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 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 a

Meredith: 1:25

video camera. There we go. Oh, how are you? Pretty good. Yeah, I can now hear myself, but I can't really hear you. Oh, hold on. Let me see if I turn this.

Meredith's Husband: 1:44

Okay, now, do you? Okay, nice. Alright.

Meredith: 1:47

Nice. How are we doing?

Meredith's Husband: 1:49

Oh, pretty good. Yeah, yeah. How are you doing?

Meredith: 1:53

Well, thanks. I'm doing well. I hope you are doing well. Welcome to what is now going to be our 11. Yes. Should we talk about?

Meredith's Husband: 2:04

Yeah, it's funny. Because last, so I did some research. Last week, it was our 10th episode. And in my research, I found that oh, the first 10 episodes are considered the honeymoon phase when you're doing a podcast. So after that, it becomes more work. Like the first 10 are just time and we were saying no, no, no. Dicky.

Meredith: 2:26

Moon, as you heard,

Meredith's Husband: 2:27

and then this last week, we both got crazy busy. Yeah. And the next episode was just a total drag.

Meredith: 2:39

It was, as my brother has said, like, akin to pushing a dead mule up a hill?

Meredith's Husband: 2:46

Yeah, it was it was it was. So we're redoing? Were we doing it? We were thinking oh, Wouldn't it be funny if we just did 10 episodes? And then that was it, and then never came back?

Meredith: 2:58

No, it would not be that funny. No. Many other things funny are. So what should we talk about?

Meredith's Husband: 3:09

Well, I was I was in the shower the other day. And I thought it sounds reminiscent, you know, how's things come to you in the shower? Just you know why only random things,

Meredith: 3:16

because it's the only time we get it's called I can't remember what it's called. But it's akin to creative. Sleep. Meaning, that's the only time when you're not distracted by something else. And your body knows what to do. Because you go through the motions. And you're not distracted. So your brain actually has time to process things and think about things and you know, we're relaxing. Oh,

Meredith's Husband: 3:49

it feels nice. You're comfortable. Oh, it's

Meredith: 3:51

so nice.

Meredith's Husband: 3:52

I can anyway. Sorry. I was just I started thinking about Google bombs. Have you ever heard the phrase Google bombs, bath bombs, Google bombs. So this was a thing that this was a big thing in the past. And I don't know why I started thinking that all of a sudden. But I thought, Oh, this is a good way. This kind of explains why linking is so important. So I don't know if anybody remembers this. But way back when George Bush, Jr. was president. If you there was a time period where if you went to Google and you did a search for miserable failure? Yeah. The number one page was his White House biopic. You remember that? Yes, I do. And so if you typed into Google miserable failure, and just pressed, I'm feeling lucky, you're staring@whitehouse.gov a picture of George Bush. That's a Google bomb. And what happens is a whole bunch of people are actually not a whole bunch of people in this case. But people get together and they say, Hey, let's create links to George Bush's bio page, and the link text is going to be miserable failure. So, of course, on George Bush's bio page, he didn't use the phrase miserable failure, right? He never talked about failures or being miserable. But just those links were enough to affect Google to put him in the number one position just because people were linking to it with that phrase, that kind of shows the power of links. Now, these these are, these are kind of possible to begin with, because nobody's competing for the phrase miserable failure. Nobody's trying to get to number one. So it's easy. It's easier to do but that shows that you Sometimes it doesn't even matter what you have on your website. It's just the links.

Meredith: 5:39

Now, here's my question, how would you create the link would look for miserable failure.

Meredith's Husband: 5:47

So you it's just a text link. So you know, when you're reading text on a blog or something, and there's a word that's linked, yeah, words, the words that were linked, were miserable highlighted, and you'd be you'd be reading something and it would say, Hey, you want to see something about a miserable failure? And those miserable failure would be the link that you click on? Yeah. Okay. A bunch of webmasters got together. And we're like, hey, Wouldn't it be funny? Yeah, I have a wet must. Anyway. Yeah. That's what I was thinking about in the shower. I don't know, it's good to know. Some people think about how to, you know, create world peace and cure cancer. I think about Google bumps. Yeah. Also, you got to you got an email this week. Well, I

Meredith: 6:32

did get an email. Yeah, one of these. Let me bring that up. Should have had it already.

Meredith's Husband: 6:40

I have it. I love to debunk these. This is so much fun. Because I get to say this is pure crap. Yeah, you got an email, somebody trying to sell you a domain? Yes. And the domain was something I have it here. Brooklyn event, Brooklyn event photographer.com. And this person was trying to sell this domain to you for 500 bucks or something and saying, Oh, this would be great for your SEO, because you for this to your domain. And then you're going to start to rank for this term Brooklyn event photographer. Yeah, that's not true. That used to be true a long time ago, which is why this started. But that's no longer true. So when you get these things like, Hey, I have the domain name for sale, best wedding photographer.

Meredith: 7:22

Yeah,

Meredith's Husband: 7:23

yeah. In your city.com. You want to buy it, don't buy it. That's what that's a total waste. That doesn't work. What does it do? Does nothing. Now it does nothing. Google released a series of updates to target this specifically. So that because something that also happened is people would go out and they buy a bunch of domains. Like if you're a photographer, you'd buy Brooklyn, kids, photographer, Brooklyn, children's photographer, Brooklyn, family photographer, you'd buy all these domains thinking that it's going to help your ranking. And for a while it did, actually for several for several years. It did. And then Google started realizing, Oh, hey, we're kind of giving rise to this whole sort of secondary spammy market. Yeah, yeah. Buying and selling domains.

Meredith: 8:08

Like tickets. What are they called? When you buy the tickets and double helpers? Yeah, terrible. Names. scalpers.

Meredith's Husband: 8:15

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. Yeah, sure. That's terrible. But anyway, so Google decided, Hey, we gotta put a stop to this. So it, so this doesn't really work. Now, it's not that it has stopped 100%. Because if you have a name, like, like, your brand name is a unique word, then it then it will carry some weight. But if if you buy a domain with generic terms, like words that are not, you know, copyrightable or trade markable. Like, if like a photographer, or Brooklyn photographer, event photographer, it's called an exact match domain, and they just don't carry weight anymore. So if you get an email like this, and somebody's trying to sell you these, these domains, you can ignore them, they do not do anything.

Meredith: 9:43

That's good to know. Now, here's my question, the person who created this email, and they send it out to 1000s of photographers and have 10 different photographers buy it?

Meredith's Husband: 9:56

No, only one person can buy it. But it's so this domain, for example, this domain was Brooklyn event photographer. So somebody buys this. They go find the top 20. They use Google, they find the top 20 Brooklyn event photographers, and they, they write to them, they find their email on their website, or they submit a form and they say, Hey, I have this domain. Do you want to buy it for 500? bucks? Somebody might buy it?

Meredith: 10:21

Yes. And hopefully nobody listening to this podcast. Well, yeah. Right now we all know better. So what else? Do you want to talk about images? I want to talk I always want to talk about images. Yeah, I thought

Meredith's Husband: 10:34

that would be something good to talk about. Since since this is all for photographers, yes. So how how what can you do with your images to improve your SEO? tag that you can tag them? Yes. Good. There's a few things. There's there's three, there's three things you can do with your images. And as a photographer, listening to this, you might know one or all of them, you might not. You may well know, at least one of these. You probably have probably have heard about all three of them. But I'm going to kind of explain them and shed some light on them. I think that's what Right. So the first the first one is image size. Yeah. So you want to keep your image size down so that it doesn't take long to load. Right? Number one, number two, and I'll get into these. Okay, number two is tagging is alt tags, image, alt tags. And then number three, which is less important, but can can still be important. Is your file naming. Finally, yeah. Okay. And that will, I'll get it likes, I'll get into each of these, but that can affect your, your alt tags. And it can help with a can help in other ways, too. So first, so So file size, so your image size. So when you save an image for the web, you want to optimize it for speed. So so it downloads quickly.

Meredith: 12:00

So you don't get those like run, run, run run. Things.

Meredith's Husband: 12:04

What are those things? You

Meredith: 12:05

know, the arrows in the reloading? Reloading?

Meredith's Husband: 12:08

Yeah, yeah. Yes. Yeah. And it's, I mean, it's usually the, the loading? Yeah, yep. Spinning Wheel. Yeah. However, I don't think they don't have that music. That's a good idea, though. Wouldn't it be cool?

Meredith: 12:29

ride around. So I'm really good at making you lose track.

Meredith's Husband: 12:39

So you want to keep your images so that they load fast now everybody, connections are getting faster and faster. So this is not so much an issue for users, at least not as much as it used to be. So you might think that this is not that important. The issue is that keep in mind, Google is crawling the entire internet every few days, the entire internet, so So to Google. And you know, if an image, if images take four nanoseconds to load, versus one nanosecond to load, it takes them four times as long to crawl the internet. So even if it's not an issue for users, if you're if your images are loading relatively fast, you still want to make sure they are loading as fast as possible. And the way to do this is with Photoshop, you might be able, there's other programs that will do this. I don't know if Lightroom does it that way, I think the best way to do it is in Photoshop, because there is a Save for Web feature. And you you click that, and then you have a little slider that says how big your file is going to be. And as you move that slider, as you move towards a smaller file size, you'll notice the image starts to become like grainy, it loses quality. So what you want to do is you want to find the sweet spot on that slider where it still looks good, it still looks really sharp, but it's as small as possible.

Meredith: 13:58

So that's what see I use that feature when for all my images. But I didn't know about the sliding. So I just thought, oh, save for web legacy. Click perfect. And then that's why you said, Oh, these files are way too big. Save for Web,

Meredith's Husband: 14:14

you have sent me files in the past that are like 10 times bigger than you would want to have. Which is

Meredith: 14:22

yeah, that's because I didn't know about this slider thing. Yeah. Where's the slider? What is it we win? When you close a street? By a street sign? You attach a screen shot with information as to which slider because if you just say the slider?

Meredith's Husband: 14:39

Yeah, it's a quality of I think it's called Cool. I'll link to a link to it. And this is the one that I think I have a feeling probably a lot. You know, a lot of photographers are going to they may know this. I don't know, I don't know, I know that you don't. But that's because I've just done this wrong.

Meredith: 14:55

Yeah. And you've done this for him. Yeah.

Meredith's Husband: 14:58

And you want to save them as JPEGs. Don't use PNG files. Don't use tiffs. You've sent me tips in the past, which are massive, massive.

Meredith: 15:10

Didn't you also say about underscores?

Meredith's Husband: 15:15

Yeah, we'll get to that. That's file naming. Oh, okay. So so that's your image size. Number two is alt tags. So you've heard people say, tag your images, tag your images? Yes. So these are what we call image alt tags. And so the purpose of these originally was twofold. It was one for visually impaired people. So that when an image is not so that when they can't see an image, for some reason, there is some text there. And the text just explains what the image is. And number two, a lot of when, when the internet was, you know, advancing, but all of our connections were still slow. People could turn off the images and pages would load faster. And then if you didn't see So in those cases, they there'd be like a blank box where the image was, was supposed supposed to be, and just this little Alltech, so that, so that the alt tag would describe again, what the image is. Yeah. So SEOs, this is a good way to insert keywords. SEO has figured this out, they could stuffed keywords in there. So that became a good way to stuff keywords into your page. And then Google caught on to that. And they said, Oh, you don't do that. So what you want to do now with your image alt tags, is you want to just, as briefly as possible, describe accurately what the image is. And the way I think of doing this is finish this sentence. So this is a photo of fill in the blank. And you still can use your use keywords, you can say this as a this is an image of a family with two family. Yeah, exactly. You know, parents and their kids, or if you're a wedding photographer, and engagement ceremony, or whatever. But don't feel the need to, to, to say like wedding photography,

Meredith: 17:07

wedding photographer in California,

Meredith's Husband: 17:10

don't do that. Just Just try to be very accurate as to what it is. And keep your image alt tags to I would say four to five words. Oh, cool. Yeah. Because you're not going to have a whole lot of celebrating love. Something like that. Yes. Flowers. Yeah. And then I would say the only other guideline that you want to use when creating all tags, if you if you are including keywords, keep them towards the front of your alt tags. So if you have a picture of a puppy playing in a in a field, say, cute puppy playing and field, don't say open field with a cute puppy playing, okay. And that's kind of that's generally true for anything related to a website, to be honest with your, if you're writing your title tags or your headings, you always want to put your keywords towards the front. Okay? Even if you're even when you look at your entire webpage, the more important the words up near the top, the first words are going to be weighted more heavily than the words at the bottom. So put your put your more important stuff, your more keyword focus stuff in the beginnings.

Meredith: 18:21

Clearly, it doesn't need to make sense, right?

Meredith's Husband: 18:25

Well, it needs to make sense. But it doesn't need to be a sentence. It doesn't need to like be it doesn't need to be you know,

Meredith: 18:30

want to say a cute puppy in a field.

Meredith's Husband: 18:35

Yeah, you can just say, you know, cute puppy playing. Okay, think about how like, think about how somebody would do a search. If there were searching through Google Images. Yeah. If you were just typing in a search, you would probably say something like cute puppy playing. If you wanted to see cute puppies playing Yeah, you wouldn't say a cute puppy playing with a red?

Meredith: 18:58

Oh, yeah. Okay. And then just to ask the most obvious question. That, to me is not obvious. Where are you putting these words? And these key words? You I'm saying? Yes, you do this for me.

Meredith's Husband: 19:15

I do this for you. Yeah. But anybody if you're familiar with your

Meredith: 19:19

this is really obvious to most people, but I don't know where you're doing.

Meredith's Husband: 19:23

Yeah. So anytime you upload an image to WordPress, there's gonna be a couple fields. There's the image title and the alt text. Okay. So the image. Yeah, the image title is different. I usually leave those blank because the image title refers to if you squint, sometimes when you scroll over an image on a website, a little text box pops up. Yeah, that's, that's what it that's the title. Usually, I think you don't want titles, right. And then the other one is the alt text and the alt text is not displayed unless the image doesn't load for some reason. Okay. Same thing with Squarespace or there's a there's a field for your alt texts. Any any sort of website editor, there's going to be a field for your alt tags.

Meredith: 20:08

Alright, thank you know,

Meredith's Husband: 20:10

and so the final thing, your file names, your file names are not as important. But I know on Squarespace, if you load an image, and you don't give it an alt tag, it will use your file name as the Alltech. Yeah.

Meredith: 20:26

I have a question about that. Because so when I named my files for my clients, I do the copyright sign, and then Meredith Zinner photography, and I put dashes in between them, and then I have the clients name, underscore, and then the number. But then then sometimes, Photoshop will say, Hey, you don't want to use these

Meredith's Husband: 20:52

tears, special characters. Yeah. Especially if you want to, you want to keep special characters out of your file name. So the copyright sign underscores, you don't want to use underscores. That's a special character. Don't use spaces. Don't use spaces when you name your image files, use hyphens use hyphens in between words. Yeah. I think

Meredith: 21:10

this is the one in the middle. That's short. Yes. Okay, just making sure is just keeping up keeping up with apostrophes. No commas, no question marks,

Meredith's Husband: 21:21

right? Because when people search, they're gonna use spaces when they when they search. Yeah, yeah, the hyphens read as spaces to Google. And underscore is a special character. So people are not searching for when they're not including underscores when they search. Same thing with the copyright sign or dollar signs

Meredith: 21:43

no longer add the copyright. I take them out

Meredith's Husband: 21:46

when you give me your images. Yes, yeah, interesting. So here's how here's how I go about file naming. Number one, you want to keep your file name reasonably short. You don't want it to be like really long. Because a lot of times, no matter how you're looking at your file names, there's going to be a limited amount of space where you see it, right. Also, you don't want to try to stuff keywords, and you don't want it just to be long. Because you start to appear to Google like, Hey, I'm trying to stuff all my keywords, right? Don't do that.

Meredith: 22:17

Yeah, I feel like like, you go into a bakery, and you're just stuffing pastries, and you're trying to walk out like there to

Meredith's Husband: 22:23

there. Yeah, you're the only one that's thinking that right now. I'm thinking, yeah. So, so keep your file names reasonably short. And then you want to do a few things. You want to have a naming system that is good for you in managing your files as a photographer? I'm sure you you have these methods already. Yeah, but then you want to? Yeah.

Meredith: 22:50

Okay. Out the window.

Meredith's Husband: 22:55

Then you want to include something, some sort of keyword focused descriptor like children, if you're, if it's children's photography, I like to include something about children first, that helps me know that this file is going to be on Meritus children's page versus her events page. If it were to have a picture of a birthday party, it would be like first event photo, so then I immediately I know, I can look at this your list of files and say, Okay, these are on her event page, etc. That's how I do it. Yeah, that's pretty clever. And then I and then I like to include some sort of branding. So Zinner, Zinner photo, Meredith dinner, this doesn't have to be 100%, consistent with all your photos, because people might be searching differently. But the reason for this is that, well, now if somebody searches for American Center photography, they're going to hopefully see all your photos, not all your friends, but they're going to see, when they on that first page of Google, it's going to be a bunch of your photos. Dinner, yeah, this, this can help do that. That's so clever. I would probably not put any sort of branding in your alt texts. That's not what. So don't put in your image alt tags, don't put Meredith center photography. Okay. It's because because again, your that's where you're just describing what the image is to somebody who isn't who can't see it. So you don't you're not saying this is Meritus? Dinner photography? Unless it's like your logo, your logo might have medicine or photography logo,

Meredith: 24:26

or for the patient me would be?

Meredith's Husband: 24:29

Yes, exactly. Okay. But in your file naming, I often like to do some sort of branding. There are some additional reasons, but they're not really that important for putting for putting branding, in your name, or in their file names. So

Meredith: 24:45

So I have a question about the copyright thing. So when my clients purchase digital files, I named them with a copyright. And then I put them in three categories for print, for personal use, and for social sharing. So the ones for social sharing, should I take out the copyright?

Meredith's Husband: 25:06

Symbol, I would always avoid putting special characters in file names, because you don't know how this how whatever system if somebody's storing those files on their phone, on their computer, is it a map? Is it windows? Is it on Facebook, all of these systems are going to look at special characters differently. And that that could screw it up. Now, it's probably I would say probably not a problem with a with a with a copyright sign. But I would not do that. If you really want to put if you want to say that this image is copyright. Just put the word copyright at the end of your file name. Okay, just

Meredith: 25:47

a meta tag. That was covered.

Meredith's Husband: 25:52

Yeah, technically, it's good. Yeah, there is a copyright there. But also also also, you can't really do much to prevent people from sharing this image around the web. But you can if you want to, if you want to, you know, remind people who are who are receiving these files, Hey, these are copied I have the copyright. At the very end of the file name, you could say copyright NZP or copyrights in her photo are

Meredith: 26:15

excellent. That's very informative. My husband.

Meredith's Husband: 26:19

Yeah, you're welcome. Meredith.

Meredith: 26:24

I was thinking I could do a podcast and it would be married as husbands wife

Meredith's Husband: 26:28

could be. I could do a blog, and it would be married as husband's wife's husband.com.com.

Meredith: 26:37

We really, really appreciate you guys listening. It's very exciting. All the questions that are coming in, if you've got questions, where, where should they go?

Meredith's Husband: 26:45

They can send questions. There's actually a link in the show notes. Oh, I can just click that link that will take them to emeritus husband.com where they can submit those questions. Fabulous. And I, I again, I love this debunking. So if you get emails that you're like, is this real? Is this a thing? Send me those emails. I love to say like, Hey, this is this is a pilot. Correct? There's

Meredith: 27:07

more. And every time I go, I'll send it to you. And I'll just write questions

Meredith's Husband: 27:13

in that. Yeah. My general rule is if somebody is sending you an email out of the blue trying to sell something, yeah. It's probably not worth buying. Probably worth buying. They wouldn't need to send random emails to people telling

Meredith: 27:27

people Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That's true. general approach. That's a good idea. It's a good statement. Observation. That's the observation. I'm still working. Okay. All right. All right. Thank you, everybody. Thank you. See you later. Have a wonderful day, everybody.

Meredith's Husband: 27:48

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 was 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. Again, thanks for listening. 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.