469 – Simple things you can do to be found by Search Engines: Tom talks Basic SEO

Episode 469 – Basic SEO
[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey, everybody, it's Tom here with Episode four hundred sixty nine and Screw the Commute podcast. Here to talk about basic SEO today. Now, this by no means means that I want you to concentrate on SEO and go broke and get disappointed six months from now. Okay. That means that you should include and understand the basics so that you don't shoot yourself in the foot with the search engines by totally ignoring SEO standards and even own that search engine optimization, in case you don't know. And and even innocently doing things or not doing things that scream to Google, I'm an idiot. You should never give me a high ranking. OK, I don't want you screaming that. And and that's what this episode is about, that I've been doing a lot of ask me a question series lately and the last one episode 468. And of course, you know, you get the back episodes by putting in screwthecommute.com slash and then the episode number 468. So that one I did how to increase your sales per customer. That's upselling theory. What are bundled offers that's related to selling, what is glancingly marketing and the pros and cons of text marketing. So that was episode four. Sixty eight. Now how'd you like me to send you big checks? Well, if you're in my affiliate program or referral program, I can send you lots of money.

[00:01:56] So check it out by email me at Tom@screwthecommute.com and I'll give you the details. Like always grab a copy of our automation ebook and please put this stuff in the play. You're going to thank me for it. You can grab a copy at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. We sell it for twenty seven bucks, but it's yours free for listening to the show. And while you're at it, pick up a copy of my podcast app. It's screwthecommute.com/app so you can put us on your cell phone and tablet and take us with you on the road now. We're still in the middle and we're working hard on our program with my school to give scholarships to persons with disabilities, so we have a crowdfunding campaign we implore you to help out. It's one of the nicest things, best things you could ever do for a person giving them a chance to study at home because of their physical disabilities and legitimately work at home. So check that out at IMTCVA.org/disabilities. And then at the top of the page, click on the Go Fund Me campaign and you can see some of the people in the program already. We're going to use some of the money to hire people to help run the program. And then I'm going to roll it out really big when I can prove that I can get these people hired. So check it out.

[00:03:23] All right, let's get to the main event. Basic SEO. Now, I got to say again, I don't want you depending on SEO or spending money on an SEO firm, which they pretty much hate me and a bunch of them used to attack me regularly. What I'm going to tell you today is if you have an IQ, at least half your shoe size, OK, you should be able to implement what I tell you today. And I'll have a few things that you shouldn't do. And I'll have a couple things that if you were if you had a little bit of cash, you could have a geek do for you, but not a lot of money and not a lot of time invested. Now we depend on email list and paid traffic for enormous amounts of money around here, but that doesn't mean I'm not happy to accept free traffic from the search engines. So these simple tips are going to give you a greater chance to be found and you won't have to spend a nickel to implement them. OK, now, first thing is last Monday, episode 466, I talked about backlinks, this is if you were going to spend some time on SEO, this is the biggest payback and the fastest payback and the longest payback.

[00:04:48] So I'm not going to go into that again. That was Episode 466. And then, of course, all of this revolves around what I've been harping on for 100 years is key word research. So you should understand Episode 1 and Episode 130, which was about voice search episode one was the biggest mistake people make is they don't do their keyword research. So you really need a firm idea about that before you can implement these things that I'm telling you today. And if you hear a dog in the background, I have a rescue dog here. And she's a little upset this morning. Jenna, quiet. I'm trying to tell these people not to waste money on SEO. I think twice already today she's pooped and peed. And I don't know what's wrong with her today. OK, here's the first thing that freaks people out. You have a better chance of being found if your site is about one topic. If you lump 50 topics on a Web site, the search engines say, well, what is this person, a jack of all trades? And so that hurt you in the search engines? If you don't care about search engines, it doesn't matter because you can direct people with paid traffic, an email directly to certain pages. But if you want to be found by the search engines eventually, then the more topics you have, the less chance you have. So one topic is good.

[00:06:17] Now, this is an interesting thing. For a long time, keywords in your domain name were really made this really important. And we were doing all kinds of weird stuff. I mean, I mentioned this in the back linked section. We'd have I'd have like public dash, dash, dash, dash, dash speaking.com doesn't fly anymore. And the search and this was abuse so bad. Search engines don't pay much attention to that anymore. However, that doesn't mean it's not a good idea if you can get your keywords in your domain name, because if if I'm looking for public speaking stuff and I see JoesEnterprises.com and publicspeaking.com or greatpublicspeaking.com or greatspeaking.com? I'm more likely to click on that. So from the user perspective, it is still a good idea to have keywords in your domain that. Now you have to have a good quantity of content on your pages. Now the number of words has varied widely over many years, from 300 to 7000. So there there's no worry about the number of words. It's just is it quality, content and substantial? It's not. You can't just put, you know, like a squeeze page with a sign up in a couple of words and expect to get that page to rank. Now, these next things are totally under your control. You can easily do them with a free plugin for WordPress if you don't have this ability on some other weirdo site that they put on national TV.

[00:07:56] But, you know, and suck you into it because you don't know any better. Well, God help you. But you can't just be slopping content up there and not thinking about these simple steps anymore, and they are really, really simple. The first one I got to tell you about is called a title tag. Now, a title tag doesn't even look like it's on your page. So if you pull up your Web page in a browser, up at the top is a tab for the browser because you could have multiple windows open their browser, things open, and each one has a tab at the top. Well, if you hold your mouse over there, a little Pop-Up Box, tiny one shows what your title tag is. And frequently these goofball idiot webmasters don't know this stuff and they make your site look all pretty, but they don't do something. So this is one of these situations where if you don't do something, you might as well hold a gun to your head and shoot yourself because you look like a total idiot to the search engines. And it's because your idiot web designer didn't know any better and was a graphic artist out of work yesterday and all of a sudden thinks they can make websites. Well, that's B.S. They're hurting you. I mean, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times over all these years, somebody raves about their web designer and how beautiful their website looks.

[00:09:29] And in 10 seconds, I can find out that the web designer was an idiot and hurt them. And their site has been been just beat down with a hammer for years because of the stupid web designer. Didn't know this stuff. Well, you can't depend on these web designers. You have to depend on yourself. And that's why you should be listening and implementing what you learn here. So up in that tab of your browser, if you hold your mouse over it, you'll see what your title tag is. It might say just another WordPress site. It might it might have the same thing on every page. Well, first of all, this is 70 to 80 to 90 percent of your success with search engines. This one little thing that doesn't even look like it's on your site. See, because the search engine, when somebody is looking for something, sends out these things called spiders and they start from the top of the page and work down. And it's not the top of the page that you see. It's the top of the HTML code behind the scenes. And that's where this title tag lives. And so if they get through it and somebody is looking for golf instruction and your site says just another WordPress site, or maybe it says about or it says contact or it says nothing. Then the search engine says, well, jeez, I'm in a hurry and somebody's looking for golf instruction, and this person site just says about in the most important part of their whole site, I'm not even going to bother looking at the rest of the site.

[00:11:10] I'll just skip it and go find somebody that has golf instruction up there. OK, so so by not doing anything and just having your website built that thing is you don't know what it's going to say, but it's not going to say anything that helps you or it's going to say the same exact thing on every page. And so Google or the search engine see that? And they say, well, why would we give this person a high ranking? It's every page in their site is identical. And go look at your site right now. And probably a lot of you're going to start crying because of your site's been up for years and you've been being screwed this whole time because your idiot web designer didn't tell you this. All right. So that's title tags. The next thing behind the scenes is the meta description. See, when you bring up search results and Google, the title tag is the part you can click on. And then underneath that is your meta description or call it a meta tag. This is, again, behind the scenes in the HTML code. Well, if you don't fill that in with something that helps you Google or the search engine, just pick any random thing they can off the page and throw it in there.

[00:12:20] Well, that's no good. So you can control that. And there's plugins for WordPress like Yoast and all in one SEO pack that makes it where you don't have to know anything about code. You just feed the words in. You do need to know the words from your keyword research, but you don't have to know any code stuff. You just plug it right in. There shouldn't cost you know, it definitely won't cost you anything once you install one of those plug ins. So that's the matter description. Now, the next thing is called anchor text, and this is something I covered on the back link. So I'm not going to go into it deeply. But when you have a link on your site going somewhere, the anchor text and this primarily to help you is if it's pages within your site, we'll talk about pages, you know, links going out of your site in a minute. But if you're linking to another page in your site, instead of having the whole URL, the HTTP, all that where they click on, you have words, you know, check out my putting section if it was a golf site. So putting it then in the anchor text and then it might go to https://Joesgolfsite.com/putting, but the text on the page is just regular text. That doesn't look like, you know, with the underlying and all that stuff, it's probably blue and that people know that that's a link.

[00:13:50] But they're seeing the text or the search engine see that text also. And so they see a keyword in it. And that gives that keyword more prominence to them. It's important. In other words, now, don't overdo any of this stuff, because a couple of years ago, you know, and I was taught by the best of the best Michael Campbell. We all got you know, I was top one, two or three major keywords for 12 years straight. But Google came out several years ago and said, you know, if you do this too perfectly, we're going to we're going to screw you over because we think you're cheating. So so I always try to think from the perspective of your visitor not trying to beat search engines. However, we're trying to beat search engines, too. OK, so that's anchor text then. A simple thing you can do when you're putting something up is just bold, an important word, and then that gives more prominence. The search engine than that page is about that word.

[00:14:47] There's other things called H1 and H2 and H3 tags, these are little tags. Again, you don't have to know any code to put these on that. Send a message to the search engines that, hey, this section or these words are really important and all you have to do is hit a dropdown box, writing your thing, and it will say H1 or H2 or H3. H2 is less important. That might be a subheading and H3 could be a subheading of a subheading, but H1 is like saying this is really, really important. So those are H1 and H2 tags.

[00:15:27] Another thing you can do that no Web person would have any clue to do for your site is make a frequently asked questions. This is back to your keyword research. What are people actually exactly saying when they're asking stuff? And also, if you are already prominent in your field, you get a lot of questions while write them down exactly how they were and have them put on your Web site and then put the answer up there. Search engines love frequently asked questions. Now, key words near the top of the page get more attention than near the bottom of the page. Now, that doesn't mean you slop all your key words at the top of the page. And while I'm thinking about it, don't lump a whole 50 different keywords on one page, make different pages about different keywords. Don't put too many on one page because it dilutes the value of any one of. But anywhere slanted near the top of the page, but that doesn't mean that don't put any near the bottom of the page. All right. Another simple thing you can do is any images on your website. Well, first of all, what good does it do you to put an image on your website from the search engine perspective, who's looking at the code? They're not looking at the picture.

[00:16:45] And it says image four, seven, eight to nine. That doesn't do crap for you. So name your images with keywords that are appropriate for that image. And then there's also a thing that's going to help you with persons with disabilities, which I'm concentrating a lot more on now since I've got them in my school. Persons with disabilities is the alternative description or alt description of an image. This should describe the image for people that are sight impaired. You can still describe the image, but make sure you get keywords in there. Say so. And this also helps you because a lot of people use Google image search. All right. Said all those are simple things. If you spend a day or two learning how to do this stuff, even one day you could do it. It gets somebody to install the all in one Skopec or Yoast, one or the other, you don't use both of them. There's probably a million YouTube videos showing you how to put the stuff in. And it's just text. You don't have to go into the code at all. So, you know, there's no reason not to do that. OK, so here's some don'ts. Try not to link out to sites that are unrelated to your topic, because you want to look like a good resource to Google besides a good site yourself. So if you're linking to all kinds of random stuff, Google says this isn't a great resource and it's just part of the thing that that convinces them you're not worthy of a high ranking.

[00:18:18] Now, if you do need to link to a site that's unrelated, again, this is very easy. You put a nofollow tag on it. You do not have to go into the code, but you're telling Google, hey, I needed to link out to this thing, but please don't follow this. And it's not me. You know, I'm innocent. These are all layman's explanations for the SEO guys, probably puking, but but anyway, try not to link out this stuff that's unrelated to you and then don't link trade. This used to be a big deal. We talk like crazy to trade links with people. Well, chances are it hurts both of you because if your sites aren't totally related in the same industry, then it's going to look bad. Google can see Google is like the Wizard of Oz that knows all sees. So it sees you linking to each other. And that that makes it sketchy like, well, you know, that's not a natural occurrence usually. So you're trying to game the system. That's what they think. So. So don't link trade anymore. And if you had linked trades, negate them, you know, now tell the people, you know, you might have had a deal with somebody and you explained to them why it's bad. And then if they still want to link to you, great. But you know, you're not going to link to them anymore.

[00:19:38] And no redirects, redirects is when somebody goes to a certain you neutral, but it instantly, like milliseconds sends them to some other. You are well these are highly frowned upon by the search engines because it looks like you're trying to trick somebody to go one place and then send them the other place. Now, there are legitimate reasons to use it sometimes, but very seldom. But let's say you had an old website and you made a new website with a different domain name. Just make a big thing at the top of the page with a regular link to the news site and explain what's going on. That's perfectly fine, but redirects no go and then don't do duplicate content. I mean, and this again, this used to be stuff we did all the time. For instance, I was training speakers to have all their promotional material, but have one for every major city with the same material but different names of cities, because a lot of meeting planners don't want to pay travel expenses. So they're looking for a local speaker. So it'd be like, hey, I'm the greatest leadership speaker in Chicago. And then the same stuff would be having the greatest leadership speaker in Cleveland, you know, so there's like 200 and some, I think more large, fairly large cities. And but that's no good anymore. That that would you'd never see the light of day. So no duplicate content anymore.

[00:21:09] All right, now, before I tell you some things that you might want to have a geek do for you, just a little bit of money and a little bit one time, I just want to remind you about my crowdfunding campaign and how you could really help someone that had a physical disability, you know, so I can jump in the car and be to 7-Eleven and back in 15 minutes. But to a person with a physical disability, I mean, it could take him an hour just to get ready to get into a car if they can even drive a car and get there. And then, you know, just it could be an hour and a half to make that round trip. So it's dealt kind of a hand that most of us didn't get dealt. So please help them out. It's like getting your name on a park bench or a library because you're changing something permanently for people. So check it out at IMTCVA.org/disabilities and then at the top is the link to the crowdfunding Go Fund Me campaign and it's going great guns and we'd love to have you as part of it so we can really ramp the program up. OK, so here's some things that you might want to have a little geek work with. Get that I mean, you can you can do this yourself to it just a little bit more effort, because you can get to be part of Google's you know, they have website developer sites and they'll tell you the stuff that they like and they don't like.

[00:22:37] So and they'll even help you evaluate your site so you can one of the big things is page speech or your page must load really fast. A lot of people take a picture off their cell phone, load it up to their Web page, and it's the super highest quality version of the picture you think is going to be good and look better. No, it doesn't look any better than the low resolution version, but it makes the page take hours to load. So you have to optimize your images for screen viewing. You can learn how to do this in about ten minutes. All right. But anyway, you need to make sure your site loads really fast and it must be mobile friendly. That's been for years now. Most of the searches and the site needs to work well and look good on cell phones and tablets. Then another thing that helps the search engines is called a site map. This is a listing of all your pages that they can crawl with their spiders and look at your whole site really fast. So that's something that a geek could make for you. And then the last thing sounds kind of crazy. It's called a schema markup. Not going to get into it. But let's, for instance, take your your frequently asked question page that can be put up there in a certain way that the search engines like even better.

[00:24:02] But it's a geek thing. I don't know how to do it personally. I just know that if it's done, it helps you out and it doesn't necessarily get you higher or lower ranking, but more of your results can show up if you do show up. Yeah, you've seen websites where it has different sections of the site showing up underneath. So you take up a big part of the screen rather than a little part of the screen with just a link to your site. So that's called schema markup again for out of the the scope of this episode. But if you do these simple things, you're not shooting yourself in the foot and you'll have a chance to get some free traffic over time. But you have to pay attention to this every time you put content up to make sure you're doing it correctly. And then you make sure your title tags are good on each page of your site. They should be different and all of that stuff. And and you'll grab some free traffic over time off the search engines. But again, it doesn't mean I'm not concentrating on email and paid traffic to get stuff done fast. That's totally under my control. All right. So please help out on the crowdfunding campaign and I will catch you on the next episode. See ya later.

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