Meredith's Husband: 0:42

Hey, this is Meredith husband. I've got some SEO advice for you, but I'm gonna keep it really simple so that you can understand it. So make sense. And most importantly, so you can actually use you ready? Yeah. Okay. I'm not, but let's do it. Do it. Okay. 321. Let's go. Okay. Quick episode today about something that we are actually dealing with. We're doing for your photography that I was planning on doing anyway. Episode, but it seems to be appropriate since we're actually going with ourselves right now.

Meredith: 1:19

Yes, we are going through it. People.

Meredith's Husband: 1:23

Yeah. Well, let's not make it that dramatic. We're basically in the middle of summer vacation. So we haven't had episodes for a few weeks. Yeah, we'll be back in a couple of weeks. Yeah, it just went on. We just went on a trip. We have some photos. We didn't want to put them online. Yes. And we don't want any, don't want other people using them?

Meredith: 1:46

Yeah. Right. And we don't want to give away the rights to them.

Meredith's Husband: 1:50

Correct. Now, this is, this is not technical, legal rights like with that there is a process if you have images on your site, and you're like, these are really property of my photography business. And if anybody uses them, I want to be able to like demand money from them immediately, then you need to have those images copyrighted.

Meredith: 2:10

Okay, and how are we gonna get into how do we do that, though, that's a legal

Meredith's Husband: 2:13

thing, I would advise if you want to do that, to probably contact a lawyer, just want to jump in and reiterate, that thought, the advice that we give here, and this episode is not a legal solution to this at all. For that you'll definitely need to talk to a lawyer. This is just to prove between two individuals, if there's some sort of argument about who or where an image came from, this will help in that situation. I have done that for you for the images that you have on the main portion of your website, I do that every couple of years, because it used to be that images got stolen like that all the time, and other photographers around the world would claim that they're their own. Thank you. And that's that wasn't good, in addition to many other places that I found them. That that that doesn't seem as that doesn't happen as often as it used to. But we still want to for our lesser image. And so you can't do that. For every single image you create as a photographer, you're gonna blog images, you're gonna have social media images, that cost time, or it cost money and requires time on your end. It's not expensive, but it's like per every time you want to copyright an image, it's I don't know what the cost is. It's like 10 bucks, I don't know. But there's money per image. And it took me lots of hours to, to organize that with a lawyer. But so those that's legal protection, what we're talking about here is not legal protection, this is not legal advice. This is more just kind of common sense.

Meredith: 3:41

Advice, only play a lawyer on TV.

Meredith's Husband: 3:46

So this, so I'll tell you, I'll tell you a little bit. So again, this is not legal advice. If you want legal protection. See, go and speak with a lawyer. Yes. But this is like this has happened to me, this has happened to me, at least once. I once built a website, for a lawyer for a legal firm. And when I whenever this was years ago, but when I do this, I would go and make a snapshot of what their website looked like, before I did any work on it. Because what can happen is, you build a website, and let's say you move over all those images, all the images that are on their existing site, I recreate I create a new site, but I use a lot of the existing images that they had. So what happened, what happened? What potentially happens and what did happen in this situation is years later, this lawyer of I mean, which is weird, but it was a legal website, had taken images that they didn't pay for. And we're using them on their site. So years later, they come back and somebody says, You need to take the you know, we're gonna sue you or you need to take these down, that that lawyer immediately said, Oh, great, Meritus husband, this husband, try that again. No, I'm just gonna, we'll just flip that, oh, you'll be fit. Okay. So what that lawyer did is immediately said, that was married his husband, I had nothing to do. He chose all those images. It's his fault, and he is legally responsible. And there was a whole bunch of back and forth email. And then I, you know, I said, I pointed to this snapshot that I had made, and I'll show you this what we're gonna talk about how to do this. I pointed to this snapshot of what her website looked like before I even touched it before we saw Find an agreement or anything, and it had those images. Snap immediately, the lawyer stopped. She never contacted me again. The problem was solved as far as I was concerned, I don't know what happens. And like I said, this is not legally, you know, this is not the images were not copyrighted. I didn't do anything like that. But this is kind of common sense. And this, you know, person and the lawyer at that thought, Okay, I, this is gonna be a tough case for me to make. But it was married as husband's fault that he went and found those images when a snapshot of my website before so. So this is kind of like you. Nobody does except me.

Meredith: 6:15

And

Meredith's Husband: 6:17

so this is so yeah. So this, I think, is common sense. It's not full blown legal protection. But it's a, it's a good thing to do if you have images that you take, and you want to put on a blog post, if you like your personal images like we're doing, and we want to kind of put them online, but we certainly don't want anybody else because we might, who knows what we will do with these in the future. We certainly don't want to have to battle anyone else, you know, claiming that there are images, right? And if this ever were to go to court, again, I don't know what would happen, but it's kind of a common sense. Safety approach. So okay. And here's what you do. Okay. When you have images, so we have, so you're gonna have like 100 plus a couple 100 images. Yeah, that's what 300 images, okay, what we'll do is we'll create a blog post. So your site is on WordPress, similar process, if you're on Squarespace, but you create a blog post, and you just put a bunch of images on it. I would say don't put 300 images on a single blog post, it's going to be way too big. The images don't need to be high resolution, high resolution, high resolution, they just need to be able to be identified as like, hey, yes, that is that image in question. So just dump those images on that blog post. They don't You don't need any text. You don't need any anything just just like a grid stateless, like a like Instagram tree. We'll get that to that in a second. Just put them on there. What I would do is password protect this blog post, so that it's not going to be visible to anyone who tries to get here. We don't want to have it. We don't want to have people arriving on this page from Google. Right? Right. Simple, right? So once you have that blog post, you're going to go to a website called web.archive.org.

Meredith: 8:06

And the dots are actual dots, not the words. Yes, correct. That's correct.

Meredith's Husband: 8:13

You'll need to create an account accounts are free. Yeah. But once you do that, what you can do here is and when you first go to this site, you'll see there's a search bar, if you search for a URL, it'll give you a snapshot of that URL throughout history. Oh, yeah. Oh, it's a cool, it's a very cool tool. But what we want to do is we want to sign up for an account. And then we're going to give it a URL to go visit and make a snapshot of that URL is the blog post that you just made with all those images. But what we want to do first, just before you take this step with web.archive.org, remove the password so that anybody can reach otherwise, the their, their tool will not be able to access it because they because there's a password. So remove the password for just a few minutes, go to the archive tool, make a snapshot of that page, it will save it, I think you can create folders and stuff in there. But all you need to do is get a snapshot of that page. So it will capture the whole page. And you can turn your password back on. Now in our case, we'll have you know, we'll have multiple blog posts, we have 300 images, I would say probably don't want to put more than like 50 ish images on a single blog post. So we'll have like six pages to do. And we can we can name them however we want. I would probably call them just like, you know, have a blog post called images. That would be what we call a parent blog post underneath that would be like, you know, the date of our trip or something. So your URL would literally be Mara Zinner photography.com/blog/images/and, then the date doesn't really it doesn't matter, though, it doesn't matter what the URL is. That's just the way that I'm planning to do it. Okay, so once that is done it I mean, that's, that's it, you can go back and it log into your archive.org. Profile in any time and find that snapshot. And if you ever have an issue with this image, you can send them you can send the images or page, you can send them a snapshot and the snapshot will have the date. And it will have the so nobody is going to be able to point to that image and prove that that was published earlier than then you're publishing it.

Meredith: 10:26

And so we have to do this before we publish it on social media.

Meredith's Husband: 10:31

Yeah, do this before you you post Send anywhere. Now, again, as a photographer, you're going to be creating and publishing a lot of images. So you don't need to do this for every single image. But if you have images that, you know, are more important to you than others like these, these are personal photos.

Meredith: 10:51

If you have pictures of, you know, families that I shoot, yeah,

Meredith's Husband: 10:55

yeah. True. True. Yeah. I mean, you know, best practice, you know, total best practice would be to get every single image trademarked. Right. But that's a little unrealistic. Second best practice would be to do this process on every single image that may or may, depending on how many images you post that may or may not be realistic. You know, if you post selfie video, or a selfie image of something, you know, yeah. Again, if you're really concerned about this, you would probably want to talk to a lawyer. Right? But like I said, this has gotten me out of a few minor jams without, without it progressing to any sort of legal issue. Who, so I think it's a good like I said, it's a good common sense rule. It's a good common sense rule. Now, though, this will not help with if you want images to appear in Google Search. Yeah, this does this does not touch technique, like SEO type of stuff, and images being attributed to your website. This is for images that are basically not on your website, that maybe you're sharing via social you're sharing somewhere else outside of your website, that you want to have some sort of proof of that you publish them first, they originated with, you know,

Meredith: 12:13

the woods, the photos that are on your website, let's say you want to share those on social media, bla bla, bla, bla, you just post them first on your website?

Meredith's Husband: 12:24

Great. Yeah. Yeah, technically, yes. However, you this, the kind of same issue applies is just because something is published on your website doesn't mean there's a record that it's been published on your website, you would want it, you'd probably want to use the same tool, the web.archive.org snapshot tool and make a snapshot of it. Oh, but yes, if you post an if, like, if you, you know, how websites often say like, at the bottom, all images and text copyright? Yeah, yeah. so and so. You don't necessarily you don't really need that text, the simple fact that you published it on your own website is proof that it's yours. And I don't think that that, you know, putting that statement there alone, I don't, as far as I know, is not any sort of legal proof or guarantee or anything, it's just,

Meredith: 13:12

you know, otherwise, let us know. Yes.

Meredith's Husband: 13:15

I think it's just kind of meant to be like as a warning to people, Hey, don't steal my images, because I'm watching.

Meredith: 13:21

Right, right. So my question is, if you do something similar to Spider Monkey mad, mini honeypot HoneyBook, is that what I use? No, I don't use there's a, there's another one. Those

Meredith's Husband: 13:40

are CRM. Those are CRM and email marketing tools. Yeah, email

Meredith: 13:44

marketing tools. If I put a photo on that, and then put it on social media, am I covered? Or still should just do the little snapshot thing?

Meredith's Husband: 13:56

So you're emailing a photo to someone either?

Meredith: 14:00

I do if I do a we call them newsletters, I do newsletter and I send it and I put a picture in there. And then I use that same picture on Oh, Instagram.

Meredith's Husband: 14:13

I would do the same thing. If you're emailing a photo, I think the chances of it being stolen are are less, I mean, fewer people or whoever, you know, are people receiving your newsletter gonna steal it and use it somewhere else? No, no. So it's so so so. Yeah. So it's probably less of an issue or potential issue. I mean, but yes, you know, this is like, I know, this is kind of a pain, everybody's busy and creating an extra sort of step to do. It's a, it's bothersome, if you have a nice any sort of assistant or virtual assistant or anything like this is a very kind of, you know, it's a simple task. Anybody

Meredith: 14:54

knows. So my next question. My next question is, so I use pic time, and hopefully there'll be an affiliate link for that somewhere on this site. I really liked them. I actually prefer them to pixie set which I had been using for a really long time. So that's what I use to share my images with my clients, etc, etc. And people can download if they've purchased them or additional prints etc, etc. Yes. If I put that up there, is that safe? Because I put them up first? Or do they then own that image?

Meredith's Husband: 15:41

I don't I don't really know. You know, ideally you want to have proof that you put this on your domain. So if your pixie set domain is buried as entered at Emeritus, dinner photography dot Pixie set.com. That's really not proof that that pic time sorry, that's not proof that you own it. That's their domain. If it's if you are using one of their subdomains, things like pic time dot Meritus, dinner photography.com, then that might be better. This blog thing is a little more definitive. And again, pick time and pixie set they probably have I'm sure that they have a legal team. I'm sure that this is in their terms of service. I'm sure like this issue has been considered. So I don't know, I can't speak to what the what their what their terms and policies are. But I mean, if you know, a common sense approach would be like, there would be some way to prove that. Yes. You uploaded that image on a certain date. Right? I would think but those are, you know, if you have if you have let's say you have 100 client images from from a session, and you're going to share them with that family. I wouldn't I wouldn't worry. You don't need to take those images and do this step unless you're also going to share them on social on, you know, on on your blog or something. Those are private like, like when you send a gallery to a client. It's those are password protected, right? Yes. Yeah. Yes. So those are totally private. If they if your client wants to take those images and put them somewhere, that's up to them.

Meredith: 17:22

Right. Okay.

Meredith's Husband: 17:25

And, you know, we'll be back in two weeks. Yeah. And what are we going to talk about?

Meredith: 17:32

Something amazing, something so special, we can even share it.

Meredith's Husband: 17:39

Or just have it written down somewhere just not in front of me. That's okay. Anyway, tune in be surprised. I hope that helped. I hope that helped your website. I hope that helped your business. I hope that helped give you a little bit of confidence that SEO is not this convoluted, cryptic, crazy thing that nobody can understand. If you did like it and you found it helpful. Please share it with a couple of your colleagues. Tell them what you like or more importantly, tell me what you liked. Let me know interview. leave a review on Apple. Tell me what parts you like. And I'll try to do more of those parts. And again, thanks for listening.