Episode 019
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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 and 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 official mail bag keeper around here, Kim White, and I am here with the Findability Queen herself, Denise Millet.
Denise, thank you for giving business owners a place to get their questions answered about SEO and the beginning of SEO, which is findability. I appreciate you so much.
Oh, I appreciate you being here with me every weekend. Maintaining that mailbag, which is getting heavier every week.
It is getting heavier.
I will say that I dove in this week and found a letter from Donna Bender and she asked multiple questions, Denise, so I'm just gonna tell you out loud all the questions today come from one listener, and that is Donna Bender. She is the founder of the Donna Bender Company and she's a branded product.
Specialists. She helps businesses use branded products and gifts to build relationships that increase their sales, multiply their referrals, and grow their business. I think that's an amazing thing that she does. But her first question is, what happens to my SEO if I change the URL on a landing page?
This is an excellent question. Once you create a landing page and it has a URL, which is the file name for all intents and purposes, it gets in and it gets crawled by a search engine spider and put into the catalog. it's fixed there. It's an entry just like it would be in a card catalog in a library.
If you change that name, it's akin to changing the title on a book and how is anybody ever gonna get to it, right? So that entry in the card catalog still there and you can't change it, but now you've changed it. So somebody's gonna click on that link that you put in there with your first name, and it's not gonna be able to find the page because it doesn't update what's already there.
You're not guaranteed it's going to update it, that link is gonna stay there. So I recommend you don't change URLs. You always create a duplicate of the page. If you want to inactivate another page, you can take the content off of it and just have a photo there, or visit me at this new page or something like that.
But you always have to leave the page there with the original link that was there because it's still in the search engine. That makes sense.
Yes, ma'am. Thank you for answering that. That's a great question. So Donna's next question is, if I use my business name on my page titles, does it help with my SEO?
You know, this was a very common thing for a lot of people setting up their websites, is to just have that page title, because it shows up on the little tab in the browser when you bring up a webpage, right? And what a great way to advertise your business. Well. It's not great for SEO because SEO uses that title as the actual thing.
It's gonna show somebody for them to click on to link to your content, to your page or whatever it is. So that title's very important. The first 150 characters are very important because that's what somebody's going to see. So if you use up the beginning with your business name on every single one, it's kind of wasteful.
Because people already know what your business is by looking at your website name or something in your description. So that's prime real estate, and I would not use my business name repetitively on every page. I would definitely make those more unique and full of keywords and things that are going to convince somebody they want to click on the link and visit your page.
Another great answer, Denise. So Donna's next question is, what does a search engine do if I do not give my page a title or description?
This is where I talk about search engines are a black box and we can conjecture based on what we've experienced in the past, but nobody really knows the actual for sure rules.
Okay? I have seen them take the first sentence of a description for a title. I have seen them take something down on the page that was a heading for a title. So I think what I am going to say, if you don't give it a specific title or description, the spider reading the page is going to look for a theme, look for something important, and make a choice for you.
So it'll take your heading and put that in the title. It'll take something from your first or second paragraph that fits that, it's trying to sort out what it's trying to read clues to figure out what your page is about. So that's giving them a lot of information on the context of what you're writing and what you're showing.
So it's gonna make decisions based on what it sees. Nobody knows for sure exactly what happens, but I will say that they know a lot about your page and to fill in the blanks. They will take things from other places and it may not be what you want it to be.
That's a great answer too. Denise makes me wanna go check all my titles and descriptions.
let's head over to a word from our sponsor today.
This episode is brought to you by the Findability Queen Denise Millet. Visit her YouTube channel yyoutube.com/@findabilityqueen for her collection of short videos, answering questions about findability and SEO for entrepreneurs every day,
welcome back to the SEO Day podcast.
We're still here talking websites and SEO. So the next question from Donna, Donna Bender is the one that has asked all the questions today. Let's just say that to remind everyone, but she asks. Does SEO impact how often search engines visit my website?
I would say yes, because search engines are making note of when they come to your site and they see when you update something.
So if you're actively adding new content for SEO and you're building up your base of information out there to get into search engines, they're gonna recognize the last time they updated something and the time between they're gonna recognize that you update often.
And that they've been able to create things from what they've gotten from you. And so yes, it can improve your crawlability and the timing between if there's a stagnant website that doesn't get updates very often. It's kind of like the boy that cried wolf. You know, they come and visit a few times and there's no changes.
No changes. So your priority goes down when you have more and more change visits that Yes. Positive. It's been changed. Yes. Positive change. And that goes on for a long period, then you get a different priority or a different classification. again, black box, they don't tell us exactly the terminology, but I believe that it increases your ability to get read more often.
Thank you, Denise. Our final question today from Donna is, does adding a menu to the bottom of website pages help with SEO?
Yeah, it does actually. we have to go back and think about what spider or robot programs do, and they're called spiders because they traverse a web. So they take a page, they get all the links that are on the page, and they make note of those.
And when they finish this page, then they go to the next one, and then the links from that, and the links from that. It's kind of like a web, right? When we create a website or a web page, we might have navigation at the top, but we don't want to necessarily have it super crowded with all these different choices up there.
Sometimes you narrow it down to just the most important things that people might need to travel to. The footer. At the bottom is your opportunity to put all of your links in there for everything, and then that gives the spiders a robots. A clear cut list of everything you want them to visit because those are links and they take note of links as the places they have to visit as they're reading your site.
So that was a long-winded roundabout to say, yes, it is helpful for SEO to do that, and that's why.
Thank you so much for answering these questions, Denise, and thank you Donna for sending that que those these questions in. We're closing the mailbag for today and we will jump back in next week. Did a great job of making it clear what SEO is and how we can use it for our businesses.
Y'all, if you haven't set it on your calendar yet, Tuesdays are the day the podcast drops. Make it your SEO day.
Thank you, Kim. Thank you for being here with me and managing that heavy, heavy inbox mailbag. I appreciate it. And thank you for all of your questions from people out there. I've created, a starting guide for you that's key about keywords called Quickly Find your Perfect Keywords, the Simple and Easy Guide to Being Findable, and you can download it today.
The link is in the show notes, you can get started on your journey with all this and you can use your Tuesday, your SEO day to, to actually implement some things that are gonna move the needle for your business. So I hope you'll take advantage of it and I look forward to you. Seeing you next, next time, worry talking to you next time.
Bye.
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 denise Millet.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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