For other parts of the series:
Beginner’s Guide to Content in 2021
Beginner’s Guide to Link Building in 2021
Transcription from Rev.com – please excuse any grammatical, syntax, and spelling errors.
Paul Warren:
Hi, I’m Paul Warren.
Ryan Klein:
And I’m Ryan Klein.
Paul Warren:
And this is another episode of SEO is Dead and Other Lies. Ryan, how are you doing on this beautiful night? Is it nighttime for you out there on the west coast?
Ryan Klein:
No, I think that you get the times mixed up because it’s 7:50-
Paul Warren:
Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know what day it is or time. Sometimes I don’t know the month. I just have been living in crazy SEO world.
Ryan Klein:
Do you consider yourself the Nic Cage of podcasters?
Paul Warren:
Oh God, I hope so.
Ryan Klein:
Especially in Leaving Las Vegas, like-
Paul Warren:
Oh, I was thinking that one where it’s a vampire Nic Cage from the early ’90s. Vampire’s Kiss, you ever seen that-
Ryan Klein:
The one where he goes, “I’m a vampire!”
Paul Warren:
Yeah. Oh, you have seen it. So yeah, that’s the one I was thinking.
Ryan Klein:
Oh good. Okay.
Paul Warren:
Yeah. I just, I don’t even know what I’m in at this point. I just keep doing it.
Ryan Klein:
Just have a whirlwind of work and side projects and hot sauce brewing and concoctions-
Paul Warren:
Hot sauce is a brewing. But I don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk about something our listeners can actually use. And that is the third part of our three part series. So the final part of SEO 101. And today, we’re going to be talking about our least favorite thing, which is on page SEO, site structure, we’re going to talk about on page optimizations, siloing, all of the nitty gritty boring stuff that no one ever wants to see you report about that will take up a lot of your time.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah. It’s stuff that can actually get quite monotonous if you’re working in house and working on one site. And once you get past the flare and the thrill of links, and then you produce your content, you’re like, “Okay, actually, that’s been the elbow grease to do this stuff.” And oftentimes, it can be outsourced with a proper checklist and a process, but it’s good if you get your hands dirty if you’re doing this for the first time.
Paul Warren:
It’s a good thing to maybe find a good audio book to have playing in the background for awhile. I like to listen to unsolved mysteries on YouTube from the ’80s.
Ryan Klein:
Good for you. That’s a good one.
Paul Warren:
There’s so many seasons and episodes it’s like it never ends. It’s just good background garbage to have on while you’re doing this kind of work. Because like we said, it’s monotonous, but we’re going to give you some steps and some guidelines to do if you’re doing this yourself.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah. It’s certainly important. I think that I got through all of LOST doing a lot of onsite optimization projects.
Paul Warren:
Yeah. I mean, you can get a lot. That’s a lot. Listening, watching LOST, getting lost in your work.
Ryan Klein:
So Paul, how we’ll approach this is I certainly don’t have a list in front of me. So we’re going to probably start from the top, which are the most obvious and also typically the most important. And what will happen is we’ll go through and then we’ll start picking our brains and digging deep to find the one offs here and there.
Paul Warren:
Definitely. Okay. So let’s start real high level here. And let’s talk a little bit about site structure, right? Because this is something you need to set up to be correct at the beginning before you actually start adding content. And so let’s talk about how you need to have your URL structure on your website. And so the way that you kind of look at that is, one, thinking about your website as containing categories, right? And those categories are going to be denoted within the URL of which they live in. So it’s important to have things in there like your website name and then blog, and then the actual title of the blog post. Right? Because you’re telling Google a little more information about what this page is about. This is specifically important when you get into local SEO and you can use correct architecture to really guide Google into the location that your business is at. So you don’t want to have a super long URL, but you want to get to … I think there’s a character limit on URLs anyways, do you know what that is, Ryan?
Ryan Klein:
100? 120? It changes all the time.
Paul Warren:
You can look it up and see whatever it is currently. But I always say the more keywords that you can provide in the URL … So if you are a multi-location business, do city. Or sorry, do state and then city, and have that be your landing page. Don’t just have a random URL out there for a location. Be specific. And then actually have pages to back up some of these things. So if it says city, have all the cities listed out on that page, that link to the actual cities that they’re in or states that they’re in.
Ryan Klein:
I take sub-directories very, very seriously. And I think this is kind of partially siloing content, it’s partially site architecture. But I know that there are SEOs out there that are like … Let’s say you have a location in Orlando. That’d be like example.com/Florida/Orlando. Right? So that’s city within. And I’ve seen some companies that’ll just be like, “Well, you want to have the United States. You want to have the area of Florida.” And then I think that it’s not ideal to have too many what I call tiers down to actually get to the page. And then especially if one of the tiers doesn’t even have a content or is a nonexistent page in the first place.
Paul Warren:
Yeah. Don’t have nonexistent tiers. For sure.
Ryan Klein:
That’s insane.
Paul Warren:
I don’t like to have more than three tiers, personally. I think you can make it work. If you have to have four, it’s not the end of the world, but you don’t want to do any more than that, in my opinion. Because as each tier that goes down, it’s another layer of stuff that Google has to crawl through and figure out to get to what’s important.
Ryan Klein:
I personally, and I don’t always work on massive websites and massive, I mean, tens of thousands of pages. I typically work in the range of hundreds and then maybe the few thousands. But I think almost everything can be accomplished, as far as the services in most businesses, can be accomplished in about two tiers. I know that organizationally, some e-commerce can get really tier-y, if you want to say that as a phrase. It can get granular. And they have plenty of reasons. So it’s just everything is just within reason. Unnecessary tiers, don’t do it, even for vanity. I don’t understand it. It’s just like you’re saying, anything that would kind of inhibit a crawler from finding these pages is not necessary.
Paul Warren:
Also, don’t have sub-domains for important things that drive traffic, organic traffic. Don’t have your blog on a sub-domain.
Ryan Klein:
Oh no.
Paul Warren:
Google’s going to treat that like it’s a separate URL. You’re going to miss out on all the SEO value that it’s going to be bringing to you like your main domain and pushing all the authority for that up. So make sure you have that as a directory, like a sub-folder on your website.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah. I think that when I was starting off as an SEO, maybe in my first couple years, we used to think that instead of creating … Because that’s when microsites used to be really popular. So it was like, “Oh, for a niche keyword, I’m going to create a microsite of five, ten pages and just rank for it.”
Paul Warren:
And the domain was the keyword.
Ryan Klein:
Exactly. It’s very, very vanity driven. And a lot of people were like, “Well, what’s the point of buying a new, completely new domain if I can create a subdomain and piggyback off of the authority of it existing?”
Paul Warren:
You don’t piggyback off of it.
Ryan Klein:
It doesn’t piggyback. It is not a thing. The reason that it would exist is because mostly you’re using the vanity in the awareness and the notoriety of the existing domain.
Paul Warren:
Yeah. Also, if you have an mDot, do those even still exist?
Ryan Klein:
No.
Paul Warren:
There’s got to be some-
Ryan Klein:
That’s pretty much done. No, those are so out of here.
Paul Warren:
So we’ll just tell you. An mDot used to be a mobile version of your website. Everyone just has dynamic websites that resize depending on the device that comes to it now. So they’re responsive. Yeah, if you happen to have one, get off of it. They’re stupid anyways. And just don’t have that.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah. We’re not that way. So yeah, site architecture. Yeah. In summation, I guess, a lot of times if you’re using WordPress, what will happen is if you have a long title, WordPress will automatically be like, “Well, we’re just going to basically take your title and just put dashes in between it to make it a cohesive URL. But if that’s extremely long, you’re going to basically just want to sum it up much shorter. So it’s-
Paul Warren:
Oh yeah. While we’re on that, so I’m assuming a lot of you out there listening are probably using WordPress. I hope that you’re using that over something like-
Ryan Klein:
Joomla.
Paul Warren:
What’s the other one?
Ryan Klein:
DotNetNuke.
Paul Warren:
No, no, hold on. That is one.
Ryan Klein:
Wix.
Paul Warren:
Wix. Yeah. That’s the one that’s really bad.
Ryan Klein:
Stop.
Paul Warren:
Yeah. Don’t use Wix. Just use WordPress over that.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah. Go and check out one of my tutorials I have set up on WordPress. It’s really not that crazy.
Paul Warren:
Yeah. So in WordPress, you want to make sure that you set it up to have keyword rich URLs and not just a bunch of random numbers in there. Your URL is the first thing that Google’s going to crawl. And it’s the first opportunity for you to tell Google what that page is about. So absolutely set that in WordPress or whatever CMS that you have to give custom URLs for the page. And like Ryan just said, you don’t want a super long one. Cut it down, just have the keywords that you want. If you can sum up what the whole page is about in three or four words, that’s what you want to make it.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah, as succinct as possible, but with enough for someone to understand. But the thing about your URL, it doesn’t have to explain what blogger page or article is about because that’s what you’re meta title and your meta information such as descriptions are for. So let’s go right into that. What is meta information?
Paul Warren:
We’ll start with the SEO page title, right? This is the most important. And this is really the only thing that has an influence on the rankings. So there’s a character limit of what your SEO page title can be. And the page title is when you open up a browser, you go to a page, you look up at the tab, you’re going to see what the page is about. And a bunch of little letters up there. You probably don’t often notice it, but that’s important information to Google. And you’re manually putting that in there. And there was a time when you could just write a bunch of different keywords about what the page was about. But standard practice now is pretty much just to have four or five words of what the page is about and then a pipe, a little pipe guy, and then the brand name of the website. And that’s pretty much what’s going on now in that world. Google can actually rearrange it to be whatever it wants, regardless of what you give it. But most of the time, it shows what you put in the SEO page title on the page.
Ryan Klein:
I think learning how to do SEO titles and getting in there and just doing all them manually is a great way to learn. I like to think that doing SEO titles is like shucking oysters for Bradley Cooper in Burnt. You do like a million.
Paul Warren:
Oh yeah, yeah.
Ryan Klein:
You do a million and that’s your-
Paul Warren:
Honestly, that’s where I got my start.
Ryan Klein:
I think it’s the first official responsible task that anyone really gets. I mean, not always. I mean, that’s what it was for you. That’s what it was for me. And it’ll be one of the first thing that will have an impact. And it’ll be the best ways for you to kind of learn how approaching SEO from a content standpoint works and a keyword standpoint. So super important. And yeah, I agree with your practice for pages and articles, definitely the main keyword then the pipe or doohickey is what some people call it. And then the brand. The only time that I change that is typically for the blog. Typically for the blog, I’ll use as an opportunity to do two keywords. I typically won’t brand a blog because it’s associated with something that’s typically more informational. And therefore, I try to draw more people and the traffic of titles.
Paul Warren:
That’s a good call out. But it’s something that this is beginning level SEO. Don’t just put a bunch of random keywords in there. You kind of want it to like … Because people see this from the SERPs when they Google these things, right? That’s one of the first things that you see and it influences if you’re going to click on it. So if it’s just a bunch of random keywords that don’t make any sense when you read it, people aren’t going to click on it. So you want it to be kind of written out in a sentence, explaining what people are about to click on, but also include the high traffic keywords that the page is trying to rank for in it.
Ryan Klein:
That being said, that’s a very important call because I think a lot of beginner, but also intermediate, SEOs will try optimizing their homepage. Because your homepage, the title is probably going to include your most important keyword along with your brand. People kind of forget that they did that. They optimize certain pages for certain keywords. And what’ll happen is that they’ll use the same titles for multiple pages. And what you can suffer from is what’s called keyword cannibalization, when you optimize the same titles for multiple pages. And that is something that most SEOs fall into early on.
Paul Warren:
That’s kind of what you need to practice is each page, even though they can interlink and they can talk about related subjects, needs to cover its own unique subject matter.
Ryan Klein:
Because what will happen is Google is crawling your website and it’s saying Birmingham Mac repairs on the homepage, but also there’s a dedicated geo page to Birmingham Mac repair. And then also later on a couple of weeks ago, you wrote a blog that has a lot to do with five signs that you need to repair your Macbook. But then you just threw Birmingham in there too. And all of a sudden, you have three pages on the website that might be attempting in Google to rank for the same keyword.
Paul Warren:
Let’s get to meta descriptions. Talked about SEO page titles. Meta descriptions, they’re boring. Right?
Ryan Klein:
You should preface everything like, “Okay, this is boring.”
Paul Warren:
Everything we’re talking about is boring right now.
Ryan Klein:
It’s because it’s not that we’re above it. It’s just that this is the one thing that we truly don’t work on this.
Paul Warren:
If you find this interesting, please send us an email and you can apply to Ryan’s agency.
Ryan Klein:
Oh, I would love to have you.
Paul Warren:
And I’m sure he’ll find a place for you if you’re about this.
Ryan Klein:
I guarantee I’ll make it work. Don’t mark my words. But I guarantee it.
Paul Warren:
All right. Meta descriptions, they do not help you rank any better. If they did, I’d be doing it all day and caring about it. But what they do help with, right, is they … When people search certain terms and your website comes up in the SERPs, they kind of bold those terms in the meta description and also tells the end user what that page is about in more of a sentence form. Right? So it’s a long form and a write up of what the page is about, as opposed to the SEO page title, which is really just a sentence, right? It can really influence click through rates, which is important. Because user statistics on your website, people clicking on it, bouncing, so they come to your web page, they don’t like it, they leave within a couple of seconds, it’s called a bounce. People do that. All that stuff is actually going to influence your ranking. So they kind of have, in a roundabout sort of way, they can influence your rankings, but they don’t directly do it. They’re important for these reasons. And it can really influence people to click on it if you write good ones.
Ryan Klein:
If you don’t bother editing your meta description, what Google typically does is it’ll crawl the first kind of content it proceeds to be the content users will see on the page itself and then kind of plug that into to the SERPs. So typically, people’s first paragraph of a page doesn’t exactly give a best description of what you’re going to see or what you’re going to get from going to the page. So it’s better that you edit it and pretty much describe it, which is a description. I think it’s roughly 140 characters, or maybe I made that up. Definitely way more than it used to be. I know that. And yeah, click through. It’s everything. And it’s valuable.
Paul Warren:
You definitely don’t want to have blank meta descriptions. They’re usually about two to three sentences that you want to focus on writing up there. There’s a character limit just like everything in SEO that’s meta related. And look and see what it is. I don’t really remember what it is at the moment. I use Yoast when I do it and it tells me when I’m over it, so I don’t know the exact number.
Ryan Klein:
I thought it was 140.
Paul Warren:
Is it 140?
Ryan Klein:
I think it used to be-
Paul Warren:
That sounds about right.
Ryan Klein:
It used to be 80, kind of like Twitter.
Paul Warren:
Oh, that’s right.
Ryan Klein:
Or maybe that’s what I’m thinking about Twitter. Either way.
Paul Warren:
But as a best practice, make sure you have a meta description and make sure that it’s unique. Don’t use the same one, copy and paste it on a bunch of pages. Write a new one.
Ryan Klein:
Please don’t. There’s a reason that they have, I don’t know if they still do, but there’s a reason that Google Search Console, formerly Google Webmaster Tools, made a point of saying, “You have duplicate titles, you have duplicate descriptions.” It’s like, “You’re being lazy. You have to make them unique.”
Paul Warren:
There’s a lot of SEOs that don’t know it as Webmaster Tools.
Ryan Klein:
I still call it GWT.
Paul Warren:
Because it’s been like, what? Three years? Four years now?
Ryan Klein:
Oh God. Why are we getting so old, Paul?
Paul Warren:
We’re getting old. All right. So we’ve talked about the meta data. Let’s move to the actual on page. So you’ve set up your URLs, you’ve set up your site architecture, you got your meta data for the article, you put it in your CMS, probably WordPress, hopefully not Drupal. There’s a lot of bad CMSs out there. Put it in there. What else do you need to optimize on the page? And so you’re going to look at your h1. And regardless of Google telling you that they don’t value h1s over h2s and h3s, that’s a bunch of crap. Don’t listen to them. They lie to you all the time about everything because they just want you to do more paid search and they don’t want you to do well organically anyways. So we’re going to focus on h1s. And that is really what the main keyword about what your article’s about, it needs to live in your h1.
Ryan Klein:
I don’t like this as an example. But forget it, I can’t think of my own. It’s supposed to be a lot like a book. So with a book, you would have the title of the book would be the h1. And then kind of your subsections would be your h2s. And they kind of describe what’s going to be happening in each of the sections.
Paul Warren:
But your subsections are going to be your h2s, right? And then within that are going to be h3s. And then within that are going to be bullet points. Right? And that’s honestly how I structure all of my articles and they all do pretty well organically.
Ryan Klein:
Sure. Let’s talk about other best practices on the page. Once you have the h1s and your 2s, sometimes you go to 3s. I don’t know why would anyone go to 4s, but they’re there. One thing I did want to mention is when we’re talking about editing meta information. Without a couple plugins such as your all in one SEO and your Yoast, you’re not going to exactly have a space on the page to edit it. Back in the day, it used to be hard-coded in the header. So you used to go via HTML and add a snippet of code that was a brackets with meta title equals and parentheses, sorry, quotations. Same with descriptions. So nowadays, life’s a lot easier here in 2020. It actually has been easier for quite some time. So you will enable a plugin, an SEO plugin of your choice.
Paul Warren:
There’s really only two SEO plugins.
Ryan Klein:
I mean, if you could think of a third, be my guess. I mean, absolutely
Paul Warren:
I can’t.
Ryan Klein:
I mean, is it you can’t or you won’t?
Paul Warren:
I can’t. I can’t think of one I would recommend outside of the two. Honestly, I would recommend Yoast above any other SEO plugin. It’s the one I always use. All in One SEO is pretty good, but I think Yoast SEO is at the top of its game. I think it has more features, better usability, and they’re more responsive to the changes in the industry than any other plugin.
Ryan Klein:
I will say something interesting about both is that they haven’t appeared to have changed or updated dramatically in the past few years. And I don’t know, I don’t think it’s necessarily even a gap anywhere, but also some of the greatest things come in threes. So who knows what could happen?
Paul Warren:
Maybe. Honestly, WordPress has added the functionality within its core to add some of these things now.
Ryan Klein:
Well, I would like to mention one thing about that then is that, and then also, a lot of themes might have something built in as well. So there’s a lot of opportunities to write and rewrite that information. So that being said, be conscientious, if you’re doing it and using certain fields or using certain functionality to do it, that meta information isn’t being overwritten or crawled in a different order.
Paul Warren:
But if you don’t have that built into your theme and you had to pick a plugin, what would you pick?
Ryan Klein:
Me personally, I’ll get on board with Yoast too. I don’t have enough fodder to make an argument for All in One. But I will say that for the functionality All in One does have, it does it correctly. And I like All In One’s site map that it generates better. And I think that there’s something else. I kind of like what they do, they make it a little bit easier to no index, no follow certain elements of your website. And there’s one other thing, I can’t think of it. There’s just a few things I prefer.
Paul Warren:
Yeah. I guess at the end of the day, all that really matters is if the information is there and it’s crawlable by Google.
Ryan Klein:
Going back to just real quick with Yoast and onsite optimization, individual page optimization. So what you’ll still do, and this is a pretty good consideration and sometimes it’s overkill, is that they’ll have kind of they’re on page or per page SEO audit. So they’ll tell you based off of its own programming, like, “Okay, you did a good title, you did a good description. You only mentioned your core keyword twice. You didn’t do X, Y, and Z.” So another thing to kind of consider is keyword insertion/keyword density, which I believe is important to be at least a little bit cognizant of when you’re developing the page.
Paul Warren:
Oh, that’s actually a really good subject matter to talk about. I don’t know if we delved … We did talk about it on the first episode of this, about content. And that’s the percentage of keywords that you should have in your content.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah, we did. So what I mentioned, probably, in the first one is that I don’t think it’s a good practice for an SEO or any copywriter, for that matter, even writing with SEO in mind to be like, “I have to mention this word X amount of times. I have to mention the keyword once every 150 words.” I think it stifles the flow. But I will say that if you are done with the page, you publish it, and you look and you didn’t mention the keyword once, then it’s time to revisit it and see how you can put it back.
Paul Warren:
Yeah. Honestly, when I have content written by outside writers, I don’t give them keywords. I give them a subject. I’m like, “I would like an article about this. And then it needs to be this many words. And I need these topics covered.” And then I let them write it. What you’ll find in the SEO industry, when you give specifics like that to writers, if you’re using Upwork or any number of outsourcing sources, they’re going to stuff that keyword in there as many times as possible because they’re going to think like, “This is what I need to do if I do a good job.” Or they’re not going to write a good article at all.
Ryan Klein:
I completely agree. It’s much easier for let them do their thing and then put them in afterwards, than be like, “Oh, I have to mention it.” And then be thinking about it the whole time while they’re writing it.
Paul Warren:
Yeah, absolutely. Just as the best advice that I can give to you for content creation, don’t tell them to write in this keyword.
Ryan Klein:
The only thing that I would tell them, and this would get into the next part of best practices for SEO optimization on page, is to definitely cite some examples offsite in an external link though. I said if you’re doing your research and you’re kind of getting sources and references and some of them are very authoritative and not your competition, by the way, that you should definitely have a few external links in there, here and there, because I do believe that onsite optimization includes a proper use of internal and external links.
Paul Warren:
You want to link your pages together from a subject matter standpoint?
Ryan Klein:
It’s going back to our sub-directories and our tiers, but that’s also how the internal linking works. So if you’re on that tier three, if you have a call to action, it’s like you want to learn more about car accidents. That’s internal linked up a tier to the car accidents. The car accidents page would be like, “If you want to get in touch with our personal injury lawyers, that goes up a tier, back to the homepage.” So it’s important to be conscientious of the flow of internal links working their way back up tiers. And the tiers that are above aren’t so much supposed to be working their way down because that’s also a part of how the link flow of juice, the juicy stuff, kind of moves along that way. If you want to research what Google perceives on page to be all about, EAT standards are important. So read all about that. It’s [crosstalk 00:25:15] documentation.
Paul Warren:
I mean, because this is a SEO 101, we didn’t really get into the EAT guidelines.
Ryan Klein:
Oh, you did want to talk about EAT?
Paul Warren:
I don’t because it’s like-
Ryan Klein:
No, we’re not going to.
Paul Warren:
A little high level.
Ryan Klein:
If you’re sighing and yawning at that, EAT is tedious. But it’s important to understand it. So we’re not going to go into it.
Paul Warren:
But one other thing that I would suggest optimizing on page, which is important, is to add alt text to your images.
Ryan Klein:
Yes.
Paul Warren:
Absolutely do this. One thing that you also want to do when you’re adding images to your website, or any files, really, you want to optimize the file path with keywords in it. So let’s say you have an image on your computer that you’re going to upload to your website. Right? Don’t just have it be a bunch of random numbers like the file, right? Actually name the image on your computer the keywords that you wanted to rank for. Right? Put some dashes in there. So if it’s personal-injury-attorney-LA, that’s what you’re going to name your image. And then when you upload it to your website, it’s going to have that in the file path for the image.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah. And then images, especially if you go through all your images via the media on a WordPress, I know we’re talking about WordPress a lot, but let’s be real. A lot of people have it. And yeah, you can go through and add alt text very quickly through there. They actually have a field for description, which frankly, I don’t know what the difference between the alt text and description is. And then they have a caption. And then yeah, they show you the title. And then they show you the URL, and yeah, the file path of the actual image. So there’s a lot that can be edited.
Paul Warren:
You’d be shocked at the amount of people that come to a website from image searches. It’s way more than you would think.
Ryan Klein:
Well, I mean, think about it this way. I mean, if you’re searching for a certain kind of food and you’re getting a bunch of your typical 10 search results that are all textual, you might just opt for the images and be like, “I’m going to look for the image that looks like the tastiest pot pie, the tastiest hot roast.” And then if you see it, you’re going to click through and-
Paul Warren:
Click on that.
Ryan Klein:
It’s going to take you to the page that hosts the image, which is going to be probably a recipe page. Same for cars or anything visual.
Paul Warren:
And honestly, image SEO is probably the easiest type of SEO to do on the planet.
Ryan Klein:
It probably is. I don’t know. Have you ever done link building through an image?
Paul Warren:
I haven’t, because most of the time I just add the meta stuff and the stuff in the URL and it ranks.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah. If you fill out all the appropriate fields, you’re way ahead of the game compared to most people.
Paul Warren:
Yeah, most people don’t even do that. And if you just do a little bit, it’ll rank in the top of Google images.
Ryan Klein:
A couple of footer notes for on page optimization. If you have videos, that’s great for time on site, which in turn does help with rankings because our aforementioned click through rates, or bounce rates, rather. Yeah. That’s one thing mentioned. For geo pages, I prefer doing mapping beds. These are all like-
Paul Warren:
Oh yeah, this is high level. We don’t want to-
Ryan Klein:
It’s like rabbit hole stuff, but it’s just stuff for your consideration that let’s start here, and then once you establish that, there’s more for you to be very, very excited about.
Paul Warren:
If you’re listening to this and you have specific questions that are beyond what we’ve covered, email us. We’ll be happy to talk to you about it and just give you some free information. But there’s previous podcasts that we’ve covered all this that you can go back and check out.
Ryan Klein:
That really sums up the page, talked about URL structure. We’ve talked about kind of site structure. Make sure anytime you’re adding a new page, new blog, new article, that it fits in somewhere that has navigation. Don’t publish just a page and then it isn’t linked, you can’t link to it. Because then it’s just going to be by itself. It’s not a part of your site technically. Or it’s not connected anywhere. So just be just conscientious that it’s a living, breathing thing and all the appendages need to be connected.
Paul Warren:
Yeah. Everything is connected. That’s the best way to think about it.
Ryan Klein:
Connected from your navigation and links on your homepage and your internal linking strategy.
Paul Warren:
I feel like if you covered all of these topics that we went over today, you’re in a good place from an entry level SEO to really cover your on page stuff. So listen to what we said, try it out, test your own things for sure. Hopefully if you’re new to the SEO industry, you found some of this useful in this three part series that we did. If you’re one of our usual listeners, we’re going to get back to doing some more high level SEO stuff on our next episodes. But we wanted to cover just all the basics for 2020 and give everyone just a good foundation to start in this industry.
Ryan Klein:
I think that if you’re starting off and you listened to this four part, well, three part series-
Paul Warren:
Oh, it’s four part. Technically, it’s four part.
Ryan Klein:
The little preface, we’re like, “Paul, we may or may not talk about all these things.” But guess what? We actually did. And we do have video tutorials as well on the SEO is Dead YouTube channel. And I think that if you’re not trying to do something that’s just hyper competitive or insanely saturated, you’re like, “Oh man, I’m going to do this to rank it for a personal injury in Los Angeles.” It’s like, “No, you’re probably not going to.” But if you’re doing some niche stuff or some hobby stuff or some passion project things and you’re a small business and even a medium sized business, I’m sure you can … You’ll definitely get some traction implementing exactly what we said. It’s very actionable.
Paul Warren:
But with that, we’re going to wrap everything up. And it’s been a fun four part, three part series. And I just want to say thank you to all of our listeners out there. We really appreciate you guys. We try to respond to you guys as quickly as possible. And we love hearing from you. We kind of hear from you guys pretty regularly now, which is pretty cool. So if you want to hit us up, you have a question you want to ask, you’re interested in being on here, or you have someone you want us to interview. You can contact us at SEOisdeadandotherlies@gmail.com. You can leave a comment on our YouTube channel. Don’t hit us up on Twitter. I hate Twitter. I don’t use our Twitter account ever. I just made it for the link juice that comes from it, which isn’t a lot. So don’t even worry about that. Or, I mean, you can kind of find us on LinkedIn if you want. I feel like a lot of people find you on LinkedIn. Right, Ryan?
Ryan Klein:
Yeah. A whole bunch, personally.
Paul Warren:
Yeah. A whole bunch. But yeah, we love hearing from you guys. We really appreciate all the downloads. I think Ryan and I were talking about this off the air, but we strive to provide actual useful information. We want to create a podcast that we would want to listen to ourselves.
Ryan Klein:
Even though you don’t listen to it.
Paul Warren:
I don’t.
Ryan Klein:
Well, I have to listen to it because a lot of editing.
Paul Warren:
When you listen to your own voice, it’s really awful.
Ryan Klein:
I don’t mind my voice, even though most people probably think it’s awful.
Paul Warren:
But it’s something that over the rest of this year, we’re going to try and provide even more content for you guys that’s useful and actionable. Just wanted to put that out there that we appreciate all you guys and we hope to hear from you soon.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah. And then one last thing, I want to give a shout out to TCU for suggesting that we do this four part series. We very much enjoyed doing it. It gave us a chance to take a step back, reflect, and then also provide information that we wouldn’t really have done otherwise. But yeah, I think it was great. And we’ve gotten some fantastic suggestions from some of our listeners for upcoming episodes and a couple new guests that we plan on having on.
Paul Warren:
Be sure to like, share, and subscribe. We really appreciate the likes. I don’t even really think they help with our rankings in Apple Podcasts or anything like that. But it just makes us feel better about ourselves.
Ryan Klein:
It’s the affirmation we’ve been looking for. If it’s not going to be monetary, it’s going to be social.
Paul Warren:
Yeah. But if you get a chance to do that, we appreciate it because we’re just doing this for you guys.
Ryan Klein:
Thanks. And then one last note, we’re the ninth biggest SEO podcast in Israel.
Paul Warren:
Oh yeah. Yeah. No, we’re ranked ninth in the US on Apple Podcasts.
Ryan Klein:
I saw that bounce back and forth. I look on my phone. I’m like, “Holy crap.” And then I look online and I’m like, “No.” So I don’t know why-
Paul Warren:
No, no, it’s definitely the same online. I checked it the other day.
Ryan Klein:
Well, being part of the top 10 is fascinating to me and very much appreciate it. Love doing it. We very much enjoy it. And we’re going to keep going, keep getting better.
Paul Warren:
We definitely do. Anyways. All right. Well, thank you for listening. I’m Paul Warren.
Ryan Klein:
And I’m Ryan Klein.
Paul Warren:
And this has been another episode of SEO is Dead and Other Lies.
Ryan Klein:
Goodbye, suckers.
Paul Warren:
Bye.