092: Master Free Google Traffic and Search Engine Optimization (Ten Quick WordPress SEO Ranking Factors)

Robert Plank 0:00 Robert Plank Show, Episode, 92 master, free Google traffic and search engine optimization, 10 quick SEO ranking factors.

Robert Plank 0:16 Welcome back to the Robert Plank show. My name is Robert Plank. And my website is Robert plank.com so go ahead there right now go to the sidebar and sign up for my email list. That way you can always get updates about this podcast. Things I have to say, my products, all kinds of interesting things. My other website is WP import.com and that is a plug in that allows you to quickly import and backdate or drip out

Robert Plank 0:46 posts or pages, basically content of your blog. So we're going to talk today about ranking in search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. And when I say ranking, I don't just mean ranking number one for whatever phrase that you want, but also ranking all over the place, and ranking for high volume, high traffic keywords. So that way you don't just rank, so you can have bragging rights. So that way, because sometimes some people will rank for phrases that are like, six words long. Some might say, I rank for the best WordPress Backup plug in in Albuquerque, New Mexico, when really only 10 people per month search that. So of course, you rank number one for that, and then likewise, other people are upset that they are not ranked number one for the phrase membership sites. And I tell them, Well, okay, first of all, if someone is searching for the phrase membership sites, you don't want to rank number one for that, because you don't even know what someone who types in the word membership sites or the phrase membership sites really knows what they're looking for. But if someone is searching for WordPress membership site or membership site drip content, we know, okay, well, they're looking to make a membership site that they host. They're not looking for joining a membership site. They're not looking to join a gym, for example, and all these different things. So we're going to talk about a few specific things, but also some high level strategy that way, in whatever year or decade you're listening and tuning into today's show all this stuff about ranking high in Google and getting all this free search engine traffic will still make sense to you no matter what year you're listening to this. Henry Ford, maybe you've heard of him, says that failure is only the opportunity to begin again, only this time more wisely. So life is full of ups and downs. It's a series of ups and downs, and especially your internet marketing career and business is got to be full of ups and downs, so don't just give up if you hit one block in the road or if you get Google slapped, Amazon slapped, Facebook slapped, whatever. The rules change all the time. Every six to 12 months, some huge, major shift happens. Maybe you have to add some new thing to your website. Maybe you have to jump through one extra hoop in order to rank high on Facebook, or maybe you have to jump through another extra hoop in order for your emails to get through. That's just the name of the game. And the way I always like to think about it is that I don't need to be super current. I don't need to read the news about whatever the latest Google update is every single week. But if I see that, there is a thing that the powers that be want me to do, right if the internet gods and right now the time that's Google and Facebook, if they want me to add a little something to my website, then I'll go ahead and add that, if it gives me a little five or 10% boost, knowing that my competitors won't do it. Now we're in the 92nd episode, the 92nd podcast of our of the show. And I like that. We made it this far because most of my competitors have already quit. I've seen so many other internet marketing podcasts say things like, I finally made it to episode number 10. I'm so tired. Well, tired. You need to be putting these things out more and more so that you can stay competitive and stay ahead of everyone else. So search engine optimization ranking high on Google, a lot of people approach it the wrong way. They look for the loopholes, the superstitions, and they think back to decades ago. We're talking 1020, 25 years ago, when all the rage were these things called doorway pages, there was literally software that would crank out and generate and duplicate 1000s of copies of one single web page, because you could, back then, easily fool search engines like Google. Well nowadays you kind of can't. Nowadays, even if there is a loophole, it's going to be closed in next few days. So what makes more sense to me is to, instead of fighting Facebook and Google, look at what Facebook and Google wants, and then give them that thing that they want. And that makes a lot more sense to me, because a lot of people, they stress out about h1 and h2 tags and meta tags, or things like. Duplicate content. They say that, well, information can only mean one site on the internet, even though it's kind of strange because they Associated Press, news wire, they syndicate news all over different sites, right? People on YouTube and Facebook and Twitter. They retweet things. There's whole huge businesses like the Huffington Post, where, I mean, there are news aggregators. All they do is they report on news that other news outlets reported on. So duplicate content across the internet isn't that big of a deal. Now, if you put something out, if you put out some kind of an article or, like a really good guest blog post or something, and you're the first one to put out that unique content, then Google will favor that slightly higher. But if that content is so good that that gets spread out on 20 or 50 different websites, those other websites will still get ranked, but just not quite as high as that original content. But when we're talking about duplicate content, I mean right off the bat, the biggest myth with this thing called duplicate content is that, well, when we're talking about duplicate content, we're talking about the same article replicated on the same website, right? Because Google doesn't want you to have one blog post and you have 100 copies of you trying to game the system, they're only going to allow that website that that.com name, that domain name, one copy in their listings, but they're totally fine with you picking up if you're allowed to, if you have that licensed content, if you're allowed to use that content, you're completely allowed to put it on your site. It's not duplicate content, although the original content will get favored slightly higher. So the point of that, the point of that little anecdote, and the point of today's episode, is to not stress out and not look so much at all the shortcuts and the hacks, but instead look for a good user experience. I got so frustrated once I was at a seminar in Atlanta, Georgia, and someone who was on stage and he was selling some weird search engine software. It was some kind of thing that, I guess, analyzed your pages to see how well they'd rank, or something like that. And he stressed out about having these things called h1 and h2 tags and title tags and meta keyword tags, meta description tag and stuff like that. And, well, the reason why he got everyone overloaded and geeked out on these terms was because he was selling an SEO software. And I remember after and that, the little thing that really kind of pushed me over the edge and actually made me leave the event was that during lunch time, I happened to be sitting at the same table as this person, and he said, Well, you know, according to such and such, all I need to do for free traffic is just to have an optimized website. I just need to have, you know, some good h1 and h2 tags, some good on page SEO. It's called, and if I just do that, then build it, and they will come, I'll get all the traffic I want. And they say, well, that's not really what's going to happen. I mean, you can go and make a little blog post, but unless you send your own traffic, unless you send your list to it, and you put it on Twitter and Facebook and have other people share it, it's not gonna just get a bunch of traffic all on its own. And this person said, No, I don't think so. And I said, Well, why do you say that? I said, well, because the person on stage told me so, so trust but verify. And I mean, if the person on stage is trying to sell you a piece of software that says, Oh, you have an h1 tag, now you're great. Don't just trust because if someone says, if your search, if your web pages are properly formatted, you'll get all the traffic you want. It's just not the case. The thing about free traffic is it is slow, but you still, I think you still should be putting out a lot of free content, because all these little things do add up. But just geeking out about your meta tags and things like that, if you know what those are, just that, on its own, is not gonna do it. And I have 10 things that you can do on your website. And to be honest, actually, I will be honest, I'm only doing about seven out of the 10, just because there's only so many hours in a day, I'm actively working to add these extra things. And maybe you only have five out of these 10 things, and that's okay. I'm just gonna list you what I think are the top 10 things that should be on your site in order to, like we said, be ranked highly for the key phrases you want, for the buying key phrases, especially for example, I would rather be ranked highly for a phrase like buy WordPress plug in, like, b, u, y, right, or WordPress plug in price, as are, like our WordPress plug In low cost or something, as opposed to just WordPress plugin, right? Or backup plug in WordPress self host, because now I know that someone is looking not just to, for example, back up the photos on their hard drive, but back up a WordPress site. And so we can do different things. And there are tools out there, like a good one is the Google key. Keyword tool. So if you have an AdWords account, which you should, it's free. There's a little tab called the Google keyword tool, and you can look up for the the phrases of things that you want to rank for. So if we're thinking, Okay, well, is, is manage WordPress websites, is that a good search phrase? We can type it in there, and they can show us how many searches those things get per month. And so if you try different searches, and if a search gets you know, only 10 or 20 people are looking for it every month, that's not really a great phrase to rank for. But then if you search something and it gets millions of searches per month, that's great, but then you'll have more competition. So that's kind of the name of the game. And then another important thing, as we're getting ramped up here, another important term for you, is called keyword stuffing, all right, stuffing, as in, like Thanksgiving. And so what this means? And it sounds almost kind of kind of sketchy, but it's not. It just means that if we're talking, for example, today about free travel from Google, I'm going to mention the term search engine optimization. And even, you know, if I'm talking about search engine optimization with WordPress, actually, I'm going to edit today's title and I'm going to mention the term WordPress in the in the blog post for today's podcast, because I want when someone searches the phrase WordPress SEO or Search Engine Optimization, I know I'm not going to rank super highly, but I want to be ranked somewhere in there now, on any search engine, right? Because, guess what? A lot of these sites that give us traffic, whether we realize that or not, are search engines now usually a search engine. We think of something like, you know, Google, Yahoo, Bing, but guess what? This podcast, the these audio episodes, are on iTunes. They're also on Stitcher. So if I'm talking about, for example, if I'm doing a podcast and I'm talking about how to publish a book on Amazon, I'm going to put in the title terms like Kindle or create space, or how to publish the book for free, or how to self publish. I don't want the title to be super long, but if I'm mentioning something like, for example, self publishing, then how about I work in to the title the actual terms,

Robert Plank 12:18 like Amazon, Kindle, create space, if I'm talking about self publishing manual or CD or a DVD, and in the episode, I talk about services like, say, kunaki or Lulu, then guess what? I'm going to mention the terms like kunaki or Lulu in the in these title tags. So those two little strategies I'll give you for free, even before we even get into the master list, use that Google keyword tool to look at what are the popular phrases people are already looking for and keyword stuff. And that doesn't mean to load up a big, long blog posts with 10 different phrases, but if you're mentioning self publishing and the topic is Kindle, put Kindle into the title of your post. Okay, so I mean the big, big picture idea here is to give people a good user experience. Okay, that's what search engines want, any search engine, but let's focus on Google. So Google wants it so that if someone goes to Google and they type in what they want, they do a voice search or something like that, that the person finds what they're looking for very quickly. And sometimes you can, and sometimes Google will even give the result without someone having to click into a search result. For example, did you know that if you type in Google the phrase countdown timer, they'll just give you a countdown timer right there on the page. If you put in Google how many ounces are in one gallon, you don't have to click on any site. They'll give you a calculator. Will give you the answer right then in there. So Google is looking to give people the answer they were looking for in the shortest amount of time. And that means that if someone's looking for how to back up a WordPress blog or how to secure a WordPress blog, they click on your web page and they're given the answer that they want. Okay, so this kind of relates to why? Why maybe Google, over the last few years, they've decided that they don't want you to have a pop up on your site as soon as someone clicks over from a Google result. Or they, for sure, don't want an exit pop up when they leave. Why is that? Because if someone looks for how to back up a WordPress blog, they click over and they don't finally looking for they click back. A pop up appears. Many people will think that, oh, that pop up is from Google. We don't like that. Or sites like Google decided a few years ago they don't want you to have an opt in page, or what's called a squeeze page or lead cap. Capture page. They don't want you to have that as soon as someone clicks over from a Google bristle now you can have an opt in form as long as there's other content on that page. But they don't want it to be just a dead end. Why? Because if someone's looking for how to back up a WordPress blog, how to secure WordPress blog, how to self publish on Amazon, they click to your site and there's no content there that is a bad user experience. And in more recent years, Google and all these search engines have made, well, there's a bunch of factors, but the big ones are dwell time and human reviewers. So dwell time means that, and that's D, W, E, L, L time like if you dwell on something, they say that if I'm looking for how to tie a tie, let me actually do that right now. If I search in Google, how to tie a tie, what comes up? Well, first of all, there's instructions right there on Google, so you don't have to click over, but there's ties.com, tie a tie.net. So I guess you can look for difference kind of ties. And there's a YouTube video, and I bet it has millions of views, 13 million views of a one minute, 52nd video of a person any and you don't even see his face. He's just tying a tie on video right there in front of you. So if I'm looking for how to tie a tie, I click over, and I don't go back, like I don't hit the back button or, okay, let me give you two things I'm looking for. How to Tie a Tie. I click over. I don't find what I want. I click back within five seconds. So and I keep looking. So Google says, aha. They only spent five seconds on the page. Because they were on our site. They clicked off, they came back five seconds later. So that means that that is not a helpful website. Now, if someone clicks over on how to tie a tie, and they stay there for 20 minutes, even if they come back, they say, okay, they stay there. They dwelled on that site for 20 minutes. So that must be a helpful site. Or, even better, if they click and never come back, well, then they didn't, I mean, they found exactly what they were looking for the very first time. And the other thing about sites like Google as well is that they will send they'll have whole call centers, and they'll have live humans from all around the world look on their computer screen at what it is you have on a web page. And if, if the site isn't helpful or doesn't have content, then those human reviewers will give you a low rating, which will hurt your your search ranking. So all these different updates that have come about over the years, like Penguin or humming bird 3.0 or all these different things are many times just them, implementing these factors, dwell time, human reviewers, stuff like that. And so you could either drive yourself crazy trying to outsmart the system, or just give the system what they want. Give them helpful content and put out some consistent content, because even if your content sucks, or even if it's not quite what someone's looking for, guess what? As Henry Ford says, begin again this time more wisely. And so my personal goal in anything, and I think I've already hit this goal, is to have about 300 topics on my blog. Now, why 300 because if I, if you have a blog about anything, self publishing on Amazon, internet marketing, Wordpress, if you say 300 different things on that, chances are that you're gonna cover most subjects. Okay, so it looks like 342 blog posts at the current time on Robert plank.com so there are all kinds of subjects from WordPress, list, building whatever. There's some videos, some written stuff. So now I can confidently say that I cover most topics in internet marketing so consistently put out content at least once a week. And in fact, these days, I mean, once a week sometimes isn't even enough. Promote it using Facebook and Twitter, and we also use tools such as E clincher to keep on tweeting on an infinite loop and Zapier, so that if I post something on my blog, it automatically posts to Twitter and Facebook and my Facebook fan pages and all that stuff. Facebook, Twitter, e clincher, Zapier, and also, if, then, if some new content platform comes along, find a way to put it on your own website as well. So for example, even if you have a decent YouTube channel, right, you post videos on your YouTube channel. It can't hurt to every time you post a video on you on that channel, to copy the copy and paste code that YouTube gives you and put it on your own site. That way, that's one more place where you're helping someone find the solution to a problem. And whatever platform is out, whatever platform is all the rage whenever you're listening to this, if it's webinars or periscopes or Snapchat or Facebook Live or whatever, and it's one of these platforms where either it's hosted not on your site, or, even worse, one of these platforms where it's only hosted temporarily save a copy and put it on your own site. So for example, if you stream on Facebook Live or something. Uh, put a copy of that on your YouTube channel as well, and then, uh, embed that YouTube video on your own blog in addition, or put it on iTunes as a podcast, or if you speak out or have video, get it transcribed and paste the transcript on your blog, or put it into a PDF document, but consistently put out lots of content, because the name of the game is being helpful and giving people the solution to the problem that they're seeking. And you might say, well, I don't want to give everything away for free. Well, you don't have to. I mean, you can still sell your own courses and things like that, but in this day and age, if you don't give a lot of things away for free. That's still fine for you, but someone else is going to be getting that traffic. So without bumming you out a little bit, let me give you the 10 things you can do, the 10 quick fixes to your WordPress blog or to your website that you can apply probably this week, if not today, to give you a boost in search engine optimization. Now, number one is to use WordPress and a mobile theme. So I'm talking about WordPress, the self hosted version, by the way, you should own, if you can somehow own your name.com, or if you have, if your blog has its own brand, right? So like, if you have, like, we have the we have membership site podcast, and I own membership site podcast.com

Robert Plank 21:26 we have a course called membership cube, and I own membershipcube.com so own the.com and that way you can toss a free WordPress blog on there. And what's great about WordPress is that you can just easily, at, you know, add some content, and a lot of the what are called themes or designs that they have are all pretty well optimized for search engines. But what you should do is install a plugin called WP touch. WP touch creates a mobile version of your WordPress blog. So you know how sometimes you go to a website on your computer and then you go and look at it on a small phone screen, and it looks different, but it looks it still looks okay on a phone, right? You don't have to zoom in. The text might be larger, or there might be less stuff on the page. Maybe it takes up the whole width of your phone. So that's a mobile optimized site. It looks in one way on a computer screen, but it looks different on the phone, but it still looks okay in each one. So WP touch, that's a free plugin that will give you a mobile Wordpress site. So so far, number one, use WordPress and a mobile theme. Number two, install these two plugins if you haven't already. The first one is called All In One SEO Pack. That's All In One SEO Pack and Google XML site maps. You don't even really have to know what these plugins do. Let's just say that these plugins make things go. Just kidding. So All In One SEO will basically make your give give search engines the things that they're looking for. And so what you can do right now is go to a Google search and I'm going to put in a site that's s, i, t, e, colon, and then the name of my site, like Robert plank.com and I can see a list of everything Google has of my site looks like we have 711 results because they index pages and categories and things like that. And the biggest bang for your buck from All In One SEO is that they they make your descriptions look better. So like in a search, there's the listings, right, and there's the title, the URL, and then maybe, like, two lines of text about what's on that page. And All In One SEO kind of cleans up that text, and usually without it, this text might be listing the links on your sidebar. So it's really helpful if you have All In One SEO installed, and that'll kind of clean up your your descriptions in those in those search results. Now Google XML site maps, what that does is it, it submits periodically a list of all your pages in Google to Google. That way, Google makes sure to have all of your content indexed All right. Now next, install a plug in called w3 total cash at C, A, C, H, E for cash, not like cash and money, but cash isn't like a cache of gold, right? W3 total cash. This makes your site run faster. This makes it so that every time you're someone comes to your website, it doesn't have to go and read files and load the database, and then it does a thing. If you don't know what this is, this is fine, but it does a thing called it minifies JavaScript and CSS. So if you've ever looked at the code, if you ever like write. At the web page and went to view source, looked at all the gobbledygook there, there. There's like the text on your page, but there's all these tags, there's this, the look and feel and all this stuff. And so w3 total cache will compress all the all the files that your website calls, right? So like all the graphics and look and feel, and the colors and things w3 total cast compresses them, and this shaves a few seconds off your load time and gives you a nice boost. If you can get your site down to about two seconds, that's awesome. And so I have a resource free here go to Google and search for Google Page Speed Insights. All right, we're gonna go there together Google Page Speed Insights, and we go just to the very top result, and I'll put in my URL, and it will take a second to analyze it, and it will give me a checklist of things to correct. And then the other place I want you to go is tools, dot ping, dom.com, that's t, O, O, L, S, dot P, I, N, G, D, O, m.com, and what I like about ping DOM is they will give you a speed test of your site and though, and so it looks like My blog loads in about 3.31 seconds. So that's almost where I want it to be, but I would like it if it was a little faster, and if it was about two seconds, if you can get under two seconds, you're doing awesome. And usually w3 total cash will do that. And what you can even do is run tools, dot ping, dom.com, and Page Speed Insights and see how fast your website loads, and then turn on the caching and then see how fast it is. And many times, I mean, I haven't been able to do this on all of my sites, but many times we've had sites that load seven or eight seconds, which is really slow in search engine terms, in SEO terms, then install the caching plugin, and the biggest bang for our buck was minifying the other files, and by doing that, we reduced it from seven seconds to two seconds. Which what does that do? It gives users who click a faster user experience, and that's what Google optimizes for. So if they see that your websites load faster, you'll get a little bit of a bump, because think about it. What if your site took two seconds to load? Let's time that. One, two, okay, pretty fast. Not bad. Now I see the page. What if it took seven seconds? 1234567,

Robert Plank 27:37 I mean, a freaking eternity. So w3, total cache. And then there's special things in the settings. And like to cache the database and the disk, but the biggest bang for your buck, you have to check these boxes specifically in the settings, Minify JavaScript, minify CSS, then load Google page, speed insights in your browser and tools, dot ping, dom.com, to see how your website matches up. Now I know that we've kind of gotten into some technical stuff and like. That's to be expected, if you can either figure it out on your own or maybe go and go and look on YouTube for how to do this. Guess what? You search Google on how to speed up your site, how to use w3 total cash. Find a YouTube video. Guess what? You're finding someone else's helpful content. So here's giving you a bit of a break by 10 years of your domain name. Okay, so we recommend you go to namecheap.com to buy your own.com name. We really don't like you to buy like, a dot info or a dot biz or a dot XYZ. Most sites, most serious sites on the Internet, are.com websites. So the next thing is that, Okay, you go and you buy that and you and on name sheet, but I think it's about nine or $10 to buy a.com name. You go spend your 10 bucks. Cool. Now you have a.com name, but all these websites want you to have a long term business, a long term web presence. So what does that mean? Well, that means that if you and you can go and buy multiple years in advance, right? So instead of just buying, instead of just paying $10 one time, and then today, in a year, if you don't pay another 10 bucks, you'll lose that.com name, you go and you buy the most number of years you can buy, and usually that's nine or 10 years. So if you already bought a.com name and you're already own one year, it's usually pretty easy to log back into your domain registrar and go ahead and buy nine more years for 90 bucks. And you might say, Okay, well, I don't know if I want to spend 90 bucks. Well, I'm not saying to buy 10 years worth of domain names on every single one of your sites. But if there's a site that you plan on having for the rest of your life or the rest of your internet career, then go ahead and buy those extra nine years because you'll get a slight boost. And sites like Google will say, okay, great, this domain name is registered nine years in advance. So we're going to take that one a little. Google more seriously, number five, and this is getting a little technical, but that's okay, search for Google Webmaster Tools. Okay, I'll do it with you, Google Webmaster Tools. And what you do here is the very first section for me is called the Google search. Let's see. There's the Google Search Console, and it looks like I have a few sites there, but I forgot to submit my blog, so I'll do that after this podcast. So there you go. So I have a lot of these steps in the checklist, but not all. So Google Webmaster Tools, and so you can basically claim the sites that are your own. And what you do is you go, and at the moment, the button is called, add a property, and you can just say, Okay, well, my website is Robert plank.com and then as part of that, you have to verify that you own it. And they'll say, upload this special file into your site. And after you've done that, then they'll say, okay, great, you've uploaded that, that special file, and now you've proven that you own it. And Google wants, I mean, they want to have as much information about you and your site as possible. So they want to know what sites you own. And then there's, there's all these little tools, and they're always kind of changing it around. But there's kind of interesting tools where you can get a list of all of the pages of the site that they've crawled. You can view your site the way that they view it. You can see if, if they've blocked any of your site, or the last time they've they've indexed it, or problems with it, stuff like that. But just by having it in here gives you a little bit of a boost. And if you also know of a service or a tool called Google Analytics, you can sign up there as well, and it'll give you a little bit of tracking code to add to your website. So kind of two tools and one. There Google Webmaster Tools, where you can verify the list of sites you own, and then Google Analytics code, where you can put a little piece of code on your website, and they'll give you all kinds of information. They'll tell you how many people are on your website right now. They'll tell you how long they stay on your website. They'll tell you what countries they come in from. And this is one of those things where, as far as I've read. So like, I'll look at every now and then blog posts by a guy named Matt cuts. I'll look at some of his videos and things he is pretty much like the face of search engine optimization on Google. And from, from what I've been able to kind of understand, because, I mean, the rules always change, but from what I've been able to understand is that the more information about your site Google has, the better, right? So if you add the special code on your site and Google sees that the average person who comes to your site looks like they the average person goes to two pages on our site, on at least on our backup creator.com site, they see that they stay on our site for about two minutes. So if we can, and we can get those numbers as high as we possibly can, then that's better, right? And if we can see that, well, maybe the average person on our site stays two minutes or five minutes or 10 minutes, then that is the more information that Google has. And they can kind of give us a little bit of a bump there. And even if you want to get really advanced, Google Analytics allows you to track your sales, right? And I'm not going to go into all this, but you can basically track in Google Analytics how well your products are selling. And then if Google sees that well your products are converting really well. The rumor is, or the general understanding is, you'll get a little bit of a boost here. So the whole name of the game today is to get all these little boosts that add up to a lot. Okay, so recapping so far, the first five out of 10 use WordPress and theme that's mobile friendly. So then, you know, load your website on a phone, and if it's not mobile friendly, install a plugin called WP touch. Number two, install plugins called All In One SEO Pack and Google XML Sitemaps. Number three, install a plugin called w3 total cache and be sure to enable the minification or Minify JavaScript and CSS. And then use tools Google page speed insights and tools, dot ping, dom.com, to see how quickly your websites load. And these tools, even if your website loads slowly, they'll show you where you can pick up some speed by making a few corrections. Number four, make sure that you own 10 years on the domain name that you want to increase in a ranking for so not on every site, but on a site where you have a blog and free content and your home on the web, like if you own your name.com, like Robert plank.com, I own 10 years on that domain number five. Verify the site with Google Webmaster Tools and on Google Analytics. Six and add the code that they give you, and there's actually a special plug in for Google analytics you can install on WordPress and put the code on there, and that way Google has more information about your site. All right, number six, kind of going back into technical territory, you might have to hire someone for this, but it's worth it. Buy an SSL certificate and redirect the site to 100% forced SSL. Now, what the heck is SSL? It means it's a secure site. So I'll give you an example. Here. Go to facebook.com you go to facebook.com and there should be like a little lock symbol on your web browser. And depending on what browser you use, it should show that the full web address. You know how usually web addresses are like http, colon, slash, slash, well, on Facebook, at least the web address is HTTPS and and a lot of people, a lot of really important people, are trying to get every website on the internet to be secure, or SSL or HTTPS. These all mean the same thing. And it basically means that it's encrypted, it's a secure connection and things like that. And so if you can handle it, if you have a tech team to do this, make it so that your entire site not only can run on s on HTTPS, but when someone just types in just a web address, no HTTP, anything, it redirects to HTTPS. And there's been all these rumors and rules coming out and things like that, that if your site is fully secure, fully HTTPS, then you'll get a little bit of a ranking there as well. So if that's too much over your head, that's fine. You can skip that one, but that's another one, another one of these booths out of these 10 small boosts. Now next is to have links to legal pages at the bottom of every page, and so even if you go to, let's say, facebook.com, that might be a bad example, because I need to find like their about page. How about this? I'm on a okay. I can go to facebook.com/about scroll to the bottom, and they have links for data, policy terms and policies, cookies. I can go to google.com

Robert Plank 37:21 and even though these web pages have very little on them, on the bottom, I'm seeing that they have a link for privacy and for terms so at some point, websites like Google decided that they want every website to list their terms of service. And you can get some like boiler plate generator, things like, if you if you Google search, privacy policy website generator, you can get one made for free. I think that you might be able to buy some as well. But they want you to have a web page on your site that explains the terms and conditions of your site. So like, people can't copy your site or things like that, and they want to know your privacy policy, which means that you know, do you store cookies on someone's site or someone's computer? Do you do you collect customer information if they pay you money things like that? So I'm going to give you a little bit of a plug here. Paper template.com this is a WordPress plugin that where you can create landing pages that are independent of the theme or the design of your WordPress, that you can just make a landing page anywhere you want, and paper template has built in terms pages legal pages for terms and conditions, for privacy policy, and then if you're selling anything, an earnings disclaimer. So that way, if you say, I make $10,000 a month, you're not you're not guaranteeing that somebody coming to your site will also make that money. So paper template comm is a great way to add some quick legal pages at the bottom of your web page. And it seems kind of silly, but Google has flat out said that if you have Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy pages on your site, that you will get a little bit higher ranking than someone who doesn't now the next thing number eight is add a physical mailing address and a phone number at the bottom of every page, even if The mailing address is just a PO Box. Guess what? You can, let's say you have, you have a mailbox at, like, a mailbox, etc, UPS store, right? You don't have to have PO Box. If your address is blah, blah, blah, Main Street PO Box, 500 you can put suite 500 S, U, I, T, E, sweet, 500 and then that way it looks like you might have an office, even though you just have a PO box. Now, Google has a free service called Google Voice, that's google.com/voice and they'll give you a free phone number. You don't have to have like a toll free number, but they'll give you a free phone number, and you can choose what area code, and you can choose from a list. And take out the exact phone number you want. And what's great about this is that you can do a number of things. First of all, if someone calls this phone number, you can have it forward to your phone if you want. And this is a great way, because, well, you can allow people to call you, but you're not exposing your actual phone number. You can redirect this number to an assistant later on, if you want, and even if you don't do any of those things, then if someone calls you and leaves the voicemail, then you'll get an email. And there's actually an area where you can log in and see a list of all your voicemails and play those right in your web browser or on the app, on your on your phone, and they will even automatically transcribe those voicemails, and you can call them back over the web browser. If they text a message to that number, you'll get that as if it's an email, and if you reply to that text, then it will actually send a text back out. So Google Voice really cool, right there, but add a physical mailing address and a phone number at the bottom of all your web pages, you'll look more legitimate. And the rumor is, the general consensus is you will rank higher in the home stretch. We're almost done. Number nine is to load up your WordPress ping list with with a series of URLs. So we're going to go to Google, we're gonna type WordPress ping list. Okay, that's W, O, R, D, P, R, E, s, s, p, i N, G, l, i s t, WordPress ping list. And the one I'm looking at right now, and I'll link to this, but just in case that things have changed in the future, I found one that says recommended WordPress ping list, and they'll give you this big list of all these things that look like, web pages like RPC dot, ping, O matic.com rpc.twingly.com all these different things. And basically what you do is you highlight this list of about looks like, maybe 30 URLs, web addresses, and then I'm gonna log into my WordPress back end at Robert plank.com/wp-a, D, M, I n, so if you have WordPress to go to whatever your web address is, slash w, P, dash, admin. And then I will go to setting and then writing. Okay, so settings writing, and it looks like I already got a pretty long list, but this is so a ping list is where, when you go and you make a new post on your on your blog, WordPress will go out and notify all these different sites, saying, Hey, this guy, Robert a plank, just made a new post. And so this, by having this list in here, the biggest bang for your buck here is that if you make a post on your on your blog, it should appear in Google results within a few minutes, whereas back in the dark ages, it might take you six months or a year. So we're looking for a WordPress ping list, and then you grab this list of about 30 web addresses, go to Settings, writing, finding where it says, Update Services, and paste this in. That's an easy way to make it so that when you make a new public post on your WordPress blog and notifies all this site. And then finally, number 10, this is something where this actually just came out as we're publishing this podcast, and I'm still in the process of waiting for approval here. There's a thing called Facebook instant articles, and I really hope it's still around by the time you're listening to this. If this is years in the future, it's called Facebook instant articles. So I installed a plug in called Facebook instant articles, and there were instructions on how to get approved. Basically, this formats your website in a certain way, where if if if someone clicks over to a blog post of yours from Facebook, it loads right away, like the name says Instant Articles. They don't have to wait for your website to load and the page to come just boom, it suddenly appears on on their phone. And so maybe notice this the next time, if you ever are browsing Facebook on your phone, on the app, and you click over to some kind of a, you know, a new article, if it loads like that instantly and like there's no sidebar or anything, and it just like loads right away. That is Facebook instant articles. And so I guess the name of the game today was that there were all these little hoops that mostly Google wants you to jump through, and then there are some that Facebook wants you to jump through, and then, I mean, that's the biggest bang for your buck. And for example, in that Google XML site maps plugin, there is an area for, I think Bing has a new site map, kind of a service, and things like that. And I think, I think Yahoo is trying to catch up. But at the moment, Google, and for the last several years, Google has been the biggest bang for your buck. So let me go over these 10 things just to make sure we don't leave you hanging that way. You don't have to go back and remember all this stuff. So first of all, number one, use WordPress and a mobile theme like WP touch. Number two, all in one, SEO, Google. Xml sitemaps. Number 3w, three, total cache, Minify JavaScript and CSS, Google PageSpeed, insights tools, dot ping, dom.com, number four, add 10 years on the domain like such as with your registrar name. Cheap five, Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics. Number six, get an SSL certificate and make your site 100% forced SSL seven legal pages like terms and conditions, earning disclaimer and a privacy policy and paper template.com. Has this built in. Eight, add a physical mailing address, even if you use a Google Voice number. That's google.com/voice

Robert Plank 45:38 nine, load up your WordPress ping list. So search WordPress ping list, and then you can grab a list of of notification website addresses, I guess. And then you can go to your WordPress back end settings, writing and paste those in, and then the Facebook instant articles plug in, which I'm still kind of getting the hang of. So the point of all this, I know there's always little shortcuts and hacks. You can go and look at your on page SEO. You could try to find the whatever. The latest loophole is. You could go ahead and do all these different things, but these search engines, like Google, they want you to be useful. They want it. So if someone's looking for how to tie a tie, they click over to your site. They get their results instantly. And that means that they click and they stay on your page for a while. That means that, and by the way, if you have a video that's a couple minutes long, guess what, they'll stay on your website for a couple minutes. And if your website loads quickly because you installed a caching plugin, because you had other useful content that's all part of the better user experience. And that should be the mantra. And I mean, even if in the future, some of these rules change, the whole goal is that you are more useful than the other competing websites. And so, I mean, that's every every action you take to rank better in search engines should be to fulfill that goal, to be more helpful than everyone else. And the other thing that we touch on today was that you should consistently put out content. If you consistently put out something new every couple of days, well, then that means, again, that you are more helpful than everyone else. So let's just leave it there. Let's just not get any crazier than that, but be more helpful than anyone else, and have your website deliver a better user experience. And then once you have all this traffic, then you can give people the opportunity to click and buy from you sign up to your list all this other stuff, but be helpful first. That's what Google and Facebook and being and Yahoo want Robert Plank from the Robert Plank show. Please rate and review us at Robert Plank show.com/itunes and check out my blog at Robert plank.com if you have a lot of content that you want to dump into your blog and drip it out, use WP import.com it's a quick $7 plug in. I've been using it for over eight years on my site, so go ahead and claim it. Grab it right now. WP import.com our Robert Plank from Robert plank.com thanks for listening. You.