Episode 015
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Welcome to SEO Day Studio with your hosts, the Findability Queen Denise Millet, and the Entrepreneur Whisperer, Kim White. This is a space to hear the questions that fellow entrepreneurs have about SEO and get them answered. So many discussions involving techy topics like SEO are loaded with jargon and unnecessary complexity.
So much so that anyone outside the tech industry has difficulty getting to the real meeting inside the information. Denise believes that every entrepreneur can benefit from search engines. Once they hear how they work in a clear and straightforward way. She's on a mission to help entrepreneurs get the content They spend hours creating included in search engines, so when their customers search online, they're findable because she believes if they can't find you, they can't do business with you.
So stay tuned. The fun starts now.
Welcome to the SEO Day podcast. I am the mailbag keeper around here, Kim White, and I'm here with the Findability Queen herself, Denise Millet. Denise, thank you for giving business owners a place to get their questions answered about findability and SEO. Hey Kim, I'm so glad you're here with me. Thank you so much for doing this with me today.
Thank you for being willing. I will just say we have dug deep into the mailbag today to pull out one, one letter from Jill Olish, and she's asked multiple questions today, Denise. So I think we need to change the. The thing for everyone to ask a question to bring your list of questions, I think that's what we're gonna start doing.
So that's great. So a little bit about Jill. Jill is a creator, uh, and a host of four podcasts. One is Mama Outspoken. Podcast Mucked Up My Self Care podcast Buckets and Boom Gates Podcast and five and 15 interview Leadership series podcast. Oh my goodness. Needless to say, she's a podcaster. That's what we're gonna take out of that.
But she says her stories of motherhood and entrepreneurship and relationships with those she seeks to inspire, others in their own journey. So she's got podcasting questions. Definitely. The first one is, what exactly is an RSS feed for a podcast? That's a great question. So first of all, I like to tell people what letters stand for.
So, RSS stands for really simple syndication, believe it or not. So it's a way for the list of your podcast information, your description, your title, your cover art, and then all your episodes and the descriptions of those, and your show notes and all those things to get distributed across many different podcasting platforms.
So that everybody has access to all these podcasts and you know, there are a lot of different, as you know, as a podcaster, Kim, there's so many out there that you, you submit your show to and then they share it with others and others. And the way they do it is by sharing this RSS feed, they call it, which is a list.
And it's changing, ever changing based on how many episodes you have, every time you add one, it gets added on there or if you change something, it gets changed, and then it gets sent out and distributed to all the platforms so that everybody has the same information about your podcast. Wow. Well, Jill's next question is she asks, should I include my podcast episodes on my website if they're already released on a pod catcher?
My opinion is yes. If you have, a webpage on your website for each of your episodes, then you have an opportunity to influence what gets into a search engine because the search engines don't always go into the episode level of podcasts. To fill up the search engine. So some do, some don't. So if you have a page on your website for each episode, then you are controlling what the search engine sees about the episode.
So you can have, you know, your version of the show notes, the summary. You can have more information about your guests or other things like that, and you can tell the search engines more about your episode and control it. Get it as an entry into the search engine on its own.
Jill got another fantastic question. It is, do I upload the audio for my pod episodes to my website or link to the pod catcher? My personal opinion is with the speeds that we are have, we have in our networks, in our computers, now that it's okay to link to. The source of where the podcast is living. So if you have your podcasts on a different platform than your website, then um, you can link to that platform and you'll have a little player in there to play the audio from there.
And that's what people are used to doing. So it's kind of a familiar thing. Um. In the old days, you might wanna put your own audio on your website 'cause it would be faster to play it in the old Wild, wild West or the internet. But everything's so much faster now. You don't really have to have that concern and you don't wanna have duplication of content in different places.
So you almost wouldn't wanna have the exact same piece of audio on your website as you had on another platform, and I think it's easier for you to link to it. Well, I just wanna give a quick little thing of what you just said. Everybody thinks that www at the beginning of a website is the worldwide web, when actually it's the wild, wild West where this so funny, it came outta your mouth and I had to like make a note of it.
Oh my God. So let's head no. Well, we compose ourselves. Let's head effort to a word from our sponsor today. This episode is brought to you by the findability Queen Denise Millet. Visit her YouTube channel youtube.com/at findability queen for her collection of short videos, answering questions about findability and SEO for entrepreneurs every day.
Well back to all our podcasters out there listening, Jill has sent in a whole list of questions that are phenomenal. Here's another question. Is it important to lay out chapters for my episodes in show notes? And I think we need explanation, Denise, of what? Chapters means for show notes. Okay. And, and this is also for videos like YouTube.
You can, this is very helpful in YouTube for videos as well. So imagine like this podcast, our format is, we have five questions. So it's helpful to have a chapter, that's what the term they use, but it's actually just a, a place on the timeline of where each question starts. So that if somebody's playing, playing the podcast and they wanna skip over a question and they wanna just go to a certain one, they can click a link and go directly to that place in the replay and the audio.
And so that's called a chapter. I think it's very helpful because it actually tells search engines. The breakdown of the content a little more and gives it kind of like a subheading that says, Hey, this is, this is about this, and here's what you're gonna hear and this about, this is what you're gonna hear.
And they pay attention to lists like that. So it helps search, but it also helps the people listening. Can I ask my own question in here, Ms. Please? So is the timestamp part of that? Yes. I missed that part. Yes. So the chapter is also the time that the chapter starts, is what you put the timestamp at the end of the description of that.
Section, and you put a timestamp there. So when you click, it actually moves ahead, moves the player ahead to that timestamp in the replay, you and Jill Way smarter than I am. So I had to make it Sure I understood. Thank you. So question number five. Today is, are podcast analytics included, do they include downloads for episodes and can I rely on the numbers as real numbers?
This is a spicy here. This is spicy question because this is opinion as well as. There's a lot of things we don't know what happens mm-hmm. In a networked environment when people visit platforms because everybody has privacy settings set in their browsers and on a lot of websites and this whole, um, the way they control knowing that you've been somewhere and what they can save about you being there.
There's now regulation around it. And some places let it happen, some places don't. So when you look at analytics, it's as much as they can count. It isn't a reflection necessarily of the actual traffic. And when you think about podcasts, they, they talk to you about downloads. Well, I don't know about you, but I don't download episodes anymore because everything's so much faster.
So, I mean, I have my catcher open and it's playing at my house, and I'm not downloading a single episode of anything I listen to every week, which is quite a number. So those things aren't getting counted. So if I'm not getting counted, how many other people aren't getting counted. And so it's helpful to know it makes you feel good.
It's a good feedback loop, but you can't, well. I don't put as much credence to the numbers being reality as other people may. Do you think? Well, I was gonna say, I wanna make it really clear to the podcasters listening. Denise is not saying you'll ever get more downloads than are real. It, the number will be less than what you're actually Right.
Right. So don't get, I just wanna Right, right. Well, Denise, thank you so much for answering these questions. We're closing the mailbag for today. We'll jump back in next week. You did a great job for making it clear what SEO is and how we can use it for our businesses and our podcast. So thank you. Thank you so much, Kim, and thank you for being here with me today as you do for all these episodes.
I really appreciate you being here with me, and thank you all to, uh, Jill for submitting all your, your list of questions. I love it. I'm so thrilled by that. And I'd like to help other people get started on their journey with SEO. So I created a guide called Quickly Find Your Perfect Keywords, the Simple and Easy Guide to Being Findable, and it's a free download as a gift on the SEO Day page podcast page, or on my home website, denisemillet.com, and also the links in the show notes. So take a minute and get your copy today and we look forward to seeing you next time. Thank you so much.
Thank you for joining Denise and Kim in the SEO Day Studio for today's discussion. If you would like one of your SEO questions answered in the future episode. Head on over to denisemillet.com/questions to let us know. The link is also in the show notes. We hope you enjoyed listening to this episode of the SEO Day podcast.
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