SEO Best Practices To Improve Your Rankings on Google

Hello everyone. Welcome to this episode of E Coffee with Experts. I’m your host, Matt Fraser. And on today’s show, I have a very special guest, Terry Power. Terry is a Greensboro SEO professional focused on ranking his client’s web pages, and hiring using proven tested SEO methods. He has over 20 years of experience in SEO and works as a local SEO consultant. He is the author of Marketing Your Small Business Online. And when not working on marketing campaigns for clients, Terry enjoys reading, motorcycling, and spending time with his wife. Terry, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the show.

I’m happy to be here. Matt.

So for our audience, I mean, Terry and I first met at SEO Rockstars in 2018, which was really cool. And he was one of the speakers at the conference that year. And I remember the presentation he gave was pretty cool. You talked about Chainsaw.

It was an SEO presentation, but.

Yeah, it was awesome. So, it’s so good to connect with you and have you here and see you again. So, 20 years of SEO. How did you first get started and interested? 20 years is a time.

Well almost 30 years ago, I first got online. My email address terrypower@email.com, not Gmail but email.com

E-Mail dot com?

Yes, I’ve had it since 1993 and in 1994 I became a certified Internet webmaster which basically meant you had to know about protocols, how to code HTML, stuff like that. But then there were like 6000 websites. So, as long as you put up a website, people would find it. You know, half those 6000 were porn. So, if you weren’t doing porn, you know, you were even more likely to be found because there was even less. But by the turn of the century, there were hundreds of thousands of websites and you no longer just putting one up, got it any attention. So, I started reading these things, Warrior Forum. Even I see cue groups and stuff and bulletin boards and about ways to get your page to rank. So, people would try all sorts of things and you’d go, does that really work? Well, let’s try and find it. And then, of course, Google came along, and then they made it all about math. An algorithm. An algorithm that they wouldn’t tell you. So, you had to figure it out yourself kind of thing. But you did certain things and you go, Hey, this is helping. I’m moving up. Or you would sit down and look at the top three or four websites and go, oh, look at them. They’re all doing this. Maybe I should be doing that. You know, you look at the search results and you see, oh, they all got the keyword there as part of their title. And I don’t know, maybe that would help.

Maybe that’ll help. Have you always taken that approach of looking at the results and seeing what they’re doing in order to optimize?

Pretty much, yeah, that’s what I do now. If I could get a potential client before I actually meet and talk with them, I will look at their competitors as well as their own web presence to see what they’re doing on platforms, but see what’s ranking for some of the keywords they’re interested in. And then I can look at their page and go, oh, well, look, you got 300 words there, lots of pictures, no old tags, but lots of pictures. Everybody else has long articles. Maybe you need to write some words.

Yeah. And have you seen that pay off taking that approach of SEO?

Yeah Absolutely, consistently for years. But I mean, now, of course, we’ve got tools like Page Optimizer Pro, Surfer Corner, tools that do a lot of that analysis for us. We used to have to do that. Sit there and look at the top. You know, you’d pull up the SERPs and then open a new tab, all the top ones, and go and look at them, look at their code and see what they were doing and compare them to what you were doing. And you’d see common things and after a while, you’d get to where there are five or six things you consistently need to do. This number, one is doing three of them. This guy is doing two of them. This guy is doing four. But if I do all of them and then you start ranking and going, Yeah, I think I got this figured out. But as more people figure it out, of course, there are more than just four or five-factor. So, you keep having to look a little deeper into it, in the competitive niches.

Yeah. Do you think that like these tools that maybe some people have never heard of up until now? Like, I know a lot of people have heard of Server SEO. But, not so many people I talked to have heard of Page Optimizer pro or Cora.

Page Optimizer Pro is very industry specific to the SEO world. Other people, for whatever reason, not many bloggers have heard of it, and not many YouTubers or social media have heard of it. Whereas a lot of them have heard of Surfer. But, Cora. Even fewer people, but it’s the best SEO software I’ve ever played with. It’s just fabulous, I can punch in a keyword, and put in a URL of a potential client. And when I go to sit down with them in a meeting, I have no doubt they’re going to hire me because I’m going to have data that they can’t find anywhere else. And to be able to say, look, this and this is what we need to do. Here is what needs to be done to get your page to the top for this keyword, for this keyword, this keyword. You can do it yourself or you can hire someone who’s competent to get it done for you. And they don’t want it themselves, they are trying to run a business.

Why are you so confident in Cora?

I’ve used the software and seen the results, and I don’t necessarily use it exactly the way everyone else does. I look at some specific portions of it and tune my pages accordingly. So, I rarely even bother looking at the back clanking of the competitors because I know from looking at their websites and my quarter reports that they’re not well tuned, a well-tuned page is going to beat them, even with a handful of backlinks, even if they’ve got a thousand of backlinks. Because the on-page, I believe, has more strength overall, than the half-page. So, if I can do the on-page, and tune it really well, I’m not going to need hardly any backlinks.

Okay. So first, do you trust Cora because of the person behind it? Like, obviously, you might know the guy behind it.

Yeah, I started using it because of the guy behind it.

And he’s constantly testing data, right?

Constantly testing data, tweaking.

And he is working that data into his software in order for you. He knows when updates are coming out before they’re even coming out.

Yeah. For that, he’s a data nerd. Really smart guy and into compiling all this data, and gathering info from it and I’ve told people this before, the first time I ever went to an SEO conference. I went in, got there, checked in the hotel, went downstairs, and there was a restaurant in the lobby. I walk in there because I’m hungry. I’ve been on a plane, so I walked in, and Ted Kubaitis, the guy who designed Cora and Kyle Roof who helped put together Page Optimizer Pro, sitting there, each got a beer and they went, hey, come join us. I sat down and we ordered dinner. They had just ordered but hadn’t gotten their food. We ordered, ate, and talked for about 3 hours and to this day, I learned more in those 3 hours than in the rest of the conference. That I still use anyway. Because I was talking to Kyle about the way I did SEO, looking at every page on the front page, dissecting what they’re doing. And he says, Yeah, I’m working on some software that’ll do that for us. And it’s like, I just got it brought out. I mean, yeah, we talked about all sorts of stuff, but it was just really cool. I knew these guys knew what they were talking about, SEO-wise, it was the first time we sat down and had text conversation messages on Skype, stuff like that. So, the first time we met, I was just really like, wow, this is some cool stuff.

I mean, Kyle, of course. You know, Again, I talked to a lot of people who have not heard of him and it surprises me, considering what he accomplished by starting to do SEO testing and learn this. You know, the fake word, it didn’t exist in Google’s index and registering the domain name, I mean what ranks Lorem Ipsum text. What was it again? Rhinoplasty, Plano?

Rhinoplasty, Plano, Texas, it was part of an SEO contest and you ranked without even using English or Spanish because it was Texas, he uses Latin but he knew where to put the right keywords in the right place, where to put variations on those keywords. And he had grabbed the number one spot in a three pack as well as the organic number one. And then somebody on search engine land wrote us and wrote an article saying, oh, somebody showed Google that they don’t know how to read and had a whole thing on it and outed himself who this was and at SEO Rockstars that year, he changed his presentation to my pages all disappeared. Google made all my websites go away because of what he would have done with Lorem ipsum and proven to us that google doesn’t actually read this, which we all sort of knew. It’s an algorithm, it’s all ones and zeros. That’s all they see, ones and zeros, but he proved it and taught us that was what was going on. And you saw that Google could be vindictive. They certainly had the power and they instituted a new rule because of what he was doing and he wasn’t the only one doing it. He got caught, so he got punished. But he also got some notoriety from it that he made it worth it, I believe.

What new rule did they implement as a result of that?

A language rule. More than X percentage I think it is of your page being in a language not native to the geo wherever. For instance, He also ranked that lorem ipsum page in Milan, which coincidentally, you know, Latin and Italian aren’t that far off. I was like that’s not really fair. But he showed in different countries around the world that it worked no matter what country provided the keywords in the appropriate language. The rest of the text did not have to be or does not matter.

That’s game-changing for us to be connected to go to these conferences to be exposed to forerunners or trailblazers or even be a part of a community that you can mindshare and connect with. Like I learned a crapload from listening to your presentation at SEO Rockstars.

Well, any time you get a chance to go to a conference in a field you have an interest in. I mean, it’s well worth traveling, to learn some things as well as make those connections. You know, I spent a couple of hours talking to Ted today. I was talking to Kyle last week, he lives in Thailand now. He moved. But you make these connections and you can reach out. There’s a lady in SEO, Carolyn Holtzman.

Oh, yes, I know, Carolyn.

She is indexing just every day for over a year now. And this summer, she was over about 3 hours from me, from where I live for the summer. And so, we each drove and met in the middle. Have lunch one day and talk. You know with Covid it’s been so long since you actually get to sit down with someone and talk SEO. You know, it was nice to have lunch with her and catch up a little in person. And of course, this year, a lot of conferences are opening back up. So, I’m looking forward to a couple of those.

Yeah, I’m going to try and get to some of them. You know, all these years, what has been the thing that has kept you attracted to SEO so much instead of venturing into Google ads or Facebook ads?

It changes. That’s what it is for me, there’s no getting boring because the rules change once in a while. Or the gorilla in the room, google says we’re changing the rules, but we’re not going to tell you how. And you don’t know if they really are or like when they announced AMP, everybody should be using accelerated mobile pages and then they went, we don’t really care if I did and it doesn’t really matter anymore if you use them or not. So, sometimes they tell you they’re going to do things and they’re not. Other times they’ll tell you they’re going to do something. And maybe they are, but they change their mind or the times change. They decide not to do it anymore. So, just because they say we’re going to change the rules, sometimes they don’t. So, you don’t even know not just how the rules are going to change, but really, even if this keeps me interested. You don’t get bored.

Absolutely. What is one common myth about SEO that people believe that you know, for a fact is not true?

Well, gosh, there are a few. From the casting and my own experience personally with websites as well as seeing test results of others. You cannot over-optimize a web page. There’s no such thing you are saying to make it too optimized. That’s a big one and that black hat, it doesn’t work or give you punishment or get you penalized or something like that.

Okay. So, first of all, you can opt to optimize a page, and the second thing is that people think you can only be a white hat SEO if you do any black hat you’re screwed?

Yes. If not now, they’ll catch you next time, but soon.

Are there any blackout techniques you’re comfortable sharing? And if you’re not, you can plead the Fifth.

Well, if you’re doing local, do some directories. That’s black hat, though, because Google says you shouldn’t do anything to try to enhance your rankings. And that’s certainly why you do the directory to help enhance your rankings.

So, do you mean creating your own directories or signing up for this?

Just, you know, signing up for all the Web and for all of those. Doing anything to better your position on the SERPs is against Google’s terms of service and they can see it as a black hat. If you read an article, so you’re doing something on inflatable kayaks is what you’re selling. You write an article on how much you love your inflatable kayak and how easy it is to transport and get in the water and whatever because you want to share this great story, your passion with somebody else. That’s okay. But if you’re writing it to help your rankings, so be sure and hit that inflatable kayak in there a couple of times, maybe 2 or 3%, then you’re just you’re doing it to help your rankings and its black hat.

That’s so true. Terry, what about keyword density? You know, people talk about having keywords too much or too little. You know, this whole thing about the percentage of keywords and so on and so forth. I mean, you just mentioned earlier that you can’t over-optimize.

Right, keyword density. Early on I mentioned Quora, we were talking about Ted Kubaitis. Ted did a test on keyword density where he created a website with a 5% keyword density and one with 10% and one with 15 on up to 95%. That 95% keyword is just keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword. You know, after 100 words, there’d be a ‘the’ and a small or a few other words, and I’ve done the same test after talking to him about it. And I know dozens of other people that have done the same kind of test. The 95% will outrank the 5, the 10, the 20, that 60, the 80 it wouldn’t convert. Don’t get me wrong, you can convert with the pace, convert with a ranking, for ranking keyword density matters. More importantly, though, keyword density is relevant density. So, not just a keyword, but some variations on your keyword, some entities that are related to a keyword. It is famously said, if you’re writing about baseball, it makes sense to have the word diamond, and the word base, the word stadium and the word glove in your article and Google understands that means the article is more about baseball than if those didn’t appear. So, you can densely pack in not just keywords but variations on the keyword and look at other relevant entities that would deal with that topic or niche, whatever it is, and recommend them in as much as you want, but if you want conversions, you don’t want to get so optimized that nobody can understand. Do you know what you’re trying to say? We’re trying to sell what the call to action is. The balancing act between ranking factors and conversion factors.

So, in other words, Is that LSI? Forgive my ignorance or if it sounds stupid.

No, there’s an argument that’s on the internet anywhere you can find about LSI. Is that what keyword variations and relevant terms and entities are? And that’s what the term means in the world of SEO, in the world of mathematics, that’s not what it means. In mathematics, it means a collection of data that leads you to certain information. So, it would sort of usurped in the SEO community to mean keyword variations and entities and related stuff. So yeah, that’s what LSI is. Unless you’re talking to a mathematician, in which case that’s not what it is. It doesn’t really matter how it’s defined. That’s what it is in the SEO world.

Will Quora give you that kind of data of what different words you use, or is it more page optimizer pro?

Quora will give you that data or identities based on Wikipedia and Google’s definitions of the entities. It’ll give you relevant keywords and their variations, it’ll tell you what the top 100 pages are using as far as variations and entities, and keywords. So, you can go, oh, I don’t have those keywords in there at all. I mean for them, I don’t have that entity at all.

If you only had two tools to choose from? Are there any additional tools besides Quora and Page Optimizer Pro that you would recommend or do you just stick to those two?

I would recommend for Off-page, having some kind of cloud software. Just because instead of doing it manually, half the people in SEO don’t know how to code anymore. So, if you can’t code, you need software to do it for you. And not that many people know but you can use WordPress on clouds. But you want to be able to build, what essentially becomes sort of a PBM, private blog network. Because the clouds will load faster than anything else. Because they’re all built by these mega-corporations, they load really fast. They’re very powerful and they’re international. They can be spread out all over the world with your delivery network. So, you can have lots of significant Web platforms that link to the pages you’re trying to rank.

This is unbelievable because so many people would say that what you just said now is SEO blasphemy. I know so because I talk to people, and they would freak out about that. Oh, no, you’re going to get dich slapped by Google. Excuse my French.

Well, I don’t worry about any of the Google updates. You know, they’re not going to harm any of my sites or my client sites or anything like that because they’re optimized. They’re tuned and Google, when they change your algorithm, it doesn’t change the way they tune.

What you’re talking about then is you’re talking about, this is like knowledge, I hope our audience is realizing how fortunate they are. You’re talking about. Because this is like a game changer. It’s like a gold nugget in regards to creating your own assets on cloud platforms such as Amazon or Google or whatever. Pick one.

IBM.

IBM, where you’re launching your own assets, and your own websites. Does it even have to have a domain name or it could just have a link?

It doesn’t have to. If it doesn’t have it, you can make it a subdomain of Amazon, a subdomain of Microsoft, Google, IBM, or Alibaba. Everybody’s got them.

Wow, and those links are valuable and will move the needle.

If the article or whatever information you put on, it was videos, articles, infographics. As long as they’re the right kind of information, no sense building them about dog training If you’re doing those kayaks. It certainly would help if they were relevant. I mean, you’re going to get some links from them anyway, and then you can build your links. You can structure those links as you wish, and you can send them to a sort of buffer page rather than go directly to the website if you don’t want everybody to be able to see exactly where they’re coming from.

So using two-tiered links, and two-tiered systems is still Irrelevant.

Yes, I build some properties, let’s just say for the Google play store and then do a GSA blast to that link.

Wow.

Because the Google play store gets millions of hits and millions of links every day. A few more don’t bother them at all, even if a few more are a hundred thousand. You know, if you’re sending a link to one of your clouds on Microsoft. Believe me, Microsoft gets linked to a lot of times, and the same with Amazon, IBM, and obviously Google. You know, you’re not going to harm anything by sending a bunch of links to it if it’s on cloud.

What about varying your keywords in the anchor text? I mean, everybody was using the same keywords at one point. Exact matched keywords and then partial match and then just click here. Then they’re talking about how you need to vary it and there’s a certain amount you need to vary it and just get to the point where it’s like, is that even true or is it just complete B.S from your experience?

I still use an exact match. Now having said that, that doesn’t mean if I build a cloud website that I’m going to use to link to a money site or a client site, but doesn’t mean I’m going to use the same term for every link because your customer’s site has a link about water heaters and a different one about fixing toilets, a different one about leaks. So, the exact match can be different for those different pages, but I would still use the exact match for whatever keyword that page I want to rank for.

You know, there was a marketer and I’m debating whether I should have him on the show or not, but I think I might. But you probably know who he is and talking about using RSS feeds for content education in order to build up your authority and build a moat around your website, your money, and so on and so forth. From your experience, is that still something that works, or since the algorithms and updates have come out?

I think it can work. But as a society, we become more litigious. So, you can also get hit with it. There’s nothing wrong with taking our RSS feed and using that snippet, but we don’t want that whole article printed.

Okay, so just a snippet.

You know. So, you got to be careful with RSS feeds, more so than you used to. You could just grab it.

That’s interesting data. Have you had any experience using AI yet? And here let me be more specific if I could. Have you had any experience yet in creating content with artificial intelligence? Content that is assisted and implemented in SEO campaigns.

Yes. I think that is a great help and a great hindrance to SEO. I’ve used Jasper, which is a tool for writing. You know you tell me. I want an article., I want a blog article., I want a little snippet or I want something for a sales page or you want to be kind of funny or want it to be educational, whatever. And it does an okay job but thanks to Jasper, which brought a lot of that. It’s a technology called GPT 3, but a lot of that AI is more forward, there are now places where you can plug in a keyword and if you don’t know, a keyword can be more than one word. You know, dog training is a keyword. So, you can plug in a keyword and hit a button and you’ll get a website of 30 or 40 pages, where the Al would go out and find like it’ll look at people also ask questions, go out and find questions about that keyword, then create the answers for it, and make each of those a separate page and then interlink them for your home page so you can find all the others. Build you an entire website and upload it for you to a cloud or a WordPress or something like that. I’ve built some of those and I say I built, I put in the keyword, and then I do turn it a little because I don’t necessarily like the overall on-page SEO. Some of them are better than others, but I’m still going to go in and tune it a little. Because like I’ll put in images and I may want to change the text or something like I’m or the image even, but I’ve done that and one, in particular, I was talking to somebody last Friday about that I built in June and it is now in position one and two for its main keyword. And I didn’t write a word of it other than some old tags and stuff like that. The title tag, but you know, the machine wrote the entire website.

And it’s rank number one or two.

Yeah, it’s got the top ten.

Do you have any concerns that Google is going to slap you and you get Google slap?

No, because I’ve got an article from Fiver and this stuff’s a lot better than many humans on Fiverr, right? So, I don’t for a minute think that AI can tell for sure when something else is AI.

Yeah, I agree with you.

But just think of it as someone who wasn’t me. Someone back in history use their brain to come up with the word brain. And this is what AI is doing, trying to figure out if something else is AI and if you’re worried about it, throw an emoji in there a couple of times. I just don’t use emojis or misspell a word. AI doesn’t misspell words. You know, you can always tweak it slightly and it’ll be obviously human to an A.I. because again you got to misspelled word here or there or use an emoji. If you’re worried about it, I’m not worried about it.

For what it’s worth, that gives me a little bit of peace because of the fearmongering of other people who are thinking that. Oh, well, you better know who is AI either. Great, all-powerful, seeing Google Sauron is going to find out that using AI and then slap you in and demand all your websites. And I think I mean maybe I’m out to lunch, but I think people who don’t ah who aren’t going to use the AI are doing it at their own peril.

Yeah, I can’t understand why your average content writer who writes for a living isn’t using AI and then tweaking it to make it more on his/her own. But why spend hours writing an article when you could spend 10 minutes tweaking it after the robot wrote it for you?

Exactly.

And the robot can do the research quicker than you can.

Exactly.

And it’s not going to forget any of the things it researched.

Yes, but I just don’t understand how. I had one person telling me to do a search for a keyword on an AI-assisted website that I created. And wanting to know how much that word came out. And also, let’s just say it’s about plumbing. Like, let’s say it’s a plumbing website and there’s like, well, search for plumbing. And if plumbing came up 60 times on the home page, then it’s a key indicator that it’s AI written content, AI written Web page, or site. But if you looked at how long the damn pages are and how many words are on there, that to me is bullshit. Sorry.

I mean, if your article is 100 words and somebody else got an article, it’s 3000 words. They’re going to have a whole lot of words more times than you are, that doesn’t mean someone different necessarily wrote them or that either which one was written by? Because you can get those robots to write you small articles. You can say, I need them to be this long, or I want them only this long, I don’t think that. AI is getting better. Also, it is no longer known. Originally it would just go grab a sentence about plumbing from this website in a sentence. From this one on this one. Put them all together and it didn’t even make sense yet again. I’m thinking back to Kyle’s test though. Google can’t read the stuff, so they’re only looking at these ones and zeros. But if those ones and zeros happened to be in a pattern and they start thinking, oh, is this either this is a human and you know, the people in like the Department of Justice will tell you they can look at 14 different things that were sent in the mail to someone to go. These are written by the same person and they’re handwritten, you know, because you pick up the personality of writers, they have style and they like to use this word with that one or whatever. AI is the same way. But if you’re really worried about it, then use three or four different AI tools to write your stuff so they all have their own little swing to it or something.

Or if you’re wanting to stay on brand, you can just continue to use the same tone. Let’s say you’re creating an author, that’s a persona. Hypothetically you would want that to have the same tone.

Hypothetically, you went to these people who do not exist or this person does not exist.com and found a hypothetical person.

Well, anyway. Coming back to that thing about Ted, that test he did with the keyword density starting at 5%, going all the way up to 95. Was there a sweet spot that worked the best or not?

95, and I think out of 20 results, one time 85 was the top, 95 was second. But if I remember right, yeah, 95 one out. Again, you’re not going to make conversions if every word on your page is a plumber.

Be a pretty crappy website in that regard.

But it might rank really well. People would bounce away really quickly. They just went, What’s this? Plumber, plumber, plumber, plumber, plumber, Seattle plumber, plumber…

Yeah, I don’t think it would convert very well at all. So there has to be a balance and I think the key takeaway for what you’re talking about is that keyword density is not a concern like over-optimizing and using too many keywords. Isn’t it?

Well, actually, the key takeaway is to use that on your private blog networks, your tier two or three properties, not on your money because you don’t need a conversion on those others. All you need is the power. The better they rank, the better.

Those don’t even cost anything. Many times, those cloud networks. Right?

I got my bill for Google Cloud last week. Not my bill, my receipt, because it’s automatic. Again, it was $2.13 and my Amazon bill was over $6. So, they can cost you. But my Amazon bill was $6. I’ve got a couple of Amazon accounts, and have over 200 websites on it, some of which have 20,000 pages. But it did cost me a little over $6 for the last month. So. they are not all free but you’re still darn close.

Wow. There are so many other questions I have for you, but I know we’re coming to the end of our time here. We’d love to have you back on the show if you would be so kind to talk about other things. I’m sure there are a thousand other topics that came up with and 200 more questions, but how can our audience connect online with you, if they choose to do so?

Terrypower.com. Terry power, all on the top line of your keyboard and if you want to connect in the first week of October, I’m going to be at SEO Underground. Black Hat SEO conference and then in November, SEO rockstars in Dallas, Texas.

All right on, it’s in Dallas this year. Wow.

Wow.

He’s been changing it. Before that, it was in Vegas. It was in Vegas for quite a few years, wasn’t it?

She lives in California, but people for years have been telling her among me, you need to bring it a little farther east once in a while. You know, I’d like to see it on the East Coast some time, but that’s a long trip for her also. So. Yeah, it’s going to be cool.

All right.

Go to some other conference, meet some people and make some connections.

Absolutely. So, Terrypower.com. And you’re also on LinkedIn.

Yeah, under Terry Power also and if you’re looking for a community IMGmonthly.com

IMG-monthly.com

Yeah, IMG-Monthly.com. I’m on there and it’s a lot of other people there. It’s a good community, it’s a place where you can ask questions, get good answers, find good information, and most importantly to me, just get other people’s perspectives on things. Because most of us, we only have these two eyes right here. We can’t see from a different angle. Yeah, and it’s important to get the perspective from someone else.

Absolutely. Once again, it’s been a pleasure having you here. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Glad to be here. And if you’re listening, keep listening. He’s got some good information, in every interview. Be a regular listener.

Thank you very much.

Thanks, Matt.