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 Can you hear me? We really have found the unofficial beginning to our podcast. Can you hear me? Yes, now I can now you

Meredith: 1:06

can hear me. I can't. I can hear you but I can't hear me. How are you doing? Find?

Meredith's Husband: 1:11

I'm good. I couldn't find a button to start it with you unmuted. It just seems to do that by default.

Meredith: 1:18

Now show you later. Okay. I'm good. How are you doing? I'm fine. Thank you on fine.

Meredith's Husband: 1:30

Any any news about Buster today?

Meredith: 1:33

He was barking. He just went out. With Marcel. His haircut is looking really weird because I took him while he was sitting on my lap. So we have a little bit. Little work to do. Yeah. I am excited though.

Meredith's Husband: 1:58

For probably doesn't mind. He doesn't mind

Meredith: 2:01

it. I'm excited for today's Marcel's first agility class.

Meredith's Husband: 2:07

Yeah, that'll be exciting. For him, maybe I don't know.

Meredith: 2:14

Everything's exciting for him. He's a puppy.

Meredith's Husband: 2:19

So anyway, today? Yes, I know, I know. We had a question to this. I want to answer, answer that question. And then I want to share a little bit about a type of SEO that I wouldn't call it like hidden SEO or secret SEO, but it's something that people are typically not going to think of as SEO. And it's, and it's really very important, not so much that it's going to help improve rankings, but it will help get better clients. Really? Yes. Okay. So, but first, the question, let's, let's dig in. What's What's today's

Meredith: 2:57

let's open it up to our question, soap in the mailbag.

Meredith's Husband: 3:01

It says,

Meredith: 3:04

Should I consider doing any SEO boosting stuff? For my hidden pages on my website? Views? These pages are for my clients that I give them links to, because they're session planning guides. They're set to public, because passwords are annoying. I currently ignore SEO for these pages, because I don't want people to come across them. Does that hurt my SEO for my website in the long run?

Meredith's Husband: 3:38

Okay, that's a good question. Yeah, this is I'm going to add a little bit of context to this before I give the answer, because I think it'll make a little more sense that way. So the way Google has evolved over the years is, you know, Google writes their algorithm, that to rank different websites, and then SEO professionals try to find a way to find loopholes in that algorithm. And then, you know, get their client sites ranked. And then so Google looks at what the SEO are doing. And they say, okay, these, these guys are trying to they're trying to cheat the system, we need to write something that's going to prevent them from doing that. And so it goes back, and it's gone back and forth like that, for, like, 20 years, probably. And so one of the things I would say, you know, 12 years ago, 10 years ago, one thing that SEO has tried to do is they tried to use what they called doorway pages. And what those were is, let's say you have a wedding photography website. And you say, okay, my main, my main site is about wedding photography, also. But I also want to rank for event venues, because I know those people are going to be looking for wedding photographers. So I want to also have a page on my site about event venues. But I want it to be hidden to my normal users. I just want to give people straight from And so Google says no, that's, that's no good. And what was happening there is people would create that page. It would just be it'd be sort of, it'd be similar to this situation, it'd be a page sitting off by itself, that then links into the rest of the site, but the rest of the site doesn't link to that page. Right. And so and so those were called doorway pages. They were a big thing with SEO is trying to, you know, blackhat SEO techniques several many years ago.

Meredith: 5:20

Wait, what any what head?

Meredith's Husband: 5:22

Black? Black hat,

Meredith: 5:24

black hat,

Meredith's Husband: 5:25

black hat so this white hat. Hate. Yeah, yes. So what Black Hat is In Blackhat, is just the is the people trying to cheat the system trying to find tricks to get high rankings overnight? white hat SEO is more like you're, you're trying to do everything right for the long term Blackhat. SEO is kind of dead. Like Google has really sort of closed the doors on that early on, that a lot of SEO was Blackhat. Like you could you could find tricks that would get you you know, a website ranked number one overnight. Wow, you can't really do that. And yeah, people still try. But the opportunities are really not there. Anyway, so back to the question about doorway pages. What the what this question is about is set, it's sounding a little bit like the structure,

Meredith: 6:21

doorway wage, like a gateway drug?

Meredith's Husband: 6:25

Kind of? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Same, same idea. You're trying to have an entry to a much bigger point. But you wouldn't go from you know, you wouldn't go from the bigger point to the entry page. Right? Now, Google doesn't like that Google wants to wants your website to be truthful and honest, is say so? Yeah. Well, you think about Google's objectives, they need to get paid, they need to send their users to people, to people, they don't need to send their users to people they need to send their users to websites that are good, and that they like and they appreciate. If if if Google users went to websites that were crappy, and shady and Blackhat, people are not people are not going to keep using Google. So that's what this so you didn't just understand what Google was trying to do that that kind of puts you one step out of the game, right? Anyway, so you don't want to do things with with your site that kind of appear to be like these old school techniques that have been, you know, designated as Blackhat. SEO, you don't want to appear to Google like you are trying to trick the system, because you can be penalized for that. So that so so that's the context. So this question is about what to do with the pages that you don't want on your regular website. Right? You just you just want to have a direct link to Yeah, unfortunately, passwords are really the best way to go there. Yeah. Because without the password, Google is going to find and crawl that page. One way or another. If you have a WordPress site, probably don't, may not know this. But when you create a page on your WordPress site, and you use let's say, you don't link to it. So you think nobody is getting there. Google knows because WordPress is automatically generating a sitemap, and it tells Google Hey, this new page is here. So Oh, wow, automatically, it's going to know unless you take steps to prevent that, which is possible. But even then, once you send that link out, even if it's just to a client, you don't know what's going to happen, you put that link in an email. Unfortunately, there's no such thing as privacy these days. So emails can be scanned, they could send that link to a friend that they could they could put it online, that page is probably going to be indexed. So Google is going to they're going to know it's there. The only way to really, totally prevent a page from appearing in Google search results is to put a password on it. Okay. Now, SEO best practice.

Meredith: 9:01

Now what if you on the page, you say here's the link? And here's the password on the same email? Does that have anything? Does that change?

Meredith's Husband: 9:10

No, that's fine. If you? No, no, no, no, yeah. If you

Meredith: 9:54

emails are gonna be scanned.

Meredith's Husband: 9:58

They're probably all going to be scanned. Yeah. No, no individual is going to be looking at hopefully, it's going to be looking at them. But you can figure they're all being scanned by some automated Gmail scanner, but I don't know. So best practice, you get to put passwords on those, unfortunately, just make that you can make the password simple. You can even I mean, you just make it a very simple password. Otherwise, you're going to have to make sure that those pages are set to no index that they are left out of your of your Sitemap. And you have to do that consistently. Anytime you create a new page, you're gonna have to take those extra steps. And even then, they might still be indexed by Google, there's really no way of preventing it without a password.

Meredith: 10:50

So you could just make puppy. Make a cute password for your clients.

Meredith's Husband: 10:54

Sure. Yeah. Can be consistency. Yeah. picky. Yeah. And one one trick if you want to know what what pages from your site are indexed, you can go to Google and you can type in the word site si te, colon, and then your domain name with.com and it will come back and it will list every Single page from your website. That's, that's in delay. Yeah, so you can see. And it will be any other pages is just going to be your site. So you can see if you have any pages if you don't want them indexed, you can see if they are indexed, and vice versa.

Meredith: 11:27

And can you just define indexed?

Meredith's Husband: 11:30

Just a quick note about the answer that they gave about in the Google's index here. Google's index is simply all the sites that you see when you do a Google search, all the organic listings, all everything other than the the ads that you see come from Google's index, just because a website exists doesn't mean that Google can display it in search results, you first have to get that website into Google's index. And then it can be displayed in search results. And that's why we use the term index. Index means it's in Google's index. Google has an index of, of, of, of websites and pages and properties. When you do a Google search, and it spits back a bunch of websites. Those are all websites that are in Google's index. If you're not in Google's index, you're not going to be displayed there. You're not going to show up there. Thank you. Yeah, unfortunately, I wish I had better news, but you got to use a password. Okay, good to know, the rest of this episode does have a video, if you want to watch it. I do encourage you to do that. So you can see what I'm talking about. But you may not need it. If you want to listen to it and check out the video later. You can also do that. The link is in the show notes.

Meredith: 12:41

So hey, that's my stuff.

Meredith's Husband: 12:44

Yeah, it's your stuff. So what I wanted to talk about this week, is what I would call branded searches. So when somebody searches for your company name, like Meredith Zinner photography, so there's only there's only probably a few different scenarios when people are going to be searching for your company name like this. One is, when people are doing their research, they're thinking of hiring you and they want to just, you know, look for reviews, or just they're doing their due diligence. Those are great clients to have. Because they're gonna, they're gonna stay with you the longest. When people when people are slow to hire, they're slow to fire, so to speak. If somebody does a lot of somebody, that's a lot of research and puts a lot of effort into making a decision to hire you. They're also going to put a lot of effort and time into making a decision if they ever decide they want to hurt somebody else. So I would argue that these clients are they're the ones you want the people doing their research. Yeah, well, yeah, one of my early clients, this and these, this company was has been my over the last decade, my my favorite client, the absolute ideal client. And so they hired me, like, I don't know, 1012 years ago. And then I found out later, the client said to me, it's like, oh, yeah, we were we were watching your own website, in search engines for about a year, before we decided to contact you. Oh, yeah. A year. Oh, they watched because it was my own site, really good rankings. So they wanted to watch that they knew that in the SEO world, a lot of sites come and go, and things change quickly. So once I had they had seen me in position 123 for a full year, they're like, that's the guy we want to hire. Wow. And so those those, that's my best, like best client ever by five. So those are the clients or clients you want to get. So this that's why this is important. When you when somebody when somebody does a branded search like this, yeah, that means they're doing they're taking their time. It could also be your competitors, that could you know, there's other situations. But it could be you, you know, but I argue that when you do this search, and if there might be, you know, one or two or three or a few different branded searches that you want to try, you want to own this page of Google. Yeah. In other words, and what I mean by that is everything from top to bottom, you want, you want it to look good and professional, right? And you really want to own that own the content here. So the first thing so we're looking at, at the at the at the first page of Google results for Medical Center photography, we got your number one. And then we have some site links. You can't control these Google ops, they pull these in automatically, but these are just links to other pages of your site.

Meredith: 15:29

Okay. We don't know how they're they pull them?

Meredith's Husband: 15:32

No, that's one thing you really can't control. If they ever does, if they pull a page in that you don't want that you can have it removed. You can say that when I don't want displayed, how do you you need to set up Google Search Console, which I recommend. We can cover that in another another podcast, but it's it's basically it's like your own Google Dashboard for your for your website in Google's index. So it's worthwhile having Okay, so next on this page is images and we've tagged and let's just say I have tagged all your images carefully so that they all display here, your logo is here. Obviously you want to make sure that for this for that reason that your all your logos are, you know, somehow either on your website or if they're not on your website or somewhere else, they need to be tagged with your, with your with your name.

Meredith: 16:24

And you do that. I do that. And I have you told me how you do that? Or we're gonna get into that

Meredith's Husband: 16:30

I have not. How do you do that?

Meredith: 16:33

What does that mean? That everybody always says, oh, make sure you tag on make sure you tag

Meredith's Husband: 16:39

there, there are a couple of a couple of different aspects of of tagging a photo one is the file name. You want to name you, your your file names you give them to me, and they have oh my god, the most awful looking filenames I've ever seen in my life. 100 120 characters, they're all different. No consistency, special characters. And then so I renamed them all. So they're like,

Meredith: 17:06

so when I get so what would like for example, what I give them to clients, they say, copyright, for example, 2021 MEREDITH Zinner photography, dash, the last name of the client and the number.

Meredith's Husband: 17:23

So do you think people are searching for copyright 2020 mirrorless, inner photographer with the last name of the client?

Meredith: 17:30

No, because whenever whenever I do put anything online, with their permission, I always take their name out. So they just,

Meredith's Husband: 17:40

that's step number one is I take their name out, I take copyright out, I usually leave in some sort of Zinner photography or American Center or something that associated with the brand, and then kids photo, kids photography, and then dash 001234. And then so if you have a gallery of say, children's photographs, they're all going to be named that same way. So it makes sense for for me, as a webmaster, it makes sense to Google. It's got the important elements. And in addition to file naming, then you can add an image alt tag, which I think we've touched base on a little bit before surviving. Yeah, that's for when an image is not loading, or you have a describes it. And it describes what the image is. So for example, this an alt tag for this top left image might be you know, something about a family photo in the woods or something. Right? In the wilderness. My other question? Yep, I was gonna say, Don't stuff, your keywords, don't stuff a whole bunch of don't call all these photos, children's photography photographer is going to be that's going to be bad. Okay, if you want it to be accurate, make it accurate.

Meredith: 18:55

You want more or less?

Meredith's Husband: 18:58

I think less than, you know, you don't want to go beyond four or five words,

Meredith: 19:01

okay? And why not?

Meredith's Husband: 19:04

Because the space is going to be limited. And number two, then it's going to start to look like you are trying to spam the system and stuff more keywords, if you have like, if all you want to do is imagine somebody is reading your webpage, and where that photo is supposed to load, it doesn't load. And instead, there's just a little two or three word description of what the photo is, if they were to see it.

Meredith: 19:28

Right. And another thing for my photos, should we have kids and family rather than children and family?

Meredith's Husband: 19:35

Why don't we talk about that at another time? My stuff, okay, so Oh, so let's get back to this page and this page that you want to own on Google. So next, then we see your Facebook page. Yeah, your Yelp page? Yeah. Your Instagram page. Yeah, LinkedIn page. And this is, hey, you know what this is? Why one one reason you want to have a LinkedIn page. If you're a photographer, I understand probably, you're not going to get clients through LinkedIn. Right? You know, nobody's going to go to LinkedIn and do a search, you're not going to be posting your work to LinkedIn, etc. You do want to have a business page on LinkedIn. And this is the reason because if you click on this, you know this, you're owning this page. This is another. This is something you can control on that first page. You can put more of your work here, you can put testimonials you can put how long you've been in business, you can you control it, and you want to have things that you can control on this. Another reason is our Betten. Most photographers, they're their target audience, their clients, the people who they want to have as clients use LinkedIn, they're professionals. I use LinkedIn every day. In fact, I heard I heard a LinkedIn marketer say so and I don't know if this is true. But he said the average income of a LinkedIn user is$80,000 a year. Oh, average. I bet the average Facebook users annual income is not $80,000. People using LinkedIn have jobs and they have money to be very blunt and And nobody none of them are going to look at at photographer and think, oh, yuck she has a LinkedIn page she she runs a business that's just I'm not going to hire her or him. So it's not going to hurt. You can control what's there, I would recommend having it. So next you have you have your your Pinterest page. Pinterest is another one that you can control. Pinterest has really good SEO on their own. So if you have a Pinterest page,

Meredith: 21:39

people say that it's important to post to Pinterest.

Meredith's Husband: 21:43

It you know, it was

Meredith: 21:46

important to post to Pinterest.

Meredith's Husband: 21:49

So people, yes, people are right. It used to be it used to be extremely valuable. It is still valuable, but in a different way nowadays. So here's your page. I would say you could probably, you know, replace. Oh, I don't know, maybe a few dozen of these Bowie things. It's all Bowie. It's all Bowie. Food and red. Really flamboyant Bowie too. It's like course it is. Yeah. So yeah. So okay, good. Keep in mind, you know, your clients, when they're really serious about hiring you are right. There's a good chance they're going to be checking this out. So yeah, maybe like maybe maybe, maybe a little less bowing. Okay. Just a little and then your final one is next door next door is becoming a you know, they're a relatively new site. What's next door next door is it's kind of like a Craigslist, but for not just New York City. It'd be like your neighborhood. Oh, locks.

Meredith: 22:55

I use them. Why? Yeah. Looking at it. I was like next door. Yeah, that's they're great.

Meredith's Husband: 23:02

Yeah. So I recommend having a next door profile. It's good. Good chance. It's gonna show up here. And then so that's, that's all the organic listings. So that's good that you start to you. You have control over I think almost all of these. Yeah.

Meredith: 23:16

Yeah. And I'm your Instagram. Now Jose, it says, animal and Bowie lover?

Meredith's Husband: 23:22

Yes. Yes. So. Okay. So that's good. You own all of these. If we get on to the next page, we'll start to see things that we would not want on the first page like, so there's pixel parents. That's another good one. But then this one gift gift rocket is selling Meredith Zinner coupons, gifts, gift cards. Do you have do you? Yeah, exactly. You don't know these people. They're selling gift cards to your photography.

Meredith: 23:53

Whoa, wait, can they do that?

Meredith's Husband: 23:55

This is a bullshit site. This is some sort of scam. But But see, you see my point, you don't want to have this no fights like this on page one. So you got to own page, you got to set up your LinkedIn, you got to stop your Pinterest your all these others, then you get these sites like zoominfo that are just going to have your your business info. This is not impressive. I mean, this is accurate information. But it's not impressive. You don't want to have this on page one. You want to have stuff that's impressive on page one, right? apollo.io It's gonna be the same thing. giftly, another site selling gift certificates to married. It's in their photography. Why? Yeah. So see,

Meredith: 24:37

hunch? Kids? What's that?

Meredith's Husband: 24:39

See? Well, once you get into this stuff, you just you don't want people seeing this. So you got to page one. So get all get all those properties. And you should have you should have this taken care of and then and then and then as a user, do a search for your own company name, go look through those listings, where you see something that doesn't look too impressive, then you have the ability to go in and change it. Right. Now, the second, the second step for this is over here on the right. This is what they call the Knowledge Graph. So this graph graph, yeah. This is the result of having a Google My Business page. So that's something else I would recommend. Get back. Yeah, do a Google search for Google My Business. Go ahead and say I want you know, the tutorials are very easy. So it will guide you, there's a very good chance you already have one you may be you might need to claim the page as your own. It's not difficult. I'll cover that in another episode also. But but this is important because you can control this image. You can control your service area, you know, right away, it looks kind of impressive. It has your name and logo has links to your website, you can call directly from Google. It has things like your office hours and making an appointment. You can display your products and prices so that clients can be a little more educated Hmm. Before they before they contact you. There's categories of products. There's all sorts of things here that you can do. do that just make your make you you and your business look more professional and legit. And if somebody if somebody is doing a search for your brand name, that's what they're looking for. They don't want to get scammed. They're looking to hire somebody who is professional and legit. So Dev, so definitely, you need to set up Google My Business, and pay it pay attention to what's there, the past to take pay attention to what you have in your profile. Yeah, and try to fill out most of the more information, most likely, the better. The only thing that I don't like about Google, my business is down here at the very bottom, they will give links to other searches that people make. So people who search for medicine or photography, also tend to search for these other people. So this is your this is your competition. So that's the one thing I don't like. But hey, you know, Google is trying to please their users. Fair enough. That's what they do. So what I thought we might do is pick on Carmen again. Example. And, and just do a search for, for her her name, and her her business name. And if

Meredith: 27:28

we will be using other photographers, when you know, just let me know you want to be

Meredith's Husband: 27:33

if you if you'd like us, if you'd like us to review your website or your SEO or anything. Yeah, shoot us a message. And we'd be happy to do that.

Meredith: 27:42

And where should they shoot the message to

Meredith's Husband: 27:44

go to Maryland Center. I'm sorry, I don't go to Maryland Center, go to Meritus husband.com. And there will be a link there somewhere where you can say, right now it's at the bottom, scroll all the way down at the bottom, click the sign up. And you can say yes, please review my website. It's a checkbox or something in there include it. Yes. Great. And we'll confirm with you before we go ahead. And so anyway, so Carmen has a lot of the same stuff. She's already set up for Google My Business, she's filled out all this information, probably could put a little a little more on here, I would think it'd be want to have a little more maybe some product information, add some more photos, etc. But her you know, she has all the same pages facebook, instagram next door PhotoShelter. Actually, you know, so here's this, I'm going to take a wild guess here and say this is probably not something that she would want to have on on the first page. This is probably just a random site. It looks like they've pulled a just a random photo from her site. And yeah, so this is just a site. This is an example of somebody, they're just they're trying to this is kind of Blackhat technique. They're trying to build their own traffic by writing off of Carmen's name. Whoa, that so that's an instance of Hey, so what I don't see here is LinkedIn. So Pinterest, LinkedIn, API images. Yeah. So some of these, some of these bottom ones I would say, are going to are things that okay, so Oh, this this. Yeah. This is not, this is not our Carmen. No, unless she was born in 1916. In which case, Carmen, you look great. No, no, but this is a Yeah, it's an obituary for somebody named Carmen done. So this is my point, get a get a LinkedIn page, get a Pinterest page, get those set up, they're probably going to replace these on the first page of Google and, and push these other ones off, which then go on to page two. And on page two, nobody's ever going to see. So.

Meredith: 29:43

Alright. Good to know.

Meredith's Husband: 29:45

Yeah, that's, you know, that's helpful. Because, cuz like I said, when people are doing this, this level of research,

Meredith: 29:52

yeah, they should, or should tell anybody to do. And those

Meredith's Husband: 29:56

are those are the people you want that who are putting thought into their decision. You don't want somebody who just doing a search for children's photography, click on the first link and call like that. That's not going to be the clients that stick with you. You want clients who are putting some time and thought into choosing you as a photographer.

Meredith: 30:15

Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Thank you. That's a good one.

Meredith's Husband: 30:20

All right. I hope that helped Carmen. I hope you liked that.

Meredith: 30:23

Great. All right. That's good. A lot. Stewart dinner. You love you?

Meredith's Husband: 30:59

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 with us 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