SEO 101

Canonical Link Tags

Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft introduced Canonical Link Tags as a joint effort to help reduce duplicate content at SMX West. 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:: 16 Feb 2009
Audio Format:: other

Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft introduced Canonical Link Tags as a joint effort to help reduce duplicate content at SMX West.

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.

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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. Hello and welcome to SEO 101 by webmasterradio.fm. This is Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing, and joining me is my co-host, Jennifer Evans-Laycock, the editor of Search Engine Guide, editor-in-chief in fact. Today our scheduled guest was Yostevok, and unfortunately he couldn't make it to the show today. We will be rescheduling and trying to get him on a future show. Today we're going to discuss a couple things. It's a little longer today because I wanted to extend our show a bit to cover a bit of the news that came out of SMX last week, SMX West, I believe it was the Santa Clara again. The search engines, the big three in my opinion, the MSN, Google, and Yahoo, I believe ASK is on board, but you know, ASK. And they have launched this new tag called the Canonical Link Tag, and the purpose of this tag is to allow people who have, let's say you've got a URL that has tracking codes in the end. So it's your site.com/company/ and then you have people going to your site from an ad, and you want to track that ad. So say it was an ad on Search Engine Guide. So it'd be a question mark, Search Engine Guide. And then that way you can actually track where people have come from when they came to your page, and you can see just what kind of business you've got from the ad you're paying for. But before when that happened, the search engines would go to your site using that URL, and actually think of it as a separate address than the actual site without the question mark. Now, Jen, I just said that pretty quickly. You did say that. And what I say actually makes sense, because... I'm still sitting here laughing at the word "canonical" just because every time I hear it, it makes me laugh. It's just canonical. I would say it. It's very important. Yeah, exactly. Three times fast. Now, I think that was a great overview of what the canonical issues actually are, though. I think that's one of the things that really overthrows some of the newbies for a loop is canonical. What the heck is that? But basically, I think the super simple version is we all see the same page, Search Engine C, different pages. And I think you did a great job of kind of summarizing how that happens, but if you've got a dynamic site that's trying to pull some content from different places and put it together. Like Amazon, that's where you get those great, big, giant long URLs that you've got to use tiny URL for if you're passing them around, or even like you said, if you're trying to get some tracking code in there for your analytics or from apps. And actually, when you and I were talking before the show, that was one of the things that popped up is, I was thinking that through, and my brain just didn't really put together the canonical issue and the tracking codes on some level. I've experienced it and worked with it on the dynamic side, but just to throw on the little question mark equals, or just whatever, for tracking purposes, I don't know, part of me just kind of didn't really see that as being a potential issue. So I'm kind of curious to kind of jump to that for a minute, what your thoughts are on that. And if you've seen any problems with adding those just really simple tracking codes, what's already a simple URL, are you seeing problems with canonical issues there and things getting double indexed? Definitely. Yeah. Well, and the reason I guess it's, you know, Google can only be so complex, at least right now. And if there are sites out there, like you said, that Amazon, where they use the question mark within their code, and it's not just passing and advertising. It's not just saying this, go to this page, the person who sent the place that sent the traffic is search engine, no, it's not, it's actually saying, please show this particular content on the page. It's quite a bit of complex code there, and it's very important to be parsed properly. So Google could remove it, or at least not even consider it. So when anyone added this kind of code to their URL, and it's just a normal URL, I mean, their site may not be dynamic at all, it's completely static, in fact.html, whatever. But when they added this code, everything got duplicated. And yeah, if you have various codes, various campaigns all leading to the same landing page, you can actually have multiple, multiple, multiple URLs, showing up in Google, and Google sees at all this duplicate content. And there is the, therein lies the main issue. That duplicate content, one of those pages, Google's going to have to choose is the main page. And if one of those happens to have more promise, it's going to choose the one with perhaps your question mark equals search engine guide, or question mark equals CNN, or whatever you're doing the advertising on. And would you really want that to rank? That's not a great thing to do, because all of a sudden, your numbers are all thrown off for your marketing. And I'm with you on that, but I guess that's where I start to get confused, is if I think of sites that I'd run tracking codes on, and if I'm digging in with analytics and looking to see what's sending traffic, and looking at those URL strings in the refers from those search engines. I don't tend to see those tracking codes, you know, tracking codes, not the dynamic. Obviously, the great, big, long dynamic ones tend to show up in search results, but I don't really tend to see those that much. Now, granted, you know, I've been on the social media side far more so than the search site for the last couple of years. So it's not really something I'd even thought that much about until we started talking about this topic. But it's one of those things that makes me a little curious on, you know, is it really that big of an issue just for the tracking URL, and actually, okay, I'll hold this other question till you do a little bit more explaining on the canonical tag, because I have some thoughts on, you know, there'd be much simpler ways for them to handle this and to give to us to handle this. But can you give us an overview of what the canonical tag is, and what they're looking, you know, how they're looking to solve this problem right now? Yeah. Yeah, so what they've done, this is the big news, is Google has launched, sorry, I always say Google, so I used to say that now, the three search engines, although I should say that Google is the only one at this point that I know who's actually paying attention to it at this point. You know, the search engines are still building it in. In any case, they've offered this tag, which is a rel tag, a relative tag. And what you do is you put it in your head, the head of the document. So say you're sending, say your landing page has a lot of these coded URLs being sent to it. Well, you don't want all of these to be considered duplicate content. So what this does is you put on the page, rel equals canonical, and then href equals. And what you do is you're specifying to Google what the actual page should be. So all of these URLs that go to it will be stem, or it's a stem, or it's a lot lacking word here, but they'll be cut to just use that phrase or use that URL. So any of the extraneous code that would have been considered by Google as a different page is being cut. So basically you're telling the one page. Okay, so you're telling the search engine in that tag, this is the URL of this page no matter what the browser is telling you. Exactly. Thank you. Much better. Yes. So it's very important because, and the benefit of this is you look at all these sites out there that also have dynamic pages, you know, this applies to static sites who do a lot of advertising and such and have all these links. But you look at dynamic sites as well, there may be different versions of the same page everywhere because, for example, on our website, we've actually got, on my step-forth website, I was doing some testing. So I did, okay, there's multiple menus, or multiple places on one page, they can all get to the same page. Let's say my company page. Well, I thought, well, the only way for me to really figure out which one they're clicking on is by adding a question mark equals, top menu, question mark equals, bottom menu, footer, whatever, but that information was being passed on and it was confusing Google. It seems, I'm with you, it seems a little bit crazy that that still would, but it does. And by using this canonical tag, you can actually consolidate all of these false seemingly different pages into one. And not only does that work well for eliminating duplicate content on the search engines, but also consolidates all of your, any kind of link popularity as well that are coming from those, if there is any. So it's good all around. You know, I'm, I'm over on search engine line right now and I'm skimming through NOSA Fox as a great article on search engine line. From the day this was announced, it really does a nice job of laying it out. So anyone listening that, you know, wants to kind of get the visual of all of this might want to head over there at some point and take a read. And I'm looking at this and I'm looking at this new tag. And I see a couple of potential problems here that, that are what's making me wonder, you know, why do it via the canonical tag? Why not? You know, generally when you're adding something like this, you've got like question mark and that might be source equals, you know, search engine guide or whatever, or you've got your question mark and then that's where you throw your parameters in. So, you know, the item is, you know, an mp3 player, the style is, you know, Apple, whatever. Wouldn't you think that rather than force us all to try and add this new tag, which there's some issues that I'll hit up on here in a minute, but rather than try and get us to add this new tag, couldn't they just standardize what they'll skip over in terms of those parameters? So couldn't they say to us, you know, if your parameter suddenly becomes question mark, source equals, then we'll ignore anything after that. Because then we're still building everything the same way we always have, but we've got that code word where they're already reading and they can just kind of say, oh, okay, well, this is just, you know, source for analytics purposes, we can ignore it as opposed to, this is a dynamic issue, you know, that's actually pulling content data out and we need to read it. Wouldn't that make more sense to you? It does make sense from here on, but what about all the past links that are out there that don't use that? With this new system, all those past links will also consolidate. So... But are we going to have to go in and change things either way? You're just adding something to the page that will ultimately fix everything. So you do one thing and all your links, perhaps, you know, if you've got a really popular page or anything like that, there may be thousands of links, maybe hundreds and hundreds of sites with different links, or with various links going to your site, to do that would take you forever. So in this case, just adding a simple code on your page and your set. Well, that's true. All of those incoming links using all of those different tracking codes, you don't always have the ability to control all of them if they're showing up on other pages. Okay, this is why people like you work for Google and not people like me, because I go into this one, this is why I stick with the social side of things more. Okay, well, so let's say we are adding this to the page. There's still a couple issues they see there. One, it seems to me that the types of sites that this is most often a problem on are the dynamically generated sites, you know, the ones that are actually pulling all this content out of the database and, you know, showing up a million different versions, you know, say for every zip code in the United States or for every state or whatever, but it's the same content. Okay, those types of sites, you know, from my limited technical knowledge, they don't generally allow you to mess with the header anyway. So if that's the case, how are you going to get in there and add this tag? I know what you're going to say. It's the two bad for them if they're not set up for us, you know? Yeah, we had a talk about this last week. I've never set up a car, but I got no pity for the ones that the content management system doesn't allow you to work that way, like allow you to do some editing and heading. Well, in the heading area, that's just drives me insane and it's not worth the salt, in my opinion. I'm sure that'll draw somewhere, but it's this fact to me, but nonetheless, there's a lot of people out there saddled with sites like that. Exactly. And you never do the best you can do with what you got. Yeah. And unfortunately, I do work, you know, with many proprietary systems, like it seems a lot of design firms have their own proprietary content management systems now. And they have a difficult time working with these because they haven't even considered that the heading main or heading the head area may require some customization. So I mean, yes, they've they've dealt with the meta tags. So that's a bill that ability is there. But yes, it will require a little bit of programming. And there's no question that that could be, you know, a couple hours, three hours, four hours of programming costs, however, I think that that would be more than worth it. And what they would do, I'm technical, but I couldn't actually write it, but I've got a good idea of how it would be done. Essentially, you would add the tag and you'd have to put in a variable in between the quotes where it says what should this tag, what should this URL actually be, the canonical. And that variable will be filled in by your database. So you'd actually just fill in the database and automatically this will be added to each page as it loaded. It does require a little bit of time, like I said, but it would certainly pay off in the long run because you've got any link popularity from these others. Links would all consolidate and potentially give you an extra boost in rankings. Huh. Okay. Well, that makes sense. But okay, then again, it doubles out of the kit. If you can get into the header and you can do some work there, wouldn't you have some more sort of standard ways to do this, like, you know, 301 redirects, getting in and playing around with the HT access? I mean, if you have the ability to get into that area and make some edits, aren't there already some other ways to kind of deal with this? Well, I'm glad you told me about this question earlier because it gave me some time to think about it. And I should have saved it and put you on the spot that would have been part of it. No, one thing that I did consider, and I mean, I got a lot of 301 redirects for clients for doing when they're doing changeovers of sites and stuff. And again, this is a bit of my limited knowledge and but from what I understand, it is a little bit server intensive, having a long list of 301s and not only that, it does take a lot of time. I can speak from experience on that to create, well, like if you've got hundreds and hundreds and perhaps thousands of different of these tracking URLs, it can take a long time to can set up those 301s. Now, you don't really want any server load to, you don't want your server to slow down. You don't want your website to slow down. That does not happen. It will not happen if you just have this particular tag on your page. So yes, the 301 works for a few links, but I would say that for sites who have this quite rampant and I'm sure there are some big sites like, you know, the big guys like Fortune and all these guys who have so many different versions of their URLs out there, they're going to need to do this on a mass scale and doing a 301, I don't think would be feasible. Well, and to go back to what you said, one of my questions earlier, you basically then have to go back in and add these 301s every time you added a new tracking URL, as opposed to just doing it the one time through this new canonical tag, correct? Exactly. So it's saving you time. It's a little bit of a, it's a quick learning curve, but it's not too in depth. It looks like they're going to have a lot of good info out there. It's supported by the major search engines. It's not just one, which is wonderful and in my opinion, kind of rare, it's quite nice to see. So I'm pretty pleased with it. When I heard about it, okay, this is actually big news, which is why we're standing today's show a little bit to fill everyone in on this. Well, now in terms of the search engines looking at it and reading it, as far as I understand, none of them are saying, you know, this will solve the problem. They're just all saying we're going to start looking at it. So this isn't, you know, we need to make clear to people that this isn't really the magic solution. This is how we're going to work with the engines to start, to start trying to solve this problem and start sort of giving them a little bit of guidance. There's no guarantee from the search engines that this is going to work, correct? Exactly. And you know what? I think that, you know, I was reading Matt Cut's blog on that and he's, you know, Matt Cut's .org, or .com. I think it's .com. If you go there and he's got a great blog and he's one of the Google engineers. His blog is wonderful and this particular case, he even mentions, I believe, that the, yes, it's not guaranteed, but it's within their interest to listen. I mean, and at this point there is no, I think by the reason they say that is for, you know, they're smart people, but I think black hats are quite smart as well and they may figure some way to make this work for them and they want to make sure that it's acknowledged that this will always work. And, but, you know, it's within their interest to do it. So I think it will work the majority of the time, at least at the beginning, until they are ironed out all the issues that pop up. Yeah, I think Google's quote was a suggestion that we honor strongly, which can maybe laugh that just sounds like such Google wording on it. But one of the things that Vanessa has in her article is she said it's more likely that it's to be processed and properly used. If there's already other best practices for URLs in place in the three she lists, one, the canonical URL is the shortest version, which makes perfect sense. The content rendered for each URL is very similar or exact and I think that's where we get back into, say you're delivering the same content, but, you know, with different zip codes or different states, you know, it's just very subtle changes because you're running through some type of big dynamic site and then the URL uses pre-standard parameter patterns. You know, the question mark, the percentage sign, you know, things like that. So it's, you know, again, that plays with giving them that little bit of slack if we can't guarantee that this is going to solve the problem, but, you know, if you do it this way, it should kind of take care of it. I think that makes a lot of sense and just kind of encourages, you know, good URL structure all around. Excellent. Well, that's good. Yeah. There's a lot of people weighing on the subject and it's really used to, it's really nice to see this kind of feedback and see everyone else's opinion out there because it is new and from what I can tell, it's mostly warmly welcome. I don't see many major issues with it. Anyway, we're going to take a quick break right now and when we come back, we'll, uh, we'll follow up a little bit more on Jennifer's upcoming week. We're great back. 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? Look it up on localpages.com. Localpages.com. What if I wanted a business number in Miami? Localpages.com. Can people find your business online? Be seen with localpages.com on every local listing in all the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, and ask. 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Make the guesswork out of increasing your conversion rate. Visit conversioncredit.com and boost your conversion rate for free. That's www.conversioncritic.com. Life Tips Making your life smarter, better, faster, wiser. Wednesdays at 4pm Eastern 1pm Pacific or on demand anytime inside the entertainment channel only on webmasterradio.fm. Ok class, take your seats and no talking. Recess is over and SEO 101 is back in session only on webmasterradio.fm. Welcome back to webmasterradio.fm's SEO 101 show with Jennifer Evans-Lacock, Editor-in-Chief of Surging Guide and myself, Roston, CEO of Stepworth Webmarket Inc. Before the break we were discussing the new Canonical URL Tag, Link Tag, from the big search engines which was quite an interesting discussion and now we're just going to do a blend in now and talk to Jennifer. She's in London right now preparing herself for the search engine strategies conference. She's a little tired. How are you doing there, Jen? It's a long flight across the pond and for some reason always end up on a red-eye coming over here. So Matt and Ellie and I got in this morning I think about 8am and thankfully they were nice enough to let us check into our room so I'm running out about 2-2 and a half hours of sleep. I think it's like 6.30 here and I don't know it's way earlier than that for you. Now we're hours and hours apart in time zones. But yeah so just getting in looking over the show, I was over here last year for it but I just came over for the training on the tail end so I've never actually got a chance to hit the London show but I've heard it's definitely a little bit of a different environment than what we get at some of the US shows so I'm really looking forward to it. Hopefully if we've got any listeners that are over here they might come seek me out at the show and come say hello but it looks like it's going to be a pretty good show. I don't think I've got anything going on until Thursday I'm doing a social media panel and then on Friday I'm going to be doing half day training on blogs, not SEO through blogs but just you know actual blog outreach and blog marketing strategy and all that type of stuff. So really looking forward to some fish and chips and some big band and some search for the British accent. Excellent. So hey how about what put you on the spot give us two of your tips for the outreach. Two of my tips for the blog outreach. My biggest one is I've actually got a pitching checklist and I can't remember for sure if it's up on search engine guide or not but maybe this is a good way to get some of our listeners in touch with us. If anyone wants to drop me an email or pop on to our Facebook group and make a post over there I've got this pitching checklist that I use when I'm teaching it's just a nice printout you know go through it and it's the things you should do before you pitch a blogger and the things that you absolutely must do before you pitch a blogger it's just kind of based on one all the pitches I've got and a lot of the pitch I've done over the years of these are all the things I wish people would pay attention to you know really simple things like get my name right you know all occasionally get pitches at search engine guide that are like deer search engine guide and I'm thinking if you can't take the time to figure out what my name actually is I'm really not going to take the time to look at your stuff. So that's a big one is just pitching people properly. It's such a simple thing and I think you know the whole link building software that a lot of people used for years just that sort of mass spamming of hey link to me link to me it kind of got everyone completely off track of how you should be doing it you know we know good link builders are sending personalized emails and it's the same thing for blog pitches it's all got to be personalized. And then I think the other one is just listening doing a lot more listening and reading of other people's sites than getting out there and talking there's a lot of companies that have really good blog marketing strategies based solely on reading other people's blogs and commenting on them and then taking you know sort of the feedback and information they get from the community and changing the way they do business based on that you know not even getting out there with their own active voice on their own blog and I think that's something a lot of people overlook. One other thing I saw the other day actually I was doing some reading on Yost's blog, Yost Devak about using WordPress which is something we're going to be doing an interview on very shortly but he mentioned that do that you go to their sites like find out who's participating on your site. So who has been perhaps commenting on your articles and he was saying about 1% of people actually do that so you know you really got to look after them and one way he does is he actually finds out you know from their link or wherever where they're at and he goes to their blog and tries to participate with them by commenting with them sort of setting up a relationship and then once he does that he may even if he finds their article really interesting he may actually do a follow up article and link to them from his site. I think it's a fascinating way to go I mean I don't know how anyone keeps track of all these different ideas but you have to pick up a purpose first. It's like what SEOs do it's no different than going into your analytics and you know looking at your keywords and you know everything else it's just it's a different form of marketing and it's interesting to me how they all kind of coincide you know social media and blogs and SEO they're also closely tied but they're also so completely separate in terms of what you can really dig in and specialize in and coming up with those strategies and sort of those procedures of you know how do we follow this conversation how do we follow people back you know a lot of people a lot of people like to read someone else's blog and then come was on their own blog you know so basically drawing the traffic back to their own community but I know a lot of people in the social media space that are pretty bound and determined know if you've got comments to make you make it on that person's blog and you add to their unique content and you help them build up their site just sort of on you know the karma effect and kind of keeping the conversation centralized I think that's a that's one of those big challenges is you start to get that fragmented conversation is everyone starts adding their two cents in a million different places and it's really hard to kind of keep up with you know what's being said and where but that's also a really nice thing on the link side if you're sort of the originating post you know you don't necessarily want everyone to come in and have a conversation on your site you want them to blog about it on their site so you've got all that extra links and traffic coming in so I kind of like a split between the two I think he makes a great point and I think it's essential to do that to go back and engage them in their own space but I definitely think there's something to be said for you know feeding them the lengths and feeding them the additional traffic that'll come from talking about it on you know on your site. I think actually I do um quick to our I guess one to two hour presentations for free in my office here for staff or not for staff as well as just the public for fun I find it good for keeping up my chops but I'm thinking about doing a blog one and I keep reading and I go oh wow that's a good idea and then I get off in tangent and doing my own site so much out there it's amazing and I mean I know but I know I don't know about you but I find I do a lot of the marketing myself just because well frankly I love it and it's a good way to keep up on top of things but that's why I feel it's a little overwhelming there's so many great ideas and so many different ways you can engage how do you keep track or you know I guess it's really you've got to make a list of the ones you're gonna actually do and stick to and if something really good comes out maybe you'll want to switch one out because you can only do so much but that's true and that's that's actually one of the things I'm really looking forward to oh and actually we haven't mentioned this yet but little intro for me will be changing soon because I've I'm still staying with search engine guide but my kids are getting a little older and I've been looking to actually get back into some more client work so I mentioned you a couple days ago that I've teamed up with Matt Bailey and I'm joining him over at SiteLogic and I'm gonna build his social media department and be director of social media over there and that's been one of the things that I'm really excited about getting back into you know Matt and his crew have such a great analytics focus they are just fantastic especially on the usability front of really going in and digging through those files to see how people are engaging and then sort of changing their strategy based off what they're seeing one of the things I'm really looking forward to tapping is that sort of that knowledge of analytics and that understanding of how you sort of reverse engineer things to really shift that social media and that blog focus from okay we want to go out and reach people and then let's figure out how to track it to okay what's our goal now how are we equipped to track it and based on how we can track it what can we do as our marketing plan sort of switching it around the other way because I just see way too many people kind of storming into blogs and social media and everything else and trying to figure out on the back end okay well we've done all this work how do we see if it's actually successful and you limit yourself a little bit and what you can do when you do it this way when you sort of start with that end goal and work back to make sure it stays trackable but you know when we're asking clients in an economy like this to give us new money for new things to try you have to be able to justify it you have to be able to track it so I'm really I'm really interested to get in and start establishing sort of some of those procedures and some of those ways that we look at things you know just to see what will happen and just to see what does end up working out the best yeah it's actually quite amazing I find a lot of past clients are people who have asked questions you know needed a little bit consulting advice a lot of them haven't applied any sort of analytics to track some very expensive campaigns they're doing online and you know if you don't have that in place how can you really quantify whether or not you want to do that campaign again or you just can keep throwing money into a hole because it couldn't be that it's not doing anything for you so I think that's great I mean analytics is huge we're trying to push it as hard as we can too and it's actually a bit of a struggle with some people because it is so much more complex and yes it does slow down the launch of campaigns but well on behalf of myself Ross Dunn CEO of Stepforth web marketing and Jennifer Evans-Lakoc now director of social media at SiteLogic congratulations Jennifer thank you for joining us today on SEO 101 webmaster radio.fm we hope you shouldn't be next week at 5 p.m. eastern standard time or 2 p.m. standard time for our next show and I wish Jennifer a great time in London and I'll be here lucky lucky I don't do the beer but I'll eat some fish and chips for you okay great thank you very much everyone [Music] 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 anytime do your future a favor visit stairs app.com today