SEO 101

Keyword Research and XML Sitemaps

Ross and John discuss the hot trend tools that you can use for Keyword Research, like Twitter keyword tools, Yahoo Buzz and Google Trends.

Plus, they discuss xml site maps and transitioning your website with an excessive amount of archives. 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:: 34m
Broadcast on:: 29 Jun 2009
Audio Format:: other

Ross and John discuss the hot trend tools that you can use for Keyword Research, like Twitter keyword tools, Yahoo Buzz and Google Trends.

Plus, they discuss xml site maps and transitioning your website with an excessive amount of archives.

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 basis. Hello and welcome to SEO 101 on webmasterradio.fm. This is Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing, and my cohost is John Carcutt, the SEO manager for MediaWiz. How are you doing today, John? Doing great. Ross, how are you? Excellent. Thank you. Not quite afternoon here yet, yeah, we've been looking for hours, you know, but grim day, not that night. Oh, well. It's nice to be inside, I guess, but the last episode was pretty cool. It's just fun. I really like this because we get to talk about everything we know and we don't quite know and we just get to jab about it, so. Yeah, and you always get good stuff at SMX Advanced as well, too, just to find conference. There's always interesting things that come out of it. Definitely. Yeah, and I guess the next one we will be going to is search engine strategies at Jose, I hope. Yeah, I plan on being there for sure, definitely. That's another great one. That's one of the best of the year as well, so. Without a doubt. Whenever you get to go to Google, it's fun, you know. Yeah. Do you wonder why, huh? Yeah. I just hope they have the party who's here. That's true. There are those nasty rumors that there's no Google dance this year, but they are just rumors so we can still hope. Yes, still. So this is part two of taking the advanced out of SMX Advanced. The last show, we discussed PageRank Sculpting, JavaScript and how JavaScript can now be indexed unless it's externalized. And we touched on, in the end there, the IAS toolkit, SEO toolkit that Microsoft had just released. So, what we didn't get to in the last show was tips for keyword research. This was a great panel I went and I sat in on. I really liked it and it started off pretty much perfect because I had Christine Churchill talking. She knows it all, man. It was great. It was good listening to her. It was a great presentation. She's very good. Very good. So, in that show, essentially, she gave a whole bunch of tips on different tools and stuff. But one thing I thought was really cool, and I'll get into the tools in a sec, is that she reminded everyone, and it's a key reminder, I have to remind clients constantly about this. Well, fair enough, there's no reason for them to know this, I guess, but with Google Analytics, you can actually tweak your account, so it will actually collect the queries from your on-site search engine. And if you think about that for a second, when people are on your site and they're using the search generally because they can't find what they want to find, or they're in a rush to find it. Now, in either case, it's pretty valuable intel. You get to find out exactly what they're searching for, what their interest is. And if they happen to exit right away, you can track that generally. Did they come in on this particular term and then they searched, and then they left? Well, it's a good indication that either you need better content for that search, or you need to add new content. There could be, they didn't find what they needed, and it could be a nice indication that there's a, perhaps, a service you need to offer, and it could be quite lucrative. Yeah. Google Analytics has made some great strides in the past couple of years, and the event triggers in Google Analytics, which I think is what you talked about using. I believe this is how you do this using event triggers, and it's not super new, but it's not very well known, and look into event triggers. You can track all kinds of great things in your sites in Google Analytics, how many times people play a video, how many people hit the form, submit button, which is what the search button is. It's great stuff. It's great stuff. Actually, I think event triggers, as you know, it is new. That was what, not only a few months old, isn't it? Yeah, it's about four or five months old, believe it's pretty new, I guess. But the actual search tracking, I've had on for over two years in my site, so I think it is a different area. Oh, so there's an addition? Okay. Yeah, excellent. I think so anyway. I know click tracks, it was different, so maybe I'm getting confused, I'm hoping not. So some of these tools, I'll speak with you out there, and if you have any thoughts you like to add, John, I just want to, there's a lot to list here. I've got some great tips, I always find myself finding new tools all the time, but these people, maybe it's their networks, I don't know, but they tend to find some pretty cool stuff. So, get to the right page here on my notes, and to start with, of course, the main ones were, now this is for doing keyword research, so you want to go out and refine what people are searching for and how that pertains to when it wraps your keyword targets. So, Google Trends, Google Insights, and the Google Hot Trends Tool. Are those tools ones that you use yourself there, John? I do use Trends and Insights quite a bit. The Hot Trends Tool, I don't have a lot of clients that really would fit with that, but I can see how it would be wonderful if you had people publishing very, very timely type of information. The Hot Trends Tool was great. Yeah, that's one thing that Christine says she did. She, and I've started to use it too, and it's a great idea, is you use the Google Hot Trends Tool to find out what's the bus, and another one you can do that with is Yahoo Bus, which is another great one for that, and what's everyone talking about? And when you do that, you can go, "Okay, well, I want to write an article on some marketing aspect." Let's say that's me. I go, "Okay, well, people are all talking about, dare I say, Ashton Kutcher." And Twitter and all that stuff. Well, I could do an article, and I can mention that, and maybe add a twist in it, or something. Something that makes it more interesting and makes it, well, frankly, timely and buzzy. And if you can get that out there, you might get, it's a good form of link bait. I'll tell you what I use more often, it's not so much the Hot Trends, it's Google Trends itself, because it's really nice for me, and I recently used this with a client where we were doing some market research, and we were trying to determine, actually, this client is opening a pretty large site in Asia targeting a number of different areas in Asia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Bangkok, that kind of thing. And for me, it was really nice to go and say, "Okay, because with Google Trends, I can go in and select by region. I can go in and actually select Hong Kong, and then look, you know, type in some traffic terms that we think are going to be traffic drivers, and see what the trends are, or how it's actually working, is the languages people are reading that, are they reading it in Chinese, or are they reading it in English?" Those kinds of things are really beneficial for that kind of market research. So, I love, recently, that's the most recent thing I've used Transforno is very helpful. That's true. Yeah, and local-based marketing, it's a dream come true, and it's amazing how searches can differ so much, like a same phrase. Two-word phrase can be misspelled, could be rotated, you know, one way, another way. It's just bizarre, depending on what location you're looking at. So I think that's pretty cool. Another one is the Facebook lexicon. I've used it a little bit, not a lot, but what I do like about it is Facebook, of course, it allows you to find out what the buzz is on people's wall postings. They stick to wall. They don't go anywhere else because that would be private issues, but privacy issues. But they do find out what people are talking about. And, you know, for Adam's example, I did a search for sore throat yesterday. I think I'm going to do a little article on this, but I did a search for sore throat, and then I did one on, what was it, was it Google trends? I guess it was Google trends. And I looked at the difference, and it was quite fast. Google trends didn't look like there was much of a change in the sore throat, like people were always talking about it. But the thing was Letterman talked about having a sore throat one day, so there's a big thing about it. Or I forget, but there's some crazy thing. And then in Facebook, you actually saw the spikes that I was more familiar with, unfortunately, because I always need to be in close, so I could see it happening. And it looked to me like that social search was actually quite a little bit more effective. You're talking about social-related illnesses, anything like that. I don't know, it merits more research anyway, I thought it was intriguing. Yeah, and actually, if you have a Twitter account, they've updated your Twitter pages to include search and stuff now, but everything they added was trending topics on Twitter, which fluctuates pretty frequently based on what's going on, but it's really nice if you're thinking about writing an article, what's the most, what are people talking about right now today? And you go look at the trending topics on Twitter, and boom, there's 10, 12 things that people are talking about on Twitter a lot right now, so it's obviously in people's mind. Yeah, definitely. Okay, well, we're going to get back, and actually there's a lot of Twitter tools here as well that I'd like to chat about, so we're going to take a quick break. SEO 101 will be back right after recess. Did you know? 99 Designs is a leading marketplace for graphic design on the internet. Did you know? 99 Designs connects you to a community of over 35,000 designers who will compete to do the best work for you. 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Okay, class, take your seats and no talking. Welcome back to SEO 101 on webmasterradio.fm with John Carcutt, SEO manager for MediaWiz and myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing Inc. Before the break, we were discussing some of the tools you can use for doing keyword research that I was benefiting from hearing on one of the seminars I went to in the SMX Advanced. And that was a really long way of saying that. Anyway, essentially, we just talked about some of the hot trend tools like Yahoo buys and Google Trends and Insights and all that sort of stuff. Well, what John just brought up was Twitter keyword tools. And are there ever a lot of them, eh? Did you hear about the new one? What's the new one? There's new ones every day. Which is new. What are we talking about? Interesting. I just saw this and I haven't read everything about it, but the title is Microsoft Veteran Launches Twitter Search Engine. It's called Crowd Eye, and I mean, I'm intrigued. I can't wait to give it a shot, but it's real-time search. And it says that it's going to be a little bit different. Apparently, it's pretty good articles, so I'm intrigued to check it out, but that's a side-of-point. I mean, that seems like an interesting thing. What's the URL to that one, Ross? I would assume it's Crowd Eye.com, but let me do that as it sounds, but let me just have a little check here. Since you're created by former Microsoft Search head, Ken Moss, Crowd Eye gives several views of a topic based on the conversations taking place on Twitter. Interesting. That's really where they don't give you a like. But it's Crowd Eye. It's got to be that. It's a secret search engine. In any case, I'm always happy when there's something new coming out, just some of the them are a little bit weak on the detail, but I see a snapshot of it, and it shows time spans using different keywords, popular links, tweets, pretty phenomenal dashboard, actually. It's going to be a good useful one. And top hashtags, top words, wow, awesome. Some of the ones that are already out there, though, were ones like Twit Scoop, tweet volume, I remember that one was interesting. I'm just going to go to it right now to refresh my memory. Have you used that one yourself? I have not. It's a, I'm going to see it to refresh my mind right. Tweet volume is essentially you get to see how often particular words or phrases appear on Twitter. So it's a good idea, a good indication of saying, let's say you've got different ways of saying your brand name. You could put them in there and see whether or not particular ones are being adopted better. You can see your competitors terms. You can compare competitor names. It's pretty much endless. It's only graphical. I actually just did a review on this for the search marketing standard yesterday and it doesn't have the ability to click on the link and see all the people discussing that phrase. So you can't tell context, which is a bit of an issue. Someone could say a particular word you're tracking, but may not have any context to what you're searching for. Right. So I just, I just did a search on SEO, SMO, PPC, and SMM and it's pretty interesting. People are talking about SEO a lot more than the other two, but it's, it just gives you basic numbers and a color graph. So it's pretty nice. Incidentally, I've got some very kind news. I did a post and a yesterday saying that I was about to start the show with you and unfortunately had issues, but it didn't happen. But I had a person post saying his name's Richard, says, "I subscribe," this is on Facebook, I posted this. "I subscribe on iTunes and listen to your every show. John is a great addition to the show. You two are quite well together. Thanks for the great info and even of us, even some of us veterans learn something new." Awesome. Thanks, Richard. That's fantastic. I wanted to mention that. That was a very kind comment. And I understand it's being well received, so thank you everyone for listening and I hope you are getting lots out of it. There's social media in action right there, Facebook to the, to the comments. You got it. And at the end of the show, we're actually on our site, actually. If you go to Webmaster Radio.fm and click on SEO1 on, you'll find a link to our Facebook page. So we'd love to get more people talking to us and asking questions for that matter. We'd love to get in there and answer some questions for you on the show. Definitely. That'd be fun. Now that I've moved the page here, I did. So what kind of cool stuff did you find at SMX? Ross, there had to be interesting one-off things happening all over the place. At least, there ever. Yeah, because we've got, let me see here, I've got to go back to that page now. There's too many things going here. XML site maps. It was more of a discussion that was brought up because people were concerned. Some people say, "Don't have an XML site map. It's just going to hurt you. Do have it because it's the only way to get a ranking." As usual, there's polarized opinions. But essentially, the gist was, "No, they're not going to hurt you, but there are some..." Have you got some opinion on that out here? Well, the biggest issue that I come across with XML site maps is that people think they're going to change the way they rank if they use XML site maps. People say, "Oh, I'm going to rank much better now because I included an XML site map. That's not necessarily the case. The XML site map pretty much just replaces the crawler." Like what we talked about on the last show with the IIS SEO toolkit where this information is sent directly out to the engines, that's what the site maps do. They send the information to the engines, but once that information gets there about your pages, it still has to go through the standard normal algorithmic process. You're not going to have an advantage for ranking by using site maps, what you can probably do is get pages that might not be crawled easily to be included in the algorithm. The algorithm will be applied to those pages where they might not have been found in the past. But if they're not being found, that means there's not crawlable links going to them. When it gets into that algorithm stage, it's going to look for crawlable links. If you don't have any links to your page, it's going to have a hard time ranking anyway. Site maps are great for that kind of thing, and I think one of the things I heard coming out of the SMX was that site maps are really good and useful when you're transitioning a site. You're doing a redesign and you're going from one domain to another domain. That's where site maps really can help improve that process. Once you've put in your transition strategy, you have all your redirects in place, feed that site map out, and it's going to help speed that process up. No question. I use that religiously. I've been using that for a few years now on our client sites, whenever they do transitions and it does speed up the process, it's awesome. The other thing is, too, a lot of people were mentioned that Google Webmaster Tools is they see errors in their site maps, and they're freaking out that that might have some impact on their rankings. Well, it's not really that direct. When you have an issue with any issues in your site map, it's just telling you that you need to look at a couple things. The site maps are only there to help you. Google doesn't care if you don't have a site map. It's just a good way for you to tell Google, "Here, check out these pages. I want to make sure you can actually prioritize your pages." It's only a suggestion, though, so when you prioritize, you tell Google, "These ones are more important than others." It's only a suggestion, as Stephen Spencer said, it's not a directive. It's a suggestion. I think that's a vital component. That's pretty much anything to do with Google. They suggest a lot of things. One other thing about site maps, though, is an interesting twist in the site maps a few months ago, maybe only just a couple months ago. There's a new version of a site maps for Google. If your site is accepted for Google News, and you're putting out a lot of content for news, you can create a separate site map -- I believe it's called news-sitemaps.xml -- that is just being picked up by the News Search Engine. If you're publishing a lot of the content quickly on a regular basis, that's actually a way to get that -- again, it's the same algorithms apply, but you're going to be able to feed your stories and your articles into the News Search Engine a lot quicker and easier with that site map. Anybody familiar with the Google News process knows that you have to have that three-digit character or three- or four-digit character in your URLs? If you're using the news site maps, you don't have to use that three-digit character in your URLs anymore. The site maps are evolving a little bit, too, and the usage is being expanded as well. That's awesome. I actually didn't -- I didn't know about that, so I have to look into that myself. Anyways, before we get into the next part here, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to touch on how to transition your website with lots of archives. SEO 101 will be back right after recess. Hey, this is Danny Sullivan from the Daily Searchcast. You know, we love bringing you the news every day, and that's made possible by the sponsorship of BruceClay.com. They've just made ink magazines list of the fastest-growing private businesses. They've exhibited and sponsored at my conferences from the very beginning. Bruce has got that long-standing search engine relationship chart, had been out there with the code of ethics, been a search engine expert in the field for ages. As you know, that BruceClay can do more than help you with just SEO. They can do PPC, web analytics, web design, marketing strategy, promotion, and branding. Everything you need for success in the online marketplace, you can check it out from the professionals at BruceClay Incorporated. For over 10 years, offices worldwide, they've got answers you need. Check them out today at BruceClay.com. As your one-stop site for everything, FCEO. From search engine marketing to pay-per-click management, S-E-O-S-E-O-S-E-C.com can help you with SEO analysis, monthly reports, title and meta tag optimization, email support, and so much more. Want to keep your SEO in-house? Let our professional trainers teach SEO to your staff. Find a free quote and a free competitive analysis today at SEOSeek.com. Hey affiliates, do you find it a challenge monetizing traffic from the UK, France, or India? You need offers that will appeal to all of your visitors no matter where they come from. AdsMarket.com has met this challenge and has turned it into a science. AdsMarket.com gets results for publishers and advertisers with a winning formula. The combination of offers, worldwide traffic, and AdsMarket's up close and personal media management is exactly the boost needed to monetize international audiences. AdsMarket.com, the science of performance. Search engine marketing formulated for Web 2.0, SEM synergy. Live broadcast Wednesdays at 3 p.m. Eastern, noon Pacific, or on demand any time inside the search engine optimization channel. And webmasterradio.fm. Okay, Glass, 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 Carca, SEO manager for MediaWiz and myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing, Inc. Before the break, we were discussing, what we were discussing, we were talking about XML site maps. XML site maps. XML site maps. It's been a whirlwind. So what we're getting into now is transitioning a website. It was one thing that was brought up and I get the question a lot, so I think it is the one where we're meriting some conversation. How do you transition a website with lots of archives into another site? So you've got a whole new domain, a whole, actually a whole new brand, and you need to take a ton of archives and move them over. It may be difficult to do a 301, in other words, the redirect we've discussed before, to make sure that Google does move all the page rank, all that stuff over, so how do you handle it? When we've done it in the past, we've been fortunate where we can just do a global redirect and essentially we can tell Google, okay, really, yes, this has changed, but all of the URLs stay the same, they just have a new beginning and no problem, it was easy. We didn't have to worry about doing selective redirects, just one page at a time. I had one recently was the exact opposite of that, they switched from a microsoft server to an Apache server, and most extensions changed from .aspx to .php, and the only thing that changed in the entire site was the extension of the URL, so we had to do the whole transition just because of that. Same thing. Could you do it a little bit redirect on that? We did it in the HTXS file, so it was pretty much just one look for this extension, if it's this extension, change it to the other one. That's good, that's not bad, but let's look at the worst case scenario, if you're actually changing everything, everything's changed. It's going to be, well, time for a hidden, probably cost for a hidden, if you have to hire someone to do it, to switch, say, 100,000 URLs to doing each one, 301 to the new URL, so what was brought up was just pick out the ones that are still driving traffic to your site, make sure there's 301, all the other ones, well, forget about them, there's a little bit of triage there, so be it. Anyways, the point is, you can't do it, it's not a big deal, just make sure that you don't lose vital traffic that's going to some of your archives, it's very easy to make sure that can be redirected to the new site. That's where Google Analytics or some kind of analytics package will really come in handy. I wouldn't make that decision just because, well, we'll just take the category pages, go and look and see which pages are driving traffic, and make sure those traffic drivers are the ones that you're getting redirected, because you don't want to lose that. It's not always as simple as, well, we'll just do the categories and we'll do this section and these top-level pages, there might be a deeper page that's really a big traffic driver for you, so I definitely use those analytics to determine which ones to do and which ones not to do. One thing that I was noted to that I really thought was important to mention, because I'm a big WordPress fan, it's very cool, if you're using WordPress and you have to change the entire URL structure, your permanent link structure, whatever you'd like to call it, it actually has the redirects built in, it'll handle the whole thing, you can change your post-log, you can change anything, and it will automatically change and it'll do 301 redirects for you seamlessly. That's pretty cool. WordPress is amazing, I'm a big fan too, definitely. We just built our new website in it and I'm telling every client, let's do WordPress unless they absolutely need something more complex. I'm actually in the middle of creating an article where I'm going through the big list of Andy Beale's big list, I think it's Andy Beale has a big list of SEO marketing blogs, it's a big SEO list, I can't remember who does that, is it Andy Beale, in any ways? No, Lee Auden, I think. Lee Auden, that's right, Lee Auden's list, so I'm going through that entire list of all his SEO blogs and I'm determining how many are actually WordPress and I bet it's a huge percentage. That's cool. I like that. Well, let's move on to the next one here, sub-domain or sub-directory? So you need to do some marketing, do you use a sub-domain or do you use a sub-directory? I know you've got some words on this, so let me spill. There's two philosophies on this, and people say, and let me back that up a little bit, this has actually changed within the last year because it used to be a sub-domain was treated as a completely 100% separate site, so if you had five sub-domains on your top level domain, there'd be almost like five different sites. Within the last year or so, Google announced that they're changing the way that's happening, so it's not a completely separate site anymore that's treated differently, it's still tied into your top level domain more than it used to be. They did that mainly because a lot of, shall we say, darker-headed SEOs were building sites with hundreds and hundreds of sub-domains and trying to utilize that for non-ethical methods of promoting sites, so they had to combat it somehow and that's one of the steps they took. You know what, though, I think this was brought up to, you know, if you've got 100 sub-domains, okay. They're spamming. There's something going on. But that's not necessarily true because there are places that legitimately have, in the past, built sites, city search, for example, a huge network of sites, for a long time, they had sub-domains based on a state and city, then they probably had thousands of sub-domains, but they had a legitimate reason for doing it. So there are sites like that, in some cases, where you can make a case for, okay, I understand why you have 100,000 and 2,000 sub-domains. Most of the time you're right, Ross. Most of the time if that's the case, there's something fishy going on. It's going to flag something to Google and they're going to have a person look at it. So it's everything in moderation. I've used sub-domains for many years for our business site because we had such different things, but I have actually gone to the sub-directory route. I've merged everything because I wanted all the relevance, everything to be on one site. I wanted to be the site for web marketing services and stuff. So I had my news directory with sub-domains, news.stepforth.com, well, I've merged that in now. Well, at least we're in the process of merging that. It's a lot of archives. We're actually in that archive transition issue. It's not quite so simple as, but we're working on it. So I do see that there's a value in sub-domains, but only on sites that are really big that have a majorly different focus all of a sudden and they need to have something or it's big enough that it just would be too big in one site. I know there are ways you could do it with sub-directory, but I think there are the benefits definitely out way for the sub-domains. I mean, my rule of thumb that I tell clients is if you're thinking about going the route of a sub-domain, you have to think of it, whatever you put on your sub-domain as a completely separate site, and you think of it from that. Does it have enough content to rate its own site? Does it have a marketing effort behind it because you're going to have to market it separately? The links that you build to your sub-domain are separate from the links you build to your main domain. So you think about that. Do you want to have two separate link building efforts? Do you want to have two separate content building efforts? If it's big enough and important enough that rate its own, almost like its own team of people or its own set of tasks and marketing and its own site, then do a sub-domain if that's the way you want to go. But again, if you're putting all that effort into a sub-domain, if you had it on a sub-directory, like Ross just said, now all that effort's not only working for your sub-directory, but if you have your navigation and your linking structure built properly, it's also going to help with your rest of your site as well, because now you're building deep links if you're doing a separate linking campaign, and those deep links are going to help the rest of the site. If there's not a sub-domain, they might not necessarily be as effective for the rest of your site. And it's true that things have changed a little, because before I used to get a ton, a ton of link juice coming from my news.stepforce to stepforce.com, because news.stepforce was where we had thousands, literally thousands of articles all with our name in it, and people would re-syndicate that stuff. So we already had a built-in marketing strategy for that sub-domain. And we still get a lot of link juice from that, no matter what Google's changed. It does still work. It's just less so. And now we're trying to merge it so that we can get everything in one site. It wasn't, I had to think pretty hard about making that change. And a lot of people will do sub-domains because they want to get multiple listings on the same SERP result. And I think, well, if I do two different sub-domains and there are three different sub-domains, I can get like three different listings, three or four listings on that search result. When they made that change last year sometime, again, you're never really going to get more than two listings in any search result for the same top-level domain. It's very, very difficult, and you rarely see it happen anymore. So you can get them either using a sub-domain or using your main domain, but you can also get them the same way. If you've got two pages on your site that are ranking on the first page for a search term, they're going to put them together in that little indented thing, whether it's a sub-domain or not. Right. Just to introduce everyone to my son, Xander, you probably heard in the background there. It's over the morning. Well, thanks very much, John. I think it was an awesome chat. I think there's still stuff we could talk about at SMX Advanced, but, you know, I will talk about it. We'll have a part three. We'll have to figure that out. Excellent. Yeah. It's always a lot of good stuff coming out of that shit. There is. And, you know, a lot of it's spin-off chatter we can have, and there's a lot of this stuff we could talk about. Definitely. We'll talk. Definitely, right. I have myself Roston, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing, and John Carca, SEO Manager for MediaWiz. Thanks for joining us today on SEO 101 on webmaster radio.fm. Thanks, everybody. Show next week. 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