Don’t fret! Converting your website to SSL (HTTPS) is likely a pretty painless process. Some of you it will be painful for. I break down the simple process in the following video:

Approximate transcription:

Hi. David Hood here, the Dallas SEO Geek, and this video is about Googles https Chrome warning. Basically, in October of 2017, users who are using Chrome, if they go to a website that isn’t https and it fulfills certain types of conditions like input type text, so basically if there’s a contact form or input type equals email, any sort of form at all, it seems like they’re going to show an error, or not an error, a warning. This is definitely not something that you want to do.
The good news is, this is a very easy fix. There’s a lot of tools now that can make this really easy especially if you have word press. It also kind of depends on your host. Some hosts are much better about this than others and some hosts, they might not charge you at all and some hosts they might charge you a small fee. I don’t envision this being really expensive although some hosts might try to charge a lot of money. If they do you might want to consider switching to another host if that’s what you want to do.
That definitely, I mean, there’s a significant amount of people that use Chrome as their major web browser and so this is something that you don’t want to get. You probably got this message and I was able to change this very easily with about five to 10 minutes of work and everything works fine so far. It hasn’t really affected my rankings. There are some additional steps if you don’t have WordPress that you need to check up on because unfortunately, without WordPress there’s some issues that can happen where not having the right 301 redirects, old pages to new pages and stuff like that can affect how things are going. I can’t speak on the full range of issues from http to https. Make sure that you talk to your developer about this.
All the other parts of it are actually very simple and typically not expensive. Beginning of October 2017, website that accepts form information so a contact form anywhere on the website, better just go ahead and switch over. Technically, it is a ranking factor. In my experience, it has not really affected rankings at all but maybe it affects it by a smidge. You might as well go ahead and do this and this also gives a little bit more confidence to your visitors, a small, a very small amount. Most people I think don’t even notice this.
Okay, so it’s an easy process. If you have something called a cPanel for your hosting which I hope you do because any good host has cPanel. Then there’s typically something called Let’s Encrypt. Again, this can change so contact your host. Usually, it’s very easy. Then you issue it to your domain, to your domain.
Then, with WordPress, there’s a plugin called Really Simple SSL. You just install this, takes a second. You activate it and boom, you’re done. You don’t have anything else you do and everything should run smoothly from that point forward. That’s WordPress. This is just one of those things where WordPress has other options. With other CMSs, Contact Management Systems, I can’t comment on those. I don’t have the experience with those. There’s just too many possibilities in terms of what could go wrong. Again, I would contact your web developer for those specific issues.
Then what you do need to do is you need to update Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools. Those are pretty simple as well. In Webmaster tools, it’s a separate URL, the https, so you add a new one. In Analytics there’s a couple of boxes and there’s quite a bit of online tutorials on how to do this. There’s like two different boxes that you need to check, that you need to change from http to https in your settings of your website. Then you should be good and you shouldn’t get this error and pretty much instantly, you should be fine.
Please let me know if you have any questions. I haven’t experienced any problems with this but I know that a lot of other people have and that weird things can happen especially with custom content management systems or hand built websites. That’s one of the reasons why I do highly recommend WordPress. WordPress is just … there’s a lot.
Some companies might have to spend thousands of dollars to do what this free plugin did in five minutes and in might take them a month or two. Thousands of dollars versus … This is one of the benefits of WordPress, and WordPress can be very secure. That’s one of the downsides that a lot of developers are, “Ah, WordPress can be hacked.” Yeah, but there’s some simple ways to make it so that it’s very hack resistant. That’s beyond the scope of this.
Please let me know if you have any questions or probably better to ask your host first and your web developer, but just know that this is something that if you don’t have https that you almost certainly should put on your site very soon, and it can happen very quickly so wouldn’t worry about it being like a really complicated process. Hopefully, I’ve broken it down and made it less scary and very doable for most business owners even on a budget. Sometimes it might even be free. If you have WordPress and you have a good host, it could be free or very inexpensive. Thanks for watching and have a great day. Bye.

I deal with the realities of how Google rank’s a website.   When push comes to shove, there are 4 things that matter far more than everything else in most circumstances.  Yes, there can definitely be exceptions, but even in those exceptions, these 4 factors play an important part.

Contact me if you’d like a free SEO analysis and recommendations.

Watch the video below for more details!

More about the Dallas SEO Geek:

SEO for Law Firms

About Me

SEO Services

Approximate Transcription:

I’m David Hood here, the Dallas SEO geek, and this video is about the top most important SEO factors. This will surprise you. If you’ve spent a lot of time reading content online about how to do SEO, you will be surprised by what I’m about to say. This is stuff that’s regurgitated online by bloggers. Google loves a lot of this, and even many authorities talk about this. There is a little bit of a grain of truth in that it is important, but it is not the whole reality, and it is not a good description of what really matters in SEO.

The saying is “Content is king”, just build great content, and people will come to your site, and you’ll rank, and you’ll naturally get traffic. While that can and does occur to a certain degree, that’s not entirely true. An analogy I like to give is: I’m in Dallas. I want to go to New York. I could walk to New York. I could definitely walk to New York. Is that incorrect? No, it’s not incorrect. I’m perfectly capable of walking to New York, but does that make sense? Is that going to be the best path for me? Maybe. Probably not. There are times in which walking is very useful, so I’m not saying that content is not useful or that it doesn’t have its place. But it is certainly not the most important factor.

Basically, I try to be objective about what should be and what reality is. It should be that you create great content, people come to you, but that’s not the reality. I see much lower content outranking higher quality content all day long. It happens all day, every day. This is what Google wants people to believe versus what Google actually uses to determine the rankings. They want people to just build the content and not worry about the SEO because they don’t want people trying to manipulate their results, by understanding what they really look at and what are the most important places that they’re going to give the most power to. I’m going to actually show you that in this video.

Number one is domain. This is tied with something else, but whatever your domain name is, that is by far going to be the most important other than this one other thing. Anything else beyond this one other thing that it’s tied with is very, very far behind. If you have Dallas Plumber dot com, it’s going to a whole lot easier for you to rank for Dallas Plumber dot com than Joes Services dot com. It’s going to be way easier. You’re going to need a whole lot less SEO elsewhere, so your domain name is very important. That’s why it’s good to, when someone calls me and they haven’t bought a domain name, that’s great. I love to hear that. A lot of people come to me, and they’ve already bought a domain, and sometimes they have a good one, and sometimes they’ve got a little bit more of an uphill battle.

This is such an easy decision early upfront. It doesn’t really take a lot of extra time to pick a better domain. To put at least part of your keyword in there, so if you’re Dallas Plumber, you don’t have to do Dallas Plumber dot com, you could have Joes Plumbing Services. That’s going to make it a whole lot better. Now if you’re only going to focus on Dallas, Joe’s Dallas Plumbing Services, that’s going to be even better. That’s going to help you rank a lot faster, especially right now. Domain is super powerful. It’s always been really powerful. You only get one domain. Google knows that, so it really tells them a lot about what’s going on on your site.

It feeds all of the content on your site or all what they expect your content to be. Google reads this data. Google is best at reading the text data in the most important limited spaces, and each site only gets one domain name. Sub-domain is part of the URL, and it’s not really part of the domain, so you get one domain. If you have search phrases or parts of search phrases in your domain, that’s going to give you a big, big boost.

The other tie for number one is what I would say “Anchor Texts / Links”. Links are very important. They’ve always been important for Google since their beginning. In fact, this is why their search results were better than the other ones. I don’t know if you were around searching Web Crawler in the mid to late nineties, but basically, a lot of things that ranked, they just put – let’s say they wanted to rank for Dallas Plumber, they would just have text that was the color of the background, the bottom of the page that said “Dallas Plumber” a thousand times. That would help them rank for it.

Well, Google’s algorithm came along and said, “We’re going to make this more of a popularity contest.” Essentially, people linking back to your site is a vote of confidence for your site. This is very important, and Google has stated that they’ve tested algorithms in-house without links, and the results are much worse. Links continue to be very important. There was a study recently, a “No, Duh” study; “Links Are Still Very Important”, yes, links are very important. They help build your authority. The exact way in which the links are built, which is anchor text, so in this case, “click here” would be the anchor text, also matters. If you have all “click here” anchor texts versus having a nice distribution and some of them maybe being “Dallas Plumber”, that’s going to help you rank for “Dallas Plumber”. It’s not that simple, but the anchor text is very important, and where the link’s coming from, what do those sites look like, how authoritative are those – going back to the vote of confidence, if Justin Bieber, Lebron James, and Barack Obama all say, “This restaurant is awesome,” then it’s going to be very popular, as it should be.

That’s how Google looks at it. Another example would be Lebron James recommending a basketball or basketball shoes, that’s even more important than say, like Justin Bieber recommending basketball shoes. That’s going to have even more of an effect, having Lebron James versus Justin Bieber. They’re still going to be important, and they’re still going to be helpful. That’s part of it. I can’t get too deep into it because it’s just a very deep rabbit hole. After this, there’s a deep chasm. If you get these first two things right, your domain and your anchor texts and links, you have a lot of things working for you. Sometimes you can rank just off that.

The next two things I’m going to show you are pretty easy. They’re also important, but they’re not as important. There’s a really deep chasm. What I want to comment on at this point – I haven’t talked about content. Content is below these in importance. Your domain name is more important than your content by and large. I’m going to talk about the exceptions to that in a minute. Tie for third, so the next two are tied, is the title of your page. Each page, you get one title. This has a huge effect on Google saying, “What is this page about?” You can have all the content in the world. If your page, let’s say is “Dallas Business Lawyer” at the title and then all your content is about cheeseburgers, well, that title is more important than the cheeseburgers, Google’s going to take more meaning out of that.

Again, I’m going to talk about the exceptions to that in a second. This is super important. This is why this is so easy to change because you have complete control over the title. It doesn’t take a whole lot of time to change usually. When I use WordPress, you just go and you edit the title, and it takes five seconds, so this is very important. Setting up your title right is very, very important. It’s not quite as important as your domain name and anchor texts and links, but it’s pretty close. Again, we’re way ahead of content. Far more important than the content on the page from an SEO ranking standpoint.

Next is URL. This is pretty simple. This includes your domain, but it also includes the full URL. Again, each page gets one URL, so Google puts a lot of importance on this. It’s very easy for them to read. They can read the text. While Google is getting more advanced at analyzing things and understanding things, it’s still software. It’s still a robot. It’s not conscious, and it reads text. When you give it the most important text in the most important places in the ways that it likes, it matters a whole lot. So, we’ve got domain, links and anchor texts, title, and URL. If you get these four things right, you’re going to rank, and yes, it helps to have good content, but it’s not the most important thing.

We haven’t even gotten to content because again, there’s a deep chasm. Anything else after this, there’s a very deep chasm. If you get those four things right, you’re going to rank pretty well. Now let’s talk about content for a second. So, where is it? I’d say it’s somewhere around 6, tied for 5th probably, something like that. Content does matter. It does help rank, but it matters most when Google starts ranking you and sending you visitors. In that Dallas Business Lawyer example, if it’s all about cheeseburgers, when it does rank, people are going to come to the site, and they’re going to immediately go back to the search results. In that case, you’re going to have a difficult continuing to rank. Obviously, you don’t want completely irrelevant content. Pretty obvious. Also, having a little bit of business lawyer content on your page within the content is going to help. A very small amount, especially compared to the other ones. It’s a deep chasm.

This is really important to understand. A lot of people, their plans for SEOs – “Let’s build a bunch of great content!” or I’ve had someone say, “Look, I’m making a ton of great blog posts. I showed rank.” Should is not really a useful word in this circumstance. It’s really just not a useful word in general, but I want to look at what really works. What really moves the needle on helping you rank for search phrases that are going to drive your target market to your website, so you can sell to more people. Focusing exclusively on great content is not the way to go. It’s just not the way to go. It’s part of the plan. You’re sending people there, yeah, you want to have a high conversion rate, that’s a little bit more [inaudible 00:10:02], so you want people to convert.

Again, if you’ve got a Dallas business page, and you are ranking, you do really great in the first 4, but you’ve still got a page about cheeseburgers, you know you’re not going to convert. People aren’t going to call you, but you’re still probably going to rank pretty decently, even if with really, really irrelevant content. Content has more to do with conversion, so this actually simplifies the content. You build the pages with the proper titles and URLs for the search phrases you want to rank for, and then you build content on those pages that basically, all you have to do is think about, “This is the person I’m trying to attract, how do I speak to them? How do I sell to them? What kind of copyrighting would I do if I’m trying to sell to them?” and answer their questions. That’s really all you have to do. It’s pretty simple.

You don’t have to worry about keywords. You don’t have to worry about putting the certain keywords in there. It can help, but by and large, it’s not really the main purpose of it, and it can be taken care of in other ways. You can always add it later, so that means your content is more about conversion. It also means you don’t just blog mindlessly about what’s on the top of your head everyday in your market. Again, that can help, and you can get natural links from content, you can rank just from content, it’s just much, much less likely. It misses a lot of the easy, low-hanging fruit of understanding that 3 of the 4 things I listed, domain, title, and URL; you have complete control over those. The linking is a lot harder, but those other 3, you have a lot of control, and it’s not that hard. Not putting any time into thinking about from an SEO standpoint domain-

So, where does that leave us? Quick review. Content is king – no, not really. When it comes to ranking your website on Google, not really. When it comes to converting, sure, it’s really important, but when it comes to getting Google to rank you in its search engine, content is not king. Especially if you have a new site. If you have no rankings anywhere, then this is of very little importance. Yeah, if you’re ranking number 1 for something, and you’re getting a lot of traffic already, then tweaking your content or improving it or creating great content is going to help you more. There’s already people seeing it, Google is sending visitors to you already, so they’re getting engagement data from you. But without engagement data, content does very, very little for you. Pick a good domain that has as many keywords as you can reasonable put in there without clashing with your brand. Do high-quality link building with someone who really knows that because this is pretty complicated stuff.

This is such easy stuff. This is no-brainer stuff. Set up the right titles and URLs. An implication of these is also how you interlink and what pages you put up that I haven’t really mentioned here, but then there’s a deep chasm. Don’t worry, if you’re just starting out your site, don’t worry about creating the best content ever. Don’t say, “Okay, I’m going to hire this guy who charges me $100 in art, but he’s a great writer, and I’m going to spend $10,000 on content. We’ve got this long-term plan. We’re just going to turn-out 100 articles, 100 blog posts, and see where we rank.” There’s no plan with the blog posts, even if you have a plan for these – “These are the keywords we’re going to target. We’re going to shoot out a bunch of blog posts.” You’re still missing a lot of the opportunity there, so if you’re about to decide on creating a domain, this is the best time to call me.

Go ahead and contact me, and I could help you with that. Even if you have picked that, we can still work on the other 3 or the 4. You’ve got what you’ve got, and you move forward the best you’ve got there. Then we can talk a little bit more about content and where it really matters and how to work it best because I do create what I think is high-quality content, for example, this video. I do believe in high-quality content. It’s not about, “You don’t ever have to create high-quality content,” it really makes a difference when it comes to converting. And you can get natural links and natural traffic in other ways, but you better believe that it’s not the reason why I’m ranking. I could put 20 times the amount of high-quality videos that I put out now, and if that’s all I focused, and I didn’t focus on the other stuff, I would not be ranking.

It would be very unlikely, so give me a call if you want a free analysis on your business. Shoot me an email, and we’ll get started. Thanks for watching, and have a great day! Bye.

The tools can also trick you into believing inaccurate things about your website.

In the video, I give an example of a BIG mistake that a client made that cost them dearly…and much more.

Check it out:

More about the Dallas SEO Geek:

• Bing SEO page
• Yahoo SEO page
• Google Sites
• LinkedIn SEO

Approximate Transcript:

Hello. David Hood here with the Dallas SEO Geek and this video is about SEO Analysis Tools, the good, the bad and the ugly. You really want to be careful with making conclusions based upon tools out there because there are a bunch of different angles to consider things from and sometimes something on one tool can look completely different than what it really should look like. It can give you a very bad impression. Some of the tools, a lot of the tools in fact have huge flaws. That doesn’t make them not useful, especially if you understand what those flaws are and how to kind of work your understanding around those tools.

Now, I’m going to show you a lot of the tools that I actually use to do my analysis of new websites and all sorts of other kinds of websites and projects that I come into contact with. A couple of things that you relay want to be aware of, and this is actually true for not just SEO but anything and something that I call … Beware of being, of thinking that something is proved via what I call naked data. Essentially what naked data is is giving a single or a few data points and determining that that is proving something of meaning.

I’m going to give you a general example for this. That would be like someone saying, in the state of Texas, x number of people have died from this thing. Oh no, everybody is going to die. That’s the only information they give. Well, what about, what was it the previous year. What was it the year before that. What’s the trend. That’s important to know because maybe it actually it went down. That’s good right if it went down. Maybe it went up but there was a trade off with something else that went way down so overall it still was good and you’ve really got to beware of any single data point that doesn’t have sort of a reference. This frustrates me to no end, especially in like politics and just news in general when they show one number. It’s almost completely meaningless and in a lot of ways it actually is worse than being, than nothing because you’re getting only a small part of the information.

Each one of these tools that I’m going to show you by and large you just can’t take them all by itself. Another thing that I really want you to be aware of is a lot of SEO packages out there that you will pay for that are really inexpensive, like anything less than two hundred dollars per month, a lot of times what they are are just reporting tools that aren’t actually improving your SEO at all. They don’t actually do anything other than give you information and especially if you don’t know a lot about SEO, that information is going to be not useful to you because you’re not going to know how to interpret it right?

I’d be very careful to pay recurring payments for SEO for any tools if you’re not like an SEO professional. I do pay for quite a few tools but that’s because I use them a lot and I understand a lot more of what they mean. I can put them within the context of all the other data of that goes on there. This naked data is so true with SEO. There’s just so many different angles that need to be considered to understand what’s really going on with an SEO project and how Google really views your site. One of the primary source of tools that people use and you might not have heard of this. You might not even know that much about Off Page but this is essentially link building. These are link aggregators.

One of the most popular ones is Moz. I’m going to go over some of the biggest ones and kind of the good, the bad and the ugly. Moz is more than just tools. There’s lots of information on here. I would be very wary of spending much time on here. They do have some good tools but unfortunately they sold their company, the guy who runs it sold, I don’t know if he sold a lot of it or a large percentage of it and as a result when you get a big company to come and take over this they’ve kind of stripped the resources and what used to be a big strength of theirs. What used to be a big strength of theirs actually has really turned out to be not so good. This is one of their tools. It’s called Open Site Explorer.

This was one of their main tools that came along that was really good. What it does is it analyzes the links and if I do cnn.com it’s going to look at the links coming back to their site. There domain authority and page authority are actually pretty good calculations for sort of the overall authority of your site. However, even before they sold, their crawler, which is their little robot that goes out and looks around on the internet for the links was really slow. I feel like it’s gotten even slower and there’s a lot of people that would back me up on this and that’s what they’re seeing as well. It’s so slow that it just misses a ton of links. It’s highly unreliable and over time I haven’t really used them anymore so I would be very wary of basing much information on this.

I actually had a client come to me and say, you haven’t built this many links and even though it was really early in the project and, you’ve only built one link or something like that. I was like, well first of all I sent you a report with these links that I did build. That was more than one, right. But also it’s like look, the person who you’re consulting with because they were consulting with someone else trying to see if I was doing my job, didn’t know that when they do find the links, when the open site explorer does find the links, sometimes it takes two to three months. We were three months into the project. I would consider this to be, well maybe the bad and the ugly. I would not use any of Moz’s tools. Their Moz Local Tool is pretty good but that’s kind of a separate thing. In terms of analyzing links they have a good calculation but their crawling is really terrible. It’s the worst okay.

Let’s look at Ahrefs. This is actually one of my favorite tools. Ahrefs. You can see now this is sort of the reverse situation. Their site explorer. Now they’ve got some new tools up here. Their crawler is one of the fastest if not the fastest and they catch links a lot of times almost immediately and one of the most important things that they are good at is how they display the anchor text which is very important to how your site ranks. But their calculation for ranking your domain and how powerful it is, they’re still kind of testing that. I don’t think their calculation is as good as Moz’s. If only they could combine Ahrefs’ data with Moz’s calculation then that would be a lot better. But if you’re looking at … I should not be doing this because it will use up all my credits. When you’re looking at their data you can trust their links a lot more.

Now, they’re still not perfect. They’re still links that they can miss. There are ways to block this tool. If you want to hide links from your competitors there are definitely ways to do that so it’s still not perfect. Keep that in mine. There’s another one, Majestic. I like this one as well. Let’s do. There are several things going on here. One of the most important things they do is something called trust flow and citation flow. This is something unique to them that they’re estimating essentially something that Google definitely looks at which is trust. There’s not really another tool out there that does this as well as them.

I feel like their crawler is sort of in between Moz and Ahrefs. It’s a lot better than Moz’s but not as good as Ahrefs’ but it’s still really good and it catches a lot of the stuff. Usually, not always but usually you’ll see more links in Ahrefs because they find more links. It’s important to know it’s still not perfect but as long as you, essentially you want your trust flow to be at least half your citation flow and this is actually pretty good. It’s a little outside the scope of this video to explain why you want that but just know this is good.

The higher the trust flow. You want this number to be as high as possible. It’s not bad if this number is high. If you have let’s say twenty trust flow and thirty citation flow that’s still good. Actually twenty in trust flow and ten citation flow wouldn’t really be as good as twenty thirty. You wouldn’t want twenty fifty or even worse sometimes people come to me and it’s like one trust flow, twenty five citation flow. Well that’s going to be an indication of low quality links or spam. That’s something that’s really good, that Majestic is really good.

Again, their calculation is really good. Crawler not quite as good as Ahrefs. I would definitely, if someone is giving you link reports based upon Moz, maybe their domain authority is good and the bigger the site and the more links it has the more accurate it is but for smaller sites with smaller amounts of links, their domain authority becomes less accurate because they find fewer links. Beware of using, putting too much weight on any of Moz’s metrics like domain authority or any link reports from Moz.

The next is On Page. This is one of the biggest things that is frustrating in terms of people, I’ve had clients who will do stuff on their site and then they’ll send me an automated grader report and say, what’s up because the automated grader will have all these marks and they think that there’s all these things wrong with their site. Now, not that there isn’t some value in some of the automated graders but by and large the vast majority of them there is what I want to call a ton of minutia on there. Really when it comes to what’s going on on your site there’s only a few things that are really going to be, account for ninety nine percent, there’s three things that are going to count for ninety nine percent of what causes your site to initially rank. Taking out the fact that if Google doesn’t have any traffic or engagement data on you. Okay, when you first set up your site what’s going to cause it to rank. Well there’s only three factors.

Okay, there’s three major factors. Title, URL and interlinking. If you do all those things right then you can have an F on automated graders but that’s not what Google is giving you. Be very aware, beware of taking too much stock in those automated graders. They can identify a little bit of opportunities. While technically a lot of things technically will help, sometimes it’s a little bit like throwing a bucket of water in the ocean. You technically, you’re adding water to the ocean but is it making the ocean bigger? Not really.

There’s another tool I like called Screaming Frog. This is what it looks like and if I were to pick, I just search Dallas Painter and I pull the first local site and there’s a lot of information. What this is does is it goes and crawls your site and it looks for information about what’s going on in your site. This is a much more useful tool than those automated graders but it’s not going to give you a grade. You kind of have to look at things and what I like to look at is actually the titles and the URLs. Again we talked about the top three and interlinking is one of the three so if you take that out and you consider a single page isolated by itself then what you’re left with is titles and URLs. You can use this heavily to look at what’s going on. Dallas Painter we can see the title of their page, right here this is their full title. They have painting and URL which is helpful and this is URLs. URLs and there’s a lot that you can get just from looking at this pretty quickly

I like tools like that. There’s a lot of tools that are actually like that. They crawl a site and give you information but again you can’t just, just like these other tools and just like [inaudible 00:12:23] data you can’t just take one isolated data. What is good for your On Page depends on what your Off Page has done and vice versa. They work together. If you’re under optimized on your On Page you can be more over optimized on your Off Page and again vice versa.

One of my favorite tools is SEMrush. Now we’re kind of in other tools. What this tool, it does have like we’ll look at links and key words and stuff but primarily what I do is to see … I can put a competitor in here and I can take some key words from them. A lot of times I just use it to see okay how are you ranking right now. Again, as with all these tools, they’re imperfect and it doesn’t catch everything. It estimates the traffic. You can see right here and if you go to SEMrush you can see some of this data and I have a paid account so you won’t see all of it. All of the exact same data that I see. Here, this is not really SEO because it’s his brand but Dallas Painting.

You can tell, what did I surf Painters Dallas or Dallas Painters. For some reason it showed up higher. For me it showed up Dallas Painter so it’s showing nine, ten right here but for me it actually was six. You can see that it’s not perfect. This tool is not perfect. It’s usually not off by that much but it only checks this like maybe once a month and rankings fluctuate. This is going to be really great for sometimes you’ll put your own site in here and you’ll be like, wow, what am I, wow I didn’t realize I was ranking for that. By knowing what you’re ranking for it can give you some ideas and potential opportunities so I really like SEMrush. It’s very useful.

You can even see, let’s see, look at the competitors, a lot of information on here. Wouldn’t really recommend necessarily spending money on this and getting it. Just because it’s probably not something you would use very often and it’s recurring. Not cheap. These tools are, the paid accounts are not cheap. We’re looking at maybe like, usually between sixty and one hundred dollars per month. It’s again not cheap. Especially if it’s something you’re not going to use very often.

Who Is. This is actually something that can be useful so this take a look at. This is whois.com/whois and the domain. There’s all sorts of other kind of who is type tools out here we can see. They’ve got privacy. That’s good. You can see in here if you’re getting a bunch of spam, even like mail to your home address, a lot of times it’s because you don’t have privacy and so your address, your home address or whatever your business address is public information on here. We can also see sometimes where it’s hosted. This doesn’t always. We can check to see if this is the name service or this is where your host is. You can see how old the site is so they’ve got a really old site. That’s useful to know but not like critical.

Google Search Operator. This can be useful as well so. This is one of the useful ones. You can see how many pages that Google has indexed so ninety one. It’s only going to show ones that have, so you can see that they have a Houston location. We can see the pages that Google likes. Here is another thing, if you wonder what pages does Google like most for certain search phrase, you’re not really ranking that well for. We put Dallas Painter. What’s the first one that shows up, okay. This is going to be their best page for this search phrase, right. There’s all sorts of other Google operators you can use. Google is your friend here and there’s a lot of different ways in which you can use Google to kind of understand what they think of you.

Archive.org. This is something that can tell you a little bit more about a site. Your own site as well as other people’s site. It doesn’t always work but what this does is this actually pulls, this actually looks at historical so on January 10th it pulled a snapshot of a site of this Phillip’s painting. Let’s see how it, let’s compare it to the way it is now. Again it doesn’t always get all of the images and the data exactly right. It looks like it kind of has trouble with that there. We can go even further back. We can see. This might not be incredibly useful to you unless you’re looking at some of your competitors so this is, it’s not perfect right. We can see, this could be useful depending on a lot of sort of things.

Actually one of the most useful scenarios that can kind of save your end is like let’s say your site gets screwed up or hacked and you have no backup. Your backup is messed up or whatever. You don’t have backup. I have restored a site. At least I got like eighty to ninety percent of what I needed from Archive.org so that’s really really useful. Actually this should be Rank Checkers. Okay. You definitely want to be checking your rankings. I wouldn’t, I don’t like the daily rank checkers because you really shouldn’t be looking at your rankings daily. SEO, especially now a days, it’s just slow. It’s not something that happens really quickly usually.

Now for low volume searchers that are low competition, you can sometimes get fast rankings but it’s a little bit like watching the stock market. You shouldn’t look at the stock market every day. It’s not good for you. It’s actually, they’ve done studies and the people who look at the stock market on a daily basis or on a regular, very regular basis, do worse than the people who look at it very infrequently. Really if you’re disciplined about your investments and you’ve got safe, kind of good safe index funds, this is a little off topic, you probably only need to look at your investments once or twice a year. With SEO I look at the rankings about once a month and that’s about as frequent as you want to get. Even with that, there’s quite a bit of randomness in the data that you can’t put too much stock in one data point. You can’t put too much stock in one single month of improvement or non-improvement for search phrases.

If you have any questions about information that you’re being shown about your website and you’re not sure what it really means, feel free to give me a call or go to my website and submit a discovery form. Go here. I’ll take a look at it and I will, or you can click get free SEO analysis. Take you here. Fill this out. I will get back to you and let you know and I’ll use a lot of these tools and you can see how I look at it from a specific perspective for your site. Thanks for watching and have a great day. Bye.

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Approximate Transcript:

Hi. David Hood, here, the Dallas SEO Geek. This video is a review of a video a shot 18 months ago in December of 2014 about the undying SEO principles. I said, in there, here’s some principles that are going to be true, not just now, but many years in the future, and have been true for the most part for many years in the past. This is just a check-up 18 months later. Are they still valid? They should definitely still be valid.

One thing to understand, here, is part of what makes things unchanging for a lot of people, even with major updates. Usually, about 1% or less of the search results are affected. You could go through 10 major updates and not see a blip of a change on your site. That’s something to keep in mind. These updates usually don’t affect a whole lot of results. Pretty rare, now a days, that things change a lot.

Why do I have a picture of a McDonald’s cheeseburger? That’s because one thing to consider is, is McDonald’s going to suddenly change their cheeseburger? Are they going to stop selling cheeseburgers and sell goat burgers instead? Well, no. This is the core of their business, is the cheeseburger. Google’s algorithm is core of their business. They’re not going to make massive changes to their algorithm, in general. They do make updates and improvements, but it’s not going to be wildly different in a year, a year from now. So far, so good. This actually has nothing to do with some of the stuff I said.

There’s three pillars to SEO, and that covers all the different things that I talked about in video, and I’m going to go over them more individually. Generally, there’s three main things that, you do these well, then you’ll rank well. on-page, off-page, and engagement. Those three things together encapsulate lots of different activities. Pretty much anything you can think of. It encapsulates all of the things below, it will encapsulate. If you do those things well, or vice versa, some people they think you can just do on-page. We’ll talk about that. And rank really well. That can happen, it’s unlikely to. It’s about maximizing your chances for success.

Relevancy. This was in the video. Is it still important? Yes, it’s still very important. In fact, I think it’s a little bit more important in that Google continues to try to incorporate this and understand it better. It’s still difficult to check precisely. Technically, things that are interconnected could still be connected. They can have weird connections. Google allows for things that are not relevant to still be able to give relevancy that are outside what they normally would be able to give. Overall, is it important? If you wanted to rank you site about injury lawyers, you wouldn’t put a bunch of dentists content on there, a bunch of stuff about teeth. That’s obviously important. Also, for your links. If all your links are about dentists, but then your trying to link your site for injury lawyer, then it’s going to be very difficult.

Simple on-page. I’ve shot several videos, and talked many times about how technically the on-page is pretty simple. You don’t need to go into too much detail. This is something that is a common amateur mistake. When you have web designers, or people who just starting in SEO, or people who are just using the really common, canned, version of SEO out there, they just do on-page. They do a lot of minutia on there. There’s so many little things they just try to do to check off. I’m moving, therefore, I’m making progress which is not true.

Most of the battle happens with just a few simple things, your titles, your URLs, and your interlinking. You do those three things well, engagements aside, I’ll assume Google doesn’t have any engagement metrics on you, and your site is generally engaging, then that’s really all you need to do from an on-page technical standpoint. That is most of the battle. If people are going in there, and you know image tags, technically that’s important, but it’s very minor. There’s a lot of stuff like that. If they’re talking a lot about your meta tags and your H1s, again, that stuff can affect things. It’s something you want to look at eventually. It’s not where you start, for sure. A lot of times, that is only going to have minor, minor effects. It’s not going to really make or break you unless you do something really, really, wrong.

Engagement metrics, so important. I have Trump here. I’m not talking about Donald Trump. I’m talking about like a trump card. This is the ultimate trump. If your site is super engaging, when Google sends you traffic from its search engines, that is a trump card. You can lose all your links, and you can be spammed, you could have a competitor spam you, and if you have high engagement, and you’ve already got that traffic, and Google is sending you there, it’s going to be pretty stinking hard to knock you off. This goes pretty deep.

This goes to video. This is why videos was so important. People just click on them and be engaged. Even if you get them to watch a video for 30 seconds, a lot of times that’s a win right there. That’s more than what some of your competitors will get. It’s a certain amount of engagement. Vice versa, if you had a really, really, ugly site, or for whatever reason, it really turned off your market, Google sends visitors there, they bounce back immediately, they look for more in the search results, you’re not going to be ranked in there for very long, or you’re going to have to really make up for that in other ways, and be very expensive. This doesn’t mean you have to have the perfect site that you’re constantly tweaking to get perfect. You can do that, it just means that you don’t want to really fail in this area. You can make it pretty easy only yourself just by making videos.

Links. Is off-page popularity still important? Yes. Google tests this. They test, in-house, algorithms that don’t incorporate links. Guess what? Their search results are much worse. This is one of the main things that made Google their money and grabbed all their market share. In the late 90s, no one else was really doing that, or they were doing it to a much, much, less degree to what Google did. Google came in and their search results, low and behold, were much, much, better. Do you think they’re going to come in and turn this off? No. Not any time soon. Maybe the way they look at them will get a little different, a little bit more sophisticated. They’ll kind of turn some dial here, but you need this.

This goes back to the amateur mistake. They just do the on-page, and then they don’t do any off-page, and the site just sits there. It’s not popular. You need to show Google that you’re popular. Without that, you’re not going to rank for anything competitive. Yeah, sometimes for low competition stuff, you can rank with just on-page, or you can get lucky and maybe you’ll get something shared, or whatever. There’s other things that can happen. If you want to dramatically, dramatically, increase the chances that you will rank highly for valuable search phrases, then you need some off-page.

Site structure. This is also in the video. All these were in the video. Still important and useful? Yeah. Over the last 10 years, it has been important. What is site structure, if you haven’t watch the video? It’s essentially how your page is interlinked. I talked about that. If you look it like this is your homepage, these are, maybe, your main categories for your site, and here’s your sub-categories. These arrows are links. What’s important here is not to link these two together, and not to link this page to this page. What ends up happening, there’s more to it than that, but what ends up happening when you do this right, it creates little pockets of relevance that make it so that you don’t need as many links to rank. It just makes it a lot easier to rank for the low volume search phrases.

A lot of people, they just try to rank their homepage for their top three or five terms. While that can work, it’s a lot harder. You’re setting up more work for yourself. You’ve got the same 80% of people going after the same 20% of traffic. I like to target that other 80% of traffic that nobody’s really targeting, along with the other 20% that people are targeting. You just get a whole bunch of win because of that.

In conclusion, the undying principles are still alive and pretty much exactly as they were at their core. I think Google is looking for even more engagement. They’re trying to gather more data and analyze more data on that. That’s still important. Again, it’s the trump card. You can’t start with engagement. Right? You don’t have any traffic when you first launch your site. It’s tough to get, but if you can get it, that’s really great. There’s other ways to get traffic other than through the search engines. That’s if you have a highly engaging site, and you can get that traffic from Google, then they definitely see it, and then that’s going to help you a lot for sure, across a lot of search phrases. Let me know if you have any questions, or if you want me to look at the unchanging principles for your website. Submit a discover form, and we can go from there. Thanks for watching, and have a great day. Bye.

If you’re making bread and leave out the yeast, then what comes out is edible yet disgusting.

I’ve delved deep into thousands of SEO projects to evaluate what pieces make the successful have in common.  The unsuccessful Search Engine Optimization Services also share some common qualities.

Submit a discovery form for a FREE SEO analysis and Recommendations.

Watch the video for more details:

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Approximate Transcript:

Hi, David over her at the Dallas SEO Geek, and this video is about the winning SEO formula. I’m taking advantage of this Charlie Sheen meme of winning. I try to give the analogy of building a house for doing an SEO project. You need need a certain formula. There’s certain things you can’t just build a roof and build lots and lots of roofs, and have a great house. You can’t just build plumbing, or you can’t build the house without the plumbing and the roof and expect it to still be livable.

Sometimes people come to me and they want to build only part of their SEO house. Sometimes you build just the roof and I guess that’s something. It’s better than standing out in the rain, but to really get the full value of all the individual pieces, you need to put together the most important pieces. Yes, your front door doesn’t have to work perfectly, but you have to have a front door, for example. A lot of this comes down to the common incorrect preconceptions.

People come into SEO and they think they know what’s going to be done or what needs to be done, or what is the most optimal to be done. They’re expecting that and then when the find out that’s not really what should be done, some people still try to stick to it and say “I just want this little piece.” “I just want you to build the back wall of my house.” Unfortunately, that can work for you, but usually that doesn’t give you a lot of results and it’s not going to really pay for itself.

One of the common misconceptions is that people think that all of SEO is on page SEO, and they think if they just build a bunch of pages on their side, or they build … They set their tags right, or their images and all that stuff, then they’re going to rank really well. This is perpetuated in a lot of places so I don’t blame people for having this misconception, but it’s just incorrect. If you are going after something extremely uncompetitive, and you do your on page really well, then yes, you can sometimes rank well.

It will usually take longer if it does happen, and sometimes you need a little bit of good fortune to help it happen as well. A close second to on page SEO, and they’re kind of intertwined because some people think of these two together, or separately as content marketing. People think “Okay, you build your content, they will come.” That’s sort of the Google mantra. You build great content, people naturally spread it around on the internet. There is some validity and truth to that. It’s a little but like saying you can walk from Los Angeles to New York. Yes, technically you can do that. You probably wouldn’t want to, and there are much more efficient and effective ways of getting you there.

Content marketing can be an important and valuable of an overall SEO plan, but some people think it’s just they do the basic, simple on page SEO, and then they just build great content and they will come. That is also no generally true. Again, you can be fortunate and it can work, and it usually works for bigger companies that have huge budgets that just hire tons of great aweosme writers to write for 2-3 years straight and then build up enough authority and popularity that works for them. Or they’ve already got some offline popularity, you know Coca-Cola blogging about stuff, they’ve already got a big brand and they’ve already got a lot of other popularity in other places in the world and online as well.

That’s not really a good case study for some plumber, or an electrician, or an accountant, or if you’re trying to sell something on your store online. It’s just not really a great plane for you. You probably don’t have the budget to pay for full-time writers to write constantly along with multiple social media managers, to constantly and full-time. 6 people or whatever to really push this whole plan.

These misconceptions are very hard to fight and a lot of people … It will do you the most interest for your SEO project to understand that there’s more to it than this. Now I’m gonna talk about that right now, and probably elude back to this a little bit more.

The starting necessary pieces. On page is important. Content is more of copyrighting, you don’t always have to spend a ton of time on it. You have the page that people are landing on and it’s interesting to them, and gets them to take action, which is what you want them to do. You’ve kinda won in that way, and great content can help you, but again, on page and despite the fact that this is simple and a lot of people fail at getting the full value here.

Then there’s off page SEO. This is so important. A lot of people don’t … They just want to ignore it. They just want to say “Okay, we’ll build the content and therefore people will come and link to us.” That’s what off-page is. Off-page is primarily about building links back to your site. Hoe popular is your site on the internet? How many reference your site on the internet? When you put the on-page and the off-page together, it creates a formula. It creates a winning puzzle, it’s like a chemical formula, and you put them together and it creates something new and powerful. Especially when you do the pieces right and in concert, okay?

You have two legs of the chair on the on-page with the basics and then the off-page are the other two legs. Can you sit in a two-legged chair? Yeah, you could probably balance it right and maybe under the right conditions you’d be fine, but it’s so much more effective to have all four legs, okay? This is unfortunate for a lot of people because they want to just do the on-page and say “Well let’s see how that goes.” Or that’s all I want to do, and sometimes that can work, but you really are missing a lot of pieces of the puzzle if you don’t do at least some off page SEO. Some link to link. You dramatically improve your chances.

That’s what I’m here to do. To maximize your chances of success of a project. Also, to speed up the time frame. I talked about content marketing, it takes several years usually to work, if it works at all. This can work must faster, for sure. Google has slowed things down in a little and a lot of ways, but at the same time, this is definitely going to dramatically improve the speed and the chances that you rank.

Now there’s another part of the winning formula. You can think of it as one piece or multiple pieces, and it spans not just on-page and off-page, but kind of all your online presence. It’s engagement, and I’ve talked about this before, but this is sort of … You do the on-page and off-page and people start arriving at your site from Google. You have to be able to engage them, and it your website is turning off the visitors very strongly, then you’re going to have trouble meeting your goal. It’s gonna be hard to stay at the top. Having an engaging site is very important.

It can even [trump 00:07:14]. Say your on-page and off-page is worse than someone, but you’re engagement is much better. You’re gonna eventually, likely rank above them. We take another step in that direction, and videos are a huge part of that, okay? Trying to make videos is very important for engagement. It’s the most engaging form of content. People can just push a button and be entertained, or be informed, and it’s a lower path of resistance. A path of less resistance for lack of a better term.

To put all the pieces together to make it to your goal, you can’t just … Let’s say he said “Well I’m gonna pack everything but my water. I’m not gonna do any water.” Well, that’s not going to work. You can have everything else just right, and everything perfectly, but you don’t have your water. Or let’s say he doesn’t bring his shoes at all. He goes barefoot. I guess it’s possible he could make it there, but it’s probably going to take him a lot longer, it’s going to be more painful. He’s gonna pay a much higher cost than he needed to.

If you have any more questions about the winning SEO formula, please feel free to contact me. If you’d like me to do a free analysis of your online SEO presence and put together a custom formula because you can kinda change the exact details of how you put these pieces together. For each business can be different, but the core overall, high level pieces are the same. Then I’ll take a look at it and I’ll tell you what I think, and yeah. Give me a call or shoot me an e-mail, or go to my website and fill out my discover form.

Thanks for watching. Have a great day! Bye.

The spoils go heavily to the victor — the data that I show in the video proves it.  The value of mediocre SEO is often a big fat zero.

SEO is a deep knowledge subject with a shifting environment that didn’t exist 20 years ago.  Do you really think someone that’s spent 5 hours a week doing/studying SEO for a few months can really provide your business with profitable results in the search engines?

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Approximate transcript of video:

Hi, this video is about Generalist SEO versus SEO Specialist. My name is David Hood, I’m the Dallas SEO Geek. There is a big difference. This comes up a lot. I don’t necessarily get as many questions about it as I hear people talk about their past and their future plans. Past plans not working or future plans and it’s a little bit of a re-education process because this is very different than a lot of other disciplines out there.

One thing that is really important to keep in mind throughout this whole thing is that the value of high quality SEO versus medium or low quality SEO is dramatic, absolutely huge. This is only one piece of the puzzle. There’s actually several other pieces that reinforce this and amplify this even stronger. This is one example of what I mean by the rewards distribution.

If you rank #1 for something you’re going to get about 37% of the traffic. This can vary dramatically; it could be 50%, it could 25%, but the trend that I’m showing here is the same in that it is an exponential drop off. When you go from #1 to #2 you’re already losing about half the amount of traffic. By the time you get to #5 you’re at about 10 times less traffic. The bottom of the first page, if something only gets searched 100 times a month and you’re #10, that’s really not going to provide a lot of value. Maybe if something gets searched 100,000 times a month and you’re #10, okay, that’s pretty stinking good.

The point here is that some people, they go for the cheaper or the more general SEO people and sometimes they’re not even getting on the first page and in their thinking they’re getting a deal when if they’d pay double, let’s say it was double, they could get 10 or really more like 100 or 1,000 times the kind of results that they could get. This is very important. I would say when you go to hire someone, don’t hire the least expensive person. I’m not the most expensive sometimes, but I’m usually not the least expensive either. Hire who you think is the best fit. Obviously you have budget concerns, but if someone doesn’t seem like a fit or they don’t seem like they really focus at all on SEO, then just don’t hire them. It’s better to do nothing and move on to other marketing opportunities.

Some examples of web designers that are generalists. Web designers, a lot of times they know a little bit about on-page SEO and they know nothing about off-page and so they integrate it a little bit with the web design and sometimes they sell it as SEO when a lot of times it’s like the very most basic simplest SEO that could be done. It’s really not going to help you rank on the first page, or especially high on the first page, unless it’s extremely noncompetitive.

Marketing agencies are another example of this. It’s a little bit different. Sometimes they have a partner that is an SEO specialist. It’s really pretty hard for them to hire a full time person who really knows SEO. It does happen from time to time. If they really are that good then a lot of times they end up leaving the company because they can usually make more money outside of that, unless it’s a really good agency. Most of the time I would say marketing agencies, their SEO is pretty limited. Sometimes, again, they do have a quality SEO. I would ask, if you are considering a marketing agency for your SEO, I would ask about the person or the team that is doing it. Make sure that there is someone who focuses on SEO exclusively because there is plenty of work to do as a full time SEO for years and years for someone who is highly technical. I’ll get a little more into that in a second.

Part time SEOs. These people are probably new, maybe they’re doing it 10 hours a week. It’s pretty hard to be really good at SEO in 10 hours a week, even if you’ve been doing it for a year like that. A part time SEO, that’s going to be pretty hard. New full time hire, some people think, “Okay, we’ll just hire a new person and train them.” Well, first of all, you’re not going to know what to train them on or how to get them started on the training. Second of all, they’re not going to know anything about SEO. They’re going to and they’re going to read the general articles that are publicly out there and they are going to choose the most expensive, least powerful, least effective form of SEO out there. The main this is people say, “Oh, content marketing, build it and they will come.” That can work, but content marketing is not in and of itself an SEO, it does help with SEO, if done well, but also it’s the most expensive and longest term pack.

For big companies that can hire a bunch of people to do the content marketing for them and they already are doing other marketing and they already have authority, this can help definitely. This can be an okay path for them. I still think it would be better if they took a little bit of a different approach, but that’s the approach that these people are going take and it’s going to take you forever to get results.

Let’s look at a specialist real quick. Me: I’m highly technical, I’ve been building my own computers since I was a kid, and websites, since the ’90’s. I have 2 engineering degrees. I’m highly technical. I’m very computer-oriented. I spend all day doing SEO, SEO is all I do. There are some things that are closely related to that that I do work on, but basically the focus on my day, every day, is SEO. Sometimes even when I go to talk to people, I’m thinking about SEO and I should be listening to them. Sometimes that happens. I’ve been doing this full time for over 4 years now and actually part time for 3 years before that. There is still more for me to learn. There’s always more, even the best people in the world have more to learn. Actually I have quite a few mentors that are extremely good at SEO and they all do it a little bit differently. They all have their own little flavor. They’re all also learning and testing and doing more, trying to get better every day. That’s kind of what I would think that you would want in order to get the quality results. Usually that’s what is required.

Another thing is focus. This is true for pretty much any discipline. If you’re a lawyer, but you try to be a lawyer and a doctor and an engineer all at once, that’s going to be pretty hard to do, right? There’s a lot of benefits to focusing. You’re going to be … If you try to do 3 different jobs, as opposed to 1 job, you’re going to be less than 1/3 as valuable. You’re going to be like 1/10th or 1/100th as valuable because there are certain efficiencies and big gains that you get when you focus and you dig deep and your brain spends a lot of its time just working on that one concept.

There’s a lot of complexities with SEO. SEO is a new discipline. It has shifting goal posts in that the algorithms change. Now the core of Google’s algorithm, I think, is roughly the same. They do have some additional factors going in there, but it’s extremely complex. There’s a lot of moving parts. There’s thousands of different moving parts. Thousands of little decisions and you don’t want someone who just knows a little bit or spends a little bit of time trying to navigate these complexities. Your website is a boat and you’re on a bunch of different rivers and you need to navigate through alligator infested waters for your business to be successful. Someone who has no experience with those rivers, it’s going to be very hard for them to deal with all the complexities that are going on. That’s maybe not the perfect analogy, but an analogy none the less.

If you’re looking for an SEO specialist, you can get a free analysis. Go to my website. Click on the discovery forum and fill that out and submit it. Then I will get back to you very soon and I’ll give you a free SEO analysis and recommendations. Then we’ll go from there. Thanks for watching and have a great day. Bye!

YouTube is also the 2nd biggest search engine (more searches than Yahoo and Bing).

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Using videos has many benefits that go well beyond Search Engine Optimization.  Even without those benefits there are some nice rankings boosts you can get when you use videos as part of your digital marketing strategy.

I discuss more of the what and why in the following video:

A quick preview of my video on YouTube about Video and YouTube SEO…hah! 🙂

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Approximate Transcript:

Hi, David Hood here, the Dallas SEO Geek and this video is about Video SEO in 2016. Videos have been powerful for a very long time. I mean Google bought YouTube … What was it, about ten years ago, and so they’re highly invested in YouTube. They still love YouTube and I think the primary reason is because videos are engaging. When you think about the kind of content that you can interact with online, the most rich content that is the easiest to consume is videos. I can just press a button, sit back and get video and audio together as opposed to like reading an article and you just kind of read.

There’s nothing wrong with that and there’s a place for that, but video is the most engaging. It’s rich media and it’s actually pretty easy to make. I love making videos. There’s so many benefits to it, but one of the main benefits is that they’re engaging to the user and this is what Google wants. When you send someone to a place that has video, let’s say on your website or if someone goes directly to your video and they sit back and they watch it for five or ten minutes, that’s extremely valuable. Google sees that and they recognize, “Wow, this person is spending a lot of time on there. It must have answered their question. We’re going to send more visitors there.”

Creating and engaging content is very important, not just from an SEO standpoint, but from a conversion standpoint as well. The more people, the longer that someone is exposed to your brand, the more you can keep them engaged with your website or any of your properties or any of your videos in any place, the better it is going to be for you to sell to them. They’re going to feel more and more comfortable potentially buying from you. Yes, I do use YouTube as the centerpiece because it is owned by Google, so they do give it a little bit of benefit, but I mean in a lot of ways it is the most authoritative video sharing site on the internet, by far.

In fact, it’s the second biggest search engine in the world. It gets more searches than Bing and Yahoo. You can actually rank videos in the organic search results regularly and you can also rank the YouTube video search results. It’s better in the organic in a lot of cases, but in some cases, it can be great in the video because there’s some things that gets searched a lot in YouTube. I recommend making each video about a specific topic. One long video can be okay, but from an SEO standpoint, it’s better to break that big video up into smaller pieces that address a specific question, so you can answer one specific question or one specific problem or one specific very narrow topic for that video.

It’s going to make it easier to rank for those specific search phrases and there are lots and lots of those search phrases for you to target. Not only that, but it’ll help you, you channel rank for some of the bigger search phrases as well. Let’s take a quick look at some of the stuff that you need to change in the video. Let’s see, I’ll go ahead and I’ll make this italics, so these are the things that we kind of look at primarily for our video. We’ll go to one of my latest videos, so here’s the title. I think if I click it … No, sorry. Oh, here’s the title.

This is the most important part of what you’re trying to rank for. I’m obviously not trying to rank this for a specific search phrase, but if I were to try to rank it for Dallas Plumbing, Dallas Water Heater Repair, okay. Let’s say we’re doing Dallas Water Heater Repair. Then … Or maybe a better would be like Dallas, website penalty recovery, I might do that. Sometimes you don’t necessarily need the Dallas, I’m going to put it more in here or I might put it towards the end, sometimes it’s Dallas…

I’ve got the Dallas right there, so website penalty recovery, okay, so this … The earlier in the title that you put the search phrase you want to rank for, the easier it is going to be to rank for that. That’s really important. It’s also one of the first things that the user sees and they see it in search results. Now the description. There’s a lot that you can do with the description. I want to talk about just a few things real quick. I’m going to make it bigger.

First, I try to get a call to action as early as possible, so you can see right here I’m telling the user, the visitor what to do and you get them to do what you want them to do when you tell them what to do. Ideally, I would actually probably have that above there, but I think this still does show up above the [fold 00:04:44], at least the start of it so they can see essentially my free offer. You can write text here. You can write quite a bit of text. You can write 200, 300, 400 words if you wanted to. I can’t remember what the maximum is, but you can write basically a full article and that’s definitely going to help you rank.

I don’t usually do that, but the video itself will rank better with an article and it will be a little bit more engaging. I don’t think very many people click on the More and read the whole article, but it can be useful. Then what you can do here is you can link out to your different properties and this can drive the traffic through here. These are also valuable links, they are no-follow, which essentially reduces their overall power significantly, but it’s still a link from YouTube that Google sees and it indexes very quickly and that can drive traffic.

I’ve started using hashtags lately and I think you get some extra value out of it so you can put the additional things on there. Maybe I’ll do a search. Let’s do SEO search engine, it’s like when I put a space in there, maybe it doesn’t catch it all away. Let’s see. You can put tags in there, you can also see my address, put my address so it’s essentially a business citation. I’ve also got the location to go to the Advanced Settings. Let’s change this back. Here we go. I would go to Advanced Settings, there is a location, it looks like you got to set it … Oh, wait there we go.

It’s right here, for some reason it was displaying something weird, but it actually had the location right, so you can put in an address and it will go there. I suggest you do that. That’s kind of another form of doing or putting your information in if you’re wanting to rank in maps, that can help just a little bit. Another tip that I think is really important to keeping your videos engaging is putting your brand name somewhere in the tags, so when someone watches one of your videos, if they have more, they will show up in the suggested videos right next to it because of the tags.

Then I generally am pretty conservative with the tags and don’t try to tag up too many, maybe three to four tags that are relevant to exactly what you’re trying to target and also kind of your higher level markets. You can see here, just search engine optimization, 2016 Dallas SEO Geek. I would put … Again, if it was doing website penalty recovery, I would make that a search phrase, whatever the main thing that I want to rank for, I’m going to put some variation in there. Probably once or twice.

Now there are ways to do live events and it is a … Oops I made some changes I don’t like. These can help you rank more … It’s still, there we go, but they’re kind of a pain to do and but that there’s some … And they’re just kind of releasing it, so it has … It can be a little bit buggy and hard to do and if you have a really poor internet connection, you definitely shouldn’t do this, but it can give your videos some extra juice and there’s some extra options available to you there in terms of kind of the ways in which you can promote it.

This is definitely not going to be a live streaming video training. You could watch, too, that can be three, four hours long. I generally don’t do it a whole lot because it’s kind of a pain and it doesn’t always come out to be the highest quality, but you do get a ranking boost and if you’re internet connection is fast, that extra ranking boost can be the difference. Okay, so that’s all I got and I appreciate you watching. Let me know if you have any questions or concerns.

If you’d like for me to help you do video SEO, go to my website DallasSEOGeek.com. Click on the Get Free SEO Analysis or click on the Discovery Form, it takes you to the same place. Fill out a Discovery Form so that I can know more information about your business and I will give you a call and we’ll go from there, so thank

It must be your lucky day:

In a nutshell, I’ve always been a math, computer, and science geek.  Doing Search Engine Optimization is a natural extension of who I’ve always been.  SEO is fun and I’m always aggressively working to get better at ranking websites in Google and the other search engines for valuable keywords.

Even more about the Dallas SEO Geek:

Do you want more clients for your law firm?  Submit a discovery form today to get a FREE SEO Analysis and Recommendations.

Ranking in Google’s Maps listings (shown below in picture and in video) has become more important for lawyers.

Related: Law Firm SEO, Local SEO in Google Maps, SEO in 2016,

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Approximate Transcript:

Hi. David Hood here at the Dallas SEO Geek cam. This video is about Law Firm SEO. I have gotten quite a bit of good results from multiple law firms in big cities like Dallas. This is something that has provided a lot of value to multiple law firms that have been happy with the amount that’s coming back to them.

One thing to consider is that there’s lots of valuable long tails and these are often un-competitive, but still extremely valuable. They might not get searched the most, so it’s not like, “Personal injury lawyer, Dallas.” That’s still something that we can target, but that’s going to take longer. Then maybe, “Dog bite lawyer, Dallas.” Something like that is very specific. It’s sort of a problem and then maybe solution, queries if you want to think about where to start on how to find these valuable long tails. In order to really find them, you need someone who knows how to do that, SEO research to get a lot of that data. That’s what I can definitely do for you. If you need that, feel free to submit my discovery form. I’ll show you how to do that in just a minute.

I do want to emphasize patience. I have ranked a lawyer in Dallas in six weeks. It does happen. It can be fast. Now, there were several things working in is favor. He had a very high package and he was very responsive to my questions and things that I asked him to do to help move the project along. Google has made it take longer and law firm SEO tends to be more competitive and so it just takes a little longer for things to kick in. Sometimes, one action that I do today is going to take six months or longer for the full reasonable effects to kick in. Six months. If I’ve worked on a project for nine months, then I really only have the first three months of full value in there and if that isn’t necessarily true. I like to look at this as six to twelve months is the time range where we take your website and go from an unproductive practice asset to a productive practice asset that’s providing valuable leads to your business, quality leads to your business on a regular basis. They’re just incoming to you.

That can grown to substantially more in the future. There’s so much of a market for this. There’s a huge market here, which is why you’re probably getting calls from SEO companies all the time. That’s part of why it’s competitive, but I have ranked. I’ve definitely driven amount of traffic to generate the calls on lawyer websites that has made lawyers quite a bit of money.

Okay, another important thing is Maps SEO. I’m shooting this in March 31 of 2016. About a year ago, maybe nine months again, they changed from what they used to have a seven pack to what this is called, a three pack or some people call it snack pack. The changes were more than that. In this search phrase, “Bankruptcy lawyer Dallas,” actually they’ve added more ads. It looks a lot more like a mobile device even on the desktop. The Maps and the ads take up so much space that even if your number one [inaudible 00:03:22], if you’re nothing above that, you still have to page down once or twice just to get to that. The Maps are really the first listing in a lot of these searches.

You can see you have to have reviews. If you’ve got great reviews and you’re number one, even if you’re not number one, if you have terrible reviews … The reviews are important, so making sure you understand how to manage that and market that so that you get reviews is important and that’s something that I can definitely help you with.

Being able to rank in the Maps, it’s different than in the regular part of the algorithm. They’re connected, but there’s definitely some differences. A lot of people struggle with this because Google is fickle with it and they change a lot, but this is something that I’ve done well for quite a few clients. I can do it for you.

If you’d like to know more about how I can help you, go to my website, submit a discovery form and get a free SEO analysis and recommendation. You go to DallasSeoGeek.com and you click on, “Get free SEO analysis.” Thanks for watching and have a great day. Bye.