Episode 020
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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 official mailbag keeper at Kim White and I'm here in the studio 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.
Hello, Kim. So glad you could be here with me today.
And are you drinking coffee today?
Oh my goodness. I love my coffee and I need everybody who, is listening because the findability queen says. To make Tuesdays your SEO day and in the mail, I got a surprise of a beautiful coffee mug that has those very words on it. So if you are listening to the audio today, it is a beautiful black coffee mug with lettering on it that's raised.
You can even feel the letters on it. It is lovely, but it does say, the Findability Queen says, Make Tuesdays Your SEO Day.
Thank you for that plug. I was just so excited 'cause everybody got them in the mail, so I was so excited.
thank you. I feel very special and I am drinking a lot of coffee today.
Yeah, me too. so here we go. Let's jump in.
I dove into the mailbag, Denise and pulled out a lovely letter from Shelly. Shelly is an author. She is a world changer, actually. She's done so many things to impact, I'm going to call it the Baby Boomers. She actually specifically works with baby boomers, but her questions she asked.
Several, and I think they're really good ones. Shelly asks, do I hurt my SEO if I delete a webpage?
Hmm. SEO is a big umbrella term for, people finding you. So it's getting your things into the search engine catalog. It's also making things show up better in results for people. It's selected keywords and doing all those things.
What Shelly asks is interesting because if you have a page that gets into the catalog, what it means is there's a link in the catalog with the title and the description to that page so that if someone looks for something, they say, oh, well this might solve this. I'll give this to the person. Right? So if you delete that page.
The search engine serves up that link to somebody as a result one day and they click on it, there's nowhere for it to go. So it's going to create an error that the person's going to see. So that frustration factor. So does it hurt your SEO in general? it breaks it.
Right,
and it also hurt you or your reputation and what your user experiences, so it's not something you ever want to do.
You want to. Keep your pages out there and available if you need to change the content on them to, change it, but you don't want to delete pages.
Great answer, Denise. Well, Shelly's next question is my SEO broken? If a visitor gets a 404 error.
Oh, okay. So she had the pieces and didn't even know she had it.
So what we described in the last question is if a page gets deleted and somebody clicks on a link to it. Your browser, which is Chrome or Safari or whatever that program is that you use to go out on the internet. That program has its own errors. So it's basically an error because someone clicks on a link and there's nothing there.
So it comes back and says, 404 is the internal name for this error of not found page. And Your SEO for that page is broken because you have an entry in the catalog and there's no page for it. So most websites have an error page that says if this happens in the browser and a 404 comes display this error page where you could say, Hey, sorry, we moved, or something happened.
Head to the homepage, so you can catch the error so that they don't see. Gobbledygook, but it's still frustrating for your viewer, your visitors. So that's why I recommend you don't delete any pages so that you don't get those errors in the browser. Did that make sense? Did I?
You did a great job and I want to just.
Interject really quickly that was one of the things that you can today do today, Tuesday on your SEO day, is to make sure you have a lovely 404. Yes, you can go in and create that. And I, that is what you would recommend, Denise. And I just want to say that out loud to everybody listening. That's actually a implementable thing for today.
Yes.
Put it on your
list for today. So Shelly's last question, at least for today is, does it matter for SEO if I have a text transcript for a video on a webpage?
Hmm.
Do you know there's many ways to go at this question. I believe that it helps you to have a text description. Of what the video's about with some detail to it, to support when the search engines read your page. Okay. Now we all know that if you put a video into YouTube, people can see subtitles, right?
So it had, there is ability in the background for video to be turned into text and it's common, more common now, but. I think it helps you and it helps your visitor who may not want to play the video actually know what the video is about. So from search engines, it helps them. They could probably figure it out themselves, but it helps to have your point of view and what you're trying to get conveyed with your video in text to support the video.
And then it helps your visitors who don't want to play video, they're in their car, they're on their phone, they can't at this moment, or they're at their desk and they can't play sound. So. You giving them a summary or some detail about it helps. Do you need a full word for word transcript? No, I don't think so.
So what's your opinion on that, Kim?
Thank you, Denise. I'm just the official mailbag keeper. Okay.
Alright. I was trying to change it up a bit.
I like my position here. Alright. I, I do think you're right though. I think you're right about like that. I think a lot of people use transcripts unnecessarily.
Because they don't, they do a lot of additional work and I want to keep Tuesdays, as you say, for implementing things. I don't think you are recommending going and putting transcripts on every page of your website, so there's a relief. Can I say that, Denise? There you go. There you
go.
Well, 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 youtube.com/@findabilityqueen for her collection of short videos, answering questions about findability and SEO for entrepreneurs every day.
We are back talking about websites and SEO, and the next questions come from someone who would rather we don't use their name.
And I want to put a little plug in here, Denise, that if someone has a question and they don't want to shout out from the podcast, but they want that question answered, please don't hesitate to send the question and just give us that information. We don't want to. You know, betray anyone's trust. No, we want to make sure that you get your questions answered, so if you want to shout out, give us the ability to give you one.
But if you would like to stay anonymous, totally fine.
Yep, absolutely.
So this question is it better for SEO to post a video on my website or put a link on my website to the video on YouTube?
Okay.
Today, in today's speed and how computers are running and the networks are running, you'll get the same, mostly the same response if you have the video on your hosted website versus linking to it somewhere else. So it used to be that speed-wise you would want it on your website today, that's doesn't matter.
However, what does matter is what your purpose is. So if you are sending someone to look at replays of an event that you did, by all means send them to the playlist over there where you got all of 'em up there because you want them to go to that platform to look at that video. Like, 'cause that's what it does.
It actually takes somebody off of your website to another place if you're in the middle of a A sequence of things that you're leading people through and you're trying to get them to understand a concept. It might be better to actually have a summary or shortened piece of the video within your site.
Not the exact same thing, but something shortened or changed up a little bit because you don't want them to go to another site and get lost there and not come back because you're trying to get them to consume more content. So I think it's the business purpose that's going to dictate that it's no longer the technology, but you don't want to have the exact same thing on YouTube and your website.
So you never want to have. The same video uploaded on your website and uploaded on YouTube. There has to be a difference and they have to be given different titles because the search engines don't like duplicates. They don't know what to do with it.
you're really competing against yourself and we don't want to do that.
Okay, so the last question for the day is from our anonymous, sender. We'll say, what does it do to my SEO if a page I link to on another site isn't there anymore?
There's a couple of things, that can happen. One, your visitor that might click on that link gets taken somewhere that has an error, as we talked about earlier in this episode.
So they're going to see an error page on that destination, and that's not cool because they're going to say, why did they do that? Why did they send me to this problem? Right? I didn't get what I wanted. Now, are they going to come back? You don't know. So I think that could be an issue. But then the other thing is that, when you link to another page, you're giving that page some authority and saying them, they're a bit of an authority because you trust them to link to them, right?
So you led credence to a little bit of trust. But then when the search engines are reading through things and they get to this link and they see the link to go there thinking they're going to go to an authority site and it's not there. That doesn't make you look good in the search engine's eyes either because there's an error on your page.
Basically, it's an error to them, and so that kind of hurts your reputation. So I don't think that, you can fix it. You take the link off. And if that person doesn't have the site completely, they've gone outta business, then you might have some other writing to do. If that page disappeared from their site or something, then you could look for a different page to send them to.
But I think you have to review this in maintenance on a regular basis every year to keep sure, make sure things don't hurt your reputation by having broken links within your site because it hurts you.
There's the second thing you can implement today on your Tuesday for SEO day is check your links if they're broken, correct it.
If you don't have the ability to correct it, redirect it. take it back to your site somehow. Right? Denise, thank you so much for answering these questions. We're closing the mailbag for today and we'll jump back in next week. You did a great job of making it clear what SEO is and how we can use it for our businesses and how we can implement it on Tuesdays.
So mark your calendars. Y'all will be back next Tuesday.
Thank you, Kim. I'm so appreciative of everyone that sent in their comment, their questions. we thrive on that. We love answering what you need to hear. I know at beginning, SEO is not easy for some people that are trying to figure it all out.
So I want to help you get started. So I created this guide called Quickly Find Your Perfect Keywords, the Simple and Easy Guide to Being Findable. And if you head over to. My website, the link is in the show notes. It's denisemillet.com/guide. You can download it there and get jumping jump right in on your SEO day to get some things done.
So until next week, 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.
Follow the show so you can hear when new episodes get released and stay in the know about SEO. Until next time.
