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

Meredith: 0:57

let's just do the podcast.

Meredith's Husband: 1:00

Do you know you have no idea we're talking about today? Do you

Meredith: 1:04

know what I ever?

Meredith's Husband: 1:07

I guess not something else.

Meredith: 1:09

Because this this is not a this is not a part two.

Meredith's Husband: 1:14

Right. This is I'm going to call this piece good advice. Bad advice. Oh, and this, because we've talked a lot in the past about how there's lots of like, misleading SEO advice out there. Yeah. So Oh, I know what's something? Yeah, you found this, you found something as an article about SEO and about that was sent to do? Was it sent to us? Or did you just come across it?

Meredith: 1:38

No, it was sent to me as a photographer from a very big

Meredith's Husband: 1:42

company. Okay. Well, I looked at the article, and I figured let's, let's go through it. And let's say whether it's good, because there is some good advice out there. It's not I'm sure there's not 100% bad. And I do want to give props where props are due, and debunk and debunk where it's possible. So you have less you know, so you don't stress about things you don't need to stress about. Yeah. So let's take a look at this. I'm just going I'm not

Meredith: 2:06

going to tell people what it is that we're even talking about.

Meredith's Husband: 2:09

Yeah, I'm gonna give them the name of the article, but I'm not going to tell them where it's from. Because I don't want to if it's not good advice, I don't want to name names, smear them. This is the name of the article is the top six SEO Mistakes photographers make and 2022.

Meredith: 2:29

And that was sent to me. I didn't even look at it. I just sent it to you.

Meredith's Husband: 2:33

Good idea. And so it gives six mistakes that photographers make and kind of tells what to do give some action steps for each one. So let's just go through these number one. The first mistake that it says is not focusing on local SEO.

Meredith: 2:51

I think that's good. Yeah,

Meredith's Husband: 2:52

that's good advice.

Meredith: 2:53

That is I would say that's good advice. Really

Meredith's Husband: 2:55

good advice. And I just, we've talked about this. What were you gonna say?

Meredith: 3:01

I said, I just got an inquiry from somebody in Charlotte.

Meredith's Husband: 3:04

Okay. Thanks for that. Yeah. Oh, no, it

Meredith: 3:08

was did Miss Park, Georgia,

Meredith's Husband: 3:11

or should we continue with the podcast? Yes. All right. The action steps under this first one are sign up for Google My Business. Absolutely. I've said that many times. mentioned your city and region, US consistent Naps. Naps is an abbreviation for name, address and phone number. So yes. And sign up for recommender directories. So yeah, recommended directories. Yeah. So recommended directories would be remember when we talked about white spark, and they go out and they build your local citations or your your local links and directories. That's that's that mentioned your city and region? Yes. I would say there's a caveat here. Do not repeat the name of your city all over the place. Don't say don't put New York and every other sentence. Put it on your homepage, maybe in your footer. And on your contact page. That's what

Meredith: 4:05

I still see. I still see. Sorry, I completely just as you said, the footer and then you said something else the contact page on the contact page? Yeah, I still see photographers saying serving New York, Brooklyn, Greenpoint. Excellent. Didn't miss part.

Meredith's Husband: 4:24

Yeah, I would not I would not do that. The intention is good. But don't do that for SEO. I mean, you can certainly say in your, on your services, or some Oh, hey, I serve everybody in New York or everybody in Brooklyn. I live in Park Slope. You know, but but make it natural. Don't don't do it that way. If you have, you know, something that can be done is I had a client once that they were putting their testimonials. They were a regional company, they were putting their testimonials online. And so they had testimonials from all these different neighborhoods. So they put testimonials on and then they put the name of the neighborhood. So that's a good way to do it. Yeah. Make it natural. Don't like don't anytime you find yourself reading a sentence. That's just a whole bunch of words with commas in between. That's not good. You keywords. If you're writing a sentence and you have 85 commas in it. That's not good. Don't do that. Okay, but this is pretty good. Number one here I think is good advice. Yeah, focus on your local you see as good as ice. Nope. I said That's good advice.

Meredith: 5:29

They said that's good as ice. But you sign

Meredith's Husband: 5:33

it might be number two, not enough content on the website. Also good. Like, it is nice. Yeah, that also is as good as ice. But that's good advice comes in cute little. We have talked a lot about building resource blocks, building resource content. That's one one aspect of this. And here there are some ideas to get started and they list you know, listing your preferred venues and shoot location, shoot locations, venues, makeup and wardrobe, gear and equipment list, FAQs. excetera. That's all I mean, to be honest, that's kind of all resourceful information.

Meredith: 6:18

So you don't have an equipment list.

Meredith's Husband: 6:21

i That's not necessary. That's definitely that's just very common now for like, especially among like, YouTubers, everybody wants to be a YouTuber, and they say, oh, what's my equipment here, here, and here. This is what I do. In case you're if you're watching a video, say, and you're you really liked the way it looks, or you really liked the way it sounds, they would have an equipment list, and then you get an affiliate, then you have an affiliate link. So fair enough, you can do that. You could you could say, yeah, you can shoot I shoot Nikon, you know, you could. That's good advice. In fact, going back to when I first optimized your website, basically, all I did was I put some text on it. words on it, because no photographers, photography, websites, were just all images, just all images. And to Google, that's just a blank page. So I literally just put text on your site. And within a month you're like, on or near the first page. Since then I've done a lot more. But to begin, that's all

Meredith: 7:28

photographers, yes.

Meredith's Husband: 7:31

There's a lot more photography. Okay, mistake number three keywords used incorrectly or without a plan? Yes, without a plan? Yes. So you have no keyword plan. And we just covered a two part series of how to create that plan how to develop a keyword plan. But yeah, that is a big one. Because a lot I think one of I do agree on a percent on this one. A lot of times people just take their what they think their keywords are and stuff them all over on every page

Meredith: 8:05

photographer ever, winning?

Meredith's Husband: 8:09

No, not. Not necessarily. But just taking, you know, if you were to take, like children's photography, and just put children's photography on every single page, well, that's that's going to do more harm than good. So yes, keywords used in that would definitely be keywords used incorrectly. mistake, mistake number four. Not enough text to balance images and video. Sort of sort of this is kind of the same thing as number two. It basically goes into there not being enough words on the page, it says try to insert at least 500 words of text on your homepage. In general, yes, you want to aim for at least 350 words on a page. If you want a page to appear in Google, okay. More than that, it's it's better typically, if you have less than 200 200 250. That's, that's a that's a very sparse page in terms of content. Which might be fine place to count. Oh, I would do it in a in a Google Doc. Yeah, just cut and paste the text into a Google Doc. Count the words.

Meredith: 9:27

And it'll count the words for you. Yeah, yeah,

Meredith's Husband: 9:29

there's a word count as a word count. There's also there is a tool that will that will do that for you called Screaming Frog SEO spider, which is it's called Screaming Frog SEO spider. It's a free tool. There's a free and a paid version, the free version is pretty good. You can scan a website up to 500 pages. If you do an a scan of your site, it will tell you the number of words on each page. But to be honest, if you just want a word count, it's easier just to go to the page as a user, highlight all the text and then paste it into a Google Doc, or like, Word Perfect or Microsoft Word or whatever you use. And there's usually some sort of word count feature that'll tell you how many words there you want there to be 350 on your your main pages that you want to have or you would like to have appear in Google. Okay. So that's a good that's a good objective. This the this mistake number four, I think is a lot of overlap between. Think it was mistake number two. Yeah. Yeah. It's this it's the same idea. Although Also good advice. I mean, yeah, keep going. And then Mistake number five, not working on backlinks. So yes. Also, we've talked about how important backlinks are in terms of Google, it's the highest

Meredith: 10:47

remind the listener and your wife what a backlink is

Meredith's Husband: 10:51

a link. So a back first a backlink and a link is the same thing. Those two terms used interchangeably. So we want links, Google rankings are largely based on links. So the more in general, the more links pointing to your website, the better. If that sounds foreign, then go back and look for one an episode that focuses on links, I know we have a couple of them, we'll probably have more in the future. And then it lists a bunch of ways you could some ideas to get links. They're not bad ideas.

Meredith: 11:23

But number six, number

Meredith's Husband: 11:24

six images not renamed. This one is not good advice. This one This, this. So what they're saying images not renamed. This is a super, super, super minor factor in terms of your rankings. But what it's saying is, you want to name your image files with your keywords. Yeah, this is not important number that really, this is a good way to think about this is if a user is going to see something on your website, then it's going to be an important ranking factor. Right? So like your headline, oh, that's important. Your visible text? Oh, that's important. That's important image captions. That's important. When is anybody ever gonna see the name of a file? Right? Only if

Meredith: 12:10

the only time they're gonna, they'll see a name of a file. If you send a signature with a photo in it, and they reply, and the signature doesn't come through, but like, no photography,

Meredith's Husband: 12:24

and you don't have alt text. Normally, they would see the alt text, they're not even the name of the file. Only if somebody in that case, there's no alt text, or if they download a file, will they see the actual name of the file? Now, it probably as good you know, to avoid put it you know, avoid name avoid, like really long names.

Meredith: 12:47

The real real this is the one this is the one to use this. Yes. Yes. This one.

Meredith's Husband: 12:53

Yeah. That's that's the mayor designer. file naming scheme. In case you're wondering, new, new new, newest, newest, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, newest, newest new rates, headaches for one of us. Anyway, so what this is saying is put keywords in your file names, I would be wary of that. Because you could be flagging to Google that you're trying to, again, stuff keywords. Now, this is probably going to happen naturally. If you have a children you have on your site. You have a children's photography page, the you there's a gallery on there. I've named those files like children so that I know if I have a just a big list of files. I know this is on the children's page. And then I have it's a gallery so I feel like children oh six, and then I have Zinner photography. So it's a little bit of not not branding, but if somebody were to download that file, right, and then send it to a friend, or you want to have some sort of ownership maybe, or at least I do personally, personally know. So putting keywords in your files, I think should be happening kind of naturally. Yeah, I wouldn't go out of your way. And more importantly, I think name them so that they are easy to use and keep track of so you have some sort of naming system not new, new, new, new, new, newest, new.

Meredith: 14:22

This one, it was Star Star, star star, space, space,

Meredith's Husband: 14:26

space new. So this article is actually pretty good. I think there's there's one thing in here that I think is just very minor and it if you take it the wrong way, you could end up being big waste of time. You could be signaling to go HAM stuffing keywords. But in general, this is a pretty good article. That's good to know. In fact, what I should say where it is. Since we didn't I didn't bag on it. Not at all. It's on SLR Lounge. Dot Yeah.

Meredith: 14:58

Yeah. So it's an email you get if you signed up for

Meredith's Husband: 15:01

any that's yeah, that's, that's, that's pretty good advice. You know what would be cool if you if listening to this, not you, Meredith, but listening to this. If you've seen any advice, if you've seen articles and you're wondering, Hey, is that good advice or bad advice? Send it to me, send it to us via Instagram.

Meredith: 15:19

And our response will be good is ice.

Meredith's Husband: 15:23

Yes, it's either good as ice or it's good advice. Melted.

Meredith: 15:29

Thank you. Bye

Meredith's Husband: 15:30

bye. Okay, 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