear a story about one company that tried to do this performance base, but they had a caveat that said, if you want us to do performance base or guarantee our results, you have to give us 100% control over your website. We can change anything, add anything, do anything we want to your website. If you allow us to do that, then we will agree to this performance guarantee. Good luck on that one. Yeah, and most clients will say, "Ah, no, never mind." Well, I didn't even some degree. That's just impossible. And I can't even imagine the contract. So that's the thing. Being an international, working with some of the international companies, how do we do that? I mean, it's not a way we can create a contract that's going to have that kind of intensity where you're also not going to drive a client away because it's 40 pages long. So it's interesting because I really wanted to do it with a few clients. See, I'd only do it. I'd be very choosy, first of all. Well, all of our clients don't have any guarantees like that. We just do good business so they keep coming back. I mean, that's how we keep afloat. It's 13 years, you know? And there's a difference between goals and guarantees. So if you get really defined goals in the beginning and you make sure that the client's expectations are set along with your expectations for the same towards these goals, then you should be fine. There's no reason to offer a guarantee because you're both shooting towards the same result anyway. Okay, well, we're going to take a quick break and we come back. I think I might just have something else to add to this. 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 ink magazines list of growing private businesses and have exhibited and sponsored up 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 PVC, web analytics, web design, marketing strategy, promotion and branding? Yep, get everything you need for success in the online marketplace. 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For the break, we're discussing SEO guarantees. And I'll just wondering how, if it could be done, how it would be done and all this. I think it's on John and I's radar quite often and I think it was something interesting to bring up. Now, in my case, I think there may be a place for it in various select circumstances where, like for example, I've got some clients who I've worked with for years who, well, from purely business perspective, it may be better for me to do this because I can go to the client. Look, I'm prepared to extend myself a little bit here. You're going to pay a lot less for services you get, but we're going to tie some performance guarantees. We're going to do that much more for you. It's not that we're doing anything better than we did before. It's that we're going to be expanding our services to do this much more for their site. And we're making cost effective, otherwise we'd have to charge so much more money. I don't know. That's one thought. And what I recommend, what I recommended was that instead of offering a guarantee, offer to build in bonus structure to the project. You reduce the upfront cost to the client, so it might not cost as much. However, you set some aggressive goals. And if you meet those aggressive goals, you get bonus to buff them beyond the original cost of the contract. That way they can feel like you're going to be busting your butt to get it done to meet those goals to get your bonus at the same time they also feel good because they're not paying as much up front. Yeah, but then you've also got to be careful too that you're in a position where you're not going to get monetized accidentally by the client too. Very true. Very changing those goals. It's a slippery slope, but I wish I could figure out the happy solution for it. And maybe it's just that you make a lot of money sometimes, maybe you don't. Clients are super happy sometimes and sometimes they're not. See, that's where I'm not comfortable with. I just want to be happy to go home, have a good sleep, know that the clients are happy and move on. Anyways, we probably did this one. I love it. I think it's an interesting topic, of course, from our perspective. But our listeners want to know more about SEO. So, let's go back to our Google Wave. John and I hope Google Wave, so we're using Google Wave to do our lists here. How would I pick the next one? Go for it. Ah, if I hide text behind an image, is that good for SEO or bad for SEO? So, hiding text behind an image, first word is hiding. Okay, why are you hiding it? Always check your reasons. Why are you doing this? Are you trying to scan Google? First of all, if that's the case, backtrack, don't do it. It's just not worth it, because it's not the kind of thing you want to get cocked for. Now, I have heard of instances where people have done that for purposes of accessibility. Although, I don't know whether or not it's very, I don't know, a very good argument. What's your thought on that, John? For accessibility, that's what the alt tags for. If you want to add accessibility to an image, that's what the alt tag is there for. Pardon me, John. I'll attribute. Oh, yes, you're right. And I asked the plaintiff about that to people, so I got caught in my own trap. Yeah, so, if you get tempted to put anything hidden behind an image, don't don't bother. It is not worth a while. So, some of the times people have, I've run across, they do that because they want to incorporate text with a background image or have some fancy font, so they want it to be very visual pleasing, but they want the engines to be able to read it, so they put the text behind there. I would step back a little bit from the visual aesthetics of that graphic. The holidays are doubly important this year, so make your celebrations doubly special. Kroger, we've got a huge selection of high-quality meats on top of fresh, natural produce, like fresh, never-frozen, prime-grade beef and our simple, truth-or-gated Brussels sprouts, or delicious king crab legs with our private-selecture-courmet potatoes. And to say that, doubly fast. Kroger, fresh for everyone. Get more ways to save at the Buy Five or More, save $1 each sale. Just buy five or more participating items and save $1 each with cart. Kroger, fresh for everyone. You can think it's much better if you take the background image and you put your text on top of it and you're using layers. You give up being able to use stylized text, but then you can figure it in the background image. You can still do some of that positioning with style sheets and you put your text on top of the image and then you get best of both worlds. Well, almost the best of the design, but definitely the best of the SEO. Well, and with design these days, you can go to all new level. Of course, you're talking about money here, but you can get some experience with fontography. And do some wild stuff. Oh, that's very true. It's just beyond my comprehension, frankly, but there's some pretty amazing things that you can do. I know CSS5 is getting ready to come out with HTML5. And I haven't read a lot about it, but I wouldn't be a bit surprised if there's a lot more font control involved in that than we have currently as well. Yeah, I'm getting this message right now from Google Wave that kind of mirrors my mind on a given day. The wave is experiencing some slight turbulence and may explode. If you don't want to explode, please reopen the wave. Wow. That's sort of how I feel with overload. You know, there's so much we could be reading. There's so much. Anyway, my first error from Google Wave. I'm in the same wave and I'm not getting it, so it's interesting. Okay, go for it. Next one. I love this question because I have a cool little story I love to tell when this question comes up. What site structure should I use when building my new website to assure rankings? It's actually a very great, great question. If you get somebody that asks it before they start building your site, praise them up and down because you want them to be your client because they actually understand a little bit of how this whole process is supposed to work. Most of the time they ask you that once the site's built. So it's great if they ask it before they build a site. But what I used to tell people when we're talking about that site structure and architecture and how it ties into search is that there's really, in my mind, there's three phases of search activity, search behavior. People will come into a search engine with this very generic type of search. I need some shoes, and they type in shoes, and it's a very generic term, millions and millions of results, and it's really just a generic search, basically. The second phase is research. So I know I need some shoes, but I'm going to be playing some tennis, so actually I need tennis shoes. Now I'm going to dig in and figure out what's going on with these tennis shoes and which ones are best. So those types are research terms and research behavior when they're doing search. And they're looking for more information. They're really digging in to doing their research. And the final phase is the action phase. They're ready to buy it. They know exactly which brand or tennis shoe they want. They know exactly what size they're wearing. What they're doing is now they're looking for who has the best price, who has the free shipping. They're ready to buy. They're ready to push the button. They want their tennis shoes so they go out and play tennis tomorrow. That ties directly into your site architecture, those three phases. Those very generic searches, shoes are your top level pages. Usually your home page is going to be the very generic topic of what your site's about. The research phase, that's going to be the categories, the subdivisions, the sections of your site. So they know they can dig in and find out more information about what they're looking for. And that last phase, that action phase, those are going to be the deepest level pages of your site where you're talking about very specific things, very specific topics, exactly what people are searching for. And it's an interesting, the way it works is you get the generic phrases, you have tons and tons of traffic, very few conversions. But those long tail or action phrases don't have that much traffic, but they convert like crazy. And that middle section is where you're building trust and authority. So when they're doing the research, they're remembering your name. These are the people that taught me what I need to know. They're more likely to come back and convert on the action phase. So as you're building out your site structure, you think, generic category, and then deep, deep, long tail. Wow, that's awesome, man. I like that. And I'm going to chime in in a second. We're going to have to retake our second break. SEO 101 will be back right after recess. As your website need a bailout, looking for a conversion rate stimulus package, do you need a website improvement to do list? On Target, a subscription service from FutureNow 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 futurenowinc.com/ontarget. I'm Brian Eisenberg and I approve this message. 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PixelSilk frees my time while making my company's website easy to manage and promote. Even better, PixelSilk has been embraced by the SEO community. I'm Bruce Clay and PixelSilk 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. Settle up with the Search Cowboys. Thursdays at 1 p.m. Eastern, 10 a.m. Pacific, or on demand any time inside the International Marketing Channel, only on webmasterradio.fm. Okay, class, take your seats and no talking. Recess is over and SEO 101 is back in session. Only on webmasterradio.fm. Welcome back to SEO 101 with John Carcutt, SEO Manager for MediaWiz and Ross Dunn. It's myself, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing Inc. Okay, and the last break for the break, John was talking about site structure, how to build a proper site structure to assure rankings. Sir, I'm jumping all over the place because I've got too many windows open. Okay, so from my perspective, I love that that analogy used was perfect. It should be one of the hits. One of the hits, we should have that in there is the top of the things we said. That's a really good one, I like it. The way I think of that, when I hear that, I think that's perfect. It makes a lot of sense to everyone. I always thought of it as so similar to reading a book. You open it up, there's the table of contents. That's kind of like the home page. I realize it's kind of like a site map too, but you go to the home page, you get a general idea what the site could be, even the introduction. Or the forward, whatever you want to call it. And then after that, you get into it, you can see the, yeah, okay, getting this all mixed up. So you start off with the forward, then you see the table of contents, let's say that way, and then you can then jump down into the main areas and you get an introduction about each one. And then you break it down into more detail. It just, it's very logical. That's what I like about it. And it's, you know, if it's logical, it makes sense. The search engine doesn't like it because they're logic-oriented. Wouldn't you agree? Definitely. And those kinds of structures also help when you're talking about, you know, internal ranking structure, internal linking structure. I'm sorry. It passes right, just like any other links will pass relevancy, your internal links pass relevancy too. So if you, if you structure your site, so I like people call it siloing. So only sections of the site talk about different topics. There's, there's debates for and against siloing, but it's still relevancy. If, if you're passing relevancy from link to link, deeper down into your page, each one of those things as you drill down, you know, pick up more of the same type of relevancy or change of relevancy. So from a structure stuff, I think that's also important. Right. Yeah. I mean, links are critical to your site. And this is all stuff you should be thinking about before you even talk to a web designer, in my opinion, which is actually why I'm deciding to make that in my focus these days. I'm working with clients, trying to catch them before they even go to the designer. They say, I want to talk, I want a website. That's when I go, okay, let's stop. I'm just applying everything out. And then only then, once you've got this beautiful layout, it's kind of like having a blueprint from a architect, they take it to the construction. Well, I'm going to take it that point with the client in hand to the designer, make sure they understand everything in terms that, in words, they understand. So there's often miscommunications. You know, there's a lot that can happen. They can go wrong when you're doing a website. And so I'm trying to help them understand that. And a lot of times the first thing the designer will hand over is wireframes. And wireframes are great, but that should be the second step, not the first. The first step should be that architecture. What's my taxonomy look like? What does the outline of my site look like? So you can look at, you know, how is the content organized from a topic and structured and relevancy standpoint before you start looking at wireframes? The funny thing is, well, not so funny because we end up with these websites in the end, but the problem is a lot of these people aren't thinking right before. Even all of that, what their goal is for the website or goals, like expectations and goals are key to how a site's going to be designed, what content's going to be on it. Ultimately, where you want a person to go when they go to the site for driving traffic or conversions or whatever you're trying to do, conversions calls, anything like that. So, you know, think ahead, think a lot ahead. One of my clients recently, I feel like a teacher when I'm doing this, but essentially I told her, no, let's just stop right now. You need to get this book and you need to do it completely from back to the front. You need to do all the exercises. And it's the one page business plan. It rocks. It will make you totally clarify what you want to do. And she found it amazing. It was hard work. I mean, it always is when you're looking at what you want to do. A lot of us get so excited about our new projects, our new websites. We don't think about what needs to be in it and what it's supposed to do for our business. And we end up with these sites that come to SEO companies, you know, like John and I, myself here. And we go, what are you trying to do? What are your targets? And we start throwing these at them and they'll say, well, I want, we're top ranking for cars. You know, I think this and this and it's like, whoa, no, this isn't the expectations are way out of the league. So they also have to run those by people, you know, are my expectations realistic. I can tell you a good story. Before I was working on a company a few years ago and we had a client come in. And this is one of my favorite stories, by the way. Okay. What do you want to do with your site? And we start talking about so we start doing keyword research for him. So what are your keywords you want to rank for? And the guy did custom doors and he did a lot of stuff for houses. And his primary keyword that he wanted to rank for was Windows. And I'm like, have you talked to Bill Gates about this? Because you're going to have a tough time beating out all of Microsoft for your custom windows. And he didn't think of it. He had no idea that you're right. You know, there's a whole other subset of business that's going to go after the same keyword I'm looking at. So setting these things up are very important if you set up those expectations ahead of time. Yeah, very important and, you know, ask for help from someone else. One of my favorite sayings is you can't read the label when you're inside the bottle. You know, we get way too close to our businesses. So you need someone just to help you clarify things. Even your spouse, someone read the stuff to them. One of the things I love about the long-page business plan is it makes you, it forces you in different steps to read aloud what you've said to someone and get their feedback. And then you take that feedback and you build it into phase two of this particular step. And it's important. Like, I've learned a lot. I'm slowly doing one right now because I've got so much going on. But I want to do it for my, this new push I'm doing to do website management to make sure people have these sites when they come out and they're perfect and they're ready to go. And they're actually ready to market. They're not going to an SEO when the site's designed. No, it's done. It's ready to market. You know, this is sort of stuff that, you know, we have to figure out how to get this stuff across. Yeah. So, let's see. What's next here? There's a real quick, there's a real quick one we should do here. The question was, some guy told me that my keyword meta tag is useless, but I don't believe him. Is it? Real easy answer is, it is completely useless. And actually, just the past week or so, Matt cuts to the Google engineer who does a lot of decent videos on YouTube. Put out a video specifically to say no, we do not use the keyword meta tag in our algorithm. It's just over 200 things. The keyword meta tag is not one of them. So, valid out, very clear. One of the few times Google does come out and say something very clear. Keyword meta tag is not used. Sure. Now, Google is not the only game in town. True. Bing is a question, Mark, because I haven't really done research, but Microsoft previously did not use it. Yahoo does not use it in their organic search algorithm at all, but apparently there's some other things they use it for occasionally, but they're not real clear on what, but it's not the organic search. So, the three big guys for organic search do not worry about the keyword meta tag. And there is one caveat to that, I would say, they will use it if you're stuffing it and trying to spam it, they will flag you to it. So, in that case, yes. I heard you. Yes. Well, before we tie things up here, one thing I like to say is I agree, like I leave it to the very last thing. The only time I ever use the keyword meta tag is just, well, there's no harm in putting misspellings in there. Some baffle gab jargon from your industry, just what the hell? I mean, I suppose you could do better things with your time, but when it comes to read down to what I'm doing, the description and the description tags for each page, I just go quickly and just drop in some misspellings and stuff in there. There are other search engines out there, and frankly, I don't see why Google should ignore it. There are good keyword tags that can help. You mentioned the description tag. The description tag is very valuable. Do not use that out. Definitely make sure that you have a unique description on every page. For this particular, I understand what you're saying, Ross, but when you have X amount of time and people are paying me X amount of dollars, I don't want to get the most value for their money. Unless I'm just really bored and doing everything to do, I'm not going to even look at the keywords meta tag. I'm using things like WordPress, where headspace is there. I can just go below and go tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, and then just that's going on in the description tag. It's no pain. It's no time. I really do believe there's an argument. There's no reason to block it completely. Now, speaking of WordPress, what I have done in that same case is tags in WordPress and social media, tag stuff, those are very valuable. I like the tags when you're tagging something WordPress is very good, but it's really, really easy to cut and paste those tags into the keyword meta tag. That is a case where, yeah, that's like two seconds, and that's easy to do. You're already creating those tags anyway. Cool. Well, on behalf of myself, for Austin, CEO of Step 4th Web Marketing, and John Karka, SEO Manager for me, we'd like to thank you for coming today. We're going to add our Twitter IDs again to, hopefully, we can connect with you online and you can ask us some questions. Mine's Ross Dunn, R-O-S-S-D-U-N-N. Where's yours, John? Mine's at John Karka, J-O-H-N-C-A-R-C-U-T-T-W-T. Great. Don't forget our form on webmasterradio.fm. You can go in there and chat and ask questions. You can also email brasko@webmasterradio.fm. That's brasko-b-r-a-s-c-o at webmasterradio.fm. Any questions you have for the SEO 101 crew here, and we'll do our best to answer it for you in the next show. Yeah, and our shows are every Monday. It's a 5PM Eastern, 2PM Pacific. You guys continue and listen to live in the radio, or download an Apple iTunes. These guys have a great, long weekend for those in Canada who are enjoying their Thanksgiving. And, John, have your great, normal weekend. Send me some turkey, Ross. Bye, everybody. Bye. [Music]