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Lesson Info

How to Craft Your Content

So how do we craft our content? This is the first step. So we have our focus, it's nailed. We know who we're targeting, we know where we're going, we know what we're trying to sell, we know the services we're giving, we have our keyword strategy even. We even know the keywords that are most used based on the services that we are offering, now we need to do some writing. Here's your keyword placement. Every one of these slides and each of the segments and each of the videos as we go through this is going to be broken out and you have a reference point with each of the slides. It'll give you an example and it'll give you a place to reference, I would say, for any ideas just go back to Lin and Jirsa. It's a great guide in terms of what to do. But keyword placement, website locations to place your keywords, are gonna be in the TUTI. The titles, the URLs, the text, and the images. TUTI's a great word, say it out loud for me. TUTI. TUTI, feels good doesn't it? TUTI, titles. Titles should...

contain keywords first. They should balance creativity and SEO. And you should understand that the link value is gonna decrease when it's further away from the homepage of a site. We will discuss this, don't worry too much about that. But here's an example of a good SEO based title. Fairmont San Francisco Wedding that's the SEO keyword, right? What type of keyword is it, is it a main keyword or is that a niche keyword? Niche. Niche. Okay, then you have your creativity. This is when you write whatever you'd like to write there. Put in your fancy flair, put in you know, more flair bell, less flair bell, this is up to you. Matt and Kim's opulent winter affair. The next thing is your URL. Keywords need to go into the URL. Now I'm not talking about the URL of your website right now, cause you're probably thinking bout my dot com is the name of my business. I'm talking about what comes after that, okay? So most CMS's, which is a content management system, that's generally what you're buying when you go to Squarespace, like these pieces of website software, they are content management systems. That's what WordPress is, okay? Most of them should allow you to have control to have unique URLs. What that means is you wanna turn this function on, okay, so permalinks, that's what it says on WordPress. The option for URLs that are spelled out is called a permalink. On Squarespace, they're called URL slugs. They might call them something differently. The important thing to remember is that you don't want a URL where it's your studio name dot com, forward slash one five seven eight nine two six is the name of the page that you're referring to and that's what they default to on a lot of them. What you want is the keywords to mirror the title inside of the URL for each page that you create. So Orange County engagement Katie Jeff. That should be the URL of Katie and Jeff's blog entry. Make sense? The next piece, text and copy. This is where we find excuses to use keywords in the copy, the text, the body of your site. Do you think it is a competitive advantage for any of you who are good writer or who want to become good writers? Oh yeah, raise your hands, that's a huge competitive advantage over any other studio. Because nobody can copy you and your personality in your words without plagiarizing you. And if they did, Google's gonna hand em a big, I can't say that word, slap. Google's gonna slap em. For stealing your content. So that's a huge competitive advantage. We want exact keyword phrases three to four times within a page. A page is what's visible on a screen, okay? Avoid keyword stuffing, test to ensure that it sounds natural by reading it out loud. Let me give you an example, this is keyword stuffing. Welcome to our Los Angeles wedding photography blog. We started our Los Angeles wedding photography studio in 2008. We specialize in capturing emotional, beautiful moments at weddings at Los Angeles weddings. While we are a Los Angeles wedding photography studio, we are also an Orange County wedding photographers, what? Stop by, like that's, you've gone way far over the top and Google will penalize you for it. A good text copy, welcome to Lin and Jirsa. Doesn't it sound better when I read it in a normal voice too? (class laughing) You know what I mean, it's a little exaggeration, it's fine, you're good, you understand. Welcome to Lin and Jirsa, Los Angeles wedding photographers. We started our wedding photography studio in and we specialize in capturing emotional, beautiful wedding moments. While we're based in Los Angeles, we also photograph weddings in Orange County and all over the world. Stop by our studio today for a consultation. We would love to be a part of your special day. Who's this written for? It's written for our audience. Right, it just happens to also include our keywords, that's your goal. You write for your audience, you include your keywords. Hey, is this a main keyword page, or is this a niche keyword page? That's a main, right? That goes on the homepage of the site. You guys are, you guys got it. You guys came in here thinking, oh my gosh this is too much, but I'm asking the questions, you guys know what I'm talking about. Next is image names, name using keywords dashes to separate each name should vary. We want the alt plus title, that's inside the link. We'll demonstrate that in just a second. It should be short keyworded descriptions. And alt plus title can be five descriptive keywords, descriptive words following the name. So this what I'm talking about. This is bad file naming, this is lazy. What Google sees, or what an SEO, what a search engine's gonna see when they see this is that every image on this page must be identical. Because they all have a very similar name. So I only need to index a couple of these. Do you understand that we get a lot of our organic SEO results, our leads are not coming from Google web search. What do you think they're coming from? Google image search. You want Google to index your images just as much if not more so than the actual text copy, and it'll index more pictures the more unique the file names and the alt title tags are. Yes, Haldis? Does Google pick up the metadata in the photo? I'm sure it probably picks up a lot of it. The primary ones we're gonna think about is just the alt and the title tags. Okay. Yeah, and I think there are Squarespace and these other sites might have settings when they pull in a photograph that it will actually make your description or your title equal to one piece of your metadata. You can look it up, so that way if you're in Lightroom you could actually type it in into Lightroom and a certain description tag, when it goes up online it'll keep that tag. Does that make sense? Yeah, so my camera has the ability to include a copyright as a part of every picture, so if you go into the settings, you do the copyright thing, so every single picture I take has the metadata of my company's name, so am I getting penalized then if my metadata has my company's name in every single picture? No not for that Okay. cause that's not what it's looking at to determine whether it's a unique image. It is there, it's available, so if someone wants to look up who has the copyright, it's there. Okay. But what Google's gonna look at is the name, and then it's gonna look at that alt and title to see the uniqueness of the, it's gonna find a, it needs to find a description of this image that's not pixel based, right? Pixel based is like, you're gonna see it visually. That's what the image actually is. What Google's looking at is let me get information on what this image is without trying to interpret the pixels of the shot. Makes sense, thanks. So good file names would follow this format. Fairmont San Francisco wedding photography with a dash between there. Bride Fairmont SF wedding. Fairmont bay area wedding photographer. Wedding ceremony at Fairmont San Francisco. So this is for the same shoot, right? This should be for the same blog entry, for the same everything, you're just alternating. And ideally I'm hoping that you're actually gonna spend a little bit of time and when these images are going up, you'll use keywords that actually describe what's in the photograph because somebody might look up bridal portraits at Fairmont, yes, Julie? So do you, because right now you use Lightroom, and when I export images from a session, they basically all have the same name and then a number. So do you recommend to then, I use WordPress, so when I upload them in WordPress, change the name there or should I change it before? Good question, this is a work flow issue, right? Cause what's gonna happen is, if you change them in Lightroom it gives you all sorts of wonky names. And when a client wants something and it's difficult to trace back. So what I would say is when you export from Lightroom, keep everything uniform, so it's a number system that goes bottom to top, right, in order. But you're gonna select out certain images and prep those for the blog. That's a different process so when you do that, you save those images and you put them in another folder whatever's gonna go to the blog in another folder, because you also have to resize them. You have to resample them to make them ready for web. You have to do all that kinda stuff. Those and only those are you gonna rename and change. Make sense? Great question. So this is a sample title and alt text. Okay, so the title, this is a URL. We'll discuss the kind of components of what makes up a URL in a minute. It's very simple, I think most of you are very familiar with it. But the title goes into the URL slug, and it's gonna be, or sorry, into the URL brackets, it's gonna be title equals bride at the Fairmont San Francisco. The alternate text is gonna be bride at the Fairmont San Francisco. It's okay that they are similar. Haldis, and anybody that wants to source out, you can post your job online, if you wanna source out writing and source out all these kinda things if that's what we wanna do. Here are agencies, you can obviously post it online, everybody knows how to post stuff online, contact your local copyrighter, hire a part-time intern but here are specific sites that do copyrighting. And I have that line in there, the in my opinion, you're still better off doing it yourself. Make it your forte, make that one of your competitive advantages. Because if your competitor is not posting full blog entries and experiences and all these kind of things, that's something that you can be doing and it's very visually differentiating for those clients. They feel like they're getting a different service. Okay, any questions on crafting of content? Yes? Google look at how old the content is? Yes. Does it rate you higher if you have newer content with a keyword versus old? Yes, so Google actually does look and any engine is gonna look at the newness of your content, so basically if you're frequently updating a page, which is why blogs are so great, because your blog gets constantly updated with new posts, right? And if you go back and you create a venue post, a venue post like a niche based keyword post, that's gonna have a long life, so you're better off in three months or six months going and popping in something new in that page, refreshing it. But newness is definitely a factor. Do you just, do you change the name of the photos for the blogs and, or also in galleries that you are delivering to clients? Just the blog-- Okay. Don't make it confusing for yourself. That's what Julie was asking. Don't make it confusing, keep the galleries your images on your computer that have the full res, all that stuff should be the same, you should save out those files that you want, down sample them and put them in another folder. The ones that are gonna go onto the blog. Save that folder too, that's part of your project file for that client, right? Save that folder, renamed there. Otherwise you're gonna run into nightmares trying to sync up and line up images. Sharon, you had one? How often should you upload new content, and is there such a thing as putting too much content on your blog? Is it good content? Of course. If it's good content I would say there's never such thing as too much. But on your road map, I have you posting something new each week. This is why I have you also doing test shoots each week. Now, those posts, they don't have to be full blog entries. Why do you think I've also had you make sure that during your test shoots you're doing befores and afters. You're doing behind the scene shots. You're doing all these different things because your blog posts, I love this question Sharon. Your blog posts, they don't have to be just a series of images. It can be five things I learned while shooting. Here's three simple tips on this. And you show a behind the scenes image with a before and after. Or you simply say, it could just be a personal realization for you. It could be a personalized blog, it doesn't have to be educational. It could be just you, and something that you experienced you learned. That's why we're going out on these test shoots and we're not only shooting the couple. But we're creating media, we're creating content to be used however we see fit, make sense? But I have you blogging once a month. I'm sorry, once a week, and if you can go more, as soon as you get the time or you can get more content you should be going more. Okay, so we're gonna complete our weekly content goals, which you guys will see inside of the workbook. Week by week we need to make sure that we have a tier two page going up. We also want to make sure we have a new piece of blog content going in.