SEO 101

Website Optimization

Website Optimization when optimizing your site for Google from the right title and meta description tags to the body text and keyword placement. 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:: 36m
Broadcast on:: 02 Mar 2009
Audio Format:: other

Website Optimization when optimizing your site for Google from the right title and meta description tags to the body text and keyword placement.

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

Are you tired of juggling contacts, manually following up and deals falling to the cracks? We can fix it so you never lose another lead, enabling 24/7 sales support via an AI that learns your business. Ready to close more deals with less hassle? Get a free trial of our marketing automation at the BuzzCRM.com Are you tired of juggling contacts, manually following up and deals falling to the cracks? We can fix it so you never lose another lead, enabling 24/7 sales support via an AI that learns your business. Ready to close more deals with less hassle? Get a free trial of our marketing automation at the BuzzCRM.com Welcome to SEO 101, your introductory course on search engine optimization. So, turn on your computers, open your minds, grab your mouse and get ready to get back to the basics. SEO 101 on webmasterradio.fm is now in session. Hello and welcome to SEO 101 on webmasterradio.fm. This is Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing, and unfortunately today, my co-host Jennifer Lemons-Laycock cannot make it, but I have pulled together a great show with my friend and cohort Scott Banach, who is the senior SEO at my company Stepforth Web Marketing. And I brought Scott on today because there's a very interesting article he did a while back that just seemed to really fit perfectly. It's called How to Optimize for Google. It's a three-part series, so we're going to break this up into three parts. There's a lot of information he'd put in there. And well, welcome, Scott. Thanks for coming. Thanks for having me today. Yeah. It's going to be good to just go through this. We both know each other pretty well, so it should be a nice casual chat, and I'll try not to throw any curveballs your way. That'd be great. So what prompted this, How to Optimize for Google? Well, it's probably one of the most common questions I hear from clients, and just anybody in general, you know, I'll get emails from various articles, "Well, what do you do for Google? How do you do this? How do you do this?" And there aren't a lot of step-by-step guides or really detailed help out there, so I thought, "Well, why not?" Well, it was certainly well received. The comments certainly portray that, and I know it was syndicated elsewhere, so let's create. If anyone wants to see this article, we're discussing it's on news.stepforth.com in our blog, and just type in Optimize for Google in our search, and you should find it there. We'll probably move it to the front page on the link, just to make things easier. But for now, let's start off. It's a short show, so let's start off with the right keywords. That's the section that you discussed at the beginning there. You know, keywords is pretty much a science unto itself, and even to say that here, you know, let's just touch on it, because, frankly, we could go on forever. What are the things that you feel are most important to keep in mind when you're picking your keywords? Well, you know, there are so many factors, like you said, and we don't want to go into too much detail. But when it comes to picking the right keyword, you definitely want to look at a few key things. First of all, is it even a cheablock? Okay, actually, we'll just back up even from there. How many people are searching for it? If nobody's searching for a key phrase, obviously it's useless. Why even bother with it? So find some keywords that people are searching for. After you've got an idea, you want to make sure that you have a chance of even attaining ranking for it. If you've got a brand new website and you've got a couple of pages about how some diet worked for you, going after the phrase "weight loss" is never going to happen. You want to make sure your target industry that you're going after and the competition is feasible. Once you know if it's obtainable, then you want to branch down from there and dig up some more keyword phrases and try to find whatever is the best fit for your site. Yeah, we've never heard anyone ask for a ranking on with a small slide like that, have we? No, never. Maybe the question is quite common. They think best, but they just don't necessarily know. So tell me, when it comes down to the keywords you mentioned, you've got to find out what keywords work and what don't, what actually has traffic. How would you find that out? Well, back in the day, we use word tracker and keyword discovery and you kind of get a rough idea of what people are searching for. But now, you know, Google AdWords keyword tool, not that recently, maybe a few months ago, they started giving actual search numbers and average monthly searches for each specific phrase you want to look at. And that's really the best tool out there now because you can see what people are searching for in Google and get more precision. I'm skeptical that the numbers are exact, but certainly they're going to be better than any other third party that's making estimates. The actual domain for that is kind of tricky to find. So I usually just do a search in Google for Google keyword tool and they come up number one and some long URL or whatever. Free to use, you don't need an AdWords account anymore and it gives you some good insight there. Excellent. So I know some of the things that you can do in keyword discovery, that's the one I like to use. I know it tends to, you can do misspellings, you can do all this stuff, can you do that with the Google Ad keyword tool? Yeah, absolutely, you can plunk in your specific misspellings if you want, or you can just do search for, say you're looking for real estate, type in real estate and it'll come up with various synonyms if you select that option and it'll give you any misspellings that actually have searches and anything that Google sees that people are searching for. They'll just come up in the list automatically so you don't even have to specifically try it. If you have a specific misspelling like a common one is accommodation with 1M, you can just type that in there and it'll come up if there are any numbers associated, or it'll come up and say non-automative data if there isn't anybody searching for it. Okay so without this becoming a big keyword research or keyword, keyword research topic, where would you put stuff like that? Let's say it's your misspellings, you find out that, I mean it's rare but it's possible to find the misspelling of a word, the second most searched phrase. So what would you do with that? Well you know there's not a lot you can do with it, I mean certainly you don't want to use it in your headings or necessarily even in your title tag because it can destroy the credibility of your site. If it's a subtle enough misspelling or one that's so common that very few people know the difference, you may want to use it within your body. You know I try not to focus too much on misspellings especially now that Google says, oh hey did you meet to search for whatever and then people are going to click that more often than the knot and your misspelling isn't going to matter anyways. So I tend to include them in places like image alt tags and maybe in your meta description, I don't want to go into the meta keyword tag right now but you might want to include it in there. But I try not to put too much focus on it unless it's something that's a fairly mainstream misspelling like or maybe like two words that can be seen as one word and stuff like that. Okay yeah I know for me I usually recommend the clients when I'm working with them that and I mentioned not to touch it necessarily but the keyword meta tag is really good for putting in jargon and misspellings especially industry jargon. We're rampant with it in our industry but I find it a very effective way of just perhaps getting a few long tail searches, you know you just might get that ranking, you may not be number one but you never know it might be number one. It works out pretty well. It's quite often with misspellings you might find that people just aren't targeting them so then you get a better chance of ranking for them so. Very true. First site optimization, I guess that's the next step then, you know we found out what the keywords are, what keyword, how do you work that keyword into the tags, the content, all that stuff. Let's start with the title tag. I know there's a lot to go with here so how would you formulate a title tag the most effective way? Well first of all I want to say the title tag is probably the most important thing you can do to your website when it comes to SEO. If you're going to do absolutely nothing else you probably want to fix your title tags. They're just critical still. You know and in almost all cases you're going to want your target phrase right at the start of the title tag. If you're going after real estate or you know a location, real estate, Seattle, real estate, whatever you want to put that Seattle real estate and then your other info. You know if you do a search in Google for just about any phrase under the sun you're going to find the majority of the top ten results have that target phrase near the start of their title tag and at the very least it'll be included in that title tag. Quite often you know I used to always say use it three times. That goes back a little ways. Now I'm you know use it once or twice. I try not to use a target phrase three times in a title. Sometimes there's an excuse to do so but and one thing you got to remember too is when you're doing a search in Google and you look all the titles that you're seeing are the actual title tags on the websites that are ranking. So if I said that right so you want to make sure that you know that people are going to read your title tag when they do a search and see your site in Google. So you don't want to just stuff it. You don't want it to look ugly. You need it to be easy to read and a little catchy if you can so try to get a book in that title. Yeah, a call to action exactly and another thing too is you're saying there that the keyword needs to go at the beginning. Well, the reason and I know why you say that because frankly it didn't put a little topic or spin on this it's because most of the time when we get sites to optimize, you know you know I've both pulled our hair over this we've found entire sites with the welcome or dot com or whatever at the beginning and it's like the keywords barely showing up. It does show up there sometimes most often but usually the end of the title tag. And the reason I point that out is I really believe it's a keyword priority and let's essentially putting into one phrase will allow what you were just saying keyword priority is key and we're going to play that out throughout the rest of this as well. But before we do that, we're going to take a quick break and when we come back, we'll touch on keyword priority. Go behind the scenes of SEO 101 with their Facebook fan page search for SEO 101 podcast on Facebook now SEO 101 will be back right after recess. Hey have you got that number for Jerry's pizza? 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And we're just discussing the title tag and how you need to formulate it to make it work best for you. Scott was explaining it, and he's read on the money, that the title tag is key. I mean, I've actually heard people say that the title tag can be, you know, if you just optimize your entire site and just do the title tag, you're going to get the majority of the benefit right there from optimization. I mean, that is the key of optimization to start with. Obviously, you need content, there's other stuff, but the title tag is very critical. Now we're just talking about keyword priority, and that's something we're going to be discussing here, too, in the next part, which is the meta description tag. Now, is there any difference in how you do the meta description tag over the title tag, Scott? I've been quite often the end of being very similar. One main difference with the description tag is that more often than not, people are not going to see it. So you don't have to focus as heavily on the call to action, although if your site is limited on content or maybe your content isn't focused enough, well, you're probably not going to rank anyways. If you want to happen to rank, there's a good chance you might see the description tag coming up in the Google search results, so you want to make sure that if people do see it, it'll make sense. You do want a little bit of a call to action there, and again, like the title tag, you want to keep your target phrase close to the start as possible. Things like, like you mentioned with the title tag, the welcome home, welcome to www.whatever.com. Keep that stuff near the end, or don't even include it. I mean, you're better if you don't include it, but if you're going to include it, keep it near the end. What would you say the limit of how big can this description tag be? Well, I tend to try to keep them relatively short, 10 to 15 words somewhere in that neighborhood. I sort of see the upper limit being around 30 words, very seldom do I do anything that big. If I'm working on a client's website and I look at their description tag, quite often you'll see 50, 60, 70 words. Sometimes I've seen they'll take their whole front paragraph from their main page and dump it in their description tag. It's just ridiculous. But try to keep it definitely under 30 words is my general rule. I'm shorter than that is better, so you know, about 15 words or so is usually what I find to be ideal. I wish I could remember. One point, I remember reading an article stating that the average length that Google actually shows. Is it 22 words? I forget, within the description, there's an average. You know what? You've totally got me. You remember seeing that, for the life of me, I can't remember the exact number. But that does sound about right somewhere in the 20 word range. I mean, it doesn't matter. It's something that I think is just sort of an intriguing point. But I've always said 22 words, let's go max, 22, 30, you're right, 30s, you know, whatever. It's going to have a little bit of a dot, dot, dot at the end of the description that shows up in Google. But if anything, that's almost like a lead in as well. So it works out well. Well, yeah. It can be for sure. Yeah, so the meta keyword tag, that's the next thing. We discussed it mainly, but would you like to make any more points about that? We talked about keyword, you know, adding jargon and misspellings. Is there anything more important about that that you would like to mention? There's not a lot to it. I mean, the meta keyword tag, depending on who you ask, some people say it does absolutely nothing. Some people say it helps. I lean towards nothing, but I think it does still play a very minor role. Like you said, including things like misspellings, that sort of thing. I think the real critical thing to know about the keyword meta tag is do not stuff it with spam. You know, spam has been around for so long and people, you would think everybody would know not to stuff their keyword meta tag by now. But every time I start a new client, I swear they've got a couple pages, I'd have a keyword tag stuffed. Just don't do it. What is stuffing? What do you mean by that? In most cases, I would say, including any given phrase more than three times. But you know, you can get away with five, maybe even six times or what have you. But every now and then you'll see a page and they've got the same keyword target phrase in there 20, 30, 40 times, you know, and you definitely don't want to do that. It sounds like the old days back at '97 when I started that was everywhere. I mean, that was how you got rankings. It's just, you should be saving for the future, but savings accounts suck and investing can be scary. We combine the ease of savings with the real returns of investing. We call it "save vesting" and it's only available in our new app, Stairs. Stairs offers four to six percent returns, no fees, and you can withdraw at any time. Do your future a favor, visit StairsApp.com today. They were so in the app that it's still everywhere. Yeah, well, thankfully, we won't find them in the top 10 very often anyway. That's right. So one of the things that, you know, back in the old days, keyword density was a big issue. I know that, you know, in house here at Stethworth, we talk about it occasionally, but we don't put a lot of weight on it. It's more of an interest-based concept. Now, for the listeners, if you don't know what that is, essentially keyword density is how many times the primary key phrase you want to get ranked for is appearing within your content in comparison to the other content on the page. So the and varies, industry, all these words may be on the page, but your main phrase is say, main phrase is keyword density. Well, how many times does that actually appear in the page in ratio to the rest of it? And once upon a time, people used to say, "Oh, you have to have a five-point, somewhat six percent keyword density to get a ranking in Google," and it's a 4.04 Altavista. I was guilty that at one point. But things don't change for a while. It did work. I know. And I've been in pretty intense discussions with people because it's just whatever baloney, but it worked in a base-to-business on it and it worked very well. Nowadays, what do you think? I don't know just exactly how much it has any play at all anymore. What do you think? Well, I think it definitely has a play to a degree. You don't need to get anal, like you said. I need 5.683 percent. I think it varies based on every industry and every search phrase you can imagine. So my general rule is, take a look at the top 10 ranking sites for your given search phrase and check out the density for that phrase on those pages. And then typically, I'll go for about an average. If you find the average of the top 10 is somewhere around 7 percent, well, shoot for that as a goal. And if you can only work in 6 percent or 5 percent, don't sweat it. Don't stress it all. I need to fit this in here somewhere because it's not really going to play that big of a role. It might, but you don't need to stress about it and we'll take those averages. Yeah. Well, I'm just thinking, let's just throw that out the window because I mean, we're thinking about it. The people who are listening, they're not going to have anything to do that kind of research with. So let's just say, you need to have your keyword show up a certain amount of times in your page. You're really not going to be in trouble by having a couple of times more. And I think that's where a lot of the surge in tree now, that's where density, you know, we use it just as a test in a sense. It's like a check at the end, you know, we're doing our boxes, we're making sure we've done everything right. But when it comes right down to it, just having the right amount of keywords in your page mixed in, it's got to be readable. All that stuff seems to make the most sense, right? Oh, absolutely. And it comes to the keyword tag as well, the same idea of the spam, don't overdo it. That's another big area where density plays a fact. Don't go 40, 50% or you're screwed. And you see that. So it's like a technical term. Some of our old school SEOs like myself and Scott, we just use it. We bat it around a lot. And if you do hear anyone mention keyword density, really all it is is just how many times have you used the phrase on the page in comparison to everything else? And you know, 50%, well, obviously that page is garbage because you're obviously over trying to over optimize the page. The fact is you write for your users and the content has to then work for search engines as an alternative. I mean, it's not your goal. Your goal is to make sure that when people get to your site, they stay there and they want to, well, hopefully want to buy or read them on whatever your key goal is on the site. So body text and keyword placement, and we've discussed a bit about how you should, how many times or estimates of what you should be doing on the page. But where do you put these words, you know, the key phrase, what areas on the page are key, Scott? Well, you know, you definitely want your target phrase to appear somewhere near the top of the page. You know, it's not so particular that you have to have it as a very first thing that Google sees. Although, if you can make it the very first thing that Google sees, that's definitely a good thing in most cases anyways. You know, you want it near the top, you want it in some of the key paragraphs near the beginning of your body. You know, if you include it in a heading tag, great, excellent. Including it in your navigation, that type of stuff is good. But yeah, you definitely want some occurrences near the top of the page. Yeah, and you know, it's funny, I was thinking about that in the heading tag. It's a pet peeve of mine lately. I've been running to a lot of sites where they're used to heading tag and like the welcome is on the page. You know, welcome to J&J.com or J&J, whatever. And it's like, no, your site's actually about, I'm selling these widgets. So, putting welcome to it, it's just a waste of space. And the heading one tag is, to me, it's a peppermint. I get so much effect from that. I've seen it make a difference in two, three, sometimes four ranking spots. It just, it has so much emphasis. Granted, those are probably less competitive phrases, but they do play a role. So everyone out there, please do not use welcome in your, your heading tag. I'll just be happy and it'll give you a few, I think it can actually help your rankings. But before we continue on, we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll touch on keywords in the URL and keywords in the domain. SEO 101 will be back, right after recess. 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. But did 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. 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Topnitchnetworks.com has exclusives and leading payouts. They welcome new affiliates with hot offers. We don't seem to get the results, we need it at a price we can afford. Topnitchnetworks.com will work on a performance-only basis, so you only pay for a result. Topnitchnetworks.com has the answers that you've been seeking for making your business a success on a performance-only basis. And that's a good thing, because my butt's falling asleep. Affiliate marketing is changing rapidly. Stay ahead of the trends with Affiliate Marketing Insider. Thursdays at 3 p.m. Eastern, noon Pacific, or on demand any time inside the Affiliate 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 on webmasterradio.fm with myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing, Inc. and my guest today, Scott Anak, who is the senior SEO at Stepforth as well. Before the break, we were discussing essentially body text, where you should be putting keywords on a page, and it's all around the topic, which is how to optimize on Google. So with that in mind, synonyms, that's something you've mentioned here. So can you give me some info on that? I'm just reading this, and for some reason it's not clicking right away. So let me think, so, synonyms would be like the long tail, right? Well, actually, just alternative words for the same word. So for example, if you're using hotel and you want Victoria hotels, consider using words like accommodations and lodging, and even tourism and travel. The best way to know what synonyms to include in your site is to go into Google, do a search for tilde and then your target phrase. And tilde, you know, if you hold down shift and hit that key to the left of your one on your keyboard, if you've got a regular keyboard, you'll get your little squiggly tilde there. And then look at the results that Google gives you. Anything that's in bold, Google considers to be a synonym for the phrase that you search for. And if you include that phrase within your site, you get a little bit of extra relevance, because Google sees that as related to your target phrase. And so it's not something you have to do, but if, you know, you're trying to fit your target phrase into a paragraph and you don't want to sound overly repetitive, see what other synonyms Google sees for that phrase and include that instead. And then you can clean up your writing a bit. You still keep the relevance up there and, you know, it just might help your rankings out. Yeah. And something I'd like to note is, there's a great point. And I think that it's, it's, it's tedious days. I'm actually working with a couple clients now where I'm trying to turn things on, on his head. I'm essentially working with them from the beginning with their web designer to make sure the site is created SEO friendly from the beginning. I mean, that's a dream world, but in this case, what we're doing is we're actually creating this keyword list right at the top and we're thinking, okay, these are your goal phrases. These are the different pages in your site. What are the goals for each page in your site? Okay. We've got that established now. What are the synonyms? What are the things we can look at and include in the copyright when that page is written? So we're going to be able to put this list for each page and another writer who's doing the content on that page so that they can just keep in mind what phrases they should try and use when they're writing it. Obviously this is an ideal situation. Most people don't think about this before they start their website, but I'm hoping that that's going to change sometime soon, but it's a good idea for doing any kind of new page on your site as well. Just have this list in front of you and keep it in mind when you're doing to work. Now, how about keywords in the URL? How do you like to work that, Scott? Well, you know, it's not something I would necessarily go and change. If a site is well-indexed and established, I wouldn't go and mess around with URLs and change them because then you're dealing with repeat or effects and all kinds of other stuff to make it work. But if you're adding a new page, a good rule of thumb is, you know, how can I categorize this or how can I set up a hierarchy of my site so that I've got keywords in there? So for example, if your site is a travel-related site, you might want all your hotels that you're listing to be within a hotel subfolder, and then that hotel or hotels will end up in the URL string for those internal pages and that gets a little bit of play with Google. They can see that relevance. They can tie that in, and it can help with your rankings a little bit. Excellent. Okay. So I know that, you know, if someone's got a whole bunch of gobbledygoop in their URLs, which are essentially all those extraneous characters, like, and the ampersand, which just looks like the anzine and all this stuff that's in there, that can be a bit of a mess. And Google identifies that as a dynamic site. So if you've got these static URLs, which in the sense of what Scott's talking about, and you've got these subdirectories, and you've got .html as the file name, this can be created on any site, even a dynamic site. So I think that I know Google recently said that it doesn't really matter, but when it comes right down to it, we do believe it does at Step 4th. And I do see having these keywords in there is quite important. Now that said, I grew a Scott too. You don't want to just go willy-nilly changing all your URLs. I mean, that can be quite the nightmare I've had with that recently, and it's a lot of... So just keep that in mind, and there's lots of content, lots of articles out there. This is a whole other subject. We can do a whole hour on probably. Now we're getting close to the end here. So I want to just whip through a few things here. So we talked to a hey tags. Now let's just touch on link anchor text. So what exactly mean by link anchor text of Scott, just for those up there that aren't made me new to this? Yeah, well in your main site navigation where people are clicking from one page to the next, the text that you actually click on is your link anchor text. The text that actually concatenes the link. And when you can have those links utilize your target phrase, you can get a little bit of extra weight on both the page that's linking and the page you're linking to. It just kind of helps, we'll see there's more relevance in there and spreads a little bit more, a little bit more love throughout your site. Okay, great, so let's tie that right into the next one, which is site navigation. Essentially, we've touched a lot of the other stuff. Site navigation. What should a person keep in mind when they're looking at creating a navigation within their site that not only is usable for people who are actually using a site, but can be navigated and on the links can be followed by a search engine? Well you know when it comes to site navigation, I would say it's probably the second most important thing. The tags are up there, site navigation is probably your second thing you want to look at. And like you said, you want to make sure Google can spider your site. And they can do that through image-based navigation, they can do it through text-based navigation. So if you have an image button or a text link for your head or navigation across the top of your page or down the left-hand side, those are probably your best things. And then you know Google can get through and see your whole site. Now, JavaScript and DHTML, if you're going to go fancy or do that kind of stuff, sometimes Google can see the links, sometimes they can't. So you really want to-- And what does that look like? What is the JavaScript and DHTML look like? You know what it can look like just about anything. Sometimes it'll look like a basic text link, in which case, why are they doing it? I don't know, but you see it happen. JavaScript, typically you see both of those two use more with drop-down menus. And some are search-friendly, some aren't. And so if you want to use a drop-down menu, what I suggest, if you can find a website out there that utilizes that same drop-down menu, go in and take a look at Google's cached-- I might get a little too technical, sorry, but Google's cached text version of that page. And if Google can see those links, you're safe. Go for it. If Google cannot see them, don't do it. You're going to kill yourself. Don't do it. Now, I'm just going to quickly tell people how to do that. Essentially, you just go into Google, type in the URL within the search box of the page you were at, or copy me and paste it, I should say. What I'll come up with is essentially come up with the page and how it's ranked, or the pages associated within all that sort of stuff. But generally, the page is there. And you can just click on a button or a link that's next to the listing that appears. It says cache. Click on that. And then the cache will come up, which is exactly what Google has is a copy of your page in its index. And then on the right-- I think it's on the top right, it says text version. You can just click on that and see what you're seeing there. Is it top right? I think so. It used to be anyways. OK. OK. So thanks a lot for coming, Scott. I think this is turning out really well. I'm pretty excited. It's going to be a good three part series. Next time, we're going to be discussing links, how to get links, what it takes to make sure the links you get are good quality. The various controversial issues, such as paid links, definitely a touchy one. It's something that many people should totally avoid, if not all, forums, different ways of just-- there's a ton of way you can get links. And we might even add on a little bit with some of the info we've learned as of recently. This article is not 100% up to date. You know, there's always stuff we can add and we do learn things every day. And then we'll get into Google Webmaster Tools. So I'm looking forward to it. And on behalf of myself, Rasta, CEO of Stepworth Web Marketing. My temporarily absent co-hosts, Jennifer Evans-Lakoc, Director of Social Media at SiteLogic. Thanks for joining us today. We're looking forward to next week's edition of SEO 101 on WebmasterRia.fm. [MUSIC] Hear that? That's the sound of someone trying to steal your crypto. 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