Meredith's husband: 0:24

Do you remember going to Tonga? Yes, yeah, a few months ago a handful of months ago now you went to Tonga, a place pretty much on the opposite side of the world from where we are. So while you did that, I did a very short episode on my own oh, and I said oh, meredith's away in Tonga swimming with humpback whales. While she's there, I'm planning on doing something special for ShowIt users. While she's there, I'm planning on doing something special for ShowIt users. If you're on ShowIt and you want to offer some of your website information so I can make this thing more valuable, whatever it's going to be, share your Google Search Console data with me. And some people did it Excellent. And so I started going about creating what I was going to call a fundamentals for show it SEO. Fundamentals for show it because there are some very specific things about show it. It's very good for SEO. It's very I understand a lot of people like it. Is it easy to use? I think it's pretty. I haven't used it in terms of designing a website, but in terms of SEO, there are some very specific things that you need to do that you don't need to do anywhere else. You don't need to do on WordPress, you don't need to do on Squarespace, you don't need to do these things anywhere else that I'm aware of. So I wanted to do a little demo. Hey, if you're on show it, make sure you do these things. So some people again shared access to their Google search console with me and I started doing it, and as I was doing that, I realized, okay, well, some of these things are also going to be applicable to people using WordPress, and so I created one that shares some of those videos, some of those lessons, and I did one for WordPress. And then I started thinking well, you know what? Wix, not Wix, no, squarespace, squarespace. Since you have been on Squarespace for a little over a year now, I have learned a lot of things about Squarespace and some mistakes that you might want to avoid. Oh, yes, so I did one for Squarespace too, thank you. So I'm going to talk a little bit in this episode about the fundamental series yes, and with emphasis on the ShowIt and WordPress, yes, and then next week I'm going to do one on Squarespace. Okay, specifically on the things that you want to make sure you get squared away if you're using Squarespace. Get it, ha ha ha, squared away on Squarespace. Okay. So the thing about ShowIt is that it's half on ShowIt servers, which is kind of like Squarespace, in the sense that you have pages on ShowIt, they're not on WordPress, they're not HTML, you can't access them. They are literally on ShowIt.

Meredith's husband: 3:01

There's like what we call a WYSIWYG. What you see is what you get. You do not call it a WYSIWYG. You absolutely do call it a WYSIWYG. What you see is what you get. You do not call it a WYSIWYG. You absolutely do call it a WYSIWYG. What you see is what you get. Designer, it's a visual builder. Wysiwyg, wysiwyg. Yeah, really, people are using that. Okay, that makes me really happy. Yes, it's a WYSIWYG builder. It's a visual builder like Squarespace, and supposedly people really like it.

Meredith's husband: 3:32

I've seen it.

Meredith's husband: 3:33

I have not built the website.

Meredith's husband: 3:35

What's not to like about WYSIWYG?

Meredith's husband: 3:36

Yeah, well, it looks to me.

Meredith's husband: 3:39

I've seen the pages and I've looked at them to see what features are available. It looks to me like Adobe. Oh, it looks like the screens that you often have on your own monitor that are either Adobe Go, not Go Live, adobe Lightroom, thank you. Or Photoshop. You're talking like I talk. Go Live actually was Adobe, but it was years and years and years ago. That's where I came up with it. I never even heard of Go Live. Yeah, of course you didn't. It was like more than two decades ago. I was not even born, yes, so I understand, especially if you're a photographer, why you like it. It looks like home, it looks like an Adobe interface and that you know. Hats off to show it for doing it that way. If that was the intent it, I think it worked well, looks nice, but that's just part of your website.

Meredith's husband: 4:27

If you have a show at website, you have your main pages on show it and then you have all your blog pages are going to be actually on WordPress. Oh, really, so you're split between these two different platforms and so what happens is you need two different site maps. Okay, that's already so overwhelming. Yeah, it's a little weird. It creates a very unique situation for SEO, because nothing else does that. What's the benefit of that? There is no benefit. That is a major downside, unless you do some things to make sure to sort of remedy it. That was the reason for the fundamentals course in Show. It is how do you get around this? Because if you don't, you are effed. Yeah, like there is some potential really big downsides to that and it doesn't tell you on Show it, on the Show it blog, at least last time I checked, watch out for this yeah how you can get around it. It just says something like make sure you do good SEO or like something like that. So I did that.

Meredith's husband: 5:24

And then there are some other issues, like, if you're you know, first, how do you create two different sitemaps? Because that's very I didn't know. There's literally no other situation where you're going to want to have two different sitemaps for the same domain. How do you? Yeah, okay, yeah, so that's what I did. That's what I found out thanks to the people who wrote in and said here's my information. I figured that out.

Meredith's husband: 5:44

After that, there's like well, what do you do with the WordPress section so that you don't screw up the show in your sitemap? So I a show it's in your site map, so what do you? So I did some initial settings. What are you going to do with yoast, the yoast seo plugin for wordpress? Because show it recommends the yoast seo plugin, although they don't tell you what to do with it. Oh, that's and out of the box. A lot of the default settings in yoast are not going to be good for seo, especially if you're on show it. So I started doing, I extended the series a little bit and then then I realized, like I said, oh, hey, this would also be really good for people who are just running a WordPress site.

Meredith's husband: 6:18

So I did that, and in doing that, inside the Yoast settings, first you need to connect your Google tools to your website, your Google Analytics, your Google. Did you just keep thinking like, oh, colin Yoast, the guy on SNL? I did not. No, every time I see Colin Yoast, I think, oh, just like the SEO plugin. So there are some settings on Yoast that you want to do. You're going to need to connect it to your Google tools, and for that there's several different ways you can do it. I go through those. One of the ways I recommend is using something called the SiteKit plugin from Google. You can do it manually. You did a lot. Yeah, there's a lot here, and that's why it took several months, I would think so.

Meredith's husband: 7:01

I thought it was going to be like a five-minute video. It's like 20 lessons. Wow, they're all short. They're all short. Yeah, it's okay, but they're potent. But you need to do them all. Yeah, I prefer that.

Meredith's husband: 7:12

So then, how do you connect to your Google Search Console. How do you then submit the sitemap? How do you check to see if any? Because once you submit your stuff to Google Search Console, you've got to come back in a couple weeks and see if everything like turned out rosy or if there's a problem. Okay, usually it turns out fine, but you absolutely want to go back. Make sure, because of the fundamentals. If there's a problem you're after forever, right, right, so you need to fix it. You'd want to know, and so you go back. Yeah, but how would you know to go back? That's in the fundamentals that I'm about to share with you. That's why it's 20 lessons and not just a single podcast episode. And then also since I also consider this fundamental setting up and optimizing your Google business profile. Oh, because that's really important too. That's a fundamental thing.

Meredith's husband: 8:05

And so the reason that I did a series of 20 lessons like this is because it's all step by step. Right, because a lot of this stuff, you could, if you want, to dig through all of our podcast episodes and try to do this on your own. A lot of the information is here, but it's not step by step. It's a little scattered, yeah, although people have written in and said hey, you know, I've been a listener and I'm now on page one. I've been doing the stuff you said. I'm on page one. I've been doing the stuff you said. I'm on Patreon. That makes me feel awesome, by the way. Thank you for sharing that. Thank you and congratulations. Yeah, that makes me feel like a butterfly.

Meredith's husband: 8:44

So if you have written in and said something like that and shared something, thank you very much. If you have experienced something like that and haven't written in, I would love to hear it. But to the people I'm going to go back to the intro here To the people who did share their ShowIt, Google Search console information with me so that I could do that very initial what I thought was going to be five minute thing on ShowIt and how to do the fundamentals. So all this, the fundamentals, are in the paid section of SEIQ. But those people who wrote in and gave me access I know who you are. You get a free month so you get to go in and check out and see what you helped me to create, because I would not have done any of this without you. This is true. So I know who you are. Look for something in your inbox and otherwise you can follow the link below and check it out. I hope it helps.