Search Engine Marketing, SEO, and PPC

This weeks AutomateMySmallBusiness.com podcast is all about Search Engine Marketing, S.E.O (Search Engine Optimization), and P.P.C (Pay Per Click). Matt and Brandon discuss the best way to drive customers to your business, whether its online or not. They discuss the tools they use and explain the best possible approach for targeting potential customers effectively and uncover some hidden gems that Google has to offer which is relatively unknown outside the online business world.

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Links from the show:

• Google
• Google Keyword Tool
• Google Adwords
• GoDaddy
• Office Live
• WordPress
• Digg
• Seobook.com

Transcript:

Welcome to Automate My Small Business where we show you how to set up and run your own automated business on the cheap. So get ready to take back your life and add a little spice. It’s time to build something automated.

BRANDON: Hi there. This is episode 3 and this is Brandon.

MATT: And this is Matt.

BRANDON: We’re here today talking a little bit about internet marketing. So let’s talk about kind of the broad range or scope here which we already kind of gotten into and where we’re going. You know, you got a product, you’ve got some sort of business model you want to make money on or you’re putting it online, you’re automating it by putting a shopping cart up or a website, you got a great little business going but how the hell are people going to know you’re even out there, right?

MATT: You mean people don’t just show up?

BRANDON: You know that’s actually the concept that people think or its common to think that that’s how the internet works is that somehow you just stumble upon a page and that’s where you are, right? Because that’s how most people surf the web. They’re browsing by clicking one link to the next and they stumble upon something they like but you would be surprised how directed your click pattern is based on advertising, the way you search with your search engine, what shows up on your search engine, what ads are showing up on that first page. And you may not realize that those links are actually put there either by somebody paying for them or a hell of a lot of marketing effort to get that link on the first page of those results.

MATT: Right and so we’re talking about both the paid, which is the easier way to get out there and the SEO organic way of getting on that results page, right?

BRANDON: Right. So let’s talk Adwords. What is Adwords?

MATT: Well if we look on the kind of the product context, we have search engine marketing and search engine marketing kind of breaks down in to different 2 different parts: you have your pay per click part and you have your search engine optimization. So let’s talk about pay per click. I think it couldn’t be more clear from its description that you pay for every click that people come to you. Is that right?

BRANDON: Right. So how do you do that?

MATT: Basically, you know when you go to Google, you’re going to enter some words in to the search field and Google refers to those words that you put in the search field as keywords. So people will bid on those keywords to show up as advertisers on that search results page. In the search results pages, after you click search, you’re going to see a list of 10 links with some advertising across the top and along with the right hand side of the search results page.

BRANDON: So if I had a business selling fluffy bunnies and I knew that anybody searching for fluffy bunnies would be interested in my product, how do I get them to come to my website?

MATT: So within adwords which is Google’s administration tool for bidding on these keywords. Its target at advertisers so you are now an advertiser since you have a business selling fluffy bunnies, you’re going to get into adwords and you’re going to bid on every keyword so you’re going to pay on fluffy bunnies. You might bid on blue fluffy bunnies, whatever keywords you think are going to drive traffic to your site.

BRANDON: And how much would that cost?

MATT: It really depends on how many other companies there are trying to advertise on fluffy bunnies. So it runs in auction and every time someone searches, it runs an auction. So if you say I will pay 50 cents a click, well, then you’re going to bid out all other people that might only want to pay 45 cents or 20 cents. But there’s an added element to that and that is the quality of your advertisement and your landing page. You want to talk about that a little bit?

BRANDON: Yeah, I mean, if you can show that you’re website can bring traffic to it and add more business for Google; they’re going to make your quality score better. And with the higher quality score, you get a better price for your keywords.

MATT: Right. So if I am trying to bid on the keyword fluff bunny and my advertisement that I’m trying to put it there says buy Viagra, well those 2 things have nothing to do with each other and Google’s going to know that and it’s going to say, instead of costing you 50 cents, it’s going to cost you $2 or $5 to buy this keyword.

BRANDON: So it’s kind of a way of penalizing you for having non relevant information on the site that you’re directing the ads for.

MATT: Right. Not just directing the ads too but also the ads themselves.

BRANDON: Right. So the actual 2 line text in the ad, the 2 lines that you get to type wherever you want should be relevant also.

MATT: Right. Absolutely. They should contain the keywords if at all possible that you’re bidding on and they should include some calls to action. So if you’re selling fluffy bunnies it might say, you know, buy fluff bunnies or get fluffy bunnies on sale, right?

BRANDON: Right. Okay, so you say I sell you know—the ad might read, fluffy bunnies for sale…

MATT: Do people really sell fluffy bunnies, by the way?

BRANDON: No, we’re just using that as an example. It’d be a great product though. I got 3 of them already. Now, so if you are selling a product and you wanted to run an ad on Google, you run that ad, it costs you let’s say anywhere from a penny to most I’ve seen is a dollar, I know it can go higher. But I’ve never been able to get any of my ads to go above a dollar.

MATT: The most I’ve seen is $5.

BRANDON: Oh really? What keywords would those be for?

MATT: They were in the electronics industry so I think they’ll a little bit more competitive and I bet if you’re trying to get that Viagra keyword that they would be at least that.

BRANDON: What? Viagra? Home mortgage I think is going to be up there too.

MATT: Or poker.

BRANDON: Poker. Anything that has high margin like that which by the way is a great way to research certain niches. You can pretty much tell how much margin is in the business by seeing what their keyword cost is.

MATT: Yeah. That’s not bad. So what are some of the other ways that you research some of these keywords?

BRANDON: Well, you know, Google has got this keyword tool. Everybody uses it at least everybody that’s in the business, online businesses. They got a keyword tool called Google keyword tool.

MATT: That is original naming.

BRANDON: And nobody knows where it is so that’s why they all search for it. So if you want to find it, go to Google, type in Google keyword tool and I think it’s the first link that comes up. But put in any sort of keyword into that tool and you can get a list of other keywords that are related to it as well as what kind of price you would expect to pay per click. It would ask what your budget is and with that budget, you can get an idea of how much traffic you can expect to be generated based on the keyword and how popular that keyword is. And then you know simply by multiplying the cost per click times the number of clicks, you can reach your budget and you can set your budget anywhere as low as say $5 a day, $5 a month to $5000 a day, $5000 a month. And that’s really the magic of this ad generation pay per click concept is you can set your budget. You do not have to break the bank like you know in comparison you would run an ad with a magazine, pay a couple of thousand dollars and have no idea how effective it’s going to be, whereas online you run an ad on Google, you can pay as little as a couple of dollars and immediately know how effective it is by not only knowing how many people are clicking on that ad and how with they call the click through rate is but also you can track how many conversions you have or how many sales you generate through that ad. So you know exactly how effective this marketing technique is and you can adjust the pricing levels to be as low or as high as you need them to be, whatever would fit your budget. And have control of it all from one screen. It’s fantastic. It’s actually probably one of the best business ideas I’ve come across and probably it’s going to be the best in internet history. I mean, there’s a reason why Google is a billion dollar company. I think, what’s their sales now, 4 billion, I think it’s 4 billion a year.

MATT: I can’t remember if that’s profit or revenue.

BRANDON. Yeah, 4 billion in a year, I mean, in only being around—well now they’re coming up to 10 years. They used to be a new company. They’re now becoming older but …

MATT: You reminded me of one of the old sayings that half my advertising dollars are wasted, the problem is I don’t know which half.

BRANDON: Exactly.

MATT: So with tracking in Google you can kind of get an idea of finding out which part of your advertising is actually working.

BRANDON: Yeah. So you can really, really target your market and you know that really draws a line between traditional business models and what you might see how we’re describing the internet business models. What might be a good business model off line, for example, a store on a very popular street where it gets a lot of foot traffic, your strategy there is to have products in that store that are very broad based, you know, something that most people would want. And you need that because you only have a limited number of foot traffic that comes in your store and so if you don’t have a product that covers the interest of a broad range of people, you’re going to be out of business real soon by having a high overhead with the rent to pay and you only have so many people that are going to be walking in that store.

MATT: So how’s the internet different?

BRANDON: It’s a complete 180. On the internet, you have the ability to have millions of people come to your store so you’re traffic is not limited and the traffic that you do get by way of advertising, say, on Google or other ways of marketing, you are targeting a very, very specific customer. Someone who is looking for fluffy bunnies, right? Somebody who is looking for that particular product and you know they’re looking for it because they’ve been searching for it. That changes the game a hundred percent because now you have a product that’s very specific and instead of having to pay high overhead for a store and high marketing cost, let’s say, for an advertisement in a magazine, you are able to pay low advertising cost to a Google search engine and other search engines and get exactly the type of customer you’re looking for.

MATT: So let’s thrive into that a little bit. So when you say exactly the type of customer I’m looking for, let’s say, you know, I have a website that sells red shoes, you know. Am I going to want to bid on just shoes as a keyword or what am I going to want to bid on?

BRANDON: Why, that’s a good point. I mean one of the ways that you can focus your ad in adwords even more so is if you can get narrowed with your keywords. You can put your keywords in quotes where red shoes comes up if you put all red shoes in quotes.

MATT: That’s called a phrase match, right?

BRANDON: Exactly. You can have your ad show only if someone searches for red shoes in quote. But they would not show the ad if the person search for shoes.

MATT: Or blue shoes.

BRANDON: Or blue shoes or gum shoe or anything else. It’s got to say red shoes so if you only sold red shoes and this is a little extreme but it makes the point, you don’t want to be paying advertisement dollars to somebody looking for blue shoes so again it’s a way of narrowing your focus to the customer so much that you are paying for ads only for customers that bring in business and that is revolutionary.

MATT: Yeah. I mean if you look at traditional marketing where I’m putting up billboard up on the street and maybe ten thousand people drive by that billboard everyday but what percentages are really interested in my product or targeted at what I need.

BRANDON: Yeah. And you know if you can get this concept, you are already ahead of the curve only because, I mean, I know people who are in the advertisement business and most of them let’s say run their own small magazine or local pet magazine or even you know there’s a lot of mom and pop magazine companies out there that run a quarterly free hand out magazine and con me all the time and they’re saying, hey you ought to advertise in our niche magazine and you know, it’s only a couple of thousand dollars for a half page. I’m thinking, you just don’t get it, you’re competing against the internet. Don’t you realize that me spending $3000 for a half page ad in your magazine, you’re going to mail them out to you know all of Los Angeles. Those dollars are just basically thrown out the window because, yeah, I guess it might increase my exposure but for every person that looks at that ad may be 1% of them would actually go to the site and that brings up another point. Okay, so now that you have an ad online and your site is online, those two things are as close as possible because that ad is one click away from having the customer at your site if you’re using an online ad.

MATT: Exactly. Okay so once they’re one click away from your site, you need to make sure that whatever they see when they make that click is really tied to the advertisement that you had before and so that brings up the concept of landing pages. You want to have landing pages on your site that are tied in with your advertising so that if someone clicks on an ad about fluffy bunnies, I guess, that whatever page they land on is about fluffy bunnies and is consistent with whatever message you had in that. So if you said, say, $50 on fluffy bunnies, well the page they land on better not say, you know, say $5 on fluffy bunnies because they’re going to say that’s a total scam.

BRANDON: That’s important because you’re going to pay a lot less for your ads.

MATT: So switching gears a little bit, if I, you know, maybe I don’t have an online business. I have a local small business say a pizza company. Is there anything I can do to use you know Google adwords to advertise for my business and automate my marketing?

BRANDON: Yeah, I mean, if you’re not advertising with Google and you have a business, it doesn’t matter what business you’re in you are behind the times. It just such an effective way of getting more customers to your website and that is a good point. You need a website usually especially if you’re going to be using say Google adwords. You need a website no matter what business you’re in.

MATT: Even if I don’t sell a product online.

BRANDON: Yes, even if you don’t sell a product. If you’re not on the web, you don’t exist because in today’s world as everybody can agree with, if you want to search something or find out more information or even use the yellow pages in today’s world, you use the internet. It’s just the way it’s going and it’s only getting stronger on a daily basis.

MATT: Okay so I have Matt’s Amazing New York Pizza Pies and do I want to just bid on the word pizza or is there a way that I can target that so that I’m not advertising for the whole US or the whole world?

BRANDON: Well, Google adwords allows you to advertise based on geographic location as well and now even demographics, you can even say I want only females although I’m not sure how accurate it is but they do have demographic profiling.

MATT: That’s awesome so like you know if I have a delivery area in a certain zip code or between certain streets or in a certain city, I know I’m not competing at every pizza parlor in the whole US right? I can just compete against the other people in my area which is probably no one because no one really realizes this yet and, you know, I’ll be the number one ad for pizza in my area, right?

BRANDON: Right. I mean, it’s a huge advantage over your competition and you’d think that you know with Google being close to 10 years old now that there’d be more people in the know on how to use this and yes there are a lot of people doing this but either so many more businesses that can take advantage of advertising with Google.

MATT: I mean, I know, my wife is a speech pathologist and we were looking at advertising for her business and no one in the whole city is advertising for you know speech pathologist. I couldn’t believe it. So the advertising market for her is wide open.

BRANDON: Right. And, you know, here’s another example. My mom is an interior designer and a lot of her work is sales driven. If she wants to drum up more business all she’s got to do is put up a simple website that could be done for free at GoDaddy or live.office.com or any of those free ones out there. Google has a free webpage builder.

MATT: WordPress.

BRANDON: WordPress is a great way to go too, even setting up a blog on blogger.com. Anything you can do to get your presence online and then drive traffic to the site by spending a nickel or dime per click is a great way of drumming up more business and even if—let’s say you’re a sales person working at a company 9 to 5 being, you know, the typical maybe you would even call yourself door to door sales person and all of a sudden you thought this would be a great way to get more leads and you would pull so far ahead of all of your colleagues by running your own ad on Google and having your website so that people would call you directly and you know you may or may not even need your employer’s permission to do this because I mean you’re doing what you’re paid to do, drum up more business, get more leads, get more business to your– whatever you’re selling.

MATT: So instead of automating my business I’m automating my job.

BRANDON: Yeah, I mean, this is a fantastic way to build more customers, more sales, more leads to any business even if it’s not even your business or you may even be working for somebody. I think it’s just a great way to get an advantage over all your competition and even your colleagues.

MATT: I think that’s a great recommendation. So getting back in to the tool itself a little bit, so when I’m in adwords, you know, I go on adwords, I pick my keywords and I set up an advertisement. Now, I typically recommend that people make more than one advertisement and test those advertisements to see which one does best. Do you do the same thing with your adwords campaign?

BRANDON: I mean, yeah. As long as you have multiple ads and you have multiple keywords that your bidding on, you’re going to get data over time that’s going to tell you what’s performing better and what’s not which is one of the things we’ve already talked about and why it’s such a fantastic tool. So over time you’re going to know that ad A or ad C was performing better than B and D and you may even want to drop or delete some of your ads because they just aren’t bringing in the kind of numbers that you want. So because of an analytics spilt in, let’s not confuse the word analytics for Google analytics and we’ll talk about more of that later. But because of the tracking ability that you have in the tool itself, you’re going to really be able to tune the ads you use and utilize the ones that are working and drop the ones that aren’t.

MATT: That’s really good recommendation. So what are some of the statistics that you look at when you’re looking at your ads? We talked about click through rate, what are the other metrics that you use to judge the effectiveness of your campaigns?

BRANDON: You know, I guess every business or every adwords campaign will be different but I’ll give you my numbers and maybe you can use that as kind of a baseline or measuring stick. You know, my click through rate seems to have around 10 to 15 percent and I feel pretty happy with that. Click through rate is basically calculated by how many impressions or how many times the ad is run divided by the number of people clicking on that ad. So if you run an ad a hundred times and 10 or 15 people click on that ad, that would be a 10 to 15 percent click through rate based on those numbers alone. You only have to pay for just the clicks by the way so that’s important key to know.

MATT: And so if I just get a good click through rate, does that mean I’m successful or what else do you look for to know if you’re successful?

BRANDON: Well, that’s a good question because, okay, let’s say I got a 100 % click through rate but if nobody’s buying when they get to my site, is that necessarily a success?

MATT: I’d say that’s a very expensive failure.

BRANDON: It’s a big failure in my book. So you hit on a very key point which is there’s a balance between wanting to have a lot of traffic come to your site versus …

MATT: a lot of buyers come to your site.

BRANDON: Yeah, I mean, just because you can pay to get a million people to come to your site and none of them buy you pretty much have now paid for a million clicks and had no revenue or no profit to speak of to justify those clicks. That’s where getting real focused on your keywords is going to be important because you’re going to want to pay as least amount as possible which means you want the highest quality traffic you can get. You’re going to get high quality traffic by getting very specific keywords to drive very specific customers to your website …

MATT: and very targeted ads, right?

BRANDON: and very targeted ads with very well written landing pages. And the combination of all four of those is going to get you good performance and high conversions as what they call a sale. So what Google does is it gives you a little snippet of code to place in your shopping cart typically in the footer or in the body, well it has to be in the body but on the confirmation page it says, thank you for shopping at xyz online store, your product will be shipping soon. That means you’ve got a sale. That’s a conversion. And Google can track that for you and by having that measured you’ll know what ads performed the best, you’ll know what keywords performed the best and you’ll know exactly what your dollar return on investment is.

MATT: Yeah, and sale is really just one type of conversion. You can set up conversion tracking so it tracks other things. If the whole goal of your advertising campaign is to get email addresses as sales leads or phone numbers, you can attribute some value to that and maybe it’s worth you know 25 cents a phone number or a dollar a phone number. You could track those as conversions and assign value to them as well.

BRANDON: Right. So conversion can be anything you decide it to be.

MATT: Anything that’s important to your business, right?

BRANDON: Right. But the ability to track that is a key feature and pretty simple to set up.

MATT: Yes, so basically you just get a snippet of code from Google adwords and you embed that in your shopping cart, usually on the order completed page, right?

BRANDON: Right. And you know for whatever reason that seemed to be something that gave me a little bit of trouble at the beginning when I was getting started so here’s my best recommendation, it’s got to be in the body and know that when you get the snippet of code, you get that from Google adwords, you go to conversion tracking is the word you’re looking for, and make sure you understand that’s different than analytics which is a different snippet of code that you place on your template throughout your website and we’ll talk about that more later. But the words you’re looking for here, the keywords here are conversion, tracking code and if you can get that from your adwords campaign, you place that into your confirmation page and put that in the body of the page and it will keep track of your conversions for you.

MATT: So once you got conversion tracking set up, you can then you know inside of adwords see that you’re getting conversion and which advertisements are leading the conversions. You took the next step at one point and turn down the automatic conversion bidding, right?

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: Could you talk about that a little bit?

BRANDON: Yeah, they call that, I believe they call that conversion optimization which if you have to do it yourself and you’re saying to yourself, alright, how do we get the best bank for my buck here, how do I get my ad dollars to go the furthest? Well, the typical answer to that would be whatever ad generates the most sales, right? I mean that seems to be an obvious answer to that.

MATT: Right. But it could be a little more complex than that though, right? I mean, Google’s going to monitor your sales and it’s going to say that all the traffic we send on Monday thru Wednesday, no one’s really buying then but you know when we send traffic on Friday and Saturday, people are buying like crazy. So it’s going to optimize your campaign to buy ads on the days that are most effective for you too.

BRANDON: Which in the long run turns out to be beneficial to Google because they get your business longer and more of it so you know it’s a win-win for both sides. Yes, so you’re optimizing your campaign by letting Google take the reins basically.

MATT: I think that’s important point because I know a lot of people are really kind of skeptical about saying, okay, Google, here’s some money. Go buy some advertising, right?

BRANDON: Right. And so they get to choose which ads are performing the best and, you know, it’s arguably true. I mean, whatever ads are performing the best, yeah, run those more. They take basically a number that you set, let’s say, I don’t want to spend more than $20 per conversion which if that’s what your business model is set up or maybe that’s kind of margin that you say anything above $20 is too much but I’m willing to pay anything below $20 of total click cost is going to be okay with me. So they, you put in $20. Google’s going to continue running this ads until it hits $20. If it goes over $20 on an average, it’s going to slowly stop running those ads. But if it stays under $20 and its running and performing real well and on an average the total cost of all your ads that you run ends up being below a total of $20 for every conversion, yeah, it’s going to run those ads more. So that’s how it works. So it basically runs on its own. And once you got that set up, you really don’t need to maintain it very much other than probably checking in just to be sure that you know your budget is on track and you’re performing well but you’re pretty much you’re hands off. So talk about automation, there you go, right?

MATT: Did you have any issues with trusting Google to turn over all that control to them?

BRANDON: No, I don’t know why but I’m a trusting person when it comes to Google. I fell in to their motto. What’s their motto, do no evil?

MATT: Don’t be evil.

BRANDON: Don’t be evil. I’m okay with that, you know, and the reason I am okay with it is because I can see every click, I can see every impression, I can see the results of every conversion, I can see through my sales, and as long as my sales match what the adwords say they match or below because if anything…

MATT: They’re going to miss a few.

BRANDON: They’re going to miss a few may be because somebody came in to my website directly and not through Google adwords so their conversion numbers is going to be a little bit lower than what my actual sales numbers are. So you know you do kind of like do an up and check with that every once in a while just for your saying okay, sales are in more than what Google says. Sounds like they’re doing what they should be doing.

MATT: Okay. So what other areas of search engine marketing shall we talk about?

BRANDON: Organic result.

MATT: Organic, so you can always pay for those ads but it’s a whole lot better when you get that same placement for free, right?

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: Well, it’s not really free. It takes a lot of work to get on that spot.

BRANDON: So you trade dollars for effort, right?

MATT: That’s right. And effort is really again dollars so organically kind of the way Google says it should work and in a perfect world it would work is that you make a great site with lots of good content and then people are going to put links on their blogs and bookmark your site and Digg, essentially build links around the web that point back to your site. And this happens in, you know, a lot of really popular sites have a lot of links to them but that takes a long time to happen so the way that Google kind of orders its search results so you know you search for something like, let’s see how many hits fluffy bunny has. Well, I’ll check right now. Fluffy bunny has 962,000 results. So how does Google decide what is on that first page of fluffy bunny? They have a lot of metrics today used to rank these things but it really comes down to relevancy and authority. So relevancy is all the content that’s on your site, right? Does your page title have fluffy bunny in it? Does your page talk about fluffy bunnies? And the other part is authority is how many people are linking to you? And when they link to you do they link to you with a link that says, you know, this site is about fluffy bunny. So based on that and a lot of numbers underneath that, Google’s going to say, okay these are the top 10 sites and that’s what I’m going to show on page 1. So getting those links is a really big part of the off page optimization. So off page optimization being things that you know are not on your site and the on page optimization is the stuff like what it says on your actual product pages and your website. So what are some of the things that you do for SEO, Brandon?

BRANDON: Well, you know, one of the techniques I like to use for off page optimization is generating content or articles of some sort either with the Blogosphere or the you know there’s a lot of websites out there that you can post your articles and the question most people have is how do you find the time to write all these articles or how do you find the time to post all these blogs or generate all these traffic or put back links out there. Well, you know, my time is valuable and I like to think of it that way. There’s just only 24 hours in a day so I like to outsource most of that to people who are better writers than I am or you know somebody from, let’s say, the Philippines who can work for a very low wage at least to me but you know somewhere in the Philippines it’s a fantastic living. So you know you can expect as low as $2 an article to pay for, I think you pay for that, right? Matt?

MATT: That’s about right, yeah.

BRANDON: And anywhere up to you know $10 an article somewhere around there but you know we’re talking for a few bucks you get some articles written and they post them on websites and drive traffic to the site but more importantly it’s just actually improving your ranking with Google which will be of more likely way of driving traffic to your site.

MATT: Yeah, so as you hear about SEO, you’re going to hear 2 terms: white hat and black hat. And white hat means you know, you’re following all the rules, you’re not breaking all the rules. You’re doing exactly what Google says you do and then black hat is basically you’re trying to scam the system and you know cheat and get more ranking by doing things that are against Google’s rule. And most SEO’s are going to fall somewhere closer to the white hat but not purely white hat, right? So Google probably wouldn’t like you going out and creating your own content on the other sites that point back to your own site. They want you to purely get links on the goodwill of others. But I mean you’re making useful content out there and you know and that’s probably going to be okay. But there’s a whole range of techniques anywhere between that white hat and the black hat that are going to maybe incur a little bit more risk for a little bit more reward. The worst thing that can happen to you is give you something that’s really bad like you try to hide text on your website or you buy links from a link farm that is you know kind of the bad neighborhood where other people buy the Viagra links, some other things like that. Google can actually completely remove you from their search results and that’s not a good thing.

BRANDON: Yeah and this has never happen to me but from what I understand if you ever do get black bold from Google it’s pretty much a sure thing that you’re not going to be able to get on their good side again.

MATT: It’s a done deal. You can pretty much write off that site and start over.

BRANDON: Yeah. Unless you can prove for whatever reason there is a glitch of some sort, you can pretty much call it a day there.

MATT: Yeah a good example of kind of a glitch or something that wasn’t really your fault is there was a worm going around to WordPress like a month ago or so and it was putting Viagra content all over everyone’s website and putting links back to someone, you know. I’m sure you went to Google and say hey my site got hacked and I got all the spam on there and I’ve cleaned it up. I’ve got it all off. Can you reenlist my site? And they would do that. There’s something on Google site that you can apply to be reinitiated into the results. Especially if you’re going to hire out for SEO it’s important to understand what the SEO people are going to do. So ask questions about you know, what techniques are they going to use, what the risk is with each technique they’re going to use, you know. Ultimately, you’re responsible for what happens to your website. And so make sure you understand the types of link they’re building or back links that they’re building.

BRANDON: Yeah you know and there’s all sorts ways to get SEO help and I can tell you I’ve gone through a lot of them. One way is to get an SEO company that will do this for you. I have to say I’ve been burned a couple of times. I paid a lot of money.

MATT: They are kind of snake-oil sales man, aren’t they?

BRANDON: Yeah, there’s so many of them out there and they all think they can do such great things then they tell you they’ll going to double your traffic every week and all this stuff and it just turns out they outsource it to somebody in India or some place and if that’s the case, you can do that yourself. I mean, go buy a book on it. Bookstores are getting full of them now—there’s lots of help to get familiar with these tactics and these strategies.

MATT: And there’s a website called seobook.com which I highly recommend. They have some really good information and kind of talks about some of the different strategies and the risks between the different strategies. So at least understand that so you can have that conversation with whoever you’re hiring to do it SEO if you outsource it.

BRANDON: Right. I mean as with anything and I think this is kind of becoming a pattern with our discussions on this podcast is you know learn enough to be dangerous, you know. Have enough knowledge to know what you’re talking about you know at least intelligently. But when you do decide to hire somebody let’s say in the Philippines or you know, I have somebody in Switzerland who manages my SEO. At least you know what you’re talking about. They do know what they’re talking about but it’s going to require some familiarity with certain terms to tell him, hey, look I want to start a backlink campaign or I want to have a constant daily entry into my blog or you know I want some on page SEO versus off page SEO. If you can just get those basics done, you’ll be well ahead of the game and it’s going to be worth every minute you’ve spent learning those basic concept.

MATT: Absolutely, and if there’s anything I can recommend it’s to focus on the onsite SEO stuff first. Make sure that is rock solid that you have great content, the title tags are set right, your meta description tags are set right, that you have the right URL structure we talked about in the last podcast, all those things are really important so you get all that, set it correctly first then start at looking at offsite stuff.

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: And especially you know make great content and make a lot of it and make it often. If you have a site where you’re continually adding new content to that site, Google’s really going to like them and it’s going to give you some authority around that.

BRANDON: So what kind of things do you do, you did mention a few things just now about your onsite SEO, how do you go about doing that and what tools and techniques do you use?

MATT: So most of my sites start out with WordPress as the foundation. So a good content management system is going to make it easy for you to add new content and one of the reason I really like WordPress is it has a very rich ecosystem of plug ins to add into WordPress that will tweak WordPress to be more SEO friendly so it does all the URL rewriting and I can customize all the description tags. You know, we talked about the title tag and the description tag so really, you know, when we’re talking about PPC you had your advertisement, it had like a title line and then 2 lines below that and the link. Well, if you look in the natural search results, you have a link, a title blue line, 2 lines of text and a link so where that first line is coming from, that blue line where the link is, that is your title tag within your HTML. Those 2 lines below that, that’s the meta description tag usually. Occasionally, Google would just pick a snippet off your page but usually if you have a good meta description tag, Google will take that. So when you’re writing that title and you’re writing that meta description, don’t put the title of your page to the, you know, welcome to, you know, Matt’s Fluffy Bunny site. Make it say something like that’s going to drive people to click on it, fluffy bunnies for sale, buy fluffy bunnies, you know, the best fluffy bunny store in the world or whatever, right?

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: And you know put calls to action in there. Make that really compelling text not just like a throw away place to put the name of your company. Put something that is really descriptive and will cause people to click on it when they see it in the result.

BRANDON: Great advice. I think that is probably the most important thing to look at on the on page. I see the description you put on the page description there.

MATT: Yeah. Some of the other things, I mean, just make sure you have a lot of good content that you’re using different keywords. We talked about using the keyword tool earlier about seeing which keyword you should advertise on. Well, once you figure out which keyword you should advertise on, those are probably the same keywords that you should optimize your SEO site for. So if you’re optimizing for red shoes, make sure the words red shoes appear on your title and content and you’re probably targeting multiple keyword so make sure all the different variants of those keywords are in there so that Google will recognize that your page is about those keywords.

BRANDON: Great advice. Tell us a little bit about back links and how that works with no follow and so on and so forth,

MATT: Okay, in the early days of the internet, a link was a link. And no matter where that link came from, Google counted it as a vote. But what kind of happen was sites are allowing people to post comments and things on their site, you know, user generated the content. And you know suddenly there was a lot of spam out there. Think of like blog comments, you know, I could go at the end of the blog and type in a comment that says link back to my Viagra site and you’ll probably see a lot of spam comments on the bottom of a blog post. What would happen is you know the site understood and don’t want to give basically that vote back to those fake sites so Google and some of the others search engines came up with a technique to put a no follow attribute into that link tag so that if Google sees that link, it just ignores it. So Wikipedia, anything that links off of Wikipedia is a no follow link, pretty much every comment on the blogging software is no follow, most of the forum softwares will put some sort of no follow in there so whatever users are posting up in there, does not get any credit from an SEO point for linking.

BRANDON: So you don’t get any real advantage by putting your website on Wikipedia in the effort to try to get more people to come to your site by going to Wikipedia and posting your website there. It’s not going to help.

MATT: You don’t get any SEO advantage.

BRANDON: You don’t get credit in the eyes of Google.

MATT: Yeah. Link is still a valuable thing if a human really clicks on it. So you know if you have that link on Wikipedia, maybe that page can feed a lot end. People look at the resources and they click through it, that’s still valuable even if Google is not counting it as part of the authority score.

BRANDON: Yeah. So there’s places to put your link that you get a lot of value out of it. But for the most part there’s areas which they call no follow that you don’t get any real search engine credit for but you could of course get the humans who click on it, of course if they come to the website that’s always good.

MATT: It’s easy to forget about the humans when you get really focused on SEO. So don’t forget about the humans.

BRANDON: They’re the ones that eventually make the purchase, right?

MATT: Exactly.

BRANDON: Good. Alright, well I think that’s a good overall guide to internet marketing and getting your traffic to the site, you know. That’s always been a question of that a lot of people have is right, great, well you know where do I get the traffic? How would people actually know that I’m out there and you know with a little bit of work and a little bit, you know, if you want to throw some dollars at it, you know, there’s a lot of opportunity to get people there. And there’s plenty of ways to do it. So…

MATT: I really think the pay per click way is a good way to start out because at least then you’ll find out the keywords that are working. And you can target that towards your SEO area, you know.

BRANDON: And you can spend as little as you want, that’s great.

MATT: Exactly. So, I mean, we’ve covered a lot of topics here so ask us some questions. Send us email. What do you want us share more explanation about? What wasn’t clear? Any of that stuff. Give us some feedback and we’ll include it on the next show.

BRANDON: Yeah. So that’s it for this episode. We’re closing out episode 3 and we’ll talk to you next time. Thanks.

MATT: Don’t we have a website?

BRANDON: Of course, we do, automatemysmallbusiness.com

MATT: And you can send us some message on Twitter with the #amsb, short for automate my small business. So until next time.

BRANDON: Thanks. This is Brandon.

MATT: This is Matt.

BRANDON: Later.

You’ve been listening to Automate My Small Business. We hope you enjoyed this episode. To get a list of the links we’ve just talked about or download more episodes and How To videos, go to automatemysmallbusiness.com. Thanks for being with us and catch us next time on Automate My Small Business Podcast.