SEO 101

Common mistakes SEOs make

Ross Dunn and Jennifer Evans Laycock discuss the common mistakes SEOs make, including Flash pages, targeting, link building, branding, and unrealistic client expectations. 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:: 27m
Broadcast on:: 02 Feb 2009
Audio Format:: other

Ross Dunn and Jennifer Evans Laycock discuss the common mistakes SEOs make, including Flash pages, targeting, link building, branding, and unrealistic client expectations.

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

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Talk to a real-page consultant today to see how your properties can meet the future of multifamily with the smart building suite. Welcome to SEO 101, your introductory course on search engine optimization. So, turn on your computers, open your minds, grab your mouse and get ready to get back to the basis. SEO 101 on webmasterradio.fm is now in session. Hello and welcome to SEO 101 by webmasterradio.fm. This is Ross Dunn, CEO of Step 4's web marketing and Jennifer Evans-Lakoff, the editor-in-chief of the esteemed search engine guide. How are you doing, Jennifer? I'm doing great. What are you doing today, Ross? Great. Whoo! We've got to ready to show. Nothing like getting dragged into fun, new things in the SEO world. I always seem to be a bit interesting to get into this, but thank you for joining us. My name is Ross Dunn. I'm the CEO, again, of Step 4's web marketing. Myself, I'll just give you a quick bio. This is my 11th and half year of doing web marketing, specifically SEO, and work from everything for small businesses. It's a whale watching company in my town, hometown here, to Time Inc. in New York, just training and consulting and stuff. Yeah, love the industry. Sometimes I get bogged down and all the crazy stuff going on at social media, but we're not touching that. It's just that I just find myself being pulled in every direction. So we're sticking to SEO tonight, and thank you for joining us, Jennifer. How about you introduce yourself? You know, see, Ross throws out that whole, we're sticking to SEO tonight, and I'm sitting over here thinking, "Oh, really? Because social media is such a part of SEO. So we're already going to have a little bit of back and forth here going on later in the show." Good. As he mentioned, I'm Jennifer Evans-Laycock. I'm the editor-in-chief of Search Engine Guide. I've been over there for about five years, mixing it up with the small business search front. And now we cover search and blogging and social media, and pretty much anything that's going to get you some rankings and traffic and conversions online we take care of. Like Ross, I've kind of been around the industry for as long as I can remember, probably at least eight or nine years now, a little longer than that if you want to just talk general online marketing. And, again, like Ross, I do a mix of a little bit of client work, a lot of traveling and training and speaking, and then just a nice variety of my own little internal projects to do some testing and kind of see what happens. So looking forward to getting a chance to get back into the mix here with some basic SEO because I've been doing a lot more work on the social media side. So I think we'll get some good back and forth on figuring out what works best. That's cool. I'm learning social media, but I think it's one of those things you can't stop learning social media. It's just continually moving. I'm exhausted trying to keep up. I just learn and enjoy and try and do my best because I'm blown away at how fast it's moving. So today I was thinking we sort of had to throw our show together pretty quickly. So in order to add some value, I thought we'd share a few, you know, the common mistakes we see in our day-to-day jobs is, well, we've been doing this a while. So as SEOs, we may just have a few things to share. And Jennifer and I have put together a few ideas, so we're just going to bump back and forth. I'll do one. She'll do one. And we'll see where that takes us. I guess at this point, let's go. So one of the ones that I've noticed is that new clients come to me and they're running multiple websites using the same content, and they come to me and they insist there must be a way to keep the sites the way they are without, well, frankly, because they don't understand that it's duplicate content that's just not going to work with Google, Google will find it. I say Google because, frankly, everything is Google these days. I'm just burdened with Google, Google, Google, Google, but the fact is it is the leader. So Google finds out they've got this duplicate content, they lose rankings, they just start to drop, their page rank goes down, all the alarm bells go off, and then they come to me and they go, how can I get this fixed? But I don't want to take down the sites, and I don't want to write new content. It's simply not that simple. Can't you just wave your magic SEO wand? What's that? I said, can't you just wave your magic SEO wand and make it all better? I know. I'd love to get one of those. It's what they want. Ross, do you find the people that are calling you, are they wanting to keep the multiple sites because they still sort of got that dream of, well, if I have lots of sites, then I can get lots more rankings and I can kind of capture those first page results. Are you getting this from people who just kind of don't really know any better and just ended up with a whole bunch of different sites, trying to focus on some different topics, and everything just kind of failed to meld? Well, most of the time, it's actually that they feel it for different markets, but it's the same content, so maybe it's a travel site and they've got information on accommodation in London, but they're in Florida and they're trying to pitch people to go to London, and then there's another one for Arkansas, and they're pitching people to go to London, but they've lent the content for London for the same stuff, so they want to make sure they're found in Arkansas and they want to be found in Florida. Two different sites, they're trying to target, and the concept's interesting, but it really can be amalgamated in one site. Some people can be so intense about what they want and they don't want to change, they don't want to do anything, and it's pretty frustrating. I try and get across just how important it is to have this one site. You can do targeting using pay-per-click, you can do some local targeting, you can of course include both terms within your content, writing, and you can get those rankings, and you can certainly target people from all aspects of the country. Why just target those civil areas? I think people coming from the old backgrounds of offline marketing, trying to apply them to online, it's just not that simple. Have you had any experiences like this? Well, the interesting thing to me with the people who come in with the multiple sites and really thinking, okay, we're trying to target all these different groups, so we need all these different sites for what's essentially the same thing. I remember, geez, way back when one of the first site clinics I did at one of the SES shows, there was a huge, huge company, one of the biggest internet providers who was in the audience. At the time, they had two completely different brands that they were operating under, and they were talking about the challenge they were having because they just couldn't compete with the one company who was the leader in this space. They were running second and fifth, and I kept trying to explain to them, you're splitting your efforts. It's what these companies do when they put these different websites up, is you're splitting your link building efforts, you're splitting your branding, and essentially, it's like if Coke had a different name for every single state they were in. Imagine how hard it would be to market Coke and to build that up, because as you travel to different places, if I leave Ohio and head out to California, I don't know to order whatever Coke is called in California because I'm used to ordering Coke as it's called in Ohio. On the branding front and on that search front, getting these people to understand that you need to get it all mixed in together because then your efforts are building one far more powerful presence as opposed to spinning your wheels and doing so much extra work to not even get the same payoff. As you know, it's kind of like a business, so you have so many ideas, I'm an idea guy. I'm sure you find you're running in tons. You can't go with all of them, you've got to focus. Like anything, if you don't focus, none of them is going to get done or if it does get done, it's not going to get done as well as it would have been if you've just focused on it, alone, and yeah, I know, I run into it a ton, and I actually dealt with it really recently and I was kind of surprised. I thought that kind of stuff that weeded out. All of us write so much and we want to give away all this info so people don't make these mistakes. We'd love for them to come to us and say, look, I just need to increase my rankings a couple spots or hey, I just need to do a new site. I want to be able to help with more of the in-depth stuff and the basics keep coming up. It's a bit frustrating because of stuff that's out there. Now, for the sake of our listeners that are just tuning in for maybe the first time or haven't really listened to the show or done much reading yet, they're out there in that situation. What would you tell them, what kind of attitude do you want them to come to you with in terms of what would you hope a company would be willing to do if they walked in the door with 12 different websites that essentially targeted the same thing? What sort of your master fix for that? Well, the master fix would be, okay, it would be a bit of a shock, I think, to them, but look, pick the domain that you really think is the most marketable. Let's think from a marketing perspective, which one is it that you really think people remember and easy for them to type in with at least amount of spelling mistakes and get that, get the basics, then take all the other ones and 301 redirect those domains to the one you picked. Then you get all what little reputation is on those, passed on to one. All of a sudden that one site really has that much more power. It's exponential. All the power from those sites get added into this one and it will have way better effect. Really, if the content's the same, you're not losing anything. If, in fact, you do have a little more targeted local content mixed in to this duplicated content, fine, make sure that that text within your site is rewritten a bit to add some of the other locations if you're really location oriented. Once you've done that, you really will have a better effect, I think. It's focus, focus, focus. Would you have anything to add to that? No, that's the exact same answer I would have given. I'd say anyone out there listening who's in that spot getting ready to call an SEO, but if you're calling a pretty decent SEO, that's probably the exact same response you're going to get from them, too. Now how about you? Did you have a--? Yeah, I've actually got a couple of them and I do have a few on the SEO front. The biggest frustration I always had, especially back in the day when I was really, really working with sort of the teeny, tiny businesses, because I think with the bigger companies now, people are starting to get sort of the holistic approach that you've got to kind of do all of this planning at the same time. But with the smaller companies, I would have this company call me up and say, you know, we just hired this local firm and they built our website and now we want you to SEO it. And I'm sure you've heard that and I'm sure anyone who's in SEO listening has heard that. And that was like one of the absolute most frustrating things I've got that I've ever had to deal with, because it's just the concept that you then have to go back and redo so much work. So I know we're coming up on break here in a minute or two, so I'd say let's go ahead and pop over to our break and when we get back, maybe you and I can hash out sort of the reasons why that drives SEOs crazy and, you know, why people need to work on breaking someone in a little earlier in the process. SEO 101 will be back right after recess. Hey, have you got the number for Jerry's Pizza? Look it up on localpages.com. Localpages.com and 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, with over 6 billion quality searches a month and bid starting as low as once said, get connected with local consumers at the exact moment they're looking for you. San Francisco, Green Bay, London. I told you. Localpages.com. List your business on localpages.com now and get $100 in free local advertising. Localpages.com, bringing your neighborhood to you. SEOSeek.com is your one-stop site for everything S-E-O. From search engine marketing to pay-per-click management, SEOSeek.com delivers high-quality SEO services and affordable prices. SEOSeek.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, get a free quote and a free competitive analysis today at SEOSeek.com. When it comes to finding the right customers with the right keywords, all you have to remember is A-B-C Search. A-B-C Search is the world's largest privately held pay-per-click network, giving advertisers the best pay-per-click traffic with over 6 billion searches a month and industry leading protection using click shield. Their patent pending fraud identification software, you can trust A-B-C Search to deliver the best possible traffic when thinking about PPC and publisher solutions. All you need to remember is A-B-C Search, Quality Partners, Quality Search, ABCSearch.com. It's time to start jamming and spamming again with the Princess of PageRank, The Heroes of HTML, The Sultans of Search, SEO Rock Stars, Tuesdays at 4 p.m. Eastern, 1 p.m. specific only on Webmaster Radio.FM. Welcome back to Webmaster Radio.FM's SEO 101 show with Ross Dunn, myself, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing and Jennifer Lekock, Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Guide. Before we left for the break, we were discussing, essentially, some of the caveats, or I guess more of the... Fat peeves. Let's go with fat peeves. Fat peeves, that's perfect. What we run into in our job on a daily, weekly basis, and I was discussing multiple sites and how, you know, duplicate content isn't a good thing. But when we finished with that, Jennifer was moving on to, well, how to deal with a website that is just not ready for SEO, but we're being asked to optimize it. So why don't you leave the weather, Jen? Yeah, that's probably my single biggest pet peeve in the SEO world. Just the idea that someone goes out and hires a company and has a brand new, generally really flashy site built, and then they show up and say, you know, I need you to SEO the site, I need you to make it rank well. And every time I get one of those emails, it just, you know, you fill your shoulders drop a little bit and you go, oh, I'm not again. Because what really tends to happen is, you know, there's still not a lot of designers and a lot of web developers out there who get the concept of search-friendly design. So you know, you get these sites in that are just poorly structured, you know, the navigation doesn't work, it's got an unspiderable content or, you know, flash-turbation going on. It's just a whole lot that ends up having to be completely redone, whereas if they had contacted an SEO company in the first place, you know, they can make sure that sort of the outline and the text facts for building the site are making sure it's search-friendly. And even just in terms of, you know, how you set up your content, you know, if they go out and have all their content written, and we have to go back and edit it so much easier to just write the content with search in mind, you know, from the first place. So big thing that I would definitely push anyone out there who, you know, is looking at doing some SEO, but also considering doing a revamp to their site, even if you're not going to actively, you know, engage the SEO right now, you know, because you want to wait and do your content after you get the site developed, you always need to make sure you at least got an SEO consulting with you on the design so you can make sure you've got, you know, something that's going to be readable and something that's going to be easy to take care of. How about you, Ross? You get those calls or emails? Yeah, I've actually got about three right now I'm dealing with. Yeah, where luckily though, I was able to get my word in before, which is great. I mean, yeah, so right now I'm actually kind of probably reinventing the wheel a bit, but I'm trying to figure out how to best steer them, because, you know, every market is so different. I have to find myself learning a bit more about their market to really understand what the site should do architecturally. I mean, yes, SEO principles are always generally the same, but I think right now, which is the best example I have right now, essentially, let's say it's about lactose intolerance or something, as someone's doing something, you know, whatever. What is ironic when to pick with me? Oh, yeah, it's all the same with me, so they actually have, they're offering some sort of menus and such for people to find restaurants that would do that. Well, in this case, I have to figure out a way to make sure that their architecture works with having these menus for different cities, different states, you know, I also make it scalable. And, you know, that's something that I have a difficult time with considering SEO, and I've been doing this for a while. I can't even imagine someone starting off and doing all this. You know, you spend a fortune to make these sites, and once it's done, it's not scalable, and it's not in an optimized pattern, it's going to be that much harder to grow. And, of course, everyone wants to grow, and everyone's got that plan. So, I find myself almost reinventing this every time I do it. I mean, if you've got a great template to do this, blue, send it my way. But it's definitely a lot of work. Yeah, that's a good point you made, though, in terms of scalability, because I think that's one of the toughest things in terms of SEO architecture. And, you know, if you're coming into a site for the first time trying to work on it, if there's so many sites that just kind of get hacked together over time because you're adding new content and, you know, you're adding these new categories, and there's no rhyme or reason it's not really planned out. And, you know, I know we were totally guilty of that at Search Engine Guide. Anyone who's been rating our site for a while probably remembers the uber hideous design that we had up until about a year, year and a half ago. It was just so horribly ugly, because it was still the original design from 1998 when we launched the site. But what had happened is we had, you know, changed directions so many times just to kind of meet the needs of the audience and what they were asking from us that we ended up with this monstrosity that was an architectural nightmare. And so we weren't pulling the same, you know, search benefits out of that we could have because we didn't have the proper cross-linking going. We weren't, you know, channeling our traffic and our, you know, link value through the site. So, when it came time for us to do our redesign and to restructure, we had to sit down and do a lot of thinking in terms of, you know, not even just what do we know for sure we're going to launch in the next year, but what are we even considering launching and how does that play in so that we could make sure we really were setting up a site structure that was going to be scalable, you know, to introduce new things. So, I think it's important for companies to think that through too is even apart from what you're at the ceiling right now and what you're fixing your link structure for right now, you have to factor in how you're going to be able to add new content and make it fit and make it work. Yeah, and I don't know, I'm sure everyone else feels the same way. Something about doing it for your own company, it's that much harder. I can do it for someone else, but my own company, oh, hello, hello. Yeah, I'm with you on that. So, here, us, it's back to you. What's your next pet peeve on your list? Well, I would have to say that I get the odd person call who's really excited about their website, and I love that. It's very infectious, but then they start going to me what they're expecting from what they've done. And I start to realize that I don't think they've done enough research, and they've just spent 90% of their budget on the website design. And I'm sitting here going, oh, no, because, you know, they don't want a little niche term. No, they want something like cars. And they're like, oh, where do I start? So, you know, launching a website with high expectations for short-term results, first of all, bad news. I mean, that's the other thing too. They're like, well, you can't get me a top ranking in two months. I mean, come on. You've been doing this so long, and like, exactly. And that's why I know that it's not going to be that short-term. You've got to do link building. You've got to build your reputation and credibility. I mean, Google's gotten very good at determining reputation. I mean, there's certainly some holes, but in most cases, it does know which sites and which companies have some experience just by their actions online and their links and how old the links are, that kind of stuff. So, Jen, how about you? Have you experienced, you know, what clients come into you with high expectations for short-term results, low budgets, and highly competitive keywords? Oh, of course. Because, you know, as I said earlier, it's just a magic SEO wand that we get to wave and we make everything all better. So, you know, someone goes out and reads about it online and they go, oh, hey, that's really a great idea. And, you know, maybe they're in a forum somewhere where they talk to someone who's just kind of getting started out. And, you know, they've quote some, you know, prices and throw some ideas around. And it's just not standard enough for people to really have a realistic expectation of what they're going to have to spend or even what can happen. But, you know, I think that segues really well into another one of the points I was going to make, which is, you know, focusing on the rankings instead of the results. It's those, you know, high expectations. And, you know, I've heard you mention at some point, you know, like someone who wants to come in and rank for cars, you know, as opposed to, you know, Ohio used cars or whatever, you know, a nice, more specific term that's going to convert better. And, I was talking to, actually, Matt Bailey this weekend. And we were talking about a client he'd had a couple years back that lost some rankings. I remember back in the Florida update. When Florida sent everything, you know, all crazy. And he had a client that was consistently pulling number one and number two rankings for, you know, one of those one word killer phrase, or, well, wouldn't be afraid, one of those single, you know, keywords that was just killer in terms of traffic. And they got knocked down to about eight when Florida came through. And there was a little bit of an initial freak out, but this was a fairly educated client. So they knew, you know, things are going to drop and then we're going to work our way back up. And, you know, Matt's company was taking care of it. But what they found happened, this was really interesting, because the number of leads and conversions they were pulling from their listings actually stayed pretty much the same, even when they were down at that number eight point. But they had so many fewer inquiries coming in that they were spending less time dealing with what amounted to the same amount of work, because it was such a high volume keyword that so many people would just absentmindedly click on the first link or two and might even send off a request for information, but it really wasn't a fit for what they were looking for. And they found that, you know, when people were determined enough to get down to the seventh and eighth listings and click through, they were already such a more qualified visitor. So it was interesting to us, you know, to see how that could happen, that you could have that much of a difference in ranking and still be getting the same quality in terms of, you know, actual conversions and actual results that was less work. So I think that's one of those, you know, kind of setting expectations, and for us doing a little bit of client educating to help them see that it's not necessarily having that number one ranking or it's not necessarily that one keyword you think you need. You know, we got to get in here with the analytics and really see what's happening and then we need to set our goals based on that. Yeah, and I didn't list this one, but how about that for a pet peeve? I mean, not having analytics on a website. Oh, oh my, yeah, that's just like death. And it's free now. I mean, please, if you want to show who doesn't have analytics, it's very, very free. Google Analytics does a great job now. They've finally added segmenting. You don't know what that is, perhaps, but you will if you start messing with it. It is awesome. I'm very impressed with it. And you just add some code to your website and all of a sudden you can track a multitude of data. And even if you don't use it, you may come to one of us someday or another SEO and they're going to go, do you have data? Please have data because then I can go and they can start to see and really get a feel for what is going on in your website and what's not worked, what has worked, marketing campaigns perhaps that actually didn't work, but you're still putting money into. It's endless how much data can come out of a simple Google Analytics account. Oh, totally. And everything else we do is, I mean, it's pretty much completely worthless if you don't have some analytics because no one can sit around and justify spending X amount of dollars for, oh look, there I am listed at number two for phrase X and number one for phrase Y. That doesn't mean anything unless you can actually get in there and get some really good solid results. Exactly. Well, thank you very much, Jennifer, for joining us. This is awesome. Hey, I'm really excited about this. In fact, because we're doing this together on a weekly basis, I think we both love it. If anyone could send in some ideas of what they'd like to learn, perhaps through our Facebook account. And you can do a search on Facebook for SEO 101, Webmaster Radio Podcast. Just go in there and post some ideas. We will look at it. We would love to get your feedback. Look for our show on Webmaster Radio. We do have the podcast downloadable. I know I'm going to listen to it. It's going to be a little scary to hear my voice, but it is there. And check out our Facebook page. Thank you very much and see you next week. [Music] [Music]