[00:00:24] Meredith's Husband: One of the problems with SEO is that it just seems confusing.  

[00:00:28] Meredith: Yes.  
 

[00:00:29] Meredith's Husband: Right?  
 

[00:00:30] Meredith: Yes.  
 

[00:00:30] Meredith's Husband: Partly, I think the SEO industry is to blame for this,  

[00:00:34] Meredith: for making everything confusing. Yes. And saying one thing and doing the other and having someone say, I have the solution. Yeah.  

[00:00:42] Meredith's Husband: Just making it sound confusing so that people think, oh, I can't, I can never do that on my own. 

I need somebody to hire and they need to do it for me. Yes. Yeah. It's really not, it's not confusing. It's actually inside the industry. I, we, it's like common sense,  

[00:00:57] Meredith: really.  

[00:00:58] Meredith's Husband: Yes, it is. It really is. And all you need to do in order to make it seem like common sense is just take a different perspective.  

[00:01:05] Meredith: Okay. 
 

Okay.  

[00:01:06] Meredith's Husband: And that's one of the things that's like the main thing I teach.  

[00:01:09] Meredith: Okay.  

[00:01:09] Meredith's Husband: In doing that. So I have something on my site called the IQ Builder.  

[00:01:13] Meredith: Yes.  
 

[00:01:13] Meredith's Husband: And it helps you develop this, this common sense approach.  

[00:01:17] Meredith: Okay. Okay. So  

[00:01:18] Meredith's Husband: to do that, you need, like I said, you need to change your perspective. You need to think about things a little bit differently then all [00:01:24] these rules and everything. 

[00:01:25] Meredith: Yeah.  

[00:01:26] Meredith's Husband: First a lot of 'em, you, you don't really need to think about. Okay. You just need to think in terms of what does Google want. So that's okay. So that's what we're gonna talk about. Okay. We're gonna talk about what does Google want, and that is the new perspective. So first, what does Google not want, because, okay, so these are, I, I would say some myths. 

Okay. Okay. So number one, a technically perfect website.  

[00:01:47] Meredith: Huh?  
 

[00:01:48] Meredith's Husband: So people always, what, what would that  

[00:01:49] Meredith: mean? What would that mean?  

[00:01:50] Meredith's Husband: Yeah, so people, uh, clients and, and people who use SEMrush, they go to SEMrush and you get a score from SEMrush, right? Yeah. And it's a from one to a hundred.  

[00:01:59] Meredith: Yeah.  

[00:01:59] Meredith's Husband: Now. It doesn't need to be a hundred. 

It doesn't need to be 99. You just need to have an A. It just needs to be good enough.  

[00:02:06] Meredith: Right.  

[00:02:07] Meredith's Husband: And that's a 92 or better. Statistically, if you have a seminar score of 92 or better, you'll be in the top 10% of by websites. That's good enough. Yeah. Like Google. Think about if you were Google.  

[00:02:19] Meredith: Yeah.  

[00:02:19] Meredith's Husband: Would you want, your goal is to have your people, your people coming to your site, you want 'em [00:02:24] to come back over and over and over, okay. 

Yes. That's how you make money. Yes. So, do you want to, would you prefer to send people to websites that are technically perfect or that are, you know, just good enough? They're pretty good, but are really useful and helpful. To people  

[00:02:38] Meredith: useful, helpful.  

[00:02:39] Meredith's Husband: Yeah, exactly. The technically perfect aspect that you don't need to do that, it just needs to be good enough. 

Okay.  

[00:02:45] Meredith: Right, right.  

[00:02:46] Meredith's Husband: Another myth is like, you gotta put your keywords in secret places, right? If you put your keywords here, you're gonna jump to the top of Google. Okay? Yeah. So  

[00:02:55] Meredith: if you put you, there's certain places you need to put certain keywords, right?  

[00:03:00] Meredith's Husband: And that's kind of true. But first we need to dispel this myth of like, there's secret places. 

Oh, secret. Again, if you are Google, would you want to reward websites? Right? Again, remember, your goal is to get people coming back to you, Google, over and over. So would you wanna send people to websites that either have their keywords, they've figured out these secret places. [00:03:24] Or they've put their keywords in places that make it, their websites really easy to use and quick to navigate. 

Yeah. Yeah. Easy. Which one? Easy  

[00:03:31] Meredith: to use. Quick to navigate. Yeah, exactly.  

[00:03:33] Meredith's Husband: There's no secret. There's no secret. Places you can stuff keywords. That's old news.  

[00:03:37] Meredith: And why are people thinking there are?  

[00:03:39] Meredith's Husband: Because that used to be true.  

[00:03:41] Meredith: Okay.  

[00:03:42] Meredith's Husband: That used to be true 10 years ago. That was very true. Like I'm guilty of this. 

Like pre 2010, we were stuffing texts. We would take white text and put it on the white background so that nobody, nobody could see it, but Google would see it. So all the keywords would be there. We have, we've found hundreds, hundreds, and hundreds of ways to do that. Okay. We used to do that. In 2012, I stopped taking that approach because even if you're successful in doing those sorts of things, it's gonna be short-lived success. 

[00:04:09] Meredith: Yeah. We want, so I  

[00:04:10] Meredith's Husband: started adopting what I now call SEIQ, this approach. Yeah. Take Google's perspective, you're gonna have long-term success rather than those short term use. That's what we want. Yes. Okay. So that's number two. No secret. There are no secrets, period. No secret [00:04:24] places you can stuff your keywords. 

Number three. Any sort of trickery if you're trying to trick Google.  

[00:04:30] Meredith: Yeah.  

[00:04:30] Meredith's Husband: If you are trying, if you're doing anything and the reason you are doing it is to get high rankings, that itself is not something Google wants to reward. Right. Okay. Again, if you're Google, do you wanna send your visitors, your customers Yeah. 

To websites that have figured out a way to trick you?  

[00:04:48] Meredith: No.  
 

[00:04:48] Meredith's Husband: Or would you rather. Send them to a site again, that's useful and helpful.  

[00:04:52] Meredith: Uh, I'm gonna yet again choose the useful and helpful. Any, any,  

[00:04:55] Meredith's Husband: and this, and there's a huge umbrella and we'll talk more about this, but any sort of trickery.  

[00:05:00] Meredith: Yeah.  

[00:05:00] Meredith's Husband: Okay. So that covers kind of broadly what Google does not want. 

Yes. So what does Google want?  

[00:05:06] Meredith: Yes. Okay.  

[00:05:07] Meredith's Husband: So we've talked about this before. They want to send. Customers to websites that they can trust. Yeah. That have authority, that have expertise on a particular topic. That's the EAT that we've talked about,  

[00:05:19] Meredith: right? Yum. Yum.  

[00:05:20] Meredith's Husband: They also, their highest level objective, and they say that, they've said this, [00:05:24] their goal as a company is to get people to websites where they get information. 

As quickly and easily as possible. Wow. That's it. That's their, that's their total goal. And if they do that, people are gonna keep going back to Google. Right? Right. If you get some, if you get what you need quickly and easily, that's a success for you. You're gonna go back and you're gonna do that again. 

[00:05:43] Meredith: Correct.  

[00:05:43] Meredith's Husband: Okay. That's pretty much all you need to make. SEO common sense. It's just that knowledge.  

[00:05:48] Meredith: Okay.  

[00:05:49] Meredith's Husband: All right.  
 

[00:05:49] Meredith: I can have that knowledge.  

[00:05:50] Meredith's Husband: Yeah, that's, that's really all you need. So this is why I built the IQ builder.  

[00:05:55] Meredith: Yeah. This  

[00:05:56] Meredith's Husband: started off. Uh, months, probably, maybe even years ago. I just created a glossary. 

'cause there's lots of jargon in seo, right? Yes. One of the reasons it's confusing. So I tried to do a glossary that was made it tried to make it more common sense. Tried to break it down, get out of the jargon, tell you in plain terms what all these things are, because there's lots of SEO glossaries out there. 

Most of the ones I've seen, even the explanation of the thing they're defining is very confusing, so Right.  

[00:06:23] Meredith: They [00:06:24] kind of make it like a secret club. Yeah, like kind of a cult.  

[00:06:26] Meredith's Husband: There is a kind of secret language and I mean, there is a reason for that. Okay. It's because a lot of, a lot of things are very specific and right. 

When you think about the people who were early in the early days creating websites and doing all this stuff, they were coders, right? And so they wanted very specific names for things so that when they were talking to each other and giving each other instructions, they would know exactly what they were talking about. 

Fair enough. So thats why some of those, that's why there's all these jargony sounding terms,  

[00:06:53] Meredith: okay?  

[00:06:54] Meredith's Husband: But they all have very simple meanings. My glossary morphed into this IQ builder because it takes the perspective of Google. Like if you're Google, why is this important to you, like we just talked about. Oh, okay. 

That  

[00:07:05] Meredith: makes sense.  

[00:07:06] Meredith's Husband: We just talked about like, you don't need a technically perfect website. There's no secret places you can put your keywords.  

[00:07:11] Meredith: Right? Right.  

[00:07:12] Meredith's Husband: If you are a Google, this is important because, and then it just starts to make a whole lot of sense.  

[00:07:17] Meredith: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.  

[00:07:18] Meredith's Husband: Today we're gonna take a couple of these, a couple of the, the most basic ones, and I'm going to just. 

Individual entries that are in [00:07:24] my IQ builder.  

[00:07:24] Meredith: Okay.  

[00:07:25] Meredith's Husband: And I'm going to share them with you as an example. Thank you. Next week we are going to go a little bit deeper into like things that are a little more tricky. Okay. And then the week after, we're gonna do something similar about ai. How AI has changed this and how some of those things are now more important. 

Interesting. Some are a little less important, but really the, so far there isn't any new, like drastically new stuff.  

[00:07:49] Meredith: So interesting. There's new and where, where is the IQ thing?  

[00:07:52] Meredith's Husband: You can go to merit's husband.com and click discover. SEIQ, if you wanna check it out. Okay, so first title tags.  

[00:08:00] Meredith: Yes,  
 

[00:08:01] Meredith's Husband: title tag. 
 

I've heard many times people think that title tags are something that you do for SEO. They're not for users because if a user goes to a website, you can't see the title tag. It's nowhere there. It's nowhere on the  

[00:08:12] Meredith: page. It's after the fold.  

[00:08:14] Meredith's Husband: No, it's nowhere. It is literally nowhere. We're talking about your title tag, not your heading. 

Your title tag is. Short line of text.  

[00:08:23] Meredith: Yeah. [00:08:24]  
 

[00:08:24] Meredith's Husband: That displays in Google when people do a search. So when you do a search as a user, oh, those blue lines of text, right, are the title tag. That exact text does not. Display anywhere on the website so people think, well, it's something you just do for SEO you don't do for users. 

Now, that's the exact wrong frame of mind to be in,  

[00:08:44] Meredith: right?  

[00:08:45] Meredith's Husband: It is absolutely critically important for users. That's why it's important for SEO. Now, why is it important for users? Let's say as an example, you're a, you're searching Google, you're looking for something, you do a search, you click enter, you see, how do you. 

Decide which website to go to  

[00:09:03] Meredith: based on what is presented to you.  

[00:09:06] Meredith's Husband: Yeah. The by in those title tags. In those little, yeah. Okay. Now I get, so if your title tag does not appeal to people, right. For whatever they just searched for. They're never gonna click it.  

[00:09:18] Meredith: This is true. Okay. Yeah.  

[00:09:19] Meredith's Husband: So saying it's not for users is, wow, that's really, that's [00:09:24] problematic. 

Now for that reason, you wanna put your keyword, like whatever key phrase, or is most important, you want it to, to be there because you wanna let people know what that page is gonna be about.  

[00:09:34] Meredith: Right?  

[00:09:35] Meredith's Husband: Okay. So that's why title tags super important to Google, because they're super important to users. Got it. 

Super important for SEO O. They're probably your single most important element in seo. Huh.  

[00:09:46] Meredith: Okay.  

[00:09:47] Meredith's Husband: Uh, a related one. Headings. Yes. When you get to a page, the heading, we call this the H one tag. Yes. Is gonna be the biggest heading at the top of the page. Yes. The subheadings are hopefully going to be H two and H three tags. 

[00:10:00] Meredith: Yes.  
 

[00:10:00] Meredith's Husband: They're gonna be probably a little bit smaller text, maybe a di, maybe a different color, but smaller text somewhere in the copy of the of the page. There's also H four, five and six tags, but those are usually reserved for places like the footer. Or side navigation where there's like a little subheading and the side navigation. 

So the ones you want to the, we're gonna talk about here are the H one, the [00:10:24] heading? Yes. The H two and the H three subhead. Yes. So this one is probably more, I hope, hope more obvious why it's important for users and not for Google.  

[00:10:34] Meredith: Okay.  

[00:10:35] Meredith's Husband: Right. As a user, you get to a page, what are you gonna look at first? 

Let's say a page opens up and you got, you know, a, a big. Bold line of text and some paragraph copy. You got an image, you got a couple subheadings and you got a A button. Right. And let's say you can see it all at once. Yeah. Right away, you're, you're, you're probably gonna look at the image first, right? I think that's pretty well established when people do, uh, like, like eye tracking, case studies, heat maps. 

Yeah. I don't know if you've ever seen this, but a heat map is like, it's a, an image of a page and it hits like a red where people, uh, or people will look the most and then it's probably orange and people and places where people will look. And then it's green. So a heat. So heat maps try to. They try to do eye tracking. 

So where do people look first and it's gonna, and when? When you see one of these, they're gonna be the images. People [00:11:24] almost always look at images first. Right? Right. As a photographer, you probably know this, then headings, subheadings, call to action.  

[00:11:30] Meredith: Right.  

[00:11:30] Meredith's Husband: Paragraph. Copy. The absolute last. Yeah. Thing that people look at. 

[00:11:34] Meredith: Yeah. Too much work. So  

[00:11:36] Meredith's Husband: knowing this, yeah, this is another place you would want to put your keywords, because remember, Google's overriding objective. Yes. We want to get people the information they want as quickly and easily as possible.  

[00:11:47] Meredith: Correct.  

[00:11:48] Meredith's Husband: So you need to be very plain in what you put in your headings and subheadings. 

People are going to look there. You will need to get 'em the information very quickly,  

[00:11:56] Meredith: right?  

[00:11:56] Meredith's Husband: You don't want to be, and this is, I've been guilty of this myself. This is one. Area where people kind of shoot themselves in their foot and they try to be cute, they try to do something funny. And if you are, imagine if you do that with your website, a single page, and somebody lands on that page and they just look at the headings and subheadings, and you're not clear about the purpose of that page. 

That person is not getting the information they want. Easily and quickly as possible. Are they, they're having to, no. [00:12:24] No. Right. Okay.  

[00:12:25] Meredith: We don't want it to be confusing. Yeah. We want it to be clear.  

[00:12:29] Meredith's Husband: That's why Google places high importance on those things. It's not a, it's not some secret trick, you know, when people say you need to have your H ones, right? 

Like that sounds confusing. Like, oh, I need like it's some secret SEO thing. I need to do my H ones. Yes. Well, no, that's what that means. You need to. You need to help people get information as quickly and easily as possible.  

[00:12:50] Meredith: Right.  

[00:12:51] Meredith's Husband: Okay. Those are two of, I think, the most important elements at SEO. So next week we are gonna go a little bit deeper. 

[00:13:00] Meredith: Ooh.  

[00:13:00] Meredith's Husband: We're going to uncover some of the ones that I think are a little more confusing or convoluted. Yes. Or unknown.  

[00:13:07] Meredith: Controversial.  

[00:13:08] Meredith's Husband: Yes. So if you know anyone who would benefit from this, who is thinking along these lines, who thinks the SEO is confusing, share this episode with them.  

[00:13:16] Meredith: For sure,  

[00:13:17] Meredith's Husband: just this one single episode. It will change their lives forever.