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in this juicy episode, we're serving up a feast of SEO optimization secrets that'll transform your online presence from outdated to outstanding.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.
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in this juicy episode, we're serving up a feast of SEO optimization secrets that'll transform your online presence from outdated to outstanding.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.
Episode two six zero late night internet marketing. This week on the late night internet marketing podcast, we're going to talk all about SEO, or search engine optimization, for old, existing sites that you're trying to revitalize. Don't have an old site? Don't worry, these great SEO tips have plenty of applicability to your new site as well. All this and more on the late night internet marketing podcast.
Mark Mason:The late night internet marketing podcast.
Mark Mason:And now broadcasting late at night from a little studio in the big state of Texas, your host, mark Mason. Hey, how is everyone doing? I am your host, mark Mason, coming to you live Well, not really live, pre-recorded, it's a podcast, and all from the little studio in Dallas, texas. I hope you're having a fantastic day. Today we're going to be talking about my current SEO journey and best practices for you and SEO specifically in the context of revitalizing an old site. Now, the reason it's my SEO journey is because, as you know, at the beginning of this year, I revitalized my commitment to the late night internet marketing brand and experience. I've got a lot of big plans for it in 2024. There's a lot of stuff going on. There's a course coming out in early summer. It's going to be very exciting, and one of the things that I wanted to make sure was true was that I was consistently building my email list, as we've talked about for years.
Mark Mason:Email lists are one of the few assets in an internet business that you actually own, that actually belong to you. It doesn't belong to YouTube or Facebook or Twitter or X or whatever we're calling that these days. Your email list is your asset. It's a part of your business that you control, and so it's very important in online businesses to manage that email list, and one great way to grow it is through opt-ins on your website, and one great way to get traffic to your website is through organic search results, and I do get a lot of traffic on late night internet marketing. But SEO is one of those things that you need to constantly be putting energy into, and I've ignored the search engine optimization on the late night internet marketing site for a very, very long time, and so I wanted to go with you through some tips that you can use for SEO best practices and kind of relate them to what's going on on the late night internet marketing brand.
Mark Mason:But before I do that, I wanted to briefly tell you about a decision that I've made about my business that impacts you. I've decided that I'm always going to have a coaching slot or two open for complimentary coaching sessions the full blown, high ticket, high end experience available to listeners for free. Now, there won't be many of these. Simply put, I've just decided that part of the value that I want to bring to the late night internet marketing community is ongoing complimentary coaching. Now, obviously, it's on a very limited basis right, I can't do much of it, but I always want to be doing some of it. One saying that I really like about stuff like this is something that one of my coaches says all the time you should do for a few people what you'd love to do for everyone and obviously I can't offer complimentary coaching to everyone, but I'd like to offer it to a few people. I'd like to always be doing that. So if you're interested in a full, complimentary, absolutely no strings attached coaching session for me, reach out to me at latenightimcom forward slash apply. And if it feels like a good fit meaning that I think I could really help you, I'll be in touch with you and we'll see about setting up a completely complimentary, no strings attached but very high end and impactful full up coaching session for you so we can talk about you and your business and I can try and help you get unstuck, get to the next step, get the right plan or whatever it is that's holding you back. We can work together to eliminate those problems. So head on over to latenightimcom forward slash apply If that's interesting to you, and I'll be in touch with you.
Mark Mason:Now it's time to talk about search engine optimization. Where do you start? So the very first and most important thing on an established site and you need to be doing this on any site that you own is to address any critical SEO health problems that you have on the site, and the most common one is fixing broken links on your site. There's a phenomenon that we call link rot in this business, and that is that links that were valid a year or two or three in my case, 10 years ago are no longer valid, and in my particular case, on late night internet marketing, I have hundreds of links that need to be updated. Websites that no longer exist are listed in various places on my website Affiliate links that are broken because the affiliate product is no longer around or the affiliate manager has changed platforms and I just never 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 of date information, and they will derate you accordingly.
Mark Mason:The second thing you need to do with an established site and again, this is something that applies even if you have a new site is you need to have a clear keyword strategy on your site, and you know, with late night internet marketing, with over 10 years of content, actually started this site originally in 2007,. The keyword strategy is all over the place and one of the things that I need to do and I'm in the process of working on is making a serious plan for exactly what keywords I want to rank for and what content is going to drive those rankings. The idea is that you have a list of targeted keywords and how you're going to rank, a plan for how you're going to rank for each one of those keywords, and usually what that means is you have a critical piece of content, oftentimes supported by links from other pieces of content on your site that help you link for that. But your keyword rankings in general are not all by accident. You have a keyword strategy that you're driving towards because you know that you want to attract certain searchers that are looking for certain things because they convert well in your business. That's what a keyword strategy looks like and that's something that I need to update and make sure is really working well for the late night internet marketing brand.
Mark Mason:And then, in the context of that strategy, the third thing is to evaluate the existing quality of content on the site and its relevance, and you know, one of the things that's going on with the late night internet marketing site is that there's a lot of old content on there that needs to be completely removed. One great way to do this if you buy a site or you get an old site and you're trying to decide what to do with it, one great thing you can do is use a tool like Screaming Frog. Screaming Frog is an amazing tool that will crawl your site and give you information about every page on your site, and what I would say is if you've got content that Screaming Frog tells you no one is visiting, it's not ranking in the search engines, you determine it to be no longer relevant and not worth updating, then I would delete that content from your site and make sure you redirect that old link to something relevant so that you don't create more broken links on your site. I prefer to 301 redirect that link to something that is relevant that could potentially help a user, in case someone comes there by accident. Of course, the next thing thing number four would be to do an on-page SEO audit of every page that's remaining, to make sure that every page that's remaining is aligned with your keyword strategy and that not just the title tags in these pages have the relevant keywords that's, the H1 tag on each page, the header tag but also that the subheadings are well constructed and they have keywords in there that make sense, that are part of your keyword strategy. That's an important audit item for every page that remains on your website, and that's why it's important to get rid of the old pages first, because you don't wanna do that work on a page that really should be deleted. That's not helping your site. That's just dragging you down in the first place.
Mark Mason:I think another problem problem number five with old sites is that they've often gotten pretty slow. They've got cruft and junk, they've got old tools that they're using and their page speed is bad, and so you wanna make sure that you're using a tool like Google PageSpeed I think it's called PageSpeed Insights to pinpoint the exact issues that are causing your slow load times. Of course, you're going to wanna compress images using something like tiny PNG, and you're going to want to use site accelerators that minimize CSS and compress your JavaScript files and so forth. Most Great website hosting platforms 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 that all that stuff is turned on and you're using all the modern speed Optimization tools that are available to you and you don't have a lot of cruft on your website. That's slowing you down.
Mark Mason:The sixth thing I would say is, if your website is really old, you need to make sure that its design is responsive. Mine is responsive. That's not an issue for me, but Google does have a mobile friendly website test that you can use to identify Specific mobile friendly issues that might be on your site. You might be surprised, so you want to go ahead and use the Google mobile friendly test to make sure that you are doing stuff that's relevant for people on cell phones, because so much of your traffic these days is going to come from those mobile users. Another thing you're going to want to do on all sites, but particularly on old sites, is make sure that you've migrated, at some point, all of your pages to to secure pages HTTPS, meaning that every page is securely served and encrypted as it's served to browsers. Google looks at this as a trust indicator, and so you might find that you have legacy pages on your site that, for whatever reason, are still either pointing to or actually serving themselves up as regular old HTTPS pages, and that's a problem, and some browsers won't even show those pages anymore. So you just need to check and make sure that everything is running on HTTPS and being served securely.
Mark Mason:Getting more into the details of SEO, the the next thing that you need to do from an SEO perspective is to check your backlink profile. This is actually my eighth recommendation. Make sure that that's cleaned up, use tools like a hrefs or SEM rush and analyze the backlink profile, because you may find that you have what we refer to as Toxic links, and, while I think Google has done a lot better job of Weighing this and not causing it to harm your site as much as it used to, if you've got Sketchy or toxic links pointing to your site maybe because you or someone else did some kind of sketchy backlink campaign to your site you need to disavow those links so that you can make sure that the links at Google's considering pointing to your site or high quality links. This is something I have to worry about on late night internet marketing, because there was a time when, if I was ranking for something other, other SEOs would institute negative SEO campaigns against my site and Actually link back to my site from these sketchy link platforms in foreign countries that were specifically for the purpose of dragging my rankings down. So lots of cleanup for me to do there from from stuff I've collected over the years.
Mark Mason:The ninth recommendation I would make and this is really funny you need to look around your site and make sure that your social media engagement strategy is up to date. I still had a few backlinks to Google plus on my website. Nothing is going to give Google a clear indication that you're ignoring your site more than some links back to a social media platform that hasn't existed for a decade. So that was a little embarrassing. You're going to want to clean that up. And while you're cleaning things up, I think the 10th thing I would recommend is just making sure that your user experience is optimized. I actually had someone look at my site and their perspective was simply well, what is it that you're wanting visitors to do on these certain pages? You need to be able to answer that question, particularly on your homepage. What is the outcome that you want, and maybe a secondary outcome that you need to make sure is really happening? And then there's some little tiki-taki stuff that I had to fix. That was also a kind of embarrassing. And that gets me to recommendation number 11.
Mark Mason:Simple things like making sure the copyright date in your footer is up to date is a signal that you're actually taking care of your site. It's a best practice to make sure that your copyright date is the current year. I'd also as recommendation number 12, tell you you should check your about page. I think this is another place where you can update that with current information to signal your authority in the space, and you may need to completely rewrite this if it's way out of date, like it is in my case and include links to authoritative places where you've appeared on podcasts and just make that about page really beefy, because authority and trust are a big deal in the Google ranking algorithm and your about page plays a part in that.
Mark Mason:And then another recommendation I have for you, recommendation 13. This is especially true if you're a local business. Make sure that your nap data name, address and phone number is up to date and it's the same on all your social media platforms where it's listed as it is on your website. That's another signal to Google, particularly in Google local rankings, that your site is not being taken care of. If you've got different, out of date phone numbers and addresses showing up all over the internet, you want to make sure that your address and phone number on Yelp, if you're a local business, is exactly the same as the one on your website. That's super important for local rankings.
Mark Mason:My 14th recommendation is definitely make sure you don't have duplicate content on your site, and by that I mean specifically what Google means, which is two pages that have identical content on your site identical page titles, identical descriptions, identical tagging. This is exactly what Google meant when they originally wrote guidelines around duplicate content. You want to make sure that you don't have the same thing appearing on your website in more than one place. Recommendation number 15 is kind of a conversion thing. You want to make sure that your page titles and descriptions are the right length to show correctly in Google search. Lots of data shows that page titles and descriptions that show on Google search and are too long, meaning they end with dots of ellipses you know the three dots they don't convert as well as ones that are written specifically to fit on Google search, and you can use a tool like Yoast SEO if you are on WordPress, in order to make sure that the titles and descriptions that you're using fit well and that you've got those optimized, because your first conversion in organic traffic is when your page appears on Google does someone click on it? And one of the things they're using to decide whether or not to click on your site is the title in the description. If those aren't optimized for the length that Google allows, you won't get as good of conversions as you would otherwise.
Mark Mason:My 16th recommendation is a little technical. It's canonicalization, and that wasn't always an important factor, but now it's worth adding a canonical tag to every page. A canonical URL it sounds super, super technical is the version of the webpage that, when chosen by the search engines, represents the main version. When there are duplicates, this happens a lot in WordPress. You know, in WordPress you can have a slug title or you can have the title with the parameters like page equals 247. There might be other URLs that all reach the same page and by adding the canonical tag to URL, you're telling Google that whenever you see this page, this is the official URL for this page. This is the one I want you to use. That's become more important recently, and so make sure that you've got that working correctly. Many SEO plugins for WordPress will handle this for you, because it's a little technical, it's not a huge issue, but it's something you should learn about and pay attention to once you get this far down in the list. That's why this is item number 16. So, finally, the last tip I'll offer you tip number 17.
Mark Mason:Number 17 is something that I was also a little embarrassed about is check and make sure your robotstxt file is correct. Mine was not and I was blocking access to part of my sites. I don't even know how that happened, but when I did an audit of my site I found that the robotstxt file was not correctly up to date. Generally speaking, google will respect your request to index or not index your site and if you've got a messed up robotstxt file or ht access, that's another web server control file If those files are messed up, you may be sending Google a signal not to index your site and so that it could be a problem.
Mark Mason:So a checklist of 17 things you can go do and work on this year on your existing website. If you've had a website for more than a year, you need to go check all these things at your leisure. This is kind of an ongoing checklist that you can be doing all the time. You don't need to do all of this stuff all the time. Maybe each week, pick a thing off this list and then four, five, six months from now, your website SEO will be much, much better. And what's great about that is it gets you free traffic, and the question is what are you doing with that free traffic? You need to be capturing those people on your email list or converting that free traffic into sales of some sort. This kind of SEO work therefore essentially represents free money that you can go get if you'll just do the work and, by the way, this is the kind of work that can be outsourced. So if you don't have time, but you do have budget, you can find reputable SEO people to help you work on the optimization of your site. So I hope this is helpful to you. I hope you'll take a few of these tips and check your site out.
Mark Mason:There are a couple of tools that I really like for this that I think you can use. One is Screaming Frog. They used to have a free version. They also have a paid version. You can go check it out. I love it just because of the name. I think that's a fantastic name for a piece of software, but it really is a good tool to analyze the content of your site. So check out Screaming Frog.
Mark Mason:And the other thing I would recommend that you check out that I think is really great is this tool by Neil Patel called Ubersuggest. So what's cool about Ubersuggest is you connect it to your Google account and you tell it your website and then it will do SEO analysis on your site and make recommendations on things you need to do. That's really nice. It sends you email, it'll track some of your keywords and it's not very expensive, and the free version of that also does some pretty useful stuff. So go check out Ubersuggest and just put your website in there and see what it tells you. Ubersuggest will identify some of these very items that I've got in my list of 17 and will make recommendations for you to fix them, and that's kind of a nice way to attack this problem as well. And the cool thing is, with a tool like Ubersuggest that's also tracking keywords, you can actually see your progress as your site rankings improve. So go check those things out. Until next time, I hope your life and your business are completely amazing, ciao.
Mark Mason:You've been listening to the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. Be sure to visit time.
Mark Mason:Okay. So kind of funny story from this morning when I recorded this episode. People for years have always asked me about advice about side hustling and how to keep that from being a problem with your employer. Like, what's the advice? And I've had entire podcast episodes how, basically, the main key is to keep things completely separate and of course you don't want a conflict of interest and all these kinds of things. Long list of things.
Mark Mason:But common sense prevails here and I typically don't talk about late night internet marketing at my employer. I've been there for 30 years. Many people there know about my late night internet marketing podcast and the brand and some of the work that I do, but it's not something that I talk about at work. I don't work on my business at work. I keep everything at home and I try to keep things separately and one of the things I've recommended is typically not to talk about your employer in the content that you create, because that creates a search engine result that could be confusing for your employer. So, for example, let's say that my day job is working at Acme Dynamite and I sell dynamite for a living and I talk about that in my side hustle in my content Maybe I'm talking about work life balance and I mentioned my employer, acme Dynamite. Then when someone searches for me at Acme Dynamite in Google, they might come up with my side hustle. Let's say Wiley Coyote is trying to find my contact information. He might find late night internet marketing instead. That's not a good look for me or my employer and it's confusing for the customer. I don't want all that so I'm very careful about it.
Mark Mason:This morning I get on camera. I had to laugh. I look at myself on the camera because I have a confidence monitor in front of me so I can see what the camera sees. And there I am with my big corporate hat on in big bold letters, facing right into the camera, about to record a podcast episode for my side hustle. So I had to turn the record button off and go change hats. It's just kind of funny. It's the little things that I guess probably don't even really matter that sometimes make me laugh.
Mark Mason:Late night. Internet marketing.