Hey everyone, I am here today with Jacob Hagberg and we just recorded, I’m going to be admitted here, we just recorded an awesome interview with him where he was explaining some SEO tips. And I’m going to back it up b saying I messed up because I have not done the live Hangouts before. I usually do the pre-recorded. Well since I messed up we decided that we’re going to re-record this for everyone, not only for the SEO group to see this but we’re also going to because I like it so much and I think every business owner needs to see this. We’re going to be putting it on our Business Growth Time. So welcome Jacob and it’s good to see you again ten minutes later.
Thanks Janet, thanks for having me on the show now.
Yeah! I appreciate your coming on. So let’s get, can you please tell me first about your background and where you came from and what you do?
Yeah, I’m a full time internet marketer. We help a lot of different small businesses and larger corporations get found online through search engine optimization. I know Janet you got a background in social media so it’s a little bit a different take and I hope that I can share some valuable stuff for your followers.
Absolutely, I’m excited to have you on! Well cool, well let’s go ahead and get right into the presentation then.
Yeah. So let me go ahead and share screens here, so we’ve got that. Let’s go ahead and take a loot at this website here, strathcom.ca. Now a lot of you probably have dot com website and this just happen to be a good one as an example. So we can look at their website, looks like a very nice website. And then they got a blog portion of their website. And so many of you small business owners may have been told that you need to blog to create content as such your visitors have, you know new things to come back and view. Now what I really what them highlight is important is make sure that you’re not just putting words on a page. Make sure it’s actually valuable and is something that you want your visitors to see and come back for. So with that being said, one of the most important things you can do to check up on and to see how well your SEO is if you’re doing it yourself or if you got a different development company or an SEO agency doing it for you, you can use a couple of these tips just to see if they’re doing a good job. So the first thing that you to want to do is go to Google because that’s the big search engine that most people care about and put in this command:site, like website colon and then your domain dot com in there. So if my website was smallbusiness.com, I put site:smallbusiness.com in there. And what this is going to do is return back all the different results that Google has for your website, all the different pages. So you see for strathcom here it shows their home page as well as some different pages like their company page, kind of like the about us you might have. Their services page, careers page and some resources. So let’s take a look and let’s find out, you know, let’s just pretend, maybe they are working with an SEO company and, you know, let’s see if that SEO company was doing a good job. And the main point of this discussion or presentation is to find duplicate content. And so why is this really critical and important? When you’re building a website and for your visitors, you don’t want to show them the same things more than once. That’s like opening up a book, reading the first page and you know that was really great content but then you turn to the second and third and fourth page and it’s all the same content and to page one hundred it’s the same, you know, you’ll know you have one real good page that doesn’t make up for 99 bad pages. So a lot of times businesses are doing this without even knowing and that’s the scary part because everybody is using WordPress. More than 30% of businesses are on WordPress. It’s just all these really easy to use out-of-the-box platform. But what’s difficult to understand is that WordPress is not configured for SEO. So let’s kind of take a look at a few of the most common mistakes that we see people making. And you can do a modifier search. Now I know that sounds really scary but you can do, in url, search for either tag or tags, plural, you should do both. And what this is going to do is show all the different pages that are tag pages on a website. Now what is a tag page? Let’s go take a look we’ll be out one here for SEO. And what this is is it’s just a simple category that helps people navigate between different pages of the website. And at first glance this seems completely harmless, in fact it seems helpful. Like having a reference of this post before I read it is about auto dealerships, best practices, online resolutions, SEO and UX websites. That sounds like valuable information. But take note I’ve viewing this information on the website here and that’s what’s really important. When you’re doing this, you’re really building a website for users. But you need to take into consideration search. Now here’s kind of the scary thing about this is if we’re to look at some of these other pages here, these other tag pages, so this ones called seo, you can see that this post that they made “Not-Too-Late New Year’s Resolutions for Your Website” and again this is a company telling you how to build your website and clean it up. And you can see that they’re missing some critical things. And this isn’t to knock them down, it’s just something that gets messed so frequently. You know they’re experts in some things but they’re not always experts in everything. So you can see this post starts out every year when January rolls around, you vow to get in shape. So let’s take a look at some of these other pages on this tag page where you can see that same content. Now let’s go to some other tag pages like auto dealerships and best practices. And you can see the same content appears over and over but it’s just a different url up here, so this one says auto dealership, where this one up here says best practices, just like this. But you can see the same content is here. And now you’re starting to see this content take shape. This tag pages are creating duplicate content but the good news is in a couple of minutes we’ll show you how you can eliminate this issue or you can take this issue up with your developer, web designer, web master and kind of point these issues out to them and they can take care of it for you. Because I know sometimes it can be a little bit daunting and a little bit scary to go into the backend because you don’t want to mess anything up, right Janet?
Oh, that’s a really good point right there because that’s the fear, I would suggest to anybody that’s not familiar with this to not touch that area just because you’ve got to be real careful not to mess things up, correct?
Exactly.
You’re not understanding.
If you mess something up then they’re going to charge you for it and as an agency that’s the most frustrating thing when you’ve got a client and they’re going in and they think that they’re really doing really good things but they’re not. That’s just something I really want to caution you about and I know everybody loves to do it themselves sometimes and it’s a good learning opportunity but this is learning opportunity on the show just to kind of double check and see, knows the company you’re working with do a good job. So let’s continue on and tag pages is just one category on a website where you can have duplicate content. Now what you see is also by default, WordPress also got this other one here called archives. And when you look at one, this post was made January 27, 2015, let’s take a look at the January archive. And what you can again see up here is a new url and this is going to be indexed in Google and again it’s the same content here. And that creates another issue. And again here’s another default setting in WordPress, I just really want to hammer this in you guys how important this is. But look, it’s written by Trish. So let’s take a look at Trish’s author page, so this is another category that WordPress creates by default, authors up here. And again you can see this same post appears here with the same content. And so again you can make the argument that yeah, the post is, the page is a little bit unique or the category page, but again you have this some percentage is the same over and over and over again. And as your website’s builds up more and more duplicate content, it can loose favor with the different search engines like Google, on thing. And that’s why this is important because it can be fixed just by clicking a few check boxes. And…
Huh! And this is something that the average person can do, can possibly fix on some of these pieces?
Exactly. You know Janet, we’ll show you how to do this in, you know, two minutes or less. And that’s
Wow!
You know it’s just an easy fix. But it can, you can just see the issues that we’re having. And finally, again, you can see that it’s in a category here, automotive. This might take a little bit of time to find the post but as we scroll along, there are probably multiple pages here and stop me if I missed it but I might have scrolled right on pass it if these are sorted by date. Did you see it by chance?
No, no, the words are pretty small for me.
Let’s also zoom in.
Okay.
It might be on the next page here. So again there’s pagination and that can create duplicate content as well, as you create different posts.
And these are all, this is all duplicate content? How much, I mean obviously there’s going to be some, correct, that’s going to happen?
Yeah, it’s going to happen on every website. But you can see every single posts is having this issue. And that’s what’s pretty scary.
Okay, got it!
Let’s see if I can find that and we’re doing this live and this is just a fresh example and this is one that’s different from the other group that we used. It’s what we get if we searched harder we’d find others posts in here but let’s just continue on for the sake of doing that. So what you want to do is log in to WordPress or have your web to my dashboard here. And we’ve got the Yoast SEO WordPress, Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress installed.
Okay, I’m going to slow you down a little bit just for people that don’t have it. It’s a, you’re exactly right, it’s Yoast SEO for WordPress plugin add-on. Can you also make your screen possibly one notch bigger? There we go, perfect! That would be great!
So the most important tag, there are a couple important tabs is Titles & Metas. So you want to make sure out of the box, WordPress, Yoast WordPress SEO plugin does not have some of these boxes checked. So you definitely want to check this box here – Noindex subpages of archives. And this stops multiple pages from getting indexed by Google. So that was one that we’re going to page 1, page 2, page 3, so it can go on indefinitely. Most of these are checked by default but then let’s take a look at Post Types. So Post Types – these are going to be part of your blog, you definitely want this indexed. This is definitely the main post that everybody thinks that are created. Same with Pages, these are like your ‘about us’, help, contacts, services, just typical pages that you’d expect to see on a business website that probably aren’t going to be changing that frequently. So now when would you use a Post versus a Page? Page is usually when you’re, you got something static where’s a Post might be like a more timely news piece, a press release, something that the date is important, too. So the next tab that you want to click here is on Taxonomies. And this is where we’re going do some funky things that we’re talking that are creating the duplicate content. So for example Categories, this is again where you can mess something up if you don’t know what you’re doing so again, I’m just really going to caution you. Some use Categories and some people don’t for their posts. And so if you don’t and you never plan to, just simply check this box for noindex. And the category again was like putting it into like automobiles, like a high level search. And just really reiterate we showed an example. This was the category of Google and SEO.
Yeah, yeah. Don’t most people use categories? I mean would you suggest using categories?
A lot of people do, not everybody does and it’s important to know what your website does.
Got it.
And you can see a lot of people use tags here for internal navigation. It’s just another kind of smaller sub-category but again it’s not necessarily something that you want indexed in Google. So let’s go back and take a look and this is where you have the option of checking noindex and follow. Meaning Google can still access the page and they’ll follow the links you have on the page but they won’t put this into the index. So it doesn’t harm you by creating that duplicate content. Optionally web masters, developers out there, you can hide this from your clients that way they don’t accidentally create additional tags. So it’s a very powerful tool for the developers.
Okay.
Other tab here, unless you got multiple authors writing on the website, under multiple accounts, in general you want to noindex but follow this author archives. And that’s because that will create a duplicate content piece for every single post that you create. And generally if it’s just one person doing all the content, just disable the author archives and that can save a lot of problems.
Wow! Okay. So if it’s one person, some have guest bloggers and that kind of thing. So with guest bloggers, don’t want to do that but if it’s just one person, main author, like mine, I just have me, for instance, so I would want to have those check marked.
Exactly. There’s no point in getting yourself in trouble and it’s not like you can change it in a later date. You know if you do add another, you know, author to your website.
What is the Yoast default?
So the Yoast’s default is there will be no check box in here, They’ll have it indexed.
Okay, that’s interesting. It’s good to know.
And finally date-based archives, you know this sounds something like you really want. Yeah, I want to know by the month and year where I could find the post. But, you know, when you’re coming from Google, rarely are you going to be searching somebody’s exact brand name plus the article name plus the date that it was found and the year. Usually you already know the post that you’re looking for and that’s what’s important to find, not the date-based archive where it sits. So now comparing back to the website, again, that had to deal with these archives here in the right side bar. And again it’s still navigable by your users on the website. Everybody can still find your different posts on the side. They can still use the search function, doesn’t impact that. It just only tells Google, “hey don’t put these into the index because they’re low quality and they’re going to cause duplicate content issues.”
Nice, nice. See that’s and the thing is so many people are unaware of this. Because a lot of people will, well including myself, will just set up those plugin and just go with what the default is. So it’s really good information. Great!
Now as you can see, you know, for almost every good post that you think that you’re making because Google tells you create good content and, you know, people will link to you and you’ll get better rankings. But out of the gate, every single tiny one good posts, you’re creating maybe five or ten bad posts or bad pages that can get added into Google’s indexed. And so Google is wondering why are you doing this? This is not what we want! We see this one really good page but it doesn’t make up for those ten bad pages that you just added.
Got it.
And you know some of you guys might be running e-commerce website. That’s a big thing, too. And not certainly something that you guys need to consider. A lot of websites are built on a platform Magento and I’ll pull up this example here. I’ll try to keep it really non-technical and really simple. Again this is something definitely for your developer, I don’t expect that most business owners can do this because it can break things really quickly and cause you a lot to get fixed.
But you know the thing is I like that you’re going into this because it’s good for the average person even to be aware of this. And we’re going to have the SEO. People looking at this but then they know what to bring to their developer, too.
So everybody’s been to website, an e-commerce website. And you can see this different category set up here. Again an appropriate time to use categories. Let’s take a look at Mugs & Drinkware. What I really want you guys to do is pay attention to this url up here, mugs-drinkware and that’s what’s called. Now we can see is there are twelve items on this page and pay special attention to this 25 oz Aluminum Alpine Sports Bottle. Now watch what happens when I click 36. You can see that a whole new url has been generated up here and this creates duplicate content in Google because Google will index this. Even though you can see the content here is almost identical. Can you see that we’ve got this 25 oz Aluminum Alpine Sports Bottle right here along with similar products. So again, every single time that we change the Sort By, let’s sort by A-Z now, and we’ve got the Bohomo Mama Mug but then again if we move back to the twelve, we’ve got the same mug there again. So you see duplicate pages are created eventhough this was not the intention of the site owner. They just simply want to get people a nice easy way to navigate their website and be able to sort and find what they want. That sounds like a good user experience and it definitely is. But it’s just also giving Google the proper signals of what not to do when they come and visit the website. Because remember, this is a robot and the robot wants to follow instructions, so you need to have instructions. So this is very technical and I won’t go into it too much but there’s a main file called robots.txt. I’ll just visit that really quick.
Sure.
Like the instruction manual for robots when they come to your website and they crawl. So when Google’s robot or Googlebot comes to your website, you want to give them specific information. So for example site map is list here and this is list of the products so Google can find them. But there’s sometimes places you don’t want Googlebot to go such as, for example this website does not want them to go to customer register, this page here. You can also tell Google and other bots to not go to specific folders. So for example we didn’t want them to go to the folder samples. Maybe we have some promo in there and we don’t want Google to index that because it’s a duplicate of a different product that we had. You know except for this time it was discounted heavily because maybe we ran a groupon. And so we tell Google to disallow on anything in that folder. Then we’ll do one more really quick that is really important I think for e-commerce owners to see.
Okay.
Is that there are many pages like this that we sell that were duplicate content but just do that they’re dynamically generated. And usually that comes from a question mark in the url. So what you can ask your developer to do is add this tag, disallow*? and that means don’t index or Google, don’t put this page into the indexed if it’s got a question mark into it anything before that. And what this does is it tells Google, hey we might already have a page like that in the indexed. So as you can see these are some really simple ways that you can tell Google, you know, what you want them to do on the website. Now from time to time, you know, we’ll see that business owners have made this mistake and they’re like, what can we do? You know we click some buttons but you know these pages are still in the indexed. You know it takes a while for Google to tramp these pages out. What Google has is a great resource here called Webmaster Tools.
Okay.
And this is a really, really powerful tool and you really need to know what you’re doing because you can mess up a lot of stuff on your website. I’m just going to show you a really detrimental example is you could click Remove URLs, Create a new removal request. If you left this blank and hit continue, you would tell Google to remove your entire website from it’s index then you’d never get found, so…
Oh no, not at all.
So that’s really powerful. But let’s say it’s just anypromo.com and again I want to get rid of anything with sample on it, I could just simply do this (anyprmo.com/sample) and hit continue and that would remove any pages with the, in the folder sample. That way those no longer impact me and damage my website. So for example as a WordPress site owner maybe you’re going to do tag or tags, depending on how it was set up or maybe there is author because you have the author inside of it. And so these are couple quick ways to do this and how quickly does this take effect. This is under 24 hours for Google to remove this from their index whereas with robots maybe if you’ve got a million pages in your website because of all the duplicate products, that takes six months, maybe it takes a year for that to go away and nobody wants to wait for that. You’re losing money and you’re losing traffic as business. And I know Janet like as the, you know, just hosting this webinar here and these videos, you know, you want to help business owners grow their business and put cash right into their pocket and this is one thing that maybe they’re doing wrong that this is going to add to their bottomline. You know these are just small, little, pro tips in the industry that can really make a big difference.
Cool, yeah. And we all know as SEO takes, I mean they should know at least, it takes some time but it’s nice to learn a little trick that can be a little bit faster. So that’s really good tips. Cool.
And so I’ll just leave it with one other or two other things.
Okay.
You know there are a lot of real estate agent guys out there, everybody wants to build their business and another example is we see this occurring is with mls listings. And everybody wants a feature, every single home on their website but then again this is duplicate content because it’s already on somebody else’s website first. And so it doesn’t really help that you’re pulling in those Zillow listings, it doesn’t really help that you’re pouring them in for I think it’s called Trulia, you know there are already somewhere else on a more authoritative website. And somebody is going to find you via search for that property listing. They’re probably going to browse your website and then start searching and sorting and using the navigation. So again, those are things that you can have on the website but you want to noindex them on Google.
Great tip because I would assume everybody feels like they need to index, index, index. Because that’s what we’ve been told, you know. And so some thing’s are important index is what you’re showing us, telling us and some things you just don’t want to index.
And so that my final tip that I’ve got is, you know, take a good look at your website, take a good look at the content. There’s one really powerful tool out there called Copyscape and this is a plagiarism checker. What this can do is, you know, you can run this across your website and your content. Sometimes people outsource content and what we discover is there’s a lot of dishonesty in the, you know, in the business from writers. And you know it’s not to say everyone but there’s a small percentage but what they’ll do is copy content and it’s essentially stolen because it’s been published somewhere else, now you’re putting that content on your website. And you think that it’s unique and you’re saying this is on my service page, this is on my about us page. But maybe it’s just a generic template that’s been used, you know and recycled hundreds and hundreds of times and that’s not really what you want either. So you can use this tool, copyscape.com, just to check and see if your content is good on your website. I just want to also make this very clear, a lot of times people take content from your website and either link back to you or sometimes they won’t. And that’s okay if they link back to you. Now sometimes when they don’t and it appears to be stolen, now you’re trying to decide should I go after this. But a lot of times Google figures out who is the original author. And they know that you are the first originator of that content. And so every time somebody takes that content from you and post it somewhere, you’re getting credit for that whether or not they give you a link.
Wow, wow. See now that is fantastic. Can you repeat that in a little bit of a different way. I just want to make sure that we make sure that point comes out and you know what, do you want to come back on the screen? I’m talking to words, I’m talking to Webmaster Tools.
So another good way to reiterate that is, and let’s combine it with social which is your specialty. So we’re going to create this, we’re going to put this on YouTube and really it’s your content. You’re the one that owns it and now what you have is people going out and taking that and putting it in places. And when you look at that that often times there is an embed but there’s not always a link back, they don’t site their source, your site, your original website. But you can see that Google knows that you’re the content creator. And they’re giving you credit and building your authority and authorship. So it’s just another way of looking at it from a different perspective.
Got it. That’s a great, I love that end on that because I think people need to know that piece, too. You taught us so many different things. Some was just at our level that anybody could do and some was up here. But it’s good to know all your information that you taught. So Jacob what I’d like to do is now let’s say somebody’s listening, they have questions and want to reach out to you. Where is the best place to get a hold of you?
Yeah, they can go to www.orangefox.com and what this is is a resource for small businesses and even larger corporations just trying to figure out well how can we do SEO. How can we do it in-house? And just to kind of get the basics and it really enables you and gives you leverage when you’re working with an agency, just because you know something and speak their language and, you know, you’re not going to get ripped off, you’re not going to be taken advantage of because so much in our industry is often sold as kind of like snake oil. And this is just kind of a resource for business owners just to kind of get a grip on, you know, what SEO actually is and how they can implement some of the basic things themselves.
Cool, well I appreciate your time and I appreciate all the tips that you taught us Jacob.
Thank you so much for having me Janet.
Yeah, thank you.