This transcript has been machine-generated and has not been edited for errors.
Basically the things working behind the scenes, indexing, doing all the things crawling. That's why I like to say that you're writing for the humans with the robots in mind, because the bots are the ones that are going to pull your information in front of that human. That's Searchie. That's typing the thing in the Google search bar. Hello and welcome to the Simple and Smart SEO show Where we provide tips and advice to improve your website's search engine ranking.
I'm Brittany Herzberg, SEO copywriter for holistic health and Wellness Pros who want to show up as the answer to a Googled question. And I'm Crystal Waddell, an e-commerce seller and content creator. I help business owners communicate the value of their products and services through content so you can make more sales and grow your business. We are business besties who love learning and sharing what we've learned.
So what are we waiting for? Let's jump in. All right. We are back friend, and we are here with what we've been promising and teasing for, gosh, I don't know how many months? A few now a few. We have your dictionary episode part two, so jazzed about this. Crystal, what do you think? Oh yeah. I love words.
I love words. Love words. And then to find like you're gonna start and to come to find out there's already like one thing that we didn't even know what it meant exactly. And we use it all the time. It's fun. It's fun to uncover what some of this stuff means. Yeah, exactly. Okay, shall we just dive in? Yeah,
I think so. Go for it. Okay. Yeah, we're gonna kick it off. We're working with, if you, if this video ever makes it anywhere, we're working with a list on our screen. So if you see us looking places, that's what we're doing. We're gonna kick it off with SEO keywords. So we're gonna talk about keyword density and keyword difficulty.
So when I say that, what do you think? I think of how many times a word is used on a page for keyword density and then keyword difficulty. I see that a lot with the tools that we use. Yeah, like keywords everywhere and Uber suggests, so I think about, okay, how hard is this particular word? How hard is it to rank for this particular word?
And another thing to think about with keyword density is stuffing. That's another word that we hear a lot. So an ideal amount of times to use a keyword in your copy. Pro tip is about two to 3% of the total wordage. But yeah, keyword density, how frequently is it showing up on a page? And then keyword difficulty is also I've seen search difficulty.
Have you seen that? Yeah. Yeah. That's because there's, those things seem interchangeable with different programs. And so I'm always like short-cutting things. So I use surfer surfer's got its own measurement of difficulty when you're writing an article because it does it by keyword clusters versus like density or difficulty. But their scale is one to 10. If it's seven, it's not like it's super easy.
That's more on the harder side. It's more like a 70 for keyword difficulty or whatever you were just saying. Search difficulty, I think. Yeah, whatever that other word was. I'm gonna try to remember, and I know you do this too, just like naturally we say this, but if there's another word or another phrase that we've heard of that can be interchangeable with the terms that we're gonna tell you,
we'll try to remember those. Yeah. And they could always let us know. Shoot us a message over on Instagram. Yeah. If you've found something different or there's a question there, because we're always, if you're smarter than us, yeah. We're always learning and we'll definitely share what we know. We can trade ideas. Yeah. Love it. Okay,
so the next one is what, before I go on, is there anything else you wanna add to the keyword difficulty or keyword density? No, I don't think so. Yeah, I'm just like charging ahead today. So this next one is one that neither one of us knew what it meant. I know I didn't this morning until 15 minutes ago. I was like,
what? So U R L stands for uniform resource locators, like who knew not me. Makes sense. It makes sense. Yeah. What do you think? Ever named it? Yeah, dude. You ever think it meant something different? Well, I don't think I ever put any thought into it. I was just like, this is a url.
Yep. Don't take any, yeah, it's like I don't need to know. I don't really need to know what it means. I just need to know what it does. So what does it do? What is, what's a url? So a URL in my head is if it's, let's say it's Britney herberg.com/seo-podcast, the slash SEO podcast. I don't recommend saying this stuff early in the morning.
A whole bunch of times in a row. That is your url. So it's the URL slug is the part that I just talked about. But the URL is like the whole thing. The whole thing. So typically I have slug in my head because I'm doing this SEO packet, so all I'm like thinking about is the slash But yeah, that's your,
that is the link that people click on to get to the thing on your website, on Instagram, on YouTube, all of those. So here's an interesting fact about URLs because I think of URLs like online real estate. Ooh. Yeah. So it's like your address. So like a lot of times people ask you like, what's your website address or whatever.
And it's essentially like what you would hang out in front of your internet house online. But guess who owns most of the online real estate? Oh, I don't even know Amazon. Oh, actually, I think you told me that a while ago. Yes. Tell our friend more about this. It's just interesting to me because I think when most people think Amazon,
what do you think? This stuff that gets to my house in two to three days. Think shopping prime, that type of stuff, right? Prime. Oh yes. That's also marvelous. Mrs. Measel. Yeah, that's not, that's not where Amazon makes their money. Amazon makes their money and Amazon web services and they have a whole, it's not an underbelly because it's really a great service.
It's a really a great business, but it's just a whole nother side of the business that most people don't even realize exists. Business owners. Yeah. When you check, like the next time you go even to a big website or say you're running movies online or watching movies online or just say anything. Anything from online, just look in the url, look in that uniform resource located right at the top of the page,
the www dot, I'm gonna forget what that's called in about five minutes. It's Yeah, but check that out. And a lot of times you're gonna see the letters A Ws and A WS stands for Amazon Web Services. Oh. So you will start to realize, like even in a lot of freebies that people download or whatever, like I use Amazon S3 to upload my freebies and store there,
and I do that for free, but there's people who pay for tons and tons of space, like websites have to get their space online from somewhere. They get it from Amazons in the most part. So I just, I've always wondered how that works. So I would love if you know how all of that works and Yeah. Tell us. Yeah,
we wanna, I would love to know. We should have you on. Yeah. But when I, there's a link in the show notes to apply to be a guest and I would like to point that out. Also, side note, tangent. We get so many emails that come to my massage email address, our email address, and it's from someone pitching someone else I don't like,
can you just talk to us? And we have the guest application thing in every single show. So just if you wanna be on the show, we would love to have you just please fill out that application. Okay. Tangent over and back to URLs. Yeah. I just thought people might find that interesting because I did. I was like, oh my gosh,
that's because I'm an Amazon seller. That's a whole nother tangent. Oh, that's why Amazon doesn't care about me anyway. They're making their money somewhere else. Exactly. Okay. Yeah. Good to know. I do think I've seen that when I've downloaded freebies and I think I only noticed it after you told me. That is so cool. I never would've known.
And just to make a note, a freebie is only like the tip of the iceberg. You're talking about major servers, entire companies, big companies running their entire online processes on Amazon web services. It's pretty powerful stuff. Oh my gosh. Wild. Okay. Also, just briefly, I don't know that we have said canonical URL on here, but I think maybe it's come up or maybe when you're Searchie things that's come up as well.
Crystal, you did a good job explaining that earlier. I think that both of us were a little bit like canonical url. Say what? Yeah, where I see this the most, like in Shopify stores is with products with multiple variants. Or let's say you have a blog that has multiple pages and it like a page equals one page equals two or whatever.
You don't need Google to index all of those pages. You don't need them to compete against each other. You need to just designate one of them to be the canonical url, which is like the one that you want Google to index. And then the rest of them are non-canonical and that means that they won't be indexed, they won't be competing against those main pages.
So that's Crystal's definition. Feel free to rip it apart. That is what we're with at this point. Yeah, that's how I understand it. Yeah. No, I thought you did such a great job like explaining that. So thank you very much. Our next term, this kept coming up on a lot of lists that I was Searchie through bots.
Yeah, bots are basically the things working behind the scenes, indexing, doing all the things crawling. That's why I like to say that you're writing for the humans with the robots in mind because the bots are the ones that are going to pull your information in front of that human. That's Searchie. That's typing the thing in the Google search bar being has been showing up so much more in my visual.
Yeah, okay. Yeah, it's going ac and behind, but I wish I could find it right now. I was like looking for it because I posted it in about it in my stories the other day because that's a robot. You know what I mean? Like most of the time we think about bots, like to me they have a negative connotation.
Yes. I'm like, I think about bots on Instagram where you're getting spammed by new accounts. I love that Instagram has that new feature where it says new on an account. Oh. So if you are followed by, or something happens from a account that looks shady, you can actually click on it and it might say new. And if it says new,
it's a dead giveaway that it's probably a bot. I've always looked at people to see, okay, do they have any followers? That's what I look for type of thing. Yeah. Yeah. Bots to me really have a negative con connotation. But spiders that Google use to crawl the websites, and like you said, those are bots. There are positive applications for bots.
But this particular thing that made me laugh from Bing was that it was giving some weird responses this week. And I guess somebody asked it like, why don't you like me? Or, or something like that. And it was giving responses like, I don't understand why you don't believe that it's not 2022. I've been trained on the internet and I know what I'm talking about all this stuff.
But it was like, well, so it's just, it's interesting because robots still are not people, no matter how smart they are, no matter matter how much they can synthesize information, there's still things that they don't know and understand. You know? They just don't understand the human experience. It's very difficult and they're not supposed to. Yeah. A lot of humans that's understanding the human experience or care about the cubic experience.
Yeah. So that was just pretty interesting, like lots of changes going on right now in ai, but that one really made me laugh. Yeah. I just, it's sure is interesting. Okay, so the next one was, that's all I wanted to say about Bot. Okay. They're there, we gotta keep 'em in mind. They help us gather and analyze things.
But you're still writing for the humans. You're still thinking of the humans when you're writing. Don't get too caught up with those bots. The next one is organic. Organic kept showing up and organic for me, like it could be strawberries, it could be market is naturally just like what's happening naturally. You're not paying for anything. It's about you being intentional,
making those connections really, again, with the humans in mind. Like you're thinking through what's their search intent, where might they be looking? Am I making this, the stuff that you've been working on, the UX design, it's just really what are you doing that's not paid? That's getting people into your world, getting them to take action. Yeah.
And that's the whole reason why we do seo, right? That we show up or when people are Searchie for what we have to offer. Offer. And another thing that I read about recently, because there is a, there's this new app in beta called artifact. Have you heard about that? No. Okay. Artifact is like a news curator. Well,
so I'm not exactly sure like how it's different from like other news curators or whatever. But whenever it's new, I like to try it and check it out or whatever. Yeah. So I do, and I signed up for the technology articles and that type of stuff. Recently they shared about this new search engine called you.com. Did I tell you about,
oh yeah, you sent me the article. Okay. So you.com is a search engine that, you know, just like all other search engines, it relies on SEO and information on the internet to give you organic search results. But there's one major caveat between you.com and let's say Google, you know what it is, ads or the lack thereof. I will be using you.com
from now on. Yeah. So I, it has an app and it's, I thought it was funny because I was looking on you.com today and I thought I, I have to go to google.com to search for you.com to search for what I want so I don't have to see Google ad. Funny. Yeah. So it's kinda, but yeah, u.com is a new search engine.
It's also an app. And it's really interesting because just a couple weeks ago I was thinking about like how in the world could Google be Deron? There's always talking about that. Yeah, we were talking about that and like disruptions and just different things that go away and why that happens. And I thought Google's kind of got the monopoly. Well, like it's be really hard for them to be deone.
But then I read this article and learned about you.com and even one of the developers said, Hey, with Google, one of their biggest challenges is not getting complacent. They're sitting on top of an ATM of cash based on their ads programs. So they don't feel any fire under their butt to create something better for the user. Whereas other people are more motivated to do that.
Yeah. And even with the evolution already of chat G P T, it's like Google initially came out and was anti ai. Like their main SEO guy has talked about being anti AI and AI generated content. But now that these other search engines are, you know, in developing ai, like buying up AI and then incorporating it into their businesses, Google's now trying to release their own and it's kind of,
why weren't they out in front of this? And part of it just, I think this guy was right. They just didn't have the urgency to do it because their business model relies on ads now. Man, that's interesting. So there's that. Yeah, kind of random, but I just wanted to say no, it's not random. There's been some shifts there in organic search.
And so I would watch out for that because the other great thing is that all of the SEO efforts that you're putting into, yeah. What you're doing are paying off. I'm meant to search for you before I came on, but I did search for myself and one of my other clients. I showed up number one for my search term was, which was senior night gifts for collageandwood.com. Really?
And then a client of mine showed up and number three for her product. So that's exciting. Yeah. So I thought Very cool. And when you say search, did you search on u.com? Yes. And did you just type in your, I typed in senior night gifts in the u.com search tool. And then I typed in one of her top search terms that one of those things that,
you know, one of the terms that she wanted to be known for. And she was, Etsy had the first two spots and then she was number three. That's exciting. I'm gonna have to go and peek at this later, man. This is cool. Okay, cool. I will go get distracted later. You're welcome. The next there goes half my day.
The next one is alt text. And I think we brought this up in the episode with Stephanie where we were talking about, I think we were talking about screaming frog and images, like we were wrapping that all together. Alt text. When you put an image in photographers, this is gonna be big for you and any bloggers, when you load an image onto a webpage,
you really want to make sure that the image title has keywords. I usually try to aim for three to five and you write it like word dashboard jpeg or whatever the goal is to have it not be imj or IMG 3 25 or whatever you want it to actually have a keyword in there because then you can show up as the answer to a Googled question. And where we had Stephanie on,
I believe I went on Google and was showing you that's happened with some of my images, like healthcare copywriter, if you type that in and go over to Google, if you're on Google and not you.com and go over to images, you'll see my face pop up. So alt text plays a role in that as well because alt text is not only, it's for images,
but it's not only for people who are visually impaired. Like my friend Robbie, I love calling out Robbie. Hey Robbie. And I know she listens. Hi Robbie. It's not only for people like her who have visual impairments, it's also got an added benefit for you, which is nice in that it's searchable. So if you put in your keyword in the alt text,
that's amazing. What are your thoughts? I'm gonna actually look up something cuz I have a note on like the character count for that. There's two things. The other benefit too is say a website doesn't load. If you have the alt text on there, it will describe the picture so that people know what's in the picture. That's true. Yeah. Yeah.
So for what that's worth. The other thing is, I just noticed this about alt text in at R yesterday because I use like a variety of tools and at has this webmaster tools that's free. So I recommend that everybody signs up for it because they'll give you a daily scan and tell you about your problems or whatever. And I like to use multiple tools because they're not all exactly right.
Yeah. Like none of them are exactly perfect, but you can at least get like a triangulation point of reference. This is where you should start, this is what's actually happening. So I do like that. And especially when it's free, I think sim, Russia's got something similar, but in a rs, when they give you your score for your overall SEO on your website,
one of the things they do tell you about like how you're doing is with alt techs, but it doesn't affect your score. Oh. It's more of like a warning thing where it's hey, but nice to have, nice to do. Once you've got these other main technical things taken care of, it's good. Okay, let's go back and take care of this next level of seo,
which would be something like alt text, but it doesn't necessarily impact your right overall score, your website or your seo, how you're doing there. Yeah. And the way that I think about it, so I was the kid in in school, if there was extra credit, I was absolutely taking advantage of it. So a lot of my tests were like 1 0 5 or if I missed something it was 95.
But I think if this is like extra credit, and again, if's a courtesy, really nice thing to do if you're already loading in your images, it takes a few extra 30 seconds or something to think of what to put in there and then to actually copy paste it. And the thing I was looking up was character count. So I found this,
I don't know where I found it, but I added it to the SEO basics checklist. If you haven't downloaded it, we will link it. Fantastic text about 125 characters max is what you're aiming for. So 125 characters, drop the keyword in there, make it descriptive. It's not necessary. It's optional, but it's like extra credit. Yeah. And you remember last week Aaron was talking about how obviously all of these platforms are being used to search engines.
And we've been talking about that for a while as well. Instagram has alt text Yes. As well, but not for reals. Not for reals. Okay. But if you upload like that phrase just sounded really funny. Not for reels though. No, for reels, for reals, it does have it for reals, not for real. Yeah. So there is a place where you can add that alt text into your regular images on Instagram.
So that's something to consider as well, because as we move into this new era of search, all of these elements will probably become a little bit more important. Yeah. So and so you might as well get in the habit of doing it, especially if you're right. Again, if you're already in there, you're uploading an image, take a little bit longer and add that in there.
Okay. I know we're running short on time, so let's bust through these last few. We've got Okay. Anchor texts, which I know I've heard you talk about. So tell us what the anchor text is. Crystal anchor text is just that highlighted text on a page that you can click and go somewhere else. So let me use myself for an example.
Like I always do over at Collagen Wood. If I want, if I'm gonna write a blog article, the point of the blog article is still that I want people to buy my stuff, right? Even though it's gonna be helpful and hopefully informative or blah, blah, blah, whatever. I still want to give them a link to go directly to buy my stuff.
And so that's where you can use anchor texts pretty creatively where let's say I'm writing about a tennis senior night, I can hyperlink something like tennis senior gifts. And hey, if you're looking for tennis senior gifts and that part is hyperlinked, it then goes to a specific product that I sell for tennis players. That's a way that you can use anchor text.
Exactly. And so you, you want it to relate to whatever you click on and end up going to. You want that text, it's a typer link to relate specifically to that in thing. So I will say a bad example, something that you should not do is click here. Yeah. I like here. There you go. And I have done that.
This is not a lecture for you. This is a reminder for myself and for you listening, don't say click here, think be more creative. You can do better. I believe in you. Yeah. And this whole podcast is one of those things where it's, I'll listen to some of the stuff we say sometimes. Yeah. And I'm thinking, Ooh,
I need to go back and do that. Like the alt text for Instagram. I know it exists and I've used it before, but do I use it every single time? No. No, I don't. Yeah. But I remember the last episode, you also said sometimes we forget about the O in seo. Yes. You can go back. Yes.
And that's what this is. It's like, hey, just go back and optimize what you've done. Yeah. I love it. Okay, next up we have domain authority or domain rank. Like those are, again, two kind of phrases that you see with that. So the, I think of domain authority as like how trustworthy are you? How much do people actually look to you for a thing?
How well is your website performing based on the information that you're providing? So with me, with the blog idea, the blog challenge that I have for myself, which I haven't done so great on in the last two weeks, but it's fine. I knew there were gonna be some flex weeks that the reason I'm doing a blog a week and trying to put out case study information,
podcast information, SEO information, testimonial stuff. It's because I want Google to stop thinking that Britney is only a massage therapist. I want Google to be like, oh yeah, she does copywriting. Oh, she reads those case studies. Oh yeah. She knows some stuff about seo. So that is like what I'm doing in order to boost my domain authority.
Yeah. Domain authority is a thorn in my side right now because like I said, I utilize, and you see it on your face. You're like, I utilize multiple websites, right? Which is staying with my own website, trying to build this e-commerce domain authority. It's been difficult because there's been times where I've had really great back links from Pinterest shop my domain authority almost to 30,
which is really exciting. I'm like, well, you're getting somewhere, but if I lose that backlink, or let's say I lose several backlinks at one time from Pinterest, which has happened before, my domain authority also plummets. Yeah. By double digits. And so, you know, right now I'm in this influx between 18 on one and 33 on another.
It's just, gosh. Again, that's where the different sites, it's good to get yourself a frame of reference and a kind of a triangulation between multiple sites. Yeah. So you don't get too excited or too low. And the other thing that I wanna point out too is at the end of the day, what's the, the biggest measurement of your success is your conversions and your sales.
So as long as more people are coming to my website, or I'm also growing the number of sales for myself or a client, I take that into consideration when I'm thinking about domain authority. Because domain authority over time, hopefully will grow, but it's not always gonna be the most Right. Reflective of your progress. Exactly. I love it. Okay,
next up we have headings. So I think we've talked about this. I we, I listened back to our other episode where we did the dictionary episode, and we didn't cover this, but we have hinted at it in other episodes. The biggest one to pay attention to is your H one. When you go to any website, it's that big giant text that you see at the top that matters the most to your SEO performance.
The other headings, your H two s and H three s do matter, but for sure you want to have your H one s in like tiptop shape. So that is what a heading is. Yeah. And then when you're Searchie on Google, like the blue hyperlink on the search engine results page, that is the H one or the page title. And sometimes I like to make those the same.
You make those same. Yeah. Yeah. I make those the same. But that's where that would show up. Yeah. The other thing is, headings are the place where you wanna strategically use keywords. Yeah. So if there's certain keywords that you're trying to dominate, then make sure that you're including that keyword in your headings and also variations of that keyword.
And that's why I like doing my SEO research, especially with case study stories or case study, since I just did those recently, like eight of them, when I create them, I do that SEO research first and then I brainstorm what the story arc is gonna be. Sometimes I create a really good story headline, case study headline at the beginning. Sometimes it's the thing that I do at the end,
but I always make sure that there's keywords in there. And then it ties into a really important point in that story. And I will say, just in case you're like me, they might not match. So Crystal makes her SEO titles in her head, her H one s the same. I don't always do that. So don't panic if they're not the same.
Also, don't panic if you're doing them the same. Like it's good either way. Yeah. I'm just a real technical geek. I'm very like, you're efficient. Yeah. That's and efficient. But I think Erin also said, good point to remember too is that you can be as technically right on as you wanna be, as you possibly could be.
But if you don't have language on the page, it really engages people and gets them to want to read and stick around, then you're not really doing yourself any favors. You gotta find that balance between the two. You do. Yeah. And it's, it takes some time. So if you don't hit the ball out of the park the first time,
welcome to the club. It's fine. All right. Last one. And then we will say goodbye to you. So 3 0 1 redirect. Again, another thing that we've talked about a lot throughout the episodes, but tell us more. I like your definitions. Oh, the 3 0 1 through three. The 3 0 1 redirect. That's one of my favorite things to show a Shopify plan.
Yes. Because in Shopify there's a special page where if you go under the navigation, there is then an option where you can redirect URLs. And so you can literally just click a button and you have a space where you can type in the old U R L, and then there's a space underneath it to say, this is where you want it to go.
Now you know the new U R L. And so a lot of people get overwhelmed by redirects or oh, if the change page page changes or whatever, that's a really easy way to do that. And there's also, in most Shopify, Squarespace, whatever type of website they'll you're using, they probably have some version of that, or you can even do it in bulk.
But to answer your question though, a 3 0 1 redirect is when you have a page's outdated or changed or whatever and you want it to go somewhere else, instead of having it be like a broken link. Right. So instead of going to either a broken link or just something you don't want people to, to see anymore, you're going somewhere different. And a lot of times this happen in eCommerce with products,
say that you changed the name of a product. So then, or you learn that instead of putting product slash 1 2 3, you realize, oh, I could actually put the name of the product in the url. Now you wanna send 1, 2, 3 to the URL that has the product name in the York Tele A 3 0 1 redirect works. I love it. So there you have it.
10 more SEO terms that you didn't you were interested in. That was 10. That was 10. I counted fast. I know. Super fast. I'm so proud of us. I felt like there was a fire under my Tosh. It was great. We're trying to be a little bit, I'm trying to be a little bit more efficient with my time,
so I'm like, crystal, I have to. Yeah. I would say that's the blessing and not a curse, but just like the blessing of this podcast is now we're getting more people to help. And so the time getting domin squish squishy. I heard, I still love my friend Mak. Yeah. She said her schedule feels squishy and I was like,
I'm using that. So shout out to you. Mak squishy is good. Squishy. Squishy is something I kind of wanna avoid. Yeah. In a few different areas. Okay. On that weird note, if we, if you're interested, I think the best thing to point you to, if you're interested in any help with any of these terms, we have our SEO audit.
So there's a link in our bio. If you're curious about it at all, let us know. We do them for $99. We can help you beyond that. But also you're gonna be empowered to know how to fix any kind of SEO issues that crop up on your website. Yes. Any final words, my friend? No. I just love the fact that you used the word empowered because you can do this,
you can do this. You don't need us. We would love to help you, but also like you got this. Yeah. Okay. On that happy note, we out. See you next time. Bye guys. Thanks for joining us today. If you like this info, subscribe before you go so you never miss out on something related to seo.
See you next time.