JAR SEO: Episode 1
Voila! The transcript for Josh and Matt’s first JAR SEO podcast! If you didn’t catch it earlier, listen here! Matt and Josh will discuss SafeWay’s website, interesting news stories, and also do a tool review of Rank Tracker.
Please note that in the future, our SEO gurus would love to do site assessments for your site. If you want them to do a site assessment for your site, then, let them know. Email either Josh or Matt and put in the subject line JAR SEO.
Email Joshua Unseth
Email Matt Lerche
Here is the transcript for JAR SEO: Episode 1!
Matt Lerche: We are on.
Josh Unseth: So, after that intro, I want to reassure everyone who’s listening that you’re not listening to a radio show about robot porn, but you’re listening to Matt Lerche and Josh Unseth, both members of The JAR Group, and we’re going to talk to you about some SEO today. It’s the first‑ever broadcast of the podcast of The JAR Group. So, welcome.
Matt: Yeah. You’ve got to start someplace, right?
Josh: [laughing] Right.
Matt: [laughs]
Josh: So, the general format’s going to be pretty simple. We’re going to do a little site assessment. We’re going to do a little weekly update, where we talk about some of the news in SEO. And then we’re going to cap our show off with a tool review. So, a lot of exciting stuff. OK? So, this week for our site assessment, we decided that we’d go with a Fortune 500 company. And so we picked Safeway’s website…
Matt: Why did we choose the Fortune 500?
Josh: Oh. Good question, Matt. Well, if you head over to The JAR Group’s website, Matt Lerche, my compadre, wrote a great post about how Fortune 500s suck at SEO.
Matt: Yeah. And for those that are listening, if you haven’t heard it before, it was a report put out by Conductor displaying how the Fortune 500s were missing out on SEO, how they were basically putting all their eggs in one basket, to pay‑per‑click.
Josh: Right.
Matt: Let’s see how they’re doing with safeway.com.
Josh: All right. So first thing I noticed when I get there, they have a real long URL structure, right on their home page. They don’t have real clean URLs. So that’s the first thing I’m seeing.
Matt: One thing, also, as soon as I hit it, and you check that, is actually a 302 redirect.
Josh: Oh, really?
Matt: Yeah, pushes it out to the home. As everybody probably knows, best practice, if you’re going to push out to that, you’re going to want to go to a 301 or restructure that. Best‑case scenario, obviously, is just as a dot‑com, like normal people. But…
Josh: That’s a good catch, Matt, because what happens is, if you’re doing SEO at all, what it means is that if you’re doing a 302 redirect, you’re not getting any of the link equity that’s going to your home page. You’re basically putting up a page that has no visible links to it, which kind of sucks.
Matt: Yeah.
Josh: So what you’d want to do is implement a 301. So that’s a good catch. The other thing is, I’m browsing here now with a browser with JavaScript turned off, and they have an awful lot of JavaScript on the site. So, all of the refer links, for example, except two, are JavaScript. They don’t even appear if I peruse the site without JavaScript on.
Matt: Yeah. And that does not help with search indexing. I’m sure there’s other ways around it, as far as the spiders finding their content, but best‑case scenario is to, obviously, have everything crawl‑able, for search engines.
Josh: Right, right. Yeah, Matt, you showed me the other day, if you click on the blog post, in the same way, if you have JavaScript turned off. Talk a little bit about what’s going on there.
Matt: Well, actually, as sort of a prelude, when search engines are basically crawling the site, they’re not executing JavaScript. So, as they hit the page, for instance, on safeway.com, to their blog, there is nothing there. It’s completely gone. It redirects. They’re using a JavaScript redirect to push users out to the blog, but the search engines aren’t actually finding the blog that route. There is another way to get users there, but it’s not this. Me, and I’m sure you are, Josh, is a fan of the path of least resistance. You want to push search‑engine crawlers to the content as quickly as possible.
Josh: I guess another big thing that I’m noticing on Safeway’s site is that they are a HUGE fan of sub domains, which is kind of frustrating. If I were doing SEO for their site, I would be extremely frustrated with this. Every little link on the top, like, I don’t know, their shopping links, the grocery carts, these things go to different sub domains. So, for example, they have safeway.com. They have shop.safeway.com…
Matt: Community.safeway….
Josh: Yeah, community.safeway.com. Tons of others that I’m only kind of finding as I continue through the site. I’m finding more and more. I’m kind of amazed at how much they use sub domains. I haven’t seen a lot of sites use sub domains quite as frequently as Safeway seems to be using them.
Matt: Yeah, exactly. I’m a fan of “keep it simple, stupid.” Get everything under one umbrella, keep it simple, keep all the content accessible…
Josh: Keep all the link equity on the main domain.
Matt: Exactly. Why spread it around?
Josh: No spreading the love. [laughter]
Matt: What else have you noticed on the site? Have you noticed anything else?
Josh: For usability, one of the things that I’ve noticed is that they have all their calls to action, in terms of joining the mail list or joining them on Facebook, all at the very bottom of the page. So it’s not above the fold. A lot of the content on the main page is in Flash, and there isn’t actually a whole lot of written script. So search engines, again, aren’t going to find a lot of the content in the Flash. They’re not going to find image content. They’re going to give less credence to text that’s in an alt tag on these pages. And so Safeway’s got, I don’t know, very little text here on the home page, maybe 100, maybe less, words, total. It’s not good for indexing.
Matt: Yeah. And again, that’s 100 words or less that the spider’s going to actually find, because of the JavaScript issue.
Josh: Also, their title text. If you take a look at their title text, it’s not conducive to rich keywords and good rankings for competitive, rich keywords, which you’d think a Fortune 500 could easily rank for, right? Matt, how much are they spending every year on SEO and other keywords for PPC?
Matt: In the millions. The millions per day.
Josh: Per day, right?
Matt: Per day. Yeah, exorbitant amount.
Josh: It’s incredible. So, yeah.
Matt: So, the benefit for them using SEO versus PPC, well, the benefit would be using them side‑by‑side. But at the same time, implementing keywords onto the pages that they want to try and rank for and trying to get those users in would also help cut down on the pay‑per‑click spent, because, obviously, if you can rank for the words that you’re paying $10 a click on, it obviously is going to save you $10 a click because you’re in the top spot. And being that this is a high‑end site, a high‑brand site, obviously, it’s going to be able to reach those rankings a little bit better than normal.
Josh: Right. For those of you who don’t know, there’s kind of a general principle in SEO and in PPC that if a keyword converts into sales in PPC, then it’s going to convert into sales in SEO.
Matt: Exactly.
Josh: If you have expensive keywords that are converting really well, if you can get them into organic search that means you’re saving money every time someone clicks on an organic result versus someone clicking on the pay‑per‑click result. So it’s a huge benefit for companies that kind of understand that. So, another thing about the Safeway is if you take a look at the backlink profile. If you don’t know how to do this, it’s pretty simple. My favorite tool is Majestic SEO, but Safeway would be considered a competitor, so you’d have to pay $30 to get their backlink profile. So if you don’t want to pay for Majestic SEO spitting out a banklink profile, you go to Yahoo or something and you type into the search box “linkdomain,” then the URL, so “safeway.com ‑site:safeway.com.” So what that says is, basically, look for the links that are going to safeway.com that are not included on the site itself. If you do that, you’ll find that Yahoo actually has reported 126, 000 links to safeway.com. Right? I don’t know what the anchor texts are on this, but that’s a pretty significant number of links.
Matt: I would guess that the majority of it’s going to be all branded Safeway.
Josh: Probably.
Matt: Safeway grocery, whatever.
Josh: Which is frustrating, right? But that actually represents a really great opportunity as an SEO, to go back, particularly in some of these; first of all, you’re going to find a lot of image links, because Safeway sponsors a lot of things. So, for example, I found a great image link on a medium square skating rink, something like that. And, if you’re an SEO, you can reach out to the people that own that website and say, “Hey.” Because image links are not going to be as high‑quality, you can ask them to actually change that to an anchor text link, or you could actually just have them change the alt text, to a specific text for you so that you get credit for the link in a way that is not just branded. Because, branded search is nice, but you’re going to rank for your own name. I wish that I could get people to understand that.
Matt: Yeah. You’re going to rank, no matter what, for your own name, especially someone that’s large. Anybody in the Fortune 500, anybody. Safeway, they’re going to rank for their name anyways. But then again, it goes back to the concept of they’re just not spending enough money on taking care of this and taking good care of that search‑engine optimization for their site. They’re more or less into the pay‑per‑click stuff. So, I think that’s where resources are probably lacking within their internal structure is trying to get that set up on their site.
Josh: I mean, Safeway has, really, no pay‑per‑click, though. If you look around their name, there’s nothing there. This is actually interesting for me, because I would think that if you were a grocery store that was competing against Safeway in their area‑‑let’s say you had a delivery service, right‑‑I would think that you would want to step in and actually compete with Safeway in the pay‑per‑click market. Because, people searching for Safeway are probably searching for groceries, unless you’re geeks like Matt and I, and you’re searching for backlinks. [laughter]
Matt: One other area that I see that they were missing out on, also, is, how many Safeways do you think there are around the US? Hundreds? Thousands?
Josh: I mean, there are a lot of grocery stores, and they’re a Fortune 500, which means that they’re making a lot of money. They’re on the West Coast, right? Mostly.
Matt: I think. But what I’m getting to is, basically, their local optimization.
Josh: Yeah.
Matt: Right now, all they’re doing is just a single field for “Enter your city, state, and ZIP.” Obviously, something they should probably take advantage of is doing a sub‑page for each store. Add to that local search. Somebody new to an area, doesn’t know where a grocery store is within Portland, Oregon, or Los Angeles, they want to find the closest grocery store. There’s an opportunity that they’re actually missing out on, from my perspective.
Josh: That’s huge. And Matt, just talks a little bit, too, about, let’s say you were Safeway, how would you structure those URLs?
Matt: Well, you can do them in numerous ways. Obviously, incorporating the city‑state into the URL. Obviously it’s going to be a subdirectory URL. But more importantly, I think, is the content on that page. You’re going to want to incorporate the city, the state, ZIP; maybe the services offered, maybe an image of the store, obviously, maybe a Google Map on the page. And then, from there, you can fold it into gathering and creating those locations within Google, taking advantage of them, getting those Google Local listings for each business. Also, on top of that is, if there’s thousands of Safeways around the US, you know what they can do is, they build out a page for each location. That also adds a few thousand more pages to their website. That’s dynamically generated very simply. You’re putting your fingers out. You’re putting those feelers out for more areas, more avenues to draw users in, for branding purposes, for search. And I think that’s really important.
Josh: I think it’s amazing, the fact that if they have 100 or 200 or 300 or 1000 stores throughout the US, just claiming their listings would get them to show up in all sorts of local, unbranded search.
Matt: Yeah. Yeah. Unbranded, branded, whatever. Like I said, it just puts those fingers out. It’s more avenues for users to come in. And it’s a great branding engine for them.
Josh: I think, also, it’s a good segue into micro‑formats. If you have thousands and thousands of location‑based pages, you can, basically, using micro‑formats, tell Google exactly what on the page is a phone number and what isn’t, although Google does a pretty good job of sorting that out already. Putting phone numbers on every page, putting addresses on every single page, is going to show the search engines where you are located, and they’re going to reward you for giving them that data by doing things like having a map show up in listings. And what that means is, anytime somebody searches, let’s say, I don’t know, “Portland groceries,” you have the potential to show up with a giant listing with a big map picture next to it. And people like pictures. People click on pictures. It means that you get more real estate in the search‑engine results page, which is especially important for mobile, just wanted to say.
Matt: Yeah. Which is a whole different piece in itself, I guess.
Josh: Yeah, we shouldn’t touch that. But just pointing that out. The more ample set you have, as more mediums come out, like the iPad, mobile, whatever, the better it is for you and your search.
Matt: Absolutely. Booyah.
Josh: Booyah! OK. So, just as a note, we want to do this once a week. We don’t want to continue to do just Fortune 500s. We’d love to do site reviews for your sites. So, if you want, we’d love for you to submit sites for us to review. You can send us an email, either at joshua.unseth@thejargroup.com or matt.lerche@thejargroup.com. So send us your sites, and we’ll take a few to review every week. OK. So, next on the list are some weekly updates.
Matt: Yeah. What have you heard? Everybody’s heard. What have you heard? Have you all heard?
Josh: Well, Matt, I heard that you got hit with some ranking problems this week, and last week and the week before.
Matt: Personally. Personal sites, I have been hit. And it’s actually a good test because it shows me what has been hit, what hasn’t. And obviously, Matt Cutts has that video out, talking about the latest update, the quality of the sites. And so, experimental sites, such as the ones I use, one of them definitely got hit, while the same basic concept have not been hit, sites going from 4‑500 uniques a day to 20 or 30 because of long‑tail, just being wiped out from the Internet, or at least from Google.
Josh: Right. Essentially, what Cutts said is that this famous “MayDay” update, which happened around May first, apparently is attacking long‑tail terms. I don’t know how to say it. They’ve removed a lot of the ability to rank for long‑tail terms out of the index, which is kind of frustrating for…
Matt: For a lot of the smaller guys.
Josh: For shady SEOs like Matt.
Matt: No, no.
Josh: Just kidding.
Matt: You know what? You see a lot of people use “shady” and this and that. It’s not shady. It’s experimental: what works, what doesn’t.
Josh: I completely agree. One of the first things that Matt and I discussed when I came to JAR, we were talking about white‑hat versus black‑hat SEO. I think Matt said it best, the best I’ve ever heard anyone say it, when he told me that there’s no such thing as white‑hat and black‑hat; there’s a spectrum, and you’ve just got to know what the risks are associated with everything new.
Matt: Exactly. What I always tell people is, how close to the fence can you get before you get electrocuted? And obviously, you have a site that dumps, like mine, obviously, after an algorithm update, obviously, you’ve touched that electric fence.
Josh: And let’s be honest. Google isn’t really into banning sites. It doesn’t happen that often. And I’ve heard a lot of fear‑mongering about it. Rarely have I seen sites banned. Rarely have I seen sites permanently drop in rankings for doing shady stuff, as long as they kind of rectify it later on. It’s pretty rare, and if it happens, then you’re probably going crazy doing something really, really bad.
Matt: Yeah. Most of the time, it’s going to push you past the top 100. So it is what it is, I guess. And obviously, Google is not the only search engine, but they are basically the top dog. In my case, they were the top driver of traffic, so, obviously, it killed traffic to that particular site. I haven’t seen it any clients. Obviously, we have clients that haven’t really been affected by it. Most of them are hitting some of the top‑level terms rather than long‑tail, because they basically have that equity to rank for those sites. I don’t know. In your case…
Josh: SEER Interactive actually did a study on their clients where they showed their traffic since the “MayDay” update. And they showed, basically, if you take a cluster, plus‑or‑minus‑five‑percent increase or decrease as normal, all of their clients were pretty much even across the spectrum. They had people that increased a lot and people that decreased a lot. It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. It seems like, if you have a slew of clients, if you have enough of a data set, you can show that, basically, the “MayDay” update, for good sites, really didn’t affect too much. And for sites that maybe the content’s a little more specious, like you’re aggregating a lot of content or spamming or something like that, it’s going to be a little harder to rank for. A lot of them are competitive terms. So you might have seen a drop.
Matt: Yeah. And my theory is, on one site that I have that’s aggregating feeds, that one actually took a dump as well in rankings. I think, and this is my theory, that they are, obviously, it’s a quality update, which has been mentioned before. What I think they’re doing is using the original content, using original content from the sites that produced those to actually rank, rather than the sites that might be aggregating it. It’s removing a lot of the duplicate issues that might be out within their index.
Josh: Right, which is frustrating if you have a site that’s really all aggregating content? But other than that, yeah…
Matt: Yeah. As well, according to Matt Cutts, from his video, this is something that they’re not going to reel back on. There are no filter changes that are coming after this. It is what it is. Take it or leave it. Make your site work for what’s going on now. If you follow a best practice from the beginning, then I think you’re pretty much good to go.
Josh: Right. Which I think is the general principle of Google, right? They do what they do, and that’s what they do. You can complain. You can bitch about it. You can moan. But in the end, whatever they do, done. And it’s going to stick there. You’re going to just adjust. The best thing to do is to adjust.
Matt: Exactly. Just look back, see what was changed, make some slight adjustments. Don’t go haywire and start changing everything, or else you won’t know what works. And then go through and just slight adjustments. Just make little keyword changes, maybe some linking here and there. Just see what happens and monitor it.
Josh: For agency SEOs like Matt and I, it’s a little different because we’re working with lots of clients. For in‑house SEOs, you’re not going to have as much to experiment with or test on. Essentially, the principle’s the same. If you want your sites to rank, you’re going to have adjusted at the time. Anything else happening, Matt? Can you think of anything else this week you wanted to cover?
Matt: No. Not that I can think of. Can you?
Josh: Not a whole lot. I thought there would be a couple of good blog posts that I wanted to point out. One is on SEOmoz. There’s a post put out by Lindsey on SEO site audits which I really enjoyed. It’s kind of a discussion of how she goes through big and small sites and does audits, which is good, especially for agency SEOs or those trying to break in as agency SEOs. Just kind of learn how to do site audits, or what goes into them, just auditing your own site. It’s a decent template for understanding what you should be looking at. And then the second thing is a post by Danny Sullivan over at Daggle. He talks about how the mainstream media stole, without crediting it, one of his posts, which was the article on‑‑you may have heard it‑‑Google getting sued by the woman who misused Google Maps. Right.
Matt: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I heard that.
Josh: Yeah. So, Danny Sullivan was the one who broke the story, and if you look online, all the mainstream media, from the UK, the US, seem to have misidentified the source content. Which is interesting, he points out, because that’s what bloggers tend to be accused of doing.
Matt: Yeah.
Josh: They even pegged his images. Interesting.
Matt: Well, I guess it’s a good form of flattery, except he’s just not getting the credit for it. It sucks for his part. Yeah. As far as the actual story, though, that lady should probably be just shot. If she has time to drive around and look at her Google Maps and try to figure out, and it turns her into a wrong direction and common sense doesn’t play into it, well…
Josh: I think she was walking and she got hit by a car. I think that was what it was. Something like that. But yeah, you’re right. I think that you’re right.
Matt: That’s just my opinion.
Josh: More than anything, I feel so sad for Danny, because I’m thinking about all the links he missed out on, and not just like regular sites. When you’re the source for an article, it’s syndicated on some of the Internet’s most important sites. So you have BBC. You have “The New York Times.” These sites pass ridiculous amounts of authority. They pass ridiculous amounts of rank being built. They’re awesome. If you can get a link from them, they used to be worth hundreds and hundreds of dollars. They’re those links that you dream of getting. And there was this article he writes that has potential to get 8, 9, 10, 15, 30 of these super‑high‑quality links, and they skipped his site.
Matt: Skipped it.
Josh: But whatever. Search Engine Land does pretty well, right?
Matt: Yeah. Cutthroat. [laughter]
Josh: So, I guess the final thing we wanted to do was…
Matt: I was going to say, any more updates? Can you think of anything else that you’ve seen across the Internet that might be worth noting this week?
Josh: Nah. Those are the most interesting things I remember, the “MayDay” update probably the most significant discussion this week.
Matt: It is. It is. To get back to that “MayDay” update, a lot of people were talking about the dates that that actually happened. In my particular case, it was around the 17th when I saw that huge dip. I know a lot of people are talking about 28th through about the beginning of May, which is about the 3rd. Obviously, mine was way after. So, just keep an eye out. Watch it. I don’t think it’s done yet, in my opinion. I think it’s still going to keep going. I think there’s still going to be some adjustments; they’re just not going to tell anybody about it, obviously. We’ll see. We’ll see what happens.
Josh: For me, for anyone listening, I’d like to note, too, all of my experiments that I was doing, on major sites, for example, YouTube, or content sites that are well‑trusted, all of my content shot to the top for the keywords I was targeting. Which is interesting, because a lot of them I’ve been experimenting with the link quality, and for a number of my YouTube videos, they shot to top of the rankings for really, really competitive keywords, even though the only thing I’m giving them are really, really, really crappy links. Which was just incredibly interesting, that Google seems to disregard the quality of those links for sites like YouTube?
Matt: So, you have a tool review.
Josh: Yeah.
Matt: What do you want to talk about?
Josh: OK. The tool that I picked up this week is one that we use internally here at JAR, and me and Matt, both, have kind of grown to really love this tool. It’s LinkAssistant’s Rank Tracker.
Matt: Love it.
Josh: All right. Good‑bye, everybody! No, I’m just kidding. [laughter]
Josh: That’s great. What this tool allows you to do is basically take all of the keywords that you want to track, throw them in, and get weekly, or daily or whatever period of time you want to, you can check your rankings, and it spits out a report for you. It’s wonderful, both for your own personal understanding of how your rankings are performing, how your keywords are performing, as well as helping your clients track their performance in search‑engine‑results pages.
Matt: Exactly. One of the things I really like about it, also, is the trending for a particular keyword on individual keywords and individual engines. So, you can actually see what’s happening from engine to engine, keyword to keyword. And also, depending on the dates that you set it at, it can help you trace back any particular keyword to a particular date. You can kind of narrow it in if something happens; say a drop in rankings or an increase. It also helps you map the trend, the rise, of that particular keyword over a certain period of time. That’s one of the main things that I really love about it.
Josh: Or the fall, as the case may be.
Matt: Yeah, yeah, the fall.
Josh: It’s one of my favorite tools. Another tool that we use is Raven SEO here at JAR. And the reason I mention that is not for me to do a review of it but because, one, I’d love a link from Jon Henshaw, who’s the CEO of Raven. No, I’m just kidding. The reason I mention it is because Raven has a function where they do ranking as well. And they do a really good job of it, but the problem with it is that it only updates, I think, once a week, right? Am I right on that?
Matt: From what I understand, yeah, I believe it’s once a week.
Josh: Right. So this allows me to get a more consistent view of my rankings, especially as my rankings are doing the Google dance, where they’re going from position 43 to position 8, or position 97 to position 13, and every single day they’re in between there somewhere, right? I can get a better understanding of what my keywords are doing and how they’re getting ready to perform, I guess.
Matt: Exactly. Position two to 253.
Josh: Man, I hate when stuff does that. [laughter]
So, yeah, I actually really like the reporting. I use it differently than I think a lot of people use it for. What I use it for is I take a look KEIs that it spits out. And when I’m, for example, putting together a plan for a blog or a new site, what I’ll do is I’ll dump in a bunch of keywords and I’ll basically let Rank Tracker do my research for me and tell me which keywords are the most efficient ones to go after. So, in terms of targeting posts, I actually go by the KEIs that it spits out. And it determines which are the most competitive but also the most rewarding keywords to pull down, and I put those up first on the blog so I can start targeting those with keywords, with link‑building.
Matt: Yeah. I like that feature as well. Another cool feature of this, as well, is just being able to customize the output of the data that’s being collected. They have a drop‑down on the right. Obviously, they have a keyword‑research view, top 10s, whatever. But the best part is there’s a custom option, allowing you to create custom columns. So, say you only want to see KEI, you only want to see just Google ranking and Yahoo ranking. You can create a custom report for just that. It’s pretty robust. And also, another feature that I really like about it is scheduling. I can schedule it to run once, twice a week, a couple days apart, and it just does it in the middle of the night when I’m not sitting here. I did notice, one bad thing that I don’t like about the scheduling is that if it’s taking a little bit longer than usual, if I’m at my computer, it bogs it down. That’s one of the things I don’t like about it. But I guess it’s expected when the engine’s running in the background. But run it in the middle of the night, works great. And you can find Rank Checker at link‑assistant.com. I don’t know how much it is off the top of my head, 99 bucks?
Josh: Yeah, it’s something like that. It’s great for individual SEOs, agency SEOs, in‑house SEOs. It’s such a useful tool.
Matt: Yeah. They have some other tools as well that are available, but this, to me, seems to be the most useful, for now. Maybe in some future podcast, we’ll talk about some of the other softwares that they offer.
Josh: Right. And one of those… I don’t remember all the names. I love them all. Rank Tracker’s the one I use most. But there’s one that it really helps you to kind of dig into competition links, backlinks and stuff that you find.
Matt: Yeah. Quickly, there’s Link Assistant, to help you gather links. Another one’s SEO SpyGlass, to spy on your competitors. And obviously, Website Auditor helps you find out what’s wrong with your website, and it kind of gives you a report back. SEO SpyGlass is pretty good. It gives you a step‑by‑step. I think they do it in seven steps, once it’s done. But again, we’ll talk about that on another podcast. We’ll go a little bit more in‑depth on that.
Josh: Right. Needless to say, this is one of my favorite softwares, one of my favorite tools that we’ve ever come across. I love it. It’s great. It’s useful. It makes my life super‑simple, and it allows me to kind of get a top‑down view from everything I’m doing, and it tells me whether I’m good at what I do or not.
Matt: Yeah.
Josh: Which I’m happy to report is an affirmative.
Matt: That’s always a plus.
Josh: I ran the Website Auditor the other day, and it said what’s wrong with my website is me.
Matt: Yeah.
Josh: Yeah. No, I’m kidding.
Matt: It said “Sell.”
Josh: Sell. [laughter]
Matt: Do‑over. [laughter]
Josh: Reboot. Yeah. It was a moment of truth.
Matt: Yeah.
Josh: OK. So, just to recap what we’ve talked about, just looking at Safeway grocery stores, a Fortune 500 company, I think that they represent a lot of problems that a lot of people have. We just want to kind of reiterate the importance of keeping your domain equity all on one domain. If you’re going to add a blog, don’t put it on a sub domain; keep it on the main domain. Keep your JavaScript to a minimum. Don’t make it part of the main navigation. Don’t put it in the footer. Don’t put it in the header. Just keep it minimal, except maybe for pretty effects. Don’t put Flash on your site. Some of the basic stuff, SEO basics, right?
Matt: Don’t use JavaScript redirects. Yeah, this is all best‑practice stuff.
Josh: Right. Which is interesting that a Fortune 500 company, spending millions a day on keywords and ranking, wouldn’t be able to get right? And I think that’s pretty crazy.
Matt: Yeah. And this is just one.
Josh: That’s just one. And it wasn’t even the worst that we found. It was just one of the more interesting ones. The other thing is, a great tool to use is Rank Tracker. Just remember that. It’s at link‑assistant.com. Or, for those of you who are afraid of the Internet, http://www… I’m not going to go through that. Then the final thing is the news that happened this week. There’s the big “MayDay” stuff that occurred, with rankings plummeting for people who after a lot of the long‑tail stuff, and some of the better, more quality sites rising to the top. And then the couple posts that I mentioned that I was exciting about reading this week and I really enjoyed.
So those are the three things that we kind of hit on this week, three main things.
Matt: Great.
Josh: Yeah. What we’re going to do, I think, next week is we’re setting up, here at JAR, a branded URL shortener. So, anything we start talking about next week, we’re going to give you a shortened URL for. You can expect that. So come back and listen. I think you’ll really enjoy what we’re going to be coming up with. We’d really like to make this more about SEO problems that most people don’t talk about, more in‑depth SEO, that kind of thing that is important to us, like the mole on Matt’s back.
Matt: Right. Exactly. [laughter]
Matt: Thanks, Josh, for giving that secret away.
Josh: You’re welcome.
Matt: Don’t tell me how you even know that from across the country.
Josh: Remember, if you’re listening, come back next week. And if you have a website that you want us to review, go ahead and submit it to joshua.unseth@thejargroup.com or matt.lerche@thejargroup.com. And we’re excited to have you. So, tune in. And we’re out. Are we going to play the robot‑porn music again?
Matt: We could, yeah. Yeah. I’ll think of something good to put on there, for the peeps.
Josh: OK. All right.
Matt: Later.
Josh: Thanks for listening.
