The New Era of Search: There's a New Way to Rank... | Dan Kurtz

If you are getting into link building and you wanna get your feet wet, according to Google, the whitest of white hat backlinks you can build to anything you own is a press release. - Interesting. - Don't put a link directly linking to your site that you can't go in and change yourself. - So important. One of the places where we're spending a lot of time on Reddit to the general public is still not very well-known, but Reddit answers. - Why didn't you tell me about that? - I am a Danzy expert. The people that say do follow, no follow, you're following advice from 2012. - Hunter. - Our guest, he's a returning guest. And he's been in marketing since 2006. He's the grower of business, the optimizer of processes, the slayer of bad digital marketing. And he's also known for his very unique, sometimes controversial t-shirts. He has a 15-year career in digital marketing, including consulting with companies like Bing, Nielsen, just to name a few. All right, we're talking about the famous or infamous Dan Kurtz and he'll be joining us in a second. We could not do this podcast without our sponsors. So we like to thank CellarBoard, AZRANK, Sophie Society, The Titan Network, and Connect Cash. Now, sit back, relax, grab a coffee, enjoy the show. Welcome, Dan. - Hey, Norm, thanks. - I wanna talk about Amazon sellers. And we've done a lot of talking. Kevin, you and I, you know, we've formed this relationship. And, you know, you've talked about things that just blew my mind about Amazon sellers, listings, that people aren't doing to get ranked and have no clue that they can use to help gain the advantage on the competitors. Can we start with that? - Yeah, absolutely. - Why don't we start, first of all, is there something that we can do on the top with either listing optimization, images, wherever you like to go? And then we can head over to the ranking site, which is completely different. - Sure. - Yeah. I think in Amazon, they call that A+, right? - Yeah, A+ is their secondary content. That's below the fold. So they have the slide deck, which has seven images. Then they have the A+, which is absolutely very critical, which has images, images in font, video. It's basically your web page. - Right. - Okay. Yeah, so we do in, excuse me, in SEO, we do the same thing a lot of times. So when we're optimizing a client page, they have their content, their copy, that they want to have at the top of the page. So when you come to do SEO, a lot of times the question is, well, if they don't want that copy touched, how do you still optimize the page? So what we do, and kind of how we've worked it, is we put supplemental content, kind of like A+ at the bottom of the page. I will do an accordion and a little clickable accordion. And within there, there'll be several questions about whatever the topic on the page is. So in the case of Amazon products, size, shape, weight, shipping, does it fit my living room? Does it, all the questions around what somebody would ask. And we put those into an accordion. We put them on the bottom of a web page. And normally that content is enough content. It's well optimized enough, just by simply talking about the topic at hand, the product, the service, whatever it might be. That is enough to actually make that page outrank everyone else. You don't have to compete by writing 38 linear feed of content. You can put very pointed, decided questions into a collapsible accordion, and that's enough to move it up. Same thing kind of applies on Amazon with the A+. Which is why I bring it up. There's a parallel there. So if you're doing anything on your website, the A+ could still be used on your website. So the image is the video. Same thing on your product page for that product. OK. Now, if we're taking a look at that listing, we talked about this before. And we actually had some examples that we are just some studies, case studies, I guess, from a couple of clients. But people don't realize that they can take their Amazon listing and rank fairly simply on Google with something that is an SEO little trick. You want to talk about that? Absolutely. So-- and what Norm's alluding to is-- I hope we're on the same wavelength. Absolutely. So what Norm is alluding to, I think, is-- I always think. I try not to, but what Norm's kind of alluding to is-- using what we like to call bar of authority. So as an Amazon seller, you're listed on Amazon.com, which has a huge, huge reputation online. Largest income in the space been around since the '90s. So in terms of what SEOs look at for metrics, so authority, relevance, things like that, number of links hitting the website, there's a ton, which is why Amazon ranks so well in the search engines. Along with during the holidays, they bump Google a little bit extra cash, and they bump the listings out. But that's neither here nor there. Same thing with Reddit in past years, if you haven't noticed. But what I'm getting at is you have all the authority of Amazon behind you. You're on Amazon.com. You have pages on Amazon.com. The thing is that if you look at a URL, you've got Amazon.com/. Every time you have a slash, you have an order of magnitude or one step further away from that domain. So you're still on Amazon.com. But you're all the way out in the nose bleed section on the listing. So think of it as like, you're going to go see a concert, you're going to see Bruce Springsteen out, John, whatever. You didn't get front-road tickets. You are up in the nose bleeds. Or you're watching outside on the jumbo tron. Right. It's one of the tips. But you're still there. So what I'm getting at is there are ways to affect how you are ranking in the search engine. So for example, being on Amazon.com, even though you're all the way out there, if you were to point a few decided links, backlinks, to your Amazon listing, for what your product is, what your product does, they could be either from an Amazon keyword tool or a Google keyword tool, or even better yet, blend them together so you can rank it both. But what you do is you build a few backlinks to it. You'll notice sometimes on Google organic listings. If you type in an exact product, there might be an affiliate website that pops up above you. Or your product might be number four or five, sometimes lower on the page, depending on what's going on. But by pointing those links at the page, you have the ability to move that website up, normally for Google to pay attention. And this is not my number. And this is from a colleague of mine. The number normally is about 25 backlinks from 25 different sites. And they don't have to go to some huge authority site and go build a link. You can go build your social media profiles. That's enough to link to it. You just simply make a post on social media with that backlinking there. And that's enough for-- --and that link going back to your Amazon listing. Right. The caveat to that is that any of the ones that are what we would call a quote unquote "walt garden," so like, putting it on Facebook is usually pretty good. But for the emergency Facebook search results, normally you have to lock it. So it has to be something where Google and their bots can come along and take a look at it. Where Amazon and their bots can come along and take a look at it and reward you based on that. So you can do it on places like Pinterest. More recently, Instagram, Reels, and Posts are now indexable in the search entrance. I heard about that. So you can now-- you can affect those if you optimize your titles and some of your stuff in there as well. Yeah, that's something we could talk about in a second as well. But we're old school. And I'm probably even more older school than you. I was doing SEO and renting out pages for all sorts of different categories back before the first update, before Panda. And it was so easy. We'd have charter fishing boats and in Florida, charter fishing boats. And we would just-- here's a keyword. We'd go for it. And we would rent out space. You want to be number one? Here's your page. And what we always used was always important. And it is to this day is quality backlinks. But I just want to get your take on this, because people might just go to Fiverr and get some guy to post 100,000 crappy backlinks from whatever sites they want. Is that going to be effective? Or how do you know where to go to get a backlink and you're not getting ripped off? Want more unfiltered tips from top e-commerce experts? Well, hit subscribe, and you'll never miss a lunch with Norm episode. So in this particular use case, you could-- and again, this is somebody speaking with almost 20 years experience in ACUP-- you could go by a Fiverr gig and go do that. What I will say is, if you're going to do that, you point it to what we would like to call as a buffer. So what that means is you make a post on, let's say, Pinterest. And then instead of giving them the link to your website or your Amazon listing, you give them the link to the Pinterest post. The reason being is Pinterest has a lot of authority. There's already a lot of backlinks pointing at it, so it can take the hit. OK. It will then-- we call it link laundering. It will scrub and all of the negative stuff that would normally trickle through actually is turned to a positive because the authority of something like Pinterest is so high. OK, let's go through-- let's back up. Can you create the sequence of events that would need to happen? Give us the action steps. What would have to happen? Sure. So go out, make your profiles, come on blog or Tumblr. Whatever websites are out there, you can find the laundry list of them. I think I gave one away on one of the previous webinars with Kevin. You-- yeah, yeah, I listened. Yeah. So there's probably about 100 out there that are really, really good. So you can pick a couple, go build profiles on them. Just plant your flag for your business. If you have questions about where to plant that flag, as far as unrelated to your brand, there's a website out there called Spark Toro, which will tell you where-- Oh, Rand Fishkin. He's in on the podcast. Yeah, he's got a tool on the back end that will actually tell you what podcasts are listening to, what channels they hang out on, where your customer is spending time. So that's a great place for you to go to figure out not only where to plant the flag, but actually where your ideal customers are hanging out. Because there's two different schools of thought, right? As an SEO, I can go build links for whatever I want and do a register profile. Or I can go hang out where the customers are, and then that's part of my SEO strategy. Because now I'm interacting with people on the platform that are actually genuinely looking for the thing that I have. Go back to Spark Toro for a second. So somebody signs up, goes to Spark Toro, gets their information. They see where their potential clients are listening and tuning in podcasts, whatever it is. Then can they target those people? So there are ways. Obviously, if it's a podcast, you can do podcast advertising. There's a lot of different ways to go and do something like that. A sponsor posting in front of somebody. There are other tools in the market where based on browsing behavior, you can go ahead and follow somebody based on what they're typing in. So there's different ways you can do it. Easiest one is get on the platform. Do it under your brand name and say, hey, we are this brand. If you have questions, this is the official account. Ask away. You see, a lot of times on Reddit companies will do that. They'll jump in and go ahead and do something like that. Where they'll set up their brand account. But then they'll also set up a couple of burn-up accounts. And they'll have people ask questions to the account to foster that engagement and move it. Kind of like the tip jar, right? Got a couple of bills in the tip jar. Get it going. But Reddit moderators are pretty privy to that. So you got to say it with your whole chest when you do it. So just going back to the action steps and-- Yeah, so market research. Yeah, plant your flag. Start posting content. Make that post a link from each of the sites to your Amazon listing. That's normally enough to bith it to the top. If not, you can go ahead and normally, I don't recommend this. Again, do this with a grain of salt and a shot. It's a killer. But you can go ahead and find a fiber gig. Don't go crazy. Find somebody who can build a couple links. They don't need 500,000. You're going to tip against your favorite. But find somebody who can build a decent amount of links. Pay them for it. Push it to one of the branded properties that you have or one of the posts that you have a link to your Amazon product. And just let it set. Let them do their thing. Don't touch it. Don't do anything else with it. And just track the difference. See what the results are. Because what will happen a lot of times with the higher authority sites like that, because they have such a massive influx of links coming in every single day, some of the big sites. You get sites from great neighborhoods. You get backlinks from not so great neighborhoods. You get backlinks from places you wouldn't even wish on your worst enemy. But because of the magnitude and the size of a lot of these sites is they're used to getting, you know, 5, 10, 15,000 links to a page at a clip. It's not a big deal for them. And they're so widely diversified in the number of backlinks that they have. There's a rule of magnitude. Now, I won't bore anybody with this. But years ago, there used to be something in Google called PageRank. And it was how they defined how authoritative a website was. There's a couple of websites where you can kind of look at it and see that nowadays. Some people trust Moz, some people trust HREFs. Personally, I like to use Majestic because it's more accurate number, I sound. It's closest to the original PageRank as possible. But PageRank was on a scale of 1 to 10. How authoritative your site is in Google's eyes. And every number that you went up, it was a logarithmic 10 degree of difficulty to get from 1 to 2 to 3, 3 to 4. Meaning, exponentially, your website had to do a certain number of things. The sites that we're talking about have an authority of 9 or 10, 90s when 100s. Once you pass 6 or 60, in this case, backlinks no longer apply to your business because you are so big at that point and you have so much algorithmic tools going for you because of the size of your site, that backlinks is no longer a thing. Meaning, Google doesn't count that factor anymore. It's part of their algorithm, which is called MC4. It's the too much of a good thing clause. It's the-- I'm going to sit there. I'm going to keep pushing the button. And eventually, somebody comes along and goes, no, that button's close. You can't use any more. Go do something else. That's how Google works. But once you hit that scale, they know that backlinks are no longer a thing. You've gotten so big that anything that somebody throws at that website is not going to tip the scale in either direction. So you can quote-unquote link wander through some of those websites. If I understand it correctly, you're going to go and find your audience. You're going to put it in a post. These links are going to go to that post. So that post could be Pinterest. It could be on Instagram. I'm not sure if you'd point it to TikTok. But it would go to one of the major social media sites. What happens is if you've got 10,000, 50,000 links going over, let's say, the Pinterest, because they're used to crap filtering crap, they're going to help get rid of the crap. And then your post that has your link over to your Amazon page has better links going over to it. Is that correct? Yes. OK, so hopefully everybody understands that. It's just not directly pointing over and saying, here you go, and you get all these porn sites and all these other things. From some cheap guy doing 500,000 clicks, that could actually hurt you, couldn't it? Absolutely. So the general rule of thumb that we use in SEO is don't put a link directly linking to your site that you can't go in and change yourself. So important. So because if, like I say, for example, with a Fiverr guy, he goes and does that, and all of a sudden, yes, I'm ranking number one. And then 24 hours later, Google goes, oh, these are junk clicks. And now your listing's gone. Your Amazon listing is not in the top, whatever, 7, 8, 10 pages. Now you went from number one, number 160, something. And there's no way to undo that because you paid somebody to do the links and you can't turn them off. Is it important to have the proper company or a country? So if you're in the US that you stick with links that are from the US. It definitely does help if you're doing international SEO. So like if you're an Amazon.com, look for.com links. If you're on Amazon.co.uk, look for.co.uk links. It does help on smaller sites. Again, when it's a bigger site, like Pinterest or something like that, the country code kind of doesn't matter. The other fun thing and the reason I keep mentioning Pinterest is Pinterest on the back end will auto translate your post into several other languages when you post it. And they won't tell you. Meaning you have a couple of referring domains there that are international. Once Google picks it up and pays attention. And Google or Pinterest by itself is probably-- and has been around forever-- I think LinkedIn and Pinterest are probably the two most underrated platforms there is out there. Yeah, absolutely, especially for Amazon products. It's a great way to get traffic, especially if you're doing-- you don't even have to do massive content production. I know a lot of the folks that are on Amazon just do Amazon. I found there's a big line down the middle. There's either people who aren't just doing stuff on Amazon and haven't built a website yet or there's people who have built a website first and then went to Amazon. Or some combination of the two. Yeah, and maybe not even just one or the other. They're either Amazon haters, so they do Shopify. Or possibly they just do Amazon. And they're leaving a ton of cash on the table. You know, we have a sponsor AZ rank. They have a company called Press X. And one of the things that they do is they find quality magazines to run editorial campaigns in. So now you're getting Forbes or you're getting what's it called? L. Just higher, the top ranked tier two, tier one, magazine sites. Would you recommend spending more? Because they're not free. You pay a few hundred dollars for these. But is it worth that quality link? It is. And a lot of times. I know folks inside of the SEO space who, depending on the vertical they're in, I have some friends and colleagues who are in the education space. And they will go ahead and they will put together a scholarship for that EDU backlink. Like they will actually go ahead and put up the money for a scholarship and get that high quality EDU backlink. So a lot of times you can build your own when you're starting. So there's the hobbyist approach. And then there's the built not bought. And then there's people who do both. I like to build what I can first. I'm obviously a hobbyist SEO. I'm like, yeah, sure, let me go build the links. If you don't have the time, or you don't have the inclination, or you don't know where to start, find somebody who can do the links. Yeah, Fiverr can be good for it. I prefer a buddy Chris Walker has a site called the JIT, L-E-G-I-I-T. That's more of an SEO service website. And he personally fets everybody that's on that platform, or tests it first, before he lets them put it up there. If you're looking for things that are more crafted towards that, like if you want an SEO, doing your SEO campaigns, go to legit not Fiverr. OK, I'm just making note of it. I've never been on legit before. Yeah, it's the same environment as Fiverr, just a little bit more nerdy. And we like our nerds, right? So the other thing, by the way, I just want to point this out. You can always reach out. Dan's just not sitting there taking orders. And you're not going to hear him say this. But he does provide a backlink service to people for Amazon. So he came out and he spoke at BDS as Iceland. He blew everybody. He literally blew everybody away with what he presented. So just to let you know that he's got the service, and he's got a ton of other things that are probably pretty helpful for Amazon resources. But I do want to talk about-- and there's all around the same sort of topic-- but we talked about Pinterest. For an Amazon seller who doesn't know anything about Pinterest, what's a few good pointers to do when you're creating Pinterest account? First, it should be a business account, right? Yeah, absolutely. Then you've got to make a couple boards. Yeah, make a couple boards. The way I view it is the same way you would structure a website. So you make your Pinterest. And then you make your boards are kind of like categories. So you put all of your stuff. You'll see people kind of structured, however they have things. So all of your-- if I was going to break it down real simple for the folks at home, so think of it as either-- let's say we're organizing Legos. We're going to do it by color, real simple. You've got a red category, blue category, yellow category. And you go ahead and you filter whatever size bricks you have. You get the big eight peg bricks, the one by one, the little mubby ones, the ones that look like coins. They all fit into that bucket. And that's kind of how you organize your Pinterest. Obviously, it's a lot more complex than that, but you can organize it in that fashion. And then everything inside of that Pinterest bucket can relate to each other. So it kind of helps them to understand. It's basically classifying and organizing your own stuff. So basically, if you keep your room clean, Google likes you. Yeah. And you can just create-- like, it's for visuals. So you can have video, you can have regular posts. You'd have a caption. And within that post, you want to link that back to your Amazon. Or if you have Shopify, over to your Shopify. And that's where you're talking about directing the backlinks over to that post. And then it would clean it up and send the links over to your Amazon. And you've seen some pretty amazing results with these Amazon backlinks, right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I wouldn't be doing it if it didn't work. But it was something that stumbled across and decided to give it a test. I'm like, well, this principle applies to a lot of other websites. Why can't we do it with Amazon? So I started playing with it, and oh, it works. So started doing it that way. So we're at the bottom of the hour. And if this is the first time you're listening to the podcast, we do something really special at the top of the hour. And that's the wheel of Kelsey. And this is where our guests give away a prize. And today, Dan is giving away a backlinks service. That's worth $500. Do you want to talk a little bit about that, Dan? Yeah, sure. So in everything we've talked about so far, we've talked about links and authority and how to do all that stuff. So what I've done in all of my ventures is I've found the best of the best as far as links are concerned. All of the websites, all of the different places to put it. And within a few button clicks because of how I've automated it and what I've done, I can effectively build those links directly to an Amazon listing. And it will do exactly what we're talking about without you having to go through everything I just described. It's a one-shot thing. We go ahead do it, the backlinks head, and the listing starts going out. And I mean, we go forward for a full 30 days, taking care of it, and getting the links crawled, and making sure Google is paying attention to 'em. And just every kind of link you can think about, dot edu, dot go, backlinks, all sorts of blog posts, networks. We've got, I've got a network of over a quarter million domains inside of my private blog networks. So we'll be using some of those to actually get links pointing to your website, like just massive amounts of stuff. - Yeah, so if you think you might wanna see your Google listing, or your Amazon listing boost up and jump up in the ranks on Google, all you have to do is hashtag will a Kelsey or tag to people, and you'll be entered automatically. Or if you get our Monday newsletter, you'll be able to join it there as well. And then not this, not today, but a week from today, we'll be doing the draw for that. So that's awesome, Dan, thanks a lot. And now I think we should go over to the word, our word from our sponsor. Did you know Amazon Profit is more than revenue minus ads? Cellarboard calculates your true profitability, factoring in every fee, return, shipping cost, and even cost of goods using fifilogic. That's first in, first out logic. Plus the automate your PPC, forecast inventory, and avoid stockouts, reclaim money with Amazon reimbursements, set FBM shipping by period, and track Walmart profits with the same dashboard. And you don't even have to have an Amazon account. You can try it for free for two months, cellarboard. Know your numbers, scale your business. Okay, you said something a little earlier on about Reddit. We've never talked about this. I don't know if I'm gonna throw you a curve ball here, but Reddit just keeps coming up nowadays to help you with your ranking, to help you just be brand awareness, everything. Can you tell us a little bit of the advantages and why we should try to create a subreddit? - Yeah, so as of what, two years ago, Google gave Reddit, roughly, or one way or the other. Somebody exchanged tens of millions of dollars to, I believe, Reddit gave it to Google to figure out what was going on with their stuff and give them access. In doing so, Google went ahead and curtailed the algorithm to Reddit to get better answers in front of people. Because Google has a section in it called people also ask on a lot of their search results. So in addition to that, Google is curating what they think are their own search results to how people are doing stuff based on what's on websites. But we know as consumers that not every time is a website always correct, nor is it have the information we're looking for. So what they started doing was providing a box where provided answers. So back of the day, it used to be Yahoo Answers was the big thing, nowadays it's Reddit. So you can go in and see the answer from a specific post or a specific subreddit or what the most upvoted thing inside of that subreddit is. And that's kind of what they use is showing up in there. And to Norma's point, yes, you can go ahead and build a subreddit specific for your brand, your audience, a keyword, whatever it might be. Or there's ways to go ahead and claim one that's been dead for a while and then use that one and re-brand it and massage it to your own brand. But that's a larger conversation. Let's talk about a popular topic, LLM. How do people start to get indexed into these LLM? The short version is SEO. And the longer version for anybody who's playing it home is it works the same way that the, and the reason I say it, it's SEO is, it works the same way that Google's bot callers did. So a bot is a little piece of code that comes to your website, picks up information and goes back to the mother shit to build a profile of your business. They exist on pretty much every site that's out there, they come and visit, there's tools out there that do specific things, they have their own bots. Anyway, all of the LLMs to some degree have a crawler that goes out and looks for information on the web about your business or just about business in general. And they go out in the crawl and they scrub and they add information into their database if they don't have any about that specific thing. So the more places that you can put information about your business, your website, your social posts, all of that stuff. If the bots understand that, hey, this brand, this is this ecosystem, that's like the most important thing to get your stuff into an LLM. So the big three for anything whenever it's a search engine, LLM, whenever there's three things that they need to know who you are, what you do and how you do it. If you can answer all three of those, they will start building a profile and a use case for what you're doing. On the other side of that, I was going to say we did a webinar with you in Kevin a little while ago and I went and showed people how to use LLMs specifically to go ahead and generate pages that were good for both humans and for LLMs. So the other thing you can do is start asking LLMs questions without your Amazon product and throwing those in there. As you start having that conversation on the back and somewhere whenever they go ahead and pull logs, that data will be added to that next run. - Very good and that, by the way, was, we've been on a few of our webinars and you are probably the most in demand. I remember getting in Kevin too, getting tons of emails because people wanted to know exactly when you were coming on and we usually keep that kind of blind, right? We just want the next guest to come up, the next guest to come up so people can't cherry pick. But every time we get overwhelmed with when Stan coming up, we got to see Dan and you deliver. Like I said, in Iceland, you've come up and you've shown consistently new ideas to either get ranked or just cutting-edge stuff that nobody is talking about. I can remember, I think, first time I heard about this, the LLMS.tax, you. And it was like, what are you talking about? And so you want to talk a little bit about the importance of that and if you don't have it, like if you've just got a robots.txt file, you're missing out on possibly being indexed or indexed quicker on the LLMs. Yeah, so it works kind of similar and if you've spent any amount of time with a website, you know that there's a file called robots.txt. And that file, as I was mentioning earlier about the spiders and the bots, that file tells them exactly who's allowed in, who's not allowed in and what they're allowed to go browse and knock browse because if you have an e-com website, you don't want them coming and browsing your sock category and just going through socks for 25 minutes in that leading. And then next week they come back to pick up their crawl. So you can tell them where to go spend their time and what's the most effective. So you can say, hey, go to this file, not this one, go to this folder, not this one. You can do a bunch of stuff like that. With the advent of AI, we now have an LLMS.txt or LLMS. Some people like to say the whole thing out loud. It's a similar thing, but you can actually, instead of giving it files and folders, you can say, hey, here's an additional information about our business. Going back to the initial part of our conversation, you can compound that and say, hey, here's a list of all my social profiles and the URLs. Here's where I hang out. Here's where I'm making posts. Here's our most recent press release. You can throw all of those URLs into that file and the LLMS will go ahead and crawl it and have a better understanding of your brand and now have more reference points. Now, is there just an article or is there something that you can reference? So in case any of the listeners aren't technical, they could just say, hey, to my developer, read this and do it. - It basically just put all of your links that you have for your business, anywhere that you're listed, into the LLMS and just let it run. It's the simplest way to do it. They know what a URL file is. They'll figure it out and go do the thing. At a rudimentary level, that's the easiest way to do it. If you're more technical, there's other ways to do it and it's still relatively new, so there's no structure to it. It's not like deciding a web page where you've got headers and paragraphs and title tags and all that. It's very, very fluid because there's so many different ways that so many different AIs and LLMS interact with data. So there's no real one way to do it yet because there's not been a developed standard. - So you're not gonna affect the speed or cause a problem not getting index because you've set it up wrong. I just remember the days of the batch and config files. And if you stack them on top of each other in the wrong order, your computer could just die, like slow down, so it was a pain in the butt until basically plug and play came around. Are we looking at that or can you just put, literally put the URLs? - I'm just dump the URLs. It's, I've been doing pretty much that. You can get more complex with it. Like I, being an SEO, we do a lot of schema, which is a markup style. It's telling computers instead of having them read the whole page with saying, "Hey, here's this snippet of code. "This is everything that's on the page. "Go take this back to home base "and go through that in the repository." So you can do some of that in the LLMS, but again, if you're not coding, you can just copy past URLs and call it a day and get the result you want for it. - You know, we talked a little bit about Reddit. One thing we didn't talk about is Cora. And Reddit and Cora put together are both really fantastic platforms to help with not only the people also asked, but to also get indexed for certain questions that you're answering. And the LLM will pick it up because you would be considered an authority. - Correct. - Isn't that correct? - Yep. - So one of the places where we're spending a lot of time on Reddit, that's not a subreddit. It's not any of that. It's still to the general public. It's still not very well-known, but Reddit answers. - Reddit now has its own thing specifically called Reddit answers, it's just a second. - Yeah. - Why didn't you tell me about that? (laughing) - I had Dan ZX for it. - Okay, we'll be talking afterwards. (laughing) I didn't know that Reddit had Reddit answers. - It's a new feature, it's Reddit.com/answers and it is their question engine. It's their answer to Yahoo Answers. Now that they have the poll and the gravitas that they do inside of the search engines, they now have Reddit answers. So you can go in there, whether it's a person or it's a branded profile, just be aware if you do it with a branded profile. People are gonna go, "Oh my God, corporate, corporate, "corporate, it's just the nature of Reddit." - Yeah. - They are, Reddit's fairly anti-establishment. So just know if you're going in there with a branded profile with your logo on it, you're probably gonna get flamed. (laughing) - Okay, but it is something cool because we talked about that on the webinar. We've talked about this just sitting around having a cigar together. But the things that you need to do to become an authorative figure right now. So Kora, Reddit, one of my favorites is press releases. - Yes. - Google, Google is actually, like when I saw this, Google is actually saying they want that original content, a press releases, if you never thought it worked in the past, then for the last 20, 25 years, I've used press releases. I've used press releases to launch businesses, to talk about employees, to talk about anything. Guess what, when I go out there, I have those authority links. Now, Google's backing it up. Everything I've been trying to preach, for my launches, on Amazon, I would use press releases. Everybody, oh yeah, boring, boring old school. Well, you can't ignore it anymore, right? - Yeah, exactly. And we've been using press releases in SEO forever. But as an SEO, if you are getting into link building and you wanna get your feet wet, according to Google, and this is without, I know what you're talking about, but I haven't read the official brief. But the whitest of white hat backlinks, you can build to anything you own, is a press release. And a lot of people, the next question that comes out. - I don't know, you're gonna say. - But Dan, that's duplicate content. And the answer is no. Because duplicate content with Google only counts if it's on the same website. What you're doing is you are syndicating. You are having the same thing posted out over a newswire. You have the same post in multiple locations, all with the same exact information. It's the same thing as going around and putting out flyers or banners or stapling things to phone polls like we used to do back in the day. It's just a different form of advertising. But Google counts each one of those domains as a backlink, as a URL, as a referring domain. Which if you remember is the thing we need in order to rank our products. So if you had a newsroom on your website, let's say, or you went ahead and made a newsroom, so I know some people charge for newsroom, so. But if you had a section on your website that has forward slash news, and you were putting out regular press releases, that would be a great way for you to go ahead and get a tunnel links back to your website. And some press release services will let you put even two or three links to your services website into the, yeah, it depends. But usually I recommend one, me too. So like if you've got a shop and an Amazon listing, you can do it that way just so that they understand that it's the same product on both platforms. But for the most part, yeah, it's one of the best ways to build backlinks. And it doesn't have to be super expensive. A lot of people spend a couple hundred bucks on a press release. As long as you can get Google News inclusion, and you'll see that on some listings, depending on where you're going, again, legit, great platform for this. You go on there, and they'll say, hey, we're getting teed included in Google News. That is enough for, number one, for you to start getting the links that you want. Okay, you don't need Yahoo.com and Binats, and all these other huge websites to link to you. You just need diversification if you're just starting out. You need a good portfolio. It's the same as investing in stocks. SEO is a consistent games over time. PPC is day trading. You're in out, in out, in out. SEO is more of a mutual fund approach. You get in, you start slow, and you see consistent growth. 100%. There's been so many times that we've, because I own a press release company, I've owned it forever. Once, in fact, I bought the press release company once I found how good it was at ranking when I had a different industry. It wasn't in Amazon at all. And we became the first video press release company in the world, and we kind of built our reputation on that. But now, we've shut the doors on that one. We, Kevin and I have created another service, but like you said, you can go out, as long as you can get some authority sites on there, like a Google News, if you're in there, you can get ranked. But even further, like if you go out, like press release companies will either give you a $49 blast, a $100 blast. So you can find people that'll just go out and do it for 10 bucks. But there's other services that you pay for. If you want to get into Yahoo Finance, Reuters, oh, what are some other market watch? There's a bunch, and some of these might have even bigger sites. So you might not have a, what are they called? A satellite station from Fox. It'll actually be the Fox main, the main content site, which will give you more authority than others. And I've never talked to you about this, but press releases, like they're not just, press releases aren't just press releases. You can go out and do exactly what you just said. Go do it very inexpensively, and that Google summary is gonna pick that up. Yep, the other thing. Oh, I was just gonna say, what do you think about spending more? So you're going out and you're getting like 400 to 5,000 sites. And most of the more, a lot of them are high quality sites, backlinks. The way that I like to use press releases is a couple different ways. So what I'll do is there are some press release sites, and this is standard across the industry, but a lot of press release sites will leave your posts on their website, and it will either roll off after 90 days. They have to clean house 'cause they're a news outlet at a ton of stuff coming in. They don't want a million plus pages on the website by the end of the year. So they will either fall off because the news cycle's done. They could be about 90 days, or it'll stay, depending on the quality of the site. The ones that stay, so I'll keep a list of which ones. And there's ways that you can check if they're a live or dead. You have to click each one. But I'll go ahead and figure out which ones are live after 90 days. And at that point, I'll go ahead and do a press release to those links, just a very small, just again, a lower level than I would normally have pointing to my site. It doesn't have to be, again, it doesn't have to be super expensive. It's $20, $50, just get it out there. But you can build a press release to those press releases and say, hey, we recently did a story on this. Here's an update 90 days later, blah, blah, blah, blah. And what that'll do is actually power up the existing links. Same way we talked about doing with the Pinterest stuff earlier. But the other thing I want to mention was earlier I had said this is you get included in Google News. A lot of times you get to press releases. Guess who's constantly scrubbing Google News, the LLMs. Meaning, if you are affecting the press releases in that particular way, and you are spending time and writing out something that's authoritative and thoughtful. Again, you don't have to spend a lot of time on it. But the LLMs will start to pick it up and start to recognize a pattern of behavior and they will start pulling information from your website and your business into those LLMs. So it's a great way that if you're not waiting for the bots to come crawl your website for the LLMs text file, you can go ahead and push a press release or better get, do the text file first, then go push a press release, and then watch the bots go, oh, there's the homepage. Click, oh, there's the LLM file. Oh, and there's every URL they've built in the past six months. Cool, now I know who they are. And they went back and now all that information is right there in the LLMs. That is great. We got to talk about, I don't do that. And it's interesting. And by the way, like even for the service that we do for ourselves, we've been able to figure it out where we can get into Google News of course, but we can also, we know we're guaranteed to be picked up on the LLMs for that press release. So we know we're getting it. But one of the things that a lot of Amazon sellers you touched on it, why not take advantage of being in the news, have your press room? So you have a copy of it in your press room and when people come to your site, that just gives you that much more authority. Plus, I got to say this because people say, oh, you said you sent it out to 400 different locations, but I only see one or two that come up when I do my search. Well, correct me if I'm wrong. That's because Google's prioritizing. They're not going to show it all. We can produce a record that says, okay, these are all the keywords that were indexed. These are all the mixed match keywords, from five letters down to two word phrases. And this is their position. And if you go and you check it, you'll find, yeah, that's correct. And the reason why is that you're not going to have 400 different sites being picked up and ranked on Google from what I've always seen. It was just the priority of one or two. - Yeah, and that's common throughout the space, because yeah, if you remember, Google's not only doing news for just you, or just your specific industry. They also have whenever it's breaking going on. So breaking stories oftentimes will get a larger swing, a larger chunk of the page when it comes to that kind of stuff. Unless there's something, a world changing event, a massive recall, or something else happening in your space, you're probably not going to end up having multiples listed. It's just, it's the nature of the world. But it's enough for Google to pick up and put a few in the index. And that's a good point I should bring up. I mentioned a word earlier. I mentioned crawl, crawl it. There's a difference between indexed and crawled. And it's a very short list. Indexed is Google thinks it's good enough to put into the search results. Crawled means Google has come to the page and is counting that back link. So it doesn't necessarily have to show up inside Google search results in order for it to count and be a value to you to actually get a ranking. As long as Google crawls that page that the link is on, that's enough to get them to pay attention and keep tally of what's going on with your business. Interesting, very good. You know, I'm not sure if it was you, but somebody told me this about two years ago, it might have been when we were sitting around in the cigar because I changed a few things. And that was a norm, use Google tools, Google loves people who use their tools. And I think that you gave me this example. You said, if you have a press release, put in your signature, the newsroom, or a link to the latest press release. And Google will look at that favorally for every Gmail that you send out. And people, it will see that there's new content going out and that you have the new link and a people press on it. That adds up. So now in the signature, it's, hey, check us out in the news. Click. And it goes to the newsroom. Was that you? That particular one wasn't me, but based off of when we turned the cameras off in Iceland, you're on the right track. [LAUGHTER] So I will give a very 30,000-foot view because the people that paid to be in the room deserve to have the data that they have. Right. Right. With the way that Google's doing stuff now, if you have a G Suite or a Google Business or any of that sort of stuff, Gemini is baked into your tools from a default that seems at this point. So it is constantly reading your drive, reading your emails, learning how all of your patterns of behavior, and it's feeding that back into Gemini. So yes, to your point, all of that stuff does count. Google does pay attention to it. Same way, they pay attention to anything else under their umbrella. That being said, using Google's tools-- and again, there's a ton of them. But as a great example, I like to use Google Drive. If you go ahead and you spend some time and you do some content writing inside of Google Drive, and you put a link to your website in there, and you turn that link live. And you publish that Google Doc, not share it, but there's actually a go-to-file publish. Google will now come and crawl that page every five minutes and see that back link. And it will count that page as a back link towards your ranking profile. And because it is such a high authority, because it's coming from drive.google.com, Google loves itself. It's 100 out of 100 in its own system, because they're narcissistic. But it will count as an authority credible back link to your website. And it can't be crawled, it can't be found, it can't be indexed by another human being, because it's such a unique URL string. But Google can see it. And that's what matters. You could theoretically build backlinks inside of a Google Drive and create your own internal linking system that nobody else can see. So I'll look at that. If you have-- let's say you have a Google Doc, which is your press release. And you might have a slideshow, or you might have some other document that you want to-- you don't mind the public seeing. You can go to share, click Publish. And then Google will see that on their root drive, I guess, and give you that-- well, they'll like it better. They'll weigh it higher. Is that correct? Correct. So-- and in that great example. So let's say you're doing a slideshow. On one of the slides, you can say, hey, we've also published this as a Google Doc. Here's a link to the Google Doc. And then on the Google Doc, you put a link that says, hey, we also made this into a slideshow. Click here to go see the slideshow. And what you're doing is you're teaching Google that you have a network of things-- again, internet of things-- that are related to that brand, that service, that news thing. And if you spend some time in there, you can manipulate those files in that system to help with rankings. Very good. Well, Dan, I hope we can have you back. Even to talk just press release. Yeah. But the probably make press releases great again. I guess that would be the-- [LAUGHS] How do you-- how can we get across to our listeners that press releases-- they're not dead. They-- a lot of listeners might think they smell funny. They're not dead. These are real viable ways that you can get indexed, ranked, along with everything else that we talked about today. Yeah. So let's-- let's do it this way. Here's-- here's a great analogy for the folks listening at home. So if you're playing online, and let's say you're just on Amazon, if you go ahead and say, hey, we just added this new product to our product line, and you put a link to the Amazon store that you have or that specific product, you will have effectively built 500 high-thorted backlinks to your Amazon listing, which will then directly affect your ranking inside of Amazon and its site of Google, meaning you are double-dipping into two different search engines for the same product. If you were to push yourself into, let's say, the top three, or top five on Amazon, or even top three, or top five on Google, you're probably looking at about, as I would say, a 60% increase in traffic on Google, number one. And then on Amazon, whatever the current CTR breakdown is there, as far as products are concerned. But you are more likely to be recommended. You are more likely to be into the people also bought. You are more likely to show them in more places because you have built those links. If $50 can't get you to-- but if you can't separate it from $50 in order to try and get that much more in sales and revenue for your products, I don't know what to tell you. But that's the fastest way that I can think of to do it. To be fair, $20 is $20, but you can do a lot of damage with that very quickly for your product. I just thought of two other questions just quickly. Sure. One of the objections that I hear comes up is that, oh, price releases, it's a bunch of crap. They only provide no follow links. Google doesn't care. A link is a link. It still shows that it's a link, right? Correct. And the people that say do follow no follow, you're following the advice from 2012. Thank you, Dan. The relevance of all of that doesn't matter because if I have the link from Fox.com, let's say, Fox Business. And it's a no follow. But I go ahead and I wind up getting on Joe's Retail website.net and it's super relevant. But it's a do follow. It's not going to have the same amount of way as Fox.com has. That being said, one of the other things that's super important is contextual links. So if you get a link to your website, make sure that it's coming from an article about that thing. Not that somebody just went in and changed the URL and did that stuff. If the website is relevant, if it's topical about what your business is about, so like getting featured on, ask pro shops as the new product that you're partnering with as a distribution partner. It's probably going to carry some weight. It's also going to do really well for your business. You talked about syndication. So anybody that's creating a press release, they know that they have to push it out there somewhere. So you can go to a fiber. You can go to a syndication company like PR Newswire. That's probably the biggest one out there. But there's a variety of different ones ranging in a variety of different price ranges. But there's also something that when you promote a, when you publish a blog article on your website, there are syndication outlets for content. There are. Nobody talks about that. And it's as important because you're doing the exact same thing. You have a blog. You spent time. You spent money maybe. And now you publish it. Well, guess what? It's on your site. What's the answer? So what's, let's have some fun with this. And this may be a good parting gift for everybody that's listening because it's low effort. And actually, it'll work really well. So again, plug legit for this. But back in 2011, 2012, a service came online called If This Then That. I have GTT. And what they have on IFTTT, that was the first of its kind. But it allowed you to take a service that you had, and another service that you had. And you can get them to pass information back and forth. It would baton pass whatever the thing was. So you could say, hey, if I leave the office, if I get within range or my phone connects to the Wi-Fi, change the thermostat in the house, stuff like that. You could do smart home stuff and things like that. But they also had connections for different blogs and websites and things like that. So what I will say is on legit. You can go search for IFTTT or syndication network. And there are people out there who, for a couple bucks, will go ahead and they will build you a network of sites, probably about 100, that will go ahead and republish and then re-republish your content. To additional sites, the first level is the ones that are under your control. The second level looks like they are brand advocates. So you get 100 referring domains pointing back to all of your stuff without having a lift of finger. They go ahead and they will look at what's called an RSS on your website, which is old-old school. I think Shopify has got one in there. But if they don't, you can turn it on. And you can connect it every time a new blog post goes out, it will take that and it will link out from those websites back to your site and then do the same thing another level down. And then now every page that you generate has 100 referring domains pointing to it just to kickstart it. And that network can be used to grow your brand. It can make it impenetrable to people who might try and hack and be malicious against your stuff. If you use it correctly, you can use any of those properties to build those links we were talking about on Fiverr, Wink, Wink. All of that stuff can be done with that network because it is so large and it's using the sites that we talked about earlier that most things kind of bounce off of. So you can make your brand un-mess-withable. Keep it PG for the folks at home against people who might be bad actors and stuff like that. - There you go. That's a piece of gold. If you stayed to the end, that's something that is extremely useful. Dan, anybody want to get a hold of you? How did they do it? - Best way is to go find me on LinkedIn and pound on the door. It's always open. - All right, that's true. And remember, if you want to register for Dan's giveaway, which is the $500 value, the backlinks to your Amazon listing, or you probably can do it for your Shopify, I'm not 100% sure, is it either or? - Yeah, either one. - Okay, all you have to do, #WillakCelsea, tag two people or go to Mondays, lunch with Norm, the LWN.News newsletter, and just enter there. Okay, Dan, well thank you so much for coming on. - You got it, what's great about it? - All right, well thank you so much. I hope everybody learned something from this podcast. I know I was making a couple notes. You probably saw me looking down on my computer because I made a few notes. Dan's always delivering. He always over-delivers. If you get a chance to see him, if he's on a webinar, if he's speaking, go and check him out. You'll never be disappointed. All right, that's it for us today. I hope you like the pre-record. We'll be back next week live and we'll see you later. (upbeat music)