March 18, 2024 • 28 mins
Ever feel like your website's stuck in a virtual time warp? I'm Mark Mason, and in this juicy episode, we're serving up a feast of SEO optimization secrets that'll transform your online presence from outdated to outstanding. You'll join me on a thrilling ride through the labyrinth of Late Night Internet Marketing, where I spill the beans on rejuvenating a site that's been collecting cobwebs. And for those hungry for success, get the scoop on my exclusive offer of complimentary high-end coaching sessions to supercharge your digital strategy.
Imagine giving your website a shot of adrenaline that rockets it up the search engine ranks—well, that's what you're in for with today's insights. From the nitty-gritty of fixing broken links and finessing your keyword game to the sweepingly strategic like ensuring your NAP data sings in harmony across the web, we're not skipping a beat. And because we love getting technical, we'll even peek under the hood at canonical tags and robotstxt files to keep those search engine bots happy. So, buckle up and get ready for a tune-up that'll make your site's traffic meter hit the red zone.
Resolutions off the rails? You’re not alone. But there’s still time to turn things around. The ALIGN Productivity Challenge is a proven system to help you achieve your goals in just 90 days—no fluff, no overwhelm. Head to AlignProductivity.com and start your comeback today.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Mark Mason (00:00):
Episode two six zero late night internet marketing.
This week on the late nightinternet marketing podcast,
we're going to talk all aboutSEO, or search engine
optimization, for old, existingsites that you're trying to
(00:21):
revitalize.
Don't have an old site?
Don't worry, these great SEOtips have plenty of
applicability to your new siteas well.
All this and more on the latenight internet marketing podcast
.
The late night internetmarketing podcast.
(01:17):
And now broadcasting late atnight from a little studio in
the big state of Texas, yourhost, mark Mason.
Hey, how is everyone doing?
I am your host, mark Mason,coming to you live Well, not
really live, pre-recorded, it'sa podcast, and all from the
little studio in Dallas, texas.
(01:39):
I hope you're having afantastic day.
Today we're going to be talkingabout my current SEO journey
and best practices for you andSEO specifically in the context
of revitalizing an old site.
Now, the reason it's my SEOjourney is because, as you know,
(02:00):
at the beginning of this year,I revitalized my commitment to
the late night internetmarketing brand and experience.
I've got a lot of big plans forit in 2024.
There's a lot of stuff going on.
There's a course coming out inearly summer.
It's going to be very exciting,and one of the things that I
(02:20):
wanted to make sure was true wasthat I was consistently
building my email list, as we'vetalked about for years.
Email lists are one of the fewassets in an internet business
that you actually own, thatactually belong to you.
It doesn't belong to YouTube orFacebook or Twitter or X or
(02:43):
whatever we're calling thatthese days.
Your email list is your asset.
It's a part of your businessthat you control, and so it's
very important in onlinebusinesses to manage that email
list, and one great way to growit is through opt-ins on your
website, and one great way toget traffic to your website is
through organic search results,and I do get a lot of traffic on
(03:06):
late night internet marketing.
But SEO is one of those thingsthat you need to constantly be
putting energy into, and I'veignored the search engine
optimization on the late nightinternet marketing site for a
very, very long time, and so Iwanted to go with you through
some tips that you can use forSEO best practices and kind of
(03:28):
relate them to what's going onon the late night internet
marketing brand.
But before I do that, I wantedto briefly tell you about a
decision that I've made about mybusiness that impacts you.
I've decided that I'm alwaysgoing to have a coaching slot or
two open for complimentarycoaching sessions the full blown
(03:53):
, high ticket, high endexperience available to
listeners for free.
Now, there won't be many ofthese.
Simply put, I've just decidedthat part of the value that I
want to bring to the late nightinternet marketing community is
ongoing complimentary coaching.
Now, obviously, it's on a verylimited basis right, I can't do
(04:16):
much of it, but I always want tobe doing some of it.
One saying that I really likeabout stuff like this is
something that one of my coachessays all the time you should do
for a few people what you'dlove to do for everyone and
obviously I can't offercomplimentary coaching to
everyone, but I'd like to offerit to a few people.
(04:37):
I'd like to always be doingthat.
So if you're interested in afull, complimentary, absolutely
no strings attached coachingsession for me, reach out to me
at latenightimcom forward slashapply.
And if it feels like a good fitmeaning that I think I could
really help you, I'll be intouch with you and we'll see
(04:57):
about setting up a completelycomplimentary, no strings
attached but very high end andimpactful full up coaching
session for you so we can talkabout you and your business and
I can try and help you getunstuck, get to the next step,
get the right plan or whateverit is that's holding you back.
We can work together toeliminate those problems.
(05:19):
So head on over tolatenightimcom forward slash
apply If that's interesting toyou, and I'll be in touch with
you.
Now it's time to talk aboutsearch engine optimization.
Where do you start?
So the very first and mostimportant thing on an
established site and you need tobe doing this on any site that
(05:41):
you own is to address anycritical SEO health problems
that you have on the site, andthe most common one is fixing
broken links on your site.
There's a phenomenon that wecall link rot in this business,
and that is that links that werevalid a year or two or three in
my case, 10 years ago are nolonger valid, and in my
(06:06):
particular case, on late nightinternet marketing, I have
hundreds of links that need tobe updated.
Websites that no longer existare listed in various places on
my website Affiliate links thatare broken because the affiliate
product is no longer around orthe affiliate manager has
(06:27):
changed platforms and I justnever kept up with it.
Just lots of stuff like that.
Google hates that.
They see that for what it is,which is you not taking care of
your site, you providing out ofdate information, and they will
derate you accordingly.
The second thing you need to dowith an established site and
again, this is something thatapplies even if you have a new
(06:49):
site is you need to have a clearkeyword strategy on your site,
and you know, with late nightinternet marketing, with over 10
years of content, actuallystarted this site originally in
2007,.
The keyword strategy is allover the place and one of the
things that I need to do and I'min the process of working on is
(07:10):
making a serious plan forexactly what keywords I want to
rank for and what content isgoing to drive those rankings.
The idea is that you have alist of targeted keywords and
how you're going to rank, a planfor how you're going to rank
for each one of those keywords,and usually what that means is
(07:31):
you have a critical piece ofcontent, oftentimes supported by
links from other pieces ofcontent on your site that help
you link for that.
But your keyword rankings ingeneral are not all by accident.
You have a keyword strategythat you're driving towards
because you know that you wantto attract certain searchers
(07:51):
that are looking for certainthings because they convert well
in your business.
That's what a keyword strategylooks like and that's something
that I need to update and makesure is really working well for
the late night internetmarketing brand.
And then, in the context of thatstrategy, the third thing is to
evaluate the existing qualityof content on the site and its
(08:15):
relevance, and you know, one ofthe things that's going on with
the late night internetmarketing site is that there's a
lot of old content on therethat needs to be completely
removed.
One great way to do this if youbuy a site or you get an old
site and you're trying to decidewhat to do with it, one great
thing you can do is use a toollike Screaming Frog.
(08:37):
Screaming Frog is an amazingtool that will crawl your site
and give you information aboutevery page on your site, and
what I would say is if you'vegot content that Screaming Frog
tells you no one is visiting,it's not ranking in the search
engines, you determine it to beno longer relevant and not worth
(08:57):
updating, then I would deletethat content from your site and
make sure you redirect that oldlink to something relevant so
that you don't create morebroken links on your site.
I prefer to 301 redirect thatlink to something that is
relevant that could potentiallyhelp a user, in case someone
(09:20):
comes there by accident.
Of course, the next thing thingnumber four would be to do an
on-page SEO audit of every pagethat's remaining, to make sure
that every page that's remainingis aligned with your keyword
strategy and that not just thetitle tags in these pages have
the relevant keywords that's,the H1 tag on each page, the
(09:43):
header tag but also that thesubheadings are well constructed
and they have keywords in therethat make sense, that are part
of your keyword strategy.
That's an important audit itemfor every page that remains on
your website, and that's whyit's important to get rid of the
old pages first, because youdon't wanna do that work on a
(10:04):
page that really should bedeleted.
That's not helping your site.
That's just dragging you downin the first place.
I think another problem problemnumber five with old sites is
that they've often gotten prettyslow.
They've got cruft and junk,they've got old tools that
they're using and their pagespeed is bad, and so you wanna
(10:25):
make sure that you're using atool like Google PageSpeed I
think it's called PageSpeedInsights to pinpoint the exact
issues that are causing yourslow load times.
Of course, you're going towanna compress images using
something like tiny PNG, andyou're going to want to use site
accelerators that minimize CSSand compress your JavaScript
(10:49):
files and so forth.
Most Great website hostingplatforms that include a CDN or,
if you're using Cloudflare,they do a lot of this kind of
work for you.
You just need to make sure thatall that stuff is turned on and
you're using all the modernspeed Optimization tools that
are available to you and youdon't have a lot of cruft on
(11:13):
your website.
That's slowing you down.
The sixth thing I would say is,if your website is really old,
you need to make sure that itsdesign is responsive.
Mine is responsive.
That's not an issue for me, butGoogle does have a mobile
friendly website test that youcan use to identify Specific
(11:33):
mobile friendly issues thatmight be on your site.
You might be surprised, so youwant to go ahead and use the
Google mobile friendly test tomake sure that you are doing
stuff that's relevant for peopleon cell phones, because so much
of your traffic these days isgoing to come from those mobile
(11:54):
users.
Another thing you're going towant to do on all sites, but
particularly on old sites, ismake sure that you've migrated,
at some point, all of your pagesto to secure pages HTTPS,
meaning that every page issecurely served and encrypted as
(12:14):
it's served to browsers.
Google looks at this as a trustindicator, and so you might
find that you have legacy pageson your site that, for whatever
reason, are still eitherpointing to or actually serving
themselves up as regular oldHTTPS pages, and that's a
problem, and some browsers won'teven show those pages anymore.
(12:37):
So you just need to check andmake sure that everything is
running on HTTPS and beingserved securely.
Getting more into the details ofSEO, the the next thing that
you need to do from an SEOperspective is to check your
backlink profile.
This is actually my eighthrecommendation.
Make sure that that's cleanedup, use tools like a hrefs or
(13:02):
SEM rush and analyze thebacklink profile, because you
may find that you have what werefer to as Toxic links, and,
while I think Google has done alot better job of Weighing this
and not causing it to harm yoursite as much as it used to, if
you've got Sketchy or toxiclinks pointing to your site
(13:24):
maybe because you or someoneelse did some kind of sketchy
backlink campaign to your siteyou need to disavow those links
so that you can make sure thatthe links at Google's
considering pointing to yoursite or high quality links.
This is something I have toworry about on late night
internet marketing, becausethere was a time when, if I was
(13:45):
ranking for something other,other SEOs would institute
negative SEO campaigns againstmy site and Actually link back
to my site from these sketchylink platforms in foreign
countries that were specificallyfor the purpose of dragging my
rankings down.
So lots of cleanup for me to dothere from from stuff I've
(14:06):
collected over the years.
The ninth recommendation I wouldmake and this is really funny
you need to look around yoursite and make sure that your
social media engagement strategyis up to date.
I still had a few backlinks toGoogle plus on my website.
Nothing is going to give Googlea clear indication that you're
(14:27):
ignoring your site more thansome links back to a social
media platform that hasn'texisted for a decade.
So that was a littleembarrassing.
You're going to want to cleanthat up.
And while you're cleaningthings up, I think the 10th
thing I would recommend is justmaking sure that your user
experience is optimized.
I actually had someone look atmy site and their perspective
(14:52):
was simply well, what is it thatyou're wanting visitors to do
on these certain pages?
You need to be able to answerthat question, particularly on
your homepage.
What is the outcome that youwant, and maybe a secondary
outcome that you need to makesure is really happening?
And then there's some littletiki-taki stuff that I had to
fix.
That was also a kind ofembarrassing.
(15:14):
And that gets me torecommendation number 11.
Simple things like making surethe copyright date in your
footer is up to date is a signalthat you're actually taking
care of your site.
It's a best practice to makesure that your copyright date is
the current year.
I'd also as recommendationnumber 12, tell you you should
(15:34):
check your about page.
I think this is another placewhere you can update that with
current information to signalyour authority in the space, and
you may need to completelyrewrite this if it's way out of
date, like it is in my case andinclude links to authoritative
places where you've appeared onpodcasts and just make that
(15:56):
about page really beefy, becauseauthority and trust are a big
deal in the Google rankingalgorithm and your about page
plays a part in that.
And then another recommendationI have for you, recommendation
13.
This is especially true ifyou're a local business.
Make sure that your nap dataname, address and phone number
(16:17):
is up to date and it's the sameon all your social media
platforms where it's listed asit is on your website.
That's another signal to Google, particularly in Google local
rankings, that your site is notbeing taken care of.
If you've got different, out ofdate phone numbers and
addresses showing up all overthe internet, you want to make
(16:40):
sure that your address and phonenumber on Yelp, if you're a
local business, is exactly thesame as the one on your website.
That's super important forlocal rankings.
My 14th recommendation isdefinitely make sure you don't
have duplicate content on yoursite, and by that I mean
specifically what Google means,which is two pages that have
(17:01):
identical content on your siteidentical page titles, identical
descriptions, identical tagging.
This is exactly what Googlemeant when they originally wrote
guidelines around duplicatecontent.
You want to make sure that youdon't have the same thing
appearing on your website inmore than one place.
(17:22):
Recommendation number 15 iskind of a conversion thing.
You want to make sure that yourpage titles and descriptions
are the right length to showcorrectly in Google search.
Lots of data shows that pagetitles and descriptions that
show on Google search and aretoo long, meaning they end with
(17:44):
dots of ellipses you know thethree dots they don't convert as
well as ones that are writtenspecifically to fit on Google
search, and you can use a toollike Yoast SEO if you are on
WordPress, in order to make surethat the titles and
descriptions that you're usingfit well and that you've got
those optimized, because yourfirst conversion in organic
(18:08):
traffic is when your pageappears on Google does someone
click on it?
And one of the things they'reusing to decide whether or not
to click on your site is thetitle in the description.
If those aren't optimized forthe length that Google allows,
you won't get as good ofconversions as you would
otherwise.
(18:29):
My 16th recommendation is alittle technical.
It's canonicalization, and thatwasn't always an important
factor, but now it's worthadding a canonical tag to every
page.
A canonical URL it sounds super, super technical is the version
of the webpage that, whenchosen by the search engines,
(18:51):
represents the main version.
When there are duplicates, thishappens a lot in WordPress.
You know, in WordPress you canhave a slug title or you can
have the title with theparameters like page equals 247.
There might be other URLs thatall reach the same page and by
adding the canonical tag to URL,you're telling Google that
(19:14):
whenever you see this page, thisis the official URL for this
page.
This is the one I want you touse.
That's become more importantrecently, and so make sure that
you've got that workingcorrectly.
Many SEO plugins for WordPresswill handle this for you,
because it's a little technical,it's not a huge issue, but it's
something you should learnabout and pay attention to once
(19:35):
you get this far down in thelist.
That's why this is item number16.
So, finally, the last tip I'lloffer you tip number 17.
Number 17 is something that Iwas also a little embarrassed
about is check and make sureyour robotstxt file is correct.
Mine was not and I was blockingaccess to part of my sites.
(19:57):
I don't even know how thathappened, but when I did an
audit of my site I found thatthe robotstxt file was not
correctly up to date.
Generally speaking, google willrespect your request to index
or not index your site and ifyou've got a messed up robotstxt
file or ht access, that'sanother web server control file
(20:21):
If those files are messed up,you may be sending Google a
signal not to index your siteand so that it could be a
problem.
So a checklist of 17 things youcan go do and work on this year
on your existing website.
If you've had a website formore than a year, you need to go
check all these things at yourleisure.
This is kind of an ongoingchecklist that you can be doing
(20:44):
all the time.
You don't need to do all ofthis stuff all the time.
Maybe each week, pick a thingoff this list and then four,
five, six months from now, yourwebsite SEO will be much, much
better.
And what's great about that isit gets you free traffic, and
the question is what are youdoing with that free traffic?
(21:05):
You need to be capturing thosepeople on your email list or
converting that free trafficinto sales of some sort.
This kind of SEO work thereforeessentially represents free
money that you can go get ifyou'll just do the work and, by
the way, this is the kind ofwork that can be outsourced.
(21:25):
So if you don't have time, butyou do have budget, you can find
reputable SEO people to helpyou work on the optimization of
your site.
So I hope this is helpful toyou.
I hope you'll take a few ofthese tips and check your site
out.
There are a couple of tools thatI really like for this that I
think you can use.
One is Screaming Frog.
(21:45):
They used to have a freeversion.
They also have a paid version.
You can go check it out.
I love it just because of thename.
I think that's a fantastic namefor a piece of software, but it
really is a good tool toanalyze the content of your site
.
So check out Screaming Frog.
And the other thing I wouldrecommend that you check out
that I think is really great isthis tool by Neil Patel called
(22:08):
Ubersuggest.
So what's cool aboutUbersuggest is you connect it to
your Google account and youtell it your website and then it
will do SEO analysis on yoursite and make recommendations on
things you need to do.
That's really nice.
It sends you email, it'll tracksome of your keywords and it's
not very expensive, and the freeversion of that also does some
(22:31):
pretty useful stuff.
So go check out Ubersuggest andjust put your website in there
and see what it tells you.
Ubersuggest will identify someof these very items that I've
got in my list of 17 and willmake recommendations for you to
fix them, and that's kind of anice way to attack this problem
as well.
And the cool thing is, with atool like Ubersuggest that's
(22:52):
also tracking keywords, you canactually see your progress as
your site rankings improve.
So go check those things out.
Until next time, I hope yourlife and your business are
completely amazing, ciao.
You've been listening to theLate Night Internet Marketing
Podcast.
(23:13):
Be sure to visit time.
(23:41):
Okay.
So kind of funny story fromthis morning when I recorded
this episode.
People for years have alwaysasked me about advice about side
hustling and how to keep thatfrom being a problem with your
employer.
Like, what's the advice?
And I've had entire podcastepisodes how, basically, the
(24:01):
main key is to keep thingscompletely separate and of
course you don't want a conflictof interest and all these kinds
of things.
Long list of things.
But common sense prevails hereand I typically don't talk about
late night internet marketingat my employer.
I've been there for 30 years.
Many people there know about mylate night internet marketing
(24:24):
podcast and the brand and someof the work that I do, but it's
not something that I talk aboutat work.
I don't work on my business atwork.
I keep everything at home and Itry to keep things separately
and one of the things I'verecommended is typically not to
talk about your employer in thecontent that you create, because
that creates a search engineresult that could be confusing
(24:44):
for your employer.
So, for example, let's say thatmy day job is working at Acme
Dynamite and I sell dynamite fora living and I talk about that
in my side hustle in my contentMaybe I'm talking about work
life balance and I mentioned myemployer, acme Dynamite.
Then when someone searches forme at Acme Dynamite in Google,
(25:08):
they might come up with my sidehustle.
Let's say Wiley Coyote istrying to find my contact
information.
He might find late nightinternet marketing instead.
That's not a good look for meor my employer and it's
confusing for the customer.
I don't want all that so I'mvery careful about it.
This morning I get on camera.
I had to laugh.
I look at myself on the camerabecause I have a confidence
(25:33):
monitor in front of me so I cansee what the camera sees.
And there I am with my bigcorporate hat on in big bold
letters, facing right into thecamera, about to record a
podcast episode for my sidehustle.
So I had to turn the recordbutton off and go change hats.
(25:54):
It's just kind of funny.
It's the little things that Iguess probably don't even really
matter that sometimes make melaugh.
Late night.
Internet marketing.
Episode two six zero late night internet marketing.
This week on the late nightinternet marketing podcast,
we're going to talk all aboutSEO, or search engine
optimization, for old, existingsites that you're trying to
(00:21):
revitalize.
Don't have an old site?
Don't worry, these great SEOtips have plenty of
applicability to your new siteas well.
All this and more on the latenight internet marketing podcast
.
The late night internetmarketing podcast.
(01:17):
And now broadcasting late atnight from a little studio in
the big state of Texas, yourhost, mark Mason.
Hey, how is everyone doing?
I am your host, mark Mason,coming to you live Well, not
really live, pre-recorded, it'sa podcast, and all from the
little studio in Dallas, texas.
(01:39):
I hope you're having afantastic day.
Today we're going to be talkingabout my current SEO journey
and best practices for you andSEO specifically in the context
of revitalizing an old site.
Now, the reason it's my SEOjourney is because, as you know,
(02:00):
at the beginning of this year,I revitalized my commitment to
the late night internetmarketing brand and experience.
I've got a lot of big plans forit in 2024.
There's a lot of stuff going on.
There's a course coming out inearly summer.
It's going to be very exciting,and one of the things that I
(02:20):
wanted to make sure was true wasthat I was consistently
building my email list, as we'vetalked about for years.
Email lists are one of the fewassets in an internet business
that you actually own, thatactually belong to you.
It doesn't belong to YouTube orFacebook or Twitter or X or
(02:43):
whatever we're calling thatthese days.
Your email list is your asset.
It's a part of your businessthat you control, and so it's
very important in onlinebusinesses to manage that email
list, and one great way to growit is through opt-ins on your
website, and one great way toget traffic to your website is
through organic search results,and I do get a lot of traffic on
(03:06):
late night internet marketing.
But SEO is one of those thingsthat you need to constantly be
putting energy into, and I'veignored the search engine
optimization on the late nightinternet marketing site for a
very, very long time, and so Iwanted to go with you through
some tips that you can use forSEO best practices and kind of
(03:28):
relate them to what's going onon the late night internet
marketing brand.
But before I do that, I wantedto briefly tell you about a
decision that I've made about mybusiness that impacts you.
I've decided that I'm alwaysgoing to have a coaching slot or
two open for complimentarycoaching sessions the full blown
(03:53):
, high ticket, high endexperience available to
listeners for free.
Now, there won't be many ofthese.
Simply put, I've just decidedthat part of the value that I
want to bring to the late nightinternet marketing community is
ongoing complimentary coaching.
Now, obviously, it's on a verylimited basis right, I can't do
(04:16):
much of it, but I always want tobe doing some of it.
One saying that I really likeabout stuff like this is
something that one of my coachessays all the time you should do
for a few people what you'dlove to do for everyone and
obviously I can't offercomplimentary coaching to
everyone, but I'd like to offerit to a few people.
(04:37):
I'd like to always be doingthat.
So if you're interested in afull, complimentary, absolutely
no strings attached coachingsession for me, reach out to me
at latenightimcom forward slashapply.
And if it feels like a good fitmeaning that I think I could
really help you, I'll be intouch with you and we'll see
(04:57):
about setting up a completelycomplimentary, no strings
attached but very high end andimpactful full up coaching
session for you so we can talkabout you and your business and
I can try and help you getunstuck, get to the next step,
get the right plan or whateverit is that's holding you back.
We can work together toeliminate those problems.
(05:19):
So head on over tolatenightimcom forward slash
apply If that's interesting toyou, and I'll be in touch with
you.
Now it's time to talk aboutsearch engine optimization.
Where do you start?
So the very first and mostimportant thing on an
established site and you need tobe doing this on any site that
(05:41):
you own is to address anycritical SEO health problems
that you have on the site, andthe most common one is fixing
broken links on your site.
There's a phenomenon that wecall link rot in this business,
and that is that links that werevalid a year or two or three in
my case, 10 years ago are nolonger valid, and in my
(06:06):
particular case, on late nightinternet marketing, I have
hundreds of links that need tobe updated.
Websites that no longer existare listed in various places on
my website Affiliate links thatare broken because the affiliate
product is no longer around orthe affiliate manager has
(06:27):
changed platforms and I justnever kept up with it.
Just lots of stuff like that.
Google hates that.
They see that for what it is,which is you not taking care of
your site, you providing out ofdate information, and they will
derate you accordingly.
The second thing you need to dowith an established site and
again, this is something thatapplies even if you have a new
(06:49):
site is you need to have a clearkeyword strategy on your site,
and you know, with late nightinternet marketing, with over 10
years of content, actuallystarted this site originally in
2007,.
The keyword strategy is allover the place and one of the
things that I need to do and I'min the process of working on is
(07:10):
making a serious plan forexactly what keywords I want to
rank for and what content isgoing to drive those rankings.
The idea is that you have alist of targeted keywords and
how you're going to rank, a planfor how you're going to rank
for each one of those keywords,and usually what that means is
(07:31):
you have a critical piece ofcontent, oftentimes supported by
links from other pieces ofcontent on your site that help
you link for that.
But your keyword rankings ingeneral are not all by accident.
You have a keyword strategythat you're driving towards
because you know that you wantto attract certain searchers
(07:51):
that are looking for certainthings because they convert well
in your business.
That's what a keyword strategylooks like and that's something
that I need to update and makesure is really working well for
the late night internetmarketing brand.
And then, in the context of thatstrategy, the third thing is to
evaluate the existing qualityof content on the site and its
(08:15):
relevance, and you know, one ofthe things that's going on with
the late night internetmarketing site is that there's a
lot of old content on therethat needs to be completely
removed.
One great way to do this if youbuy a site or you get an old
site and you're trying to decidewhat to do with it, one great
thing you can do is use a toollike Screaming Frog.
(08:37):
Screaming Frog is an amazingtool that will crawl your site
and give you information aboutevery page on your site, and
what I would say is if you'vegot content that Screaming Frog
tells you no one is visiting,it's not ranking in the search
engines, you determine it to beno longer relevant and not worth
(08:57):
updating, then I would deletethat content from your site and
make sure you redirect that oldlink to something relevant so
that you don't create morebroken links on your site.
I prefer to 301 redirect thatlink to something that is
relevant that could potentiallyhelp a user, in case someone
(09:20):
comes there by accident.
Of course, the next thing thingnumber four would be to do an
on-page SEO audit of every pagethat's remaining, to make sure
that every page that's remainingis aligned with your keyword
strategy and that not just thetitle tags in these pages have
the relevant keywords that's,the H1 tag on each page, the
(09:43):
header tag but also that thesubheadings are well constructed
and they have keywords in therethat make sense, that are part
of your keyword strategy.
That's an important audit itemfor every page that remains on
your website, and that's whyit's important to get rid of the
old pages first, because youdon't wanna do that work on a
(10:04):
page that really should bedeleted.
That's not helping your site.
That's just dragging you downin the first place.
I think another problem problemnumber five with old sites is
that they've often gotten prettyslow.
They've got cruft and junk,they've got old tools that
they're using and their pagespeed is bad, and so you wanna
(10:25):
make sure that you're using atool like Google PageSpeed I
think it's called PageSpeedInsights to pinpoint the exact
issues that are causing yourslow load times.
Of course, you're going towanna compress images using
something like tiny PNG, andyou're going to want to use site
accelerators that minimize CSSand compress your JavaScript
(10:49):
files and so forth.
Most Great website hostingplatforms that include a CDN or,
if you're using Cloudflare,they do a lot of this kind of
work for you.
You just need to make sure thatall that stuff is turned on and
you're using all the modernspeed Optimization tools that
are available to you and youdon't have a lot of cruft on
(11:13):
your website.
That's slowing you down.
The sixth thing I would say is,if your website is really old,
you need to make sure that itsdesign is responsive.
Mine is responsive.
That's not an issue for me, butGoogle does have a mobile
friendly website test that youcan use to identify Specific
(11:33):
mobile friendly issues thatmight be on your site.
You might be surprised, so youwant to go ahead and use the
Google mobile friendly test tomake sure that you are doing
stuff that's relevant for peopleon cell phones, because so much
of your traffic these days isgoing to come from those mobile
(11:54):
users.
Another thing you're going towant to do on all sites, but
particularly on old sites, ismake sure that you've migrated,
at some point, all of your pagesto to secure pages HTTPS,
meaning that every page issecurely served and encrypted as
(12:14):
it's served to browsers.
Google looks at this as a trustindicator, and so you might
find that you have legacy pageson your site that, for whatever
reason, are still eitherpointing to or actually serving
themselves up as regular oldHTTPS pages, and that's a
problem, and some browsers won'teven show those pages anymore.
(12:37):
So you just need to check andmake sure that everything is
running on HTTPS and beingserved securely.
Getting more into the details ofSEO, the the next thing that
you need to do from an SEOperspective is to check your
backlink profile.
This is actually my eighthrecommendation.
Make sure that that's cleanedup, use tools like a hrefs or
(13:02):
SEM rush and analyze thebacklink profile, because you
may find that you have what werefer to as Toxic links, and,
while I think Google has done alot better job of Weighing this
and not causing it to harm yoursite as much as it used to, if
you've got Sketchy or toxiclinks pointing to your site
(13:24):
maybe because you or someoneelse did some kind of sketchy
backlink campaign to your siteyou need to disavow those links
so that you can make sure thatthe links at Google's
considering pointing to yoursite or high quality links.
This is something I have toworry about on late night
internet marketing, becausethere was a time when, if I was
(13:45):
ranking for something other,other SEOs would institute
negative SEO campaigns againstmy site and Actually link back
to my site from these sketchylink platforms in foreign
countries that were specificallyfor the purpose of dragging my
rankings down.
So lots of cleanup for me to dothere from from stuff I've
(14:06):
collected over the years.
The ninth recommendation I wouldmake and this is really funny
you need to look around yoursite and make sure that your
social media engagement strategyis up to date.
I still had a few backlinks toGoogle plus on my website.
Nothing is going to give Googlea clear indication that you're
(14:27):
ignoring your site more thansome links back to a social
media platform that hasn'texisted for a decade.
So that was a littleembarrassing.
You're going to want to cleanthat up.
And while you're cleaningthings up, I think the 10th
thing I would recommend is justmaking sure that your user
experience is optimized.
I actually had someone look atmy site and their perspective
(14:52):
was simply well, what is it thatyou're wanting visitors to do
on these certain pages?
You need to be able to answerthat question, particularly on
your homepage.
What is the outcome that youwant, and maybe a secondary
outcome that you need to makesure is really happening?
And then there's some littletiki-taki stuff that I had to
fix.
That was also a kind ofembarrassing.
(15:14):
And that gets me torecommendation number 11.
Simple things like making surethe copyright date in your
footer is up to date is a signalthat you're actually taking
care of your site.
It's a best practice to makesure that your copyright date is
the current year.
I'd also as recommendationnumber 12, tell you you should
(15:34):
check your about page.
I think this is another placewhere you can update that with
current information to signalyour authority in the space, and
you may need to completelyrewrite this if it's way out of
date, like it is in my case andinclude links to authoritative
places where you've appeared onpodcasts and just make that
(15:56):
about page really beefy, becauseauthority and trust are a big
deal in the Google rankingalgorithm and your about page
plays a part in that.
And then another recommendationI have for you, recommendation
13.
This is especially true ifyou're a local business.
Make sure that your nap dataname, address and phone number
(16:17):
is up to date and it's the sameon all your social media
platforms where it's listed asit is on your website.
That's another signal to Google, particularly in Google local
rankings, that your site is notbeing taken care of.
If you've got different, out ofdate phone numbers and
addresses showing up all overthe internet, you want to make
(16:40):
sure that your address and phonenumber on Yelp, if you're a
local business, is exactly thesame as the one on your website.
That's super important forlocal rankings.
My 14th recommendation isdefinitely make sure you don't
have duplicate content on yoursite, and by that I mean
specifically what Google means,which is two pages that have
(17:01):
identical content on your siteidentical page titles, identical
descriptions, identical tagging.
This is exactly what Googlemeant when they originally wrote
guidelines around duplicatecontent.
You want to make sure that youdon't have the same thing
appearing on your website inmore than one place.
(17:22):
Recommendation number 15 iskind of a conversion thing.
You want to make sure that yourpage titles and descriptions
are the right length to showcorrectly in Google search.
Lots of data shows that pagetitles and descriptions that
show on Google search and aretoo long, meaning they end with
(17:44):
dots of ellipses you know thethree dots they don't convert as
well as ones that are writtenspecifically to fit on Google
search, and you can use a toollike Yoast SEO if you are on
WordPress, in order to make surethat the titles and
descriptions that you're usingfit well and that you've got
those optimized, because yourfirst conversion in organic
(18:08):
traffic is when your pageappears on Google does someone
click on it?
And one of the things they'reusing to decide whether or not
to click on your site is thetitle in the description.
If those aren't optimized forthe length that Google allows,
you won't get as good ofconversions as you would
otherwise.
(18:29):
My 16th recommendation is alittle technical.
It's canonicalization, and thatwasn't always an important
factor, but now it's worthadding a canonical tag to every
page.
A canonical URL it sounds super, super technical is the version
of the webpage that, whenchosen by the search engines,
(18:51):
represents the main version.
When there are duplicates, thishappens a lot in WordPress.
You know, in WordPress you canhave a slug title or you can
have the title with theparameters like page equals 247.
There might be other URLs thatall reach the same page and by
adding the canonical tag to URL,you're telling Google that
(19:14):
whenever you see this page, thisis the official URL for this
page.
This is the one I want you touse.
That's become more importantrecently, and so make sure that
you've got that workingcorrectly.
Many SEO plugins for WordPresswill handle this for you,
because it's a little technical,it's not a huge issue, but it's
something you should learnabout and pay attention to once
(19:35):
you get this far down in thelist.
That's why this is item number16.
So, finally, the last tip I'lloffer you tip number 17.
Number 17 is something that Iwas also a little embarrassed
about is check and make sureyour robotstxt file is correct.
Mine was not and I was blockingaccess to part of my sites.
(19:57):
I don't even know how thathappened, but when I did an
audit of my site I found thatthe robotstxt file was not
correctly up to date.
Generally speaking, google willrespect your request to index
or not index your site and ifyou've got a messed up robotstxt
file or ht access, that'sanother web server control file
(20:21):
If those files are messed up,you may be sending Google a
signal not to index your siteand so that it could be a
problem.
So a checklist of 17 things youcan go do and work on this year
on your existing website.
If you've had a website formore than a year, you need to go
check all these things at yourleisure.
This is kind of an ongoingchecklist that you can be doing
(20:44):
all the time.
You don't need to do all ofthis stuff all the time.
Maybe each week, pick a thingoff this list and then four,
five, six months from now, yourwebsite SEO will be much, much
better.
And what's great about that isit gets you free traffic, and
the question is what are youdoing with that free traffic?
(21:05):
You need to be capturing thosepeople on your email list or
converting that free trafficinto sales of some sort.
This kind of SEO work thereforeessentially represents free
money that you can go get ifyou'll just do the work and, by
the way, this is the kind ofwork that can be outsourced.
(21:25):
So if you don't have time, butyou do have budget, you can find
reputable SEO people to helpyou work on the optimization of
your site.
So I hope this is helpful toyou.
I hope you'll take a few ofthese tips and check your site
out.
There are a couple of tools thatI really like for this that I
think you can use.
One is Screaming Frog.
(21:45):
They used to have a freeversion.
They also have a paid version.
You can go check it out.
I love it just because of thename.
I think that's a fantastic namefor a piece of software, but it
really is a good tool toanalyze the content of your site
.
So check out Screaming Frog.
And the other thing I wouldrecommend that you check out
that I think is really great isthis tool by Neil Patel called
(22:08):
Ubersuggest.
So what's cool aboutUbersuggest is you connect it to
your Google account and youtell it your website and then it
will do SEO analysis on yoursite and make recommendations on
things you need to do.
That's really nice.
It sends you email, it'll tracksome of your keywords and it's
not very expensive, and the freeversion of that also does some
(22:31):
pretty useful stuff.
So go check out Ubersuggest andjust put your website in there
and see what it tells you.
Ubersuggest will identify someof these very items that I've
got in my list of 17 and willmake recommendations for you to
fix them, and that's kind of anice way to attack this problem
as well.
And the cool thing is, with atool like Ubersuggest that's
(22:52):
also tracking keywords, you canactually see your progress as
your site rankings improve.
So go check those things out.
Until next time, I hope yourlife and your business are
completely amazing, ciao.
You've been listening to theLate Night Internet Marketing
Podcast.
(23:13):
Be sure to visit time.
(23:41):
Okay.
So kind of funny story fromthis morning when I recorded
this episode.
People for years have alwaysasked me about advice about side
hustling and how to keep thatfrom being a problem with your
employer.
Like, what's the advice?
And I've had entire podcastepisodes how, basically, the
(24:01):
main key is to keep thingscompletely separate and of
course you don't want a conflictof interest and all these kinds
of things.
Long list of things.
But common sense prevails hereand I typically don't talk about
late night internet marketingat my employer.
I've been there for 30 years.
Many people there know about mylate night internet marketing
(24:24):
podcast and the brand and someof the work that I do, but it's
not something that I talk aboutat work.
I don't work on my business atwork.
I keep everything at home and Itry to keep things separately
and one of the things I'verecommended is typically not to
talk about your employer in thecontent that you create, because
that creates a search engineresult that could be confusing
(24:44):
for your employer.
So, for example, let's say thatmy day job is working at Acme
Dynamite and I sell dynamite fora living and I talk about that
in my side hustle in my contentMaybe I'm talking about work
life balance and I mentioned myemployer, acme Dynamite.
Then when someone searches forme at Acme Dynamite in Google,
(25:08):
they might come up with my sidehustle.
Let's say Wiley Coyote istrying to find my contact
information.
He might find late nightinternet marketing instead.
That's not a good look for meor my employer and it's
confusing for the customer.
I don't want all that so I'mvery careful about it.
This morning I get on camera.
I had to laugh.
I look at myself on the camerabecause I have a confidence
(25:33):
monitor in front of me so I cansee what the camera sees.
And there I am with my bigcorporate hat on in big bold
letters, facing right into thecamera, about to record a
podcast episode for my sidehustle.
So I had to turn the recordbutton off and go change hats.
(25:54):
It's just kind of funny.
It's the little things that Iguess probably don't even really
matter that sometimes make melaugh.
Late night.
Internet marketing.
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