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Eighteenth E-Webstyle.com SEO Podcast June 5th 2009.  Second page of Transcription

Paul: Ok, now for his meta tags, he had some good, he had some really good meta tags in his website. He had things that were related to his business, he, I think can remember, like “Costa Rican Villa”, which is exactly what he was, so I was like “ok, you got some really…” Ok yeah, there we go, let’s pull up his meta tags. He had some really good meta tags, I thought he did a really good job, and I liked it. He at least…20 meta tags in here.

 

Chris: Yeah, he’s got quite a few.

 

Paul: And he offers different services at his…he offers different services…well some of them don’t match, like that one I’m looking at right here, I don’t know what he has that in there…

 

Chris: You don’t think monkeys are…

 

Paul: Yeah, unless you sell monkeys, you probably shouldn’t have monkeys in your meta tags.

 

Chris: Now he does have Humming Bird Villa, a Villa called Humming Bird Villa, so maybe if he had a Monkey Villa or something—I’m not really sure you want to call it the Monkey Villa. Maybe that’s where the wild and crazy parties go on…

 

Paul: But the…other than monkeys, his meta tags I thought were really good. He could have used additions, I believe, to it, but his basic meta tags were really good, I liked them.

 

Chris: Number one, when we’re looking at meta tags, first we start off with “are there any?”…

 

Paul: And often, there aren’t.

 

Chris: So, there are meta tags. And we know the reason there are meta tags, and I think this probably important to cover, our friend in Costa Rica is probably, or already moving off of a service that he was using in India. So he was doing Search Engine Optimization with a company in India, and as we have found with all of our clients, or most of our clients, who do business with Indian Search Engine Optimization customers, and we’ve talked about this in the past, the concept of customer service is very challenging for people outside of the United States. What I’m saying is, we are unbelievably spoiled. When we subscribe to a serve that is supposed to move our website up to the first page of Google, we want to know where we start, and we want a monthly report on where we are each month, and we want to see progress toward the front. In India, they just feel, they tend to feel, it seems, as long as they’re doing the work, they don’t need to get information to us. So he mentioned things like, he would request a report…what was it? We were joking because it was three months and…

 

Paul: Yeah, he was asking for a Google Analytics report for three months, and still has not seen it.

 

Chris: And we were joking, you know, three months is crazy. We get, you know, if a customer is on top of us regularly, we’ll get it to you at least within in two months.

 

Paul: At least, I mean come on.

 

Chris: Actually, our reports without request go out monthly.

 

Paul: Every month.

 

Chris: They go out with the invoice, we want you to see the value that you’re getting with the invoice and in the reports and that’s monthly. And they’re full color where applicable, so you know, that’s a high value thing. We understand, we could email it to you, actually we could set up the same software that we use to create the reports to automatically email it to you, and that just doesn’t have as much value because an email can be too easily dismissed. If you’re at least looking at the invoice, you’re also going to glance at the report. And we actually just, you know, we want to show off what we’re doing! You know, we’re moving you from page unknown to page one, and we want to show you that because it’s our opportunity to pat ourselves on the back, and if you feel like it, give us a call and say “Wow, you guys are doing a great job.” Thank you, we’ll continue to do that, because that’s what we do. So it wasn’t really surprising that they had meta tags. I agree the monkeys is a little odd. I also think he’s got some one-phrase terms, which are really a waste of time and space, like the word “lodging”, alright, it’s never going to be his goal to be on the first page when you type “lodging.”

 

Paul: Of course.

 

Chris: Because you know, that’s just too indiscriminant. Anybody, anywhere…

 

Paul: That’s a worldwide term.

 

Chris: That’s if I’m going Motel 6. He’s not Motel 6! You know “romantic getaway”, that’s fine, I think I would have kept in “Costa Rica” on most of these terms…

 

Paul: He had a lot of geographic terms in there. He also, he has his state or country in there, like, if you were in Houston we definitely recommend you have Houston in your meta tags. I thought that was really good, he had some things that were related to his business, like, you know, like I said “Costa Rican Villa”, and he has Costa Rican Villas, so he has a lot of good things like that.

 

Chris: So um, I think you gave him a four out of five on that?

 

Paul: Yeah I gave him a four out of five on his meta tags. Could use some, some… some personally that was my, I didn’t email that to him, but I just thought “Hey you get a four out of five.” I thought that was a really good job.

 

Chris: You know I… I’ve got to agree. We’ll give him a four out of five. We get into some details a little bit later when we start talking about keywords. I think I did mention, and I think I may have mentioned it in another section…no I mentioned it right there, is that—one of the problems that he does have with meta tags, so he has them. One of the challenges he has is he only has one set of keywords.

 

Paul: Oh yeah, that’s right.

 

Chris: And he puts that set on every page, and what does is limits your ability to hone in or target a particular key set… keyword set on a particular page and so that’s one reason we would give him four out of five. If you think about it though, you know, he’s got, let’s say 20 pages, really he’s got ineffective keywords on every page, so you know…

 

Paul: On every single page because his home page is not about monkeys, or…

 

Chris: Or one of the villas, like one of his villas is called the Humming Bird Villa, so the home page isn’t about the Humming Bird Villa. You really want the Humming Bird Villa page to be about the Humming Bird Villa. So you know, I’m going to have to downgrade him to a Defcon three.

 

Paul: Oh man.

 

Chris: Three, three out of five, so but we’ll be working with him on that, we’ll get that all straightened out. The next thing that we went into was cont.. . not contact… but content. This is the number two item. Do you want to kind of mention what you saw on his content?

 

Paul: One thing that I liked, he had, from a text standpoint, he had some really good text.

 

Chris: And lots of it, and that’s valuable.

 

Paul: Yes, and I can’t explain how many websites I see and they’re homepage has pictures and four words on it. All the time, it happens a lot, so I was like “you have…”, from a text standpoint I thought he had a lot of good text. There was some, and you brought this up, there was some, a couple things that I feel like are very important that were hidden. Specifically, a virtual tour. I was like I think that’s a very big thing that, you know, if I’m going to go and rent a villa somewhere in a foreign country, I would like to see it before…I do this with normal hotel rooms, I like to see them before I book them.

 

Chris: I do it with Motel 6!

 

Paul: And his virtual tour, and you brought this up, was virtually hidden. I didn’t know he had a virtual tour until you…

 

Chris: Told you that it was hidden?

 

Paul: Yeah, until you told me it was hidden, like “Wow, I didn’t even know that!”, and so, that and things like that, there was a few little things like that that could have put in better places. Text was great, but that virtual tour, in my opinion that could almost make or break a sale.

 

Chris: Yeah, I think so.

 

Paul: If I got to see—because he had some great images and I mean he’s got a good setup down there in Costa Rica, and I was like “If I would see this photo, it would almost make me pick up the phone and say ‘Let’s do this right now’, because this is awesome.”

 

Chris: Yep, I agree. And the nice thing, one of the reasons I was probably drawn to the virtual tour is we actually have a Flash component—now his virtual tour is in Quicktime, not Flash. So it’s just a movie, and so it’s just kind of spins around the room. Ours is a Flash component so it’s dynamic, so you can use your cursor to move in and out and it gives a really nice interactive feel with that room. So, that would be something I would recommend, for two reasons. 1) It is interactive, that’s more valuable, and 2) with Quicktime. Quicktime is not on everybody’s computer. It doesn’t come previously installed, but Flash is on some 90% of the computers that are out there, so…

 

Paul: And everybody with Flash on their site usually has “Don’t have Flash? Download it here!”

 

Chris: “Download it now!” yeah. And that’s what we would do as well, so it’s real easy to implement Flash. Quicktime is a little tougher, but we know why they do it, you know, for the graphic reasons and whatever tool they were using, and…

 

Paul: Quicktime, you know the only reason I got Quicktime is because I downloaded iTunes.

 

Chris: Yeah.

 

Paul: That’s the only reason I have it on my PC here. And I downloaded iTunes here like a week ago.

 

Chris: Yeah, so there’s, I mean—and that’s a great example that a lot of people don’t actually have Quicktime. Now, our number one most important thing on any website, websites are about three things—well it was five wasn’t it? Keywords, content, keywords, navigation…

 

Paul: And keywords.

 

Chris: So, three out of five is keywords, number three is keywords, so that’s excellent. Again, Paul do you want to kind of put out, throw out there what you saw about keywords?

 

Paul: I did, one thing I didn’t see was I didn’t see a lot of keywords in his text, or just throughout his site. The site looks really nice and great pictures, but I was like “you know, keywords” because I mean keywords, that’s really what’s going to bring somebody there, you know…

 

Chris: From a search engine.

 

Paul: Yeah, exactly. That’s what’s going to bring somebody there from a search engine, and so, I really felt that he was kind of lacking keywords, and you brought up—what were you saying, keywords, uh, what was it that you put….keywords and linking and… was that another point?

 

Chris: I put a couple, it may be another point—my comment on keywords were maybe some additional terms that they seem to be missing from their keyword list, which would be like “luxury,” “exclusive,” “echo tourism” is a really buzz word in tourism right now, especially when you’re heading down to any part of Latin America, if you can jump on “echo tourism” and talk about how you get to, you know, be bitten by mosquitoes for the whole time. In Panama, they’re called Chitré, and there’s not mosquitoes, it’s actually, we call them here, I think we call them noseeums because I couldn’t see them, and they were everywhere, and they just chewed you up and spit you out. And it was really an “echo tourist” vacation that my wife and I took. We actually slept on a hut on the water off of this small little island…

 

Paul: In like the net?