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SEO: Other Considerations

Lesson 18 from: The Photographer's Guide to SEO and Online Marketing

Lawrence Chan

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Lesson Info

18. SEO: Other Considerations

Next Lesson: SEO: Application

Lesson Info

SEO: Other Considerations

So other considerations you want to have our components of search results and, um design of your website some parts are public some parts of hidden so let's take a look at these first, sometimes you will see a website outrank you and you would notice that the website has everything done incorrect done incorrectly and I've seen that before I'm like, I don't know how this person still outranks me even though he or she has no clue what you're doing, you know, but thing is is that when you look back into the, you can have to find out there who is dot net find out the age of websites, those older website, the more weight it has. So the pull point of this google was trying teo avoid people from creating websites, creating lots of links to each other and then the leading them and then buying their websites lincoln tater, deleting them just three days old and removing them and they do this thousands of times. So you want to make sure that you keep your website as long as possible even if it's ...

delinquent just throw up a free hosting on there and keep it running and remember how I tell mentioned that you could have internal wings which can generate as much as you want but doesn't give you that much weight or external things which are very valuable because it's in from an external source linking to you're vouching for you so it comes to a question of do you have um two different websites for your blogged and your website yes I know I see yes and no so nodding shaking but t me like so my what my vlog is on a wordpress and it's like pointed towards my website domain but it's not like a whole inclusive my portfolio site is my block tight that's one way so basically there are two options you can see I have to say lawrence lawrence dot com and lawrence block dot com or you have everything consolidate as lawrence dot com and lawrence dot com slash balog which do you d'oh now? They're pros and cons for each because if you have a consulted every link that comes in that you tell all of the publishers and your friends it goes to one sight so that one side becomes bigger wow if you split it if you ask your publishers to link to you they may only lead to one place which one you have to choose now you're blogged or your sight so that's where the drawback is and you have to determine which is worth more to you so age isn't everything that keep in mind design is also very important and when I'm talking about design for this part I'm strictly talking about the coding you have to have clean codes and I understand if you don't know coding it's difficult to understand what's considered clean what's considered missy but for the most part if you buy professional themes from safety in forest or who themes or all those other great places they're going to be really efficiently coded and for the most part work press is also very efficiently coded so it's not like you're going to have any issues there, so if you have someone to stick with those platforms, you should be going the next thing you want to consider is low that time google factors in how faster where page loads the slower it is the slower the less you know wait it's going to give it because in this day and age it's all about speed so you don't want to load up you know one big photos and twenty of them that's loading twenty megs in order to load your site that's a lot, especially on the mobile browser mobile phone not everybody has ella two yet, so you want to make sure that it was very quickly so optimize all of your photos. The next thing you want to consider is above the fold sort of like a newspaper newspapers are generally folded in half whatever is above the fold that you're going to see first before a person opens up a whole newspaper that top part has precedence over everything else, so whatever it may be put it there so I tried as much as possible to avoid a gigantic banners that take up the entire fold because then you have no text for no room for text, something else you consider to be the frequency of content this is when you have the whole dry spell, you don't want to do that because in activity is also telling google that you're inactive and when you're not there, what does google do deem you less relevant and then bumps you lower and search results so you want to maintain a consistent voice and if that means I get to block daily but at least it has to be consistent, it could be weekly biweekly and so far, mike, this is the part I was wondering about the frequency if it's not a blogged, but just your portfolio site like, should you keep on like changing picture's, changing what you write if it's not the block, how you updated frequently, I'm sorry, can you for google page like this for the not google this salad, but for the a ceo on the page, frank, if it's your main site, not your blog's site, should you be switching out pictures to keep it looking like you're updating your website constantly? I would have to say, you know, warn you against that because once google indexes the photos it was stated for quite a while remember the age of website matters a lot, so if you look at those photos and the links I have for a lie texas I want since number one I mean, I took the screen shot when I became number one, but when I blogged it, I was on the second page, I was number fifteen, number sixteen, within two hours I was about the tents on the first page, and as within less than a day, I was number one, but it takes time, so the older, the website, the longer it stays more prevalent, it's going to be so don't change it if that's what you know to answer in short, because again, I try to focus on the strategy and then the reason behind the tactic, because otherwise I just don't change it and it's like, okay, I won't change it, but I'm trying to explain that age matters, so, you know, keep that in mind and as well as changing the photos yasmin had said, what about just page updates or site design changes? I guess that's kind of the same as the photos on the question the question is can just pay j updates affect people's view of your site frequency? If you're talking about paige up, they says in terms of a theme then no okay, so you're talking about block posts yes specifically when it comes to the real code because everything else when it comes to themes they're using something called css or the cascading style shoots and that is just it's aesthetics that's all it is if you take that css out it just becomes pure code and that's what google is pays attention to if you ever go on the's developer to bars for those who are techies, you can just remove all style sheets and that's what google sees just pure code and follows but it's not really important, so I'm not going to go into it. So next thing is multiple websites if you have we talked about earlier about having a separate blogged and a main site it does wonder it's because you can allow yourself to boost each other up and if you think about the whole risk calls in aruba thing I was not I mean, I was number ten and I was like, I cannot show this off to create life if I'm number ten and I'm supposed to be ceo expert ish you know? So I got another website a second one linked to that post and made it for five now if I really wanted to push hard for it because I have a multiple websites lots of them I can just get them constantly linked to the one to the main one and eventually push it to them I want if I wanted to but I figured that the point is made and you get the idea it's important it's a valuable to have multiple websites so that you can use them and execute you know posts when necessary so it's really good it's the same idea of having no online bloggers feature you it's technically another website but if you can feature yourself you have all of the control you want you don't need to wait to be featured I can feature myself anytime I want and push myself forward so if you want if you're thinking really long term purchase multiple websites build content and each one slowly built up a drink get links to them and then you can always just execute them when you'd be something else you want to keep in mind is the location location of search so I did a search of portrait photographer from the hotel across the street and this is these are the results that came up I don't know any of these photographers but there is you know listing, listing listing and after that they're all map listings and if you know it's on the right side above the ads there's a map right with all the points a b, c, d e f and so forth so the question is how do you get yourself up there for all of these uh because you don't necessarily have to have a search listing on there you can have a business listening on there too, and business listings are actually very easy to, uh, on the second shin have okay, I have to get the link up. I think I put in another slide on accident, but basically when it comes to location searches, you can type and put your portrait photographer or pizza and it's only going to draw up the local locations. So it's important to have your business located in this local area. But what happens if you have a home business? Do any of you have a home studio? Are you don't meet people and don't have a brick and mortar studio, and you don't want to disclose your home address at the same time. So how do you get around that? But you still want to be somewhere on the map, how you can do so, and how I did it back then was to get a ups box. You can't use a p o box because in order to have if you go on google google's business or a google places yeah, google search google places and then you'll see there's, a google dot com slash my business or something, and they're going to require you to submit information and address and where to verify the address they're going to send you a card, a postcard with a code so you don't have to be a let me see that card but they don't send appeal boxes but they're okay to senate teo ups boxes so what you do is get a ups box sort of central to the map of where you're trying to be in business so in this case seattle yet one in the center of seattle when I was in los angeles I have one dead center in ela and how you pee you know, ups box it's a hundred bucks a year for a tiny box which I've barely used but it was just the whole point of it was to use that code put my business on there and if you know it's not only have the dress but you can also have profiles photos if you could see right here there's a a little narrow link here you can click on it and his whole profile comes up the other thing you want to keep in mind is that if you have google reviews it will pop up and it looks much more prevalent compared to the ones that don't have google rivers so keep all that in mind now another thing that also affects your search engine ranking is your location of the server and that sounds really bizarre like why where is my server in the first place? Well, I was going to know but you can know if you have to inquire and it doesn't matter and matt cuts who's like the lead developer of google search even mentioned that it does matter I have this one um photographer you know colleague who is in australia and no matter what in all american browsers she is number one search results but when it comes to her local city in australia she is not a number one she's someone their first paid with not number one and it's just really mind boggling at first until we did a little more research and found that her server was in ohio well her business and was in australia so all of these things do effect where you rank I'm going to get into how the coding works and everything but I want to break down all of the components first. So next time we have to understand are the components of a web page there public and hidden aspects of a web page and once we understand all these aspects I can use this jargon and be able teo tell you exactly what to do. So the first thing you have to stand is that there's a site title a sight title is with public when it comes to search results this is where it look where it will be it's the blue part of the google search results so in this case would be lawrence town for toffee dot I thought now what happens if you want to put all you want to plug in a lot of keyboards in there all of the cool keywords in one google has a trick for that too it stops you after the first sixty characters and I want you to write that down site title is limited to sixty characters including spaces anything after that is truncated as you can see with an ellipsis data dot it doesn't matter what's after that good well cut it off anyway google won't count it how you can also see on your website this isn't for a search results but on your website if you hover over the tab you can see mine would be a photography of marketing tips ideas social media strategy free and now sounds really incoherent but I have a reason why it's written like that so I'll explain how you can do so is for yourself as well, but next thing you want to know is the meta description on your site it's hidden but on public search engines it's viewable if you want to go into view source you can see it now I want you also write this down met a description is limited to one hundred and sixty characters including spaces so let's check it out on the search is over that's where that's where it's the black text so I'm lawrence chen I'm a marking strategist at the thought anything beyond one hundred sixty characters including spaces would be also chunk aided with an ellipsis so make sure you keep that in mind the next thing you want teo understand our medic keywords medic keywords are hidden but they are completely useless so doing right now I'm not even joking they're completely useless and like two thousand nine google along with all search engines all said we're not using it because people game this is some men we don't use it so it is inward press settings you'll see it I'm just telling you it's going to be there but ignore it and next thing you want is understand needs in the sun is in your l this is public this is where you know you see on top of the your website bar or in this case to appear so calm slash about or something next things you won't understand our head of tags heather tags are the each one's age to h threes it's not exactly important to know this I was demonstrating how to use them for war press later it's also same applicable equally if they go for blogger for score space for any cms or content management system out there all header tags are the same thing when it comes to agent of html but for the most part it's more for design purposes ward press already integrates all block post tiles with head it takes so you don't really have to even worry about that the next thing you want to be concerned about would be the content body the content body is basically the contents where you put all the texts and photos next thing would be links links are the ones that you write to other people now that part is public but a link title is hidden and I'll explain how teo see that later run there is no limit on text length for this one the next thing you have to know is image for images these air public the ones that you see but if you think about if you if you imagine you're in google's position your computer how can you tell where the photo is? You can't sew in the world to know what a photo is you have to tell google this photo is a red fire truck I mean there is some facial recognition is getting smarter you khun tell colors but I still can't tell everything so you have to be able tell google what the images about and that's where image alter tags come in or the alternative because some people don't load images on the browser is just too saved you know, loading time sold alternate tags come up they're very important though okay now we're getting to the nuances of search results there tiny differences between keywords so imagine I'm going to use wedding photography for or even used pay photography what's the difference between seattle pet photography versus seattle pet photographer versus yelp for those roses yellow pet pictures do they make a difference? You know in a way in short yes they do they do make a tiny difference but for the most part you have to imagine in the position of your target audience what keywords are gonna be thinking of and I'll explain what how to think in that mode after I show you the nuances first so when it comes to us in a website search results if you think about alexis hotel weighing photography you have one line so one, two, three, four five photos and then it becomes text results and that's where mine is right now. But if you look up image search results there two types remember how I said alexis hotel wedding pictures or wedding photos so what happens then automatically you have three rows of photos versus earlier one row for those you know is how fathers take a president's now now, if you recall from my ruba I had four photos and explain how you can get multiple photos on all of these search results so photos versus pictures matter I blurted out everything but you can see how the position of the father was also change pictures versus follows there are nuances to all of these so next thing you know afghanistan are explained earlier is location search results I'm sorry, this is where the linkous so if you go the google dot com slash my business, you can register for all of the information your name, your girl, your photos, your youtube channel and your address you really need a dress? I can't overemphasize that otherwise you cannot have a google place now whenever comes to any search result, you're most likely unless it's something about you you always limited to two spots. I'm sorry I ce away little fast, but this is the location search results before portrait photographer I didn't have to type in seattle it just came up, so when it comes to search result, you're always usually limited to two, so if your website you're limited to two text based search results if it comes to images you're limited to two so here's a little story about what I did, so this is basically right now for ritz carlton, aruba wedding photography or photos. You can see that I have four photos and how I was able to do so was have two websites two photos from each makes for photos when I first taught him search engine optimization too for the hog first it was a really funny story because there's a place called the ritz carlton logan and the girl in california really beautiful place overlooking the ocean and how I was able tio established myself you know among other photographers was first I invited a lot of the opinion leaders at the time and still are to this hotel room I had everybody meet there and I asked everyone in the room who has shot here at the lagoon in the gallovits carlton everybody raise your hands all I've shot him ten times five times a show here last week you know I say okay well I haven't and they all came because they understood I was popping up on all search results and they need they wanted to know how I did that and I was willing to share that information and I said since I haven't shot here before but I just got here yesterday I took a few photos and I posted on some search results and I had the time I had five different websites so you can imagine a one page has told of ten search results possible so what I did was I asked him what would be a key term uh a bride might look up you know rich carlton looking into girl wedding pictures for those or photography so okay sure let's type that in boom I had five websites two results each so I took up all ten search results entire first pages me so then I was I asked him to take do you want to learn how to do this on douse it and the rest is history so keep that in mind if you want to have multiple listings you want dominate certain key words have multiple websites it's not too difficult to have and you can build europe a drink slowly because age matters and helps a lot too we have so many questions lots about the have multiple websites okay I don't know if you want to get into that a little bit more um yes I have a bunch of questions about it or maybe if you just want to explain in a little bit more so some of the questions are russell said when you say get multiple web sites you mean separate hosting accounts or its okay to have websites on the same hosting account and creative uh gal says does this work the same as multi sites jazmine says when you have multiple sites do they need to be full blown sites if they don't have other valuable content other than links remain site isn't that considered black hat asio yes in in a way yes um I'm sorry a lot of questions there's so many I know okay so when you have multi sites it's not exactly like tell me like a bloody press or anything like that can explain what multi sites are it's probably easier we competed it ok but that's ok full blown single sights who was better full blown site like you have sites that are all of your work like the blogged the portfolio I'm going to get into what avoid what you shouldn't do in terms of black hat in terms of like replicate do precooked content or no content at all but definitely have contents build value in each of them and I'm not saying thiss takes a lot of work keep in mind to constant generate content for all of your sights it's it's a lot it's a lot of work but your wedding photographer you would have multiple sites that are about your wedding photographer yeah but you which you would only have your client's goto one of those sites well you can have member your main site versus your block sites that in itself it is already two sites but you can have another one just for industry news just for a wedding photographers specifically it's like oh I this is how I shot this photo guys check it out he's submitted to like peta pixel or even creative live have them you know feature on their blog's this can lead to different traffic and different page ranks in self okay, what about russell's question which wass having all of these websites hosted on the same domain versus having them hosted because a lot of times when you get hosting you can have multiple sites you know they don't they don't charge you additionally for extra sites is that fine to do or do you need different that's okay too d'oh? Okay, because you have to imagine a lot of shared service out there go daddy the ones that you pay six dollars a month that's one hard drive serving I don't know how many websites twenty thirty forty websites at one time so those shared drives it's more economical but they all share the same type and I p is basically your address on the web and you can have all your all of your dna's pointing to the same server or your domain names ever and that's okay all of my sites are actually hosted on one server and I have multiple so it's ok ok great thanks I think I understand um when you said that right there with the u s servers but with sub domains are those separate sites are they all won so I have like my camera dot com and I have blogged out my camera dot com does that make it that sort of makes it a little difference now I can't say because I don't know the algorithm again but I believe that is deemed as separate but it cannot be too it's a little gray area and I get what you're saying because it can be completely you know multi site in that sense you know very different and I'm fortunate I I'm not google I didn't cut it so I cannot tell you I can only tell you from you know input output you know multiple inputs and outputs and you want talk statistics? You know, progressions and all that. It's. Still still working for whatever I'm doing.

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Ratings and Reviews

Daniel
 

Lawrence has done a great job in trying to simplify SEO and marketing in such a short course. He's obviously a clever and well clued up guy, and he comes across well if a little nervous and bumbling at times. The course itself felt quite fragmented over the first day. At times I almost felt like we were going through a business studies book, but in a disjointed way not knowing what direction we'd go next. Having said that the course is worth watching as there are a few nuggets of gold in there and it's a great general overview of both marketing and SEO which is an incredibly deep topic. There were a few questionable area for me over both days, but I've studied SEO reasonably well, for example he told a viewer to keep her old site and not move to a new domain as she'd lose all page rank. In actual fact the lady could quite easily move from one domain to another, and using a 301 permanent redirect she could transfer between 90-99% of her old pages link juice (ranking power). I understand going through deeper areas like this might have put fear in some people, but I think a few areas could have been better presented or explained. Would I recommend this course, yes I would. Although I saw faults in it, the amount of information on offer is pretty extensive and will help most photographers who run their own websites. SEO can go so much further than has been explained here, but for most small businesses this will be a great starting block to getting your business out there and ranking higher than you ever did before! Note to all: Anyone using wordpress please make sure you get it hosted on a decent host. After hosting my wordpress site on bluehost, and getting incredibly slow load times, I researched extensively to find out that the host plays a really important part in this area and going cheap isn't a great option. If your pages load slow you run the risk of losing a lot of potential customers and hits, so do yourself a favour and pay a little more for a decent host.

a Creativelive Student
 

I have been looking for a course like this to learn more about Online Marketing and SEO and randomly came across this course playing live. I usually decide within the first 5 minutes whether I want to continue learning, and Lawrence Chan definitely had me hooked. I wanted to continue watching his engaging presentation and listen to what he had to say. His quirky and nervous disposition was handled well as he broke into a smile or laughter from time to time, which made him funny yet relatable. Like everyone else, I was impressed by his thorough knowledge of Online Marketing and liked the examples he gave as he progressed with the course. Hopefully Lawrence Chan can be featured in Creative Live again!

Corrie W
 

Brilliant ! Great content, well organized, practicable, understandable. I felt like I had a good handle on SEO and really thought I’d be getting a refresher. I am amazed at the new things I learned. Great resource that I’ll go back to often. Well done!

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