Cloud Wise Joe and Co-Host Chauncey help businesses make the internet work for them, and not against them.
In this episode, Joe elaborates on advice from Google web genius Matt Cutts, about getting your business found online. As well, Chauncey and Joe talk about what site links are and why they’re important to grow your business.
Joe: OK so I think you’ve just led us into the next audio here in a minute where Matt Cutts from Google, actually head of their word spam department. He’s going to talk a little bit about the way he sees businesses putting content onto a website. In other words what words they use and how they describe things. He explains the very large gap between what is a business we think should go on our pages his content and what he sees. People are actually typing into Google and looking for and he’s basically going to lay out the case that you really need to know what people are typing for and Google and you need to write or create your content at that level.
But real quick before we move on you know the speaker in that audio clip was one of the contributors at Yoast, the CEO actually. So I think it would help our audience to know what Yoast was. I mean first off was he even relevant. He should have been speaking you know. Who cares who he is. Yoast is his first name and they’re in the company. And they offer plugins. That’s one of the neat things they do. You know if you have a WordPress website go look for some of the Yoast plugins and they’ve got really helpful plugins to help you with your SEO you know do things like help you figure out what keywords you’re using. There are just all kinds.
We do try to make sure that you have got context around how you can manage and understand how the Internet is impacting your business. But we also want to try to give you actual steps and I can say right now one of the most valuable things you can do is log into your WordPress site which you probably have because right now at this point I don’t know I think like 26 percent of the Internet’s built on WordPress. Log in and see if you have Yoast’s plugins and get familiar with those. If you do not add them because they will help you understand some of the basic pillars of what’s good or bad with your website as it pertains to Google wanting to crawl or display it.
Chauncey: And if you’re having a hard time submitting yourself to Google Webmaster Tools , Yoast will provide you the one thing that you need to make that happen.
Matt Cutts talks about how Google search works.
Matt Cutts: I’m holding in my hand a little device and you might have seen them before you stick them into computers. They store things maybe you put your presentation on it you give it to a friend she sits on her computer. Maybe you’re proofreading a friend’s paper. You take it maybe you put pictures on it maybe your mom sends you one. You’ve all seen this right. This is not alien technology.
Think in your head if you are going to go to Google and you’re going to type in what this is. Prepare your search query. What is this? What is this device? Don’t say it out loud. OK, I’m going to Google and I’m going to go buy one of these. It’s retractable. Now turn to the person next to you and compare notes. Literally, take a minute and say what would you search on Google and what would I search warrant do.
Oh, wait there are some people on the edge like I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it. Ok. Ok, cool cool. Now you got to know your neighbor a little bit. So let’s hear. What did you type into Google to find this? Flash drive, USB drive, thumb drive. What else would have a retractable? Right. So you think oh yeah this is a USB drive but your neighbor thinks not. Now, this is a thumb drive. And the person on your right thinks it’s a flash drive and somebody might not even use the word drive. Right. So the takeaway is if you were a blogger think about all the different ways that someone can describe something.
Think about all the different ways that you can naturally fit that in your post. Now I’m not talking about saying would you like to buy a thumb drive, thumb drives are for you, then you would like to get a thumb drive which is really good right. Well, we’ll see an example of that later on I thought. Instead, think about ways to naturally put that in your post. Hey, buy a flash drive. I was using this one thumb drive which is really cool.
It works via USB right. I’ve used most of my major keywords and a couple of them and it still sounds natural. You don’t have to stop it. You don’t have to be really natural. There’s another thing which is jargon mismatch right. A lot of times if you’re in a particular industry you’re thinking about you know what are the words people are going to use. And you don’t think about what a regular user is going to say. So, for example, earlier today or earlier this week we were doing a site review and we were giving advice to people who had sites and this was the site this is pretty cool this is the University of California San Francisco and they have a site about HIV.
Oh, my God, this is the whole page really on the home page and you like recommendations for use of antiretroviral drugs and HIV infected women for maternal health and interventions to reduce perinatal HIV transmission the United States. Is this a technically good paper. Probably. I have no idea what it’s about. Right. It’s an Editor’s Pick someone has selected this paper it’s important for some reason. This one’s about swine flu. It’s something I need to know about swine flu and they’re not telling me. I don’t know how to translate it into regular English translated into regular English for example. I’ve seen the queries that people type. This is the sort of stuff that people type. Do I have AIDS? I don’t know.
Joe: So let’s break that down. You’re listening to Being Found show. The audio you were just listening to was Matt Cutts from Google. He’s been around forever. He’s got a great blog. Does great videos. But he was giving a speech, a big long speech, about how Google thinks and how you can write well for Google to be impressed with you. I’m paraphrasing and he’s in charge of helping people write and do the right kinds of things at Google. So there’s a lot of myths that he just busted there. So I don’t want to break that video down with you, Chauncey. So one of the myths that this guy just busted is that when you are creating a page that you want to be found whether it’s your About Us page or product page and about your service the idea that you’re using just one keyword.
Chauncey: Yeah. I don’t know if it’s fair to say that he busted this myth. This used to be true and that’s why it’s all the more difficult to find people who don’t do it because there’s a lot of companies that are just like this has worked for years, why isn’t it working now? Here’s why isn’t it working now because we don’t know Google and Google changes. And so as we know what that means to me is, LSI, Latent Semantic Indexing.
Google put out an update where I think we were talking about this last week where the lawyer in Redding, counsel in Redding, and an attorney in Redding now mean the same thing before they were separate search terms with separate lamming pages. But now they’re basically semantics. And so they mean one page for those three topics not three pages or you’re basically duplicating content and competing with yourself.
Joe: Google knows it’s all one thing if you try to do it the old-fashioned way. You are actually creating competing content on your website which still always boggles my mind. That there is such a thing but there it’s you can actually compete with yourself and you could cut the results when you look at it.
Chauncey: Let’s say you have 100 points and you’re going to advertise for your attorney in Redding with 100 points. Well, I’m going to put all hundred in attorney in Redding or I’m going to put 33 in each of the different things so now I’m way lower on the search results because my efforts and my links and everything has gone to three pages as opposed to one.
Joe: And what about keyword stuffing. I still hear this and I still get asked this all the time what are you, what do you want the density of the keyword to be, how many times should I say it’s on the page? You know it’s like hey in about one paragraph Google gets what this page is about. I’m going back to when he’s describing the natural way you would describe a flash drive so you wouldn’t say this is a flash drive. I love my flash drive I use my flash drive. You know I do a presentation with my flash drive. You would naturally say things like you know I just bought a new flash drive. This is one of my favorite tools that I use to move presentations around. Anything I want on my thumb drive.
Chauncey: You know what I mean it’s just natural and the one thing everybody forgets. Once you’ve established what “it” is you can use “it” on the page and Google’s going to figure that out.
Joe: Right. OK so now let’s fly back a little bit and think about this specific concept. Are we telling a business owner right now. Write your pages this way. Maybe if you have the time. Are we telling you to hire somebody and just know that they know this stuff and they’re going to do a great job? No we’re not telling you that the reason we’re bringing this up is so that as a business you’re educated and prepared and equipped to go look at your own pages even if you’re not writing them and even if you’re not writing them yourself which I know a lot of us don’t have time to do, I don’t write any of my own pages, you can go read them and you can say to yourself gosh are these keywords being stuffed? Are there other natural terms that might be used on this page and you can ask whoever’s working on it to make adjustments just like you would in any other part of your business.
Joe: I do want to get into one other part though. It is my favorite part of the video that he brings up. If you ask me it’s the big thorn in my side when talking to businesses about what kind of content should be on their website and what I find is businesses are always trying to be super impressed with their content. Either they’re trying to impress their CEO with their massively extensive vocabulary that they want them to see and say wow that is the smartest thing I’ve ever seen written or they’re trying to impress their other marketing friends or their competitors and they’re completely missing the point that a customer is looking for hey where do I get this thing. What is this thing?
Chauncey: Well here’s here’s a really depressing ranking factor. You should write about an eighth-grade level. And I know that’s really sad. So it’s not quite as limiting but by pandering to the lowest common denominator, however you want to put it, basically it allows anybody who comes to your site to understand and use it and convert you know so when he was saying about the titles it’s like not only is that title clickable where anybody wants to click it. But to some people that title was straight up scary like I don’t want to click that because who knows what’s on the other side.
