003: William Bay – SEO Strategies and Web Site Design to Help You Rank Higher in Google

003: William Bay – SEO Strategies and Web Site Design to Help You Rank Higher in Google

Andrew Hellmich:
I'm really excited to have with me today a special guest, and that's William Bay, all the way from San Diego in California. Now, William's a photographer, but his primary business these days is as a Web Designer and SEO Specialist. He owns and runs flauntyoursite.com, which is where I first came across his work and his awesome blog. That's what I first found when I was doing some Google searches for SEO for photography websites, and I picked up some great hints and tips from there. Now, if you have a look there yourself, you can see that he's had some amazingly successful photographers as clients from all over the world. He's obviously very good at what he does. Now, in today's episode, William is going to reveal some of the secrets on how to have a great photography website yourself, what you need to be doing to get noticed by potential clients, and also, just as importantly, get noticed by Google. And we're going to cover things to help you rank hopefully and get yourself to the first page of Google, and whether you need to use things like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google Plus, or even whether you need to have a blog to help you rank well. Now the funny thing is, when I was doing up for our chat today, I found out that William had been, just, sorry, had just returned from WPPI in Vegas, and to my total shock, one of his emails he says that he's waiting for some film to come back from processing from all the shots he took at WPPI. Now I find that totally awesome. I haven't shot film for a long time, and I'm keen to hear about that as much as the SEO stuff that he's going to be talking about today. William, welcome to the podcast mate.

William Bay:
Hey, thank you Andrew, it's my pleasure to be on I really appreciate the opportunity to be here tonight.

Andrew Hellmich:
Mate, it's a pleasure. How was WPPI?

William Bay:
Oh, it was such a blast, such a blast. It was out there with, with a really great group of friends, and, you know, got to see, you know, people I'd never met before. Got to see people, you know, I know, from last year. And just a great time, just a really good time.

Andrew Hellmich:
So if anyone that hasn't been to WPPI, it's, it is in Las Vegas, and is it just, is it just a trade show?

William Bay:
No, it's a, it's, they have two or three days of trade show associated with it, but they like, it's almost a full week of learning. So you have just, you know, industry giants, you know, photo giants, like Cliff Mautner, and actually, from down, you know, your way, you got, like, Sue Bryce was there. Jerry Ghionis, I think that's some pronouncing his right name, right?

Andrew Hellmich:
Yeah.. yeah.

William Bay:
Let's see here, actually, Jonas wasn't speaking this year. Jonas Peterson wasn't speaking this year, but he was up there. We hung out with him for a bit. I mean, just, you know, I mean, you got tons of people. I got to see, you know, people that I would wanted to see for a while. You know Dennis Reggie, the godfather of wedding photojournalism and so, yeah..

Andrew Hellmich:
Really.

William Bay:
It's really inspiring. You get to learn so much. I mean, I've been photographing since I was eight years old. But really, you know, it's like seeing these guys, it's a humbling experience, because you could see photography in a whole new light. I got, I brought, got so much inspiration out of it. I started looking at the way I shoot when I was there. We actually, like you said, I shot quite a bit. You know, during that time, in the afternoons, we'd go off into the desert or, you know, find a place to photograph and, yeah, so you get to look at stylistically, you know, how I shoot, and see where I can really bring some depth to it.

Andrew Hellmich:
So when you go off and do these shoots, are they part of a workshop, or were you just sort of going out with a bunch of other photographer mates and taking some photos?

William Bay:
Going off with the mates, going off with my friends, and I sorry, I tend to think, you know, Americans shouldn't use the word mate and the Aussies and the, I don't know, maybe the Aussies can get away with dude, but I know the Brits. You know I hear, I hear a Brit say 'dude', and I'm like, "Okay, no, you can't. No, sorry, can't. Can't say the word dude", and sounds like, cool. Same with an American saying 'mate', you just can't do it.

Andrew Hellmich:
So a mate for you is a bit different, isn't it to a mate for us?

William Bay:
I just, I think it rolling off the tongue an American saying 'mate' is just, it's probably just, you probably cringe when you hear that.

Andrew Hellmich:
Right. Not at all, not at all. Tell me too about the film. So what's the go with film? So are you shooting digital and film, or you just shooting film for fun?

William Bay:
No, I haven't shot digital in a while. Let's see, probably a good, except my iPhone. Probably, you know, a year. I haven't been doing much client work either. So really, the film stuff has been a bit of like, you know, for fun and then just getting used to it again, you know, like, like I mentioned, I shot since I was about eight years old. As you know, 14 years old, I was in the dark room shooting with a Pentax K1000, developing my own film. And then, you know, as I grew up, I, you know, started shooting large format, you know, field, you know, four by five sheet film. And I had my own dark room in my studio downtown, and so really, it's very much a part of, you know, part of my life, a part of me. It is one of those things. It's, there's some tangibility to the film. I feel like there's, it's a bit ritualistic. As you load the film in, you're actually touching the substrate in which you're going to be shooting on. So it's a little philosophical.. Yeah, I just, you know, just, there's a, a like soul to it, if you will.

Andrew Hellmich:
Definitely. Look, I can't even remember the days, you know, we actually waiting for the film to come back after shoot. I mean that much. That's awesome.

William Bay:
I know I'm sitting here like, twiddling my thumbs, almost like, "Huh? Okay, so when's that coming?"

Andrew Hellmich:
That's exciting. It's cool.

William Bay:
Yeah, yeah, I , I know, I love the immediacy. I do love the immediacy of digital. I love the ability to post those shots, like right away, up on Facebook and share that, you know, with everyone, all your friends. And I was just at a concert the other night, too, and I see all these other shots coming up of, you know, the band, and I'm like, "Oh man, I cannot wait to put mine up."

Andrew Hellmich:
Yeah, yeah. I bet you're excited about getting them back, which is cool.

William Bay:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Andrew Hellmich:
Just before we jump into the website stuff, what's, have you got a general feeling of what the wedding sort of, photography sort of situation is like in San Diego? Is it, how does it compare, Americans I guess you don't know what it's like in Australia, but I guess the feeling here is that it's getting tougher and tougher. There's more and more new guys getting into the, into the field. There's a lot of women are getting into it as well, I guess, more so than ever, as a backup income or a second income, is the same sort of thing in San Diego?

William Bay:
Yeah, and I do have a little bit of a pulse on, on you know, like Sydney and, you know, some of the like, you know, Hunter Valley, Newcastle areas, Melbourne... I got a, you know, a few clients Down Under. So I got a little bit of a pulse down there, but it's, it's San Diego is very much like, I would say, probably, like, maybe Sunshine Coast, you know, very, you know, like a lot of people live there, you know, the, the, you know, you have kind of upper clientele, uhm you know, let's see, you know, really, really competitive. Ah, you know, San Diego, Orange County here, also, LA, so you got, you know, going from south to north, you have San Diego, then the Orange County areas, and then LA. So all those are very, compared to Southern California, is just a very competitive market in general. And, yeah, and, you know, you kind of hit the nail on the head. It is very much like, you know, women getting into it, moms with cameras getting, you know, turned on because, you know, okay, great, they got married. And what's a very creative outlet from, you know, that they discovered during their marriage process, you know. You know, getting prepared for the wedding. And, you know, like, you know, "Do we do florals, I want to do something, right", you know? And you know, some of them are getting into photography. It's a very creative thing. You know, the States are getting kind of bombarded with it. WPPI actually had a record turnout, over 15,000 people, I think was the attendance.

Andrew Hellmich:
Wow.

William Bay:
And, yeah, so was, you know, I think it was Dennis Reggie that was kind of commenting on the, you know, I mean this, you know, were primarily American numbers when he was talking about it. But, yeah, I mean, you had kind of a, the digital era brought this flip flop where it was a very 80% or so dominated market of men compared to women, to this whole shift from maybe 2004 I think is when the first real accessible digital camera, SLRs came out. You know, like the Canon, you know, EOS Rebels, and you know, those that kind of like that pro like, Prosumer model started hitting the shelves, and in that thousand to $2,000 for the bodies range, it really flipped the market. Now you got a very, I think it was probably somewhere between 70 and 80%, 60 to 70 to 80% women, you know, really making up the market of wedding photographers now. And I could see, like, see why, you know, the photographers, the women photographers, really connect with the brides. They've got a lot of talk about. Some of them are former, I mean, you know, went through all that preparation, the shoes, the dresses. Like, you know all the details and all that. There's just a connection that women have with each other when they can start talking about that.

Andrew Hellmich:
Yeah, Totally agree. I do.

William Bay:
Yeah, nothing, nothing. I mean, like, you know, it's a great, I think it's a great thing for the market. And it's, you know, the women definitely have that advantage. And I think there's, I had mentioned something to a friend, you know, it's, you know, you're going to be at a competitive disadvantage in the market unless you're a woman or you're a couple. And you see, you know, this kind of ties-in with the website and SEO stuff that, you know, we'll start talking about later. But couples, couples as a photography like partnership, they have such a an advantage because, you know, with the two of them, one can really focus on the marketing side, the website, any technical side of things and then combined, they can do the photography. Some of them can, you know, one can do all the post processing work that needs to get done, and, but I think couples really have that, that competitive advantage over. You know, everyone else you see, like, you know, like Matt and Katie from, from down there, right? You got, oh, let's see here the Burge, you got, I mean.

Andrew Hellmich:
There are heaps, there's heaps, yeah.

William Bay:
Oh, there's, I think was it maybe two or three on the American photos top 10 this year were actually couples.

Andrew Hellmich:
Right.

William Bay:
As and, I don't think we had any couples last year. I might be mistaken on that, but yeah, I think there was like two or three this year, so..

Andrew Hellmich:
Yeah, and I think it's the same thing here, my little group of friends that are photographers on the central coast here, there's quite a few of those that are husband and wife teams, and definitely going well.

William Bay:
Uh huh, right. Yeah, it's, it's a definite advantage for people, because, I mean, like, I said, you got people that can, you know, yeah, all right, you don't like doing the marketing. You don't like doing, you know, like commenting on other people's sites and, you know, generating the community and that sort of thing around you. Great, let the hubby do it. Or great, let you know, let wifey do it.

Andrew Hellmich:
Sure thing.

William Bay:
Yeah.

Andrew Hellmich:
So let's that, let's talk a little bit about the stuff that you're doing every day, and that is building the website. So, like, can you tell me, in your opinion, what makes a good photographer's website?

William Bay:
Well, I think anything that makes up a great website in general, like clarity, good usability, having a purpose. Like, what is the purpose for a website? A lot of people just put it up because they think they have to put it up. And they just grab whatever is available to them, that whatever you know price they have, you know that they can afford at the time. And as you get a little bit deeper into your career, and you know, like you develop a deeper brand or a sense of your own business, it's something that people you know wish they could have actually put more money into. And, you know, so they go back and explore it then, you know. So a lot of times you'll see, you know, people just starting out, coming up with, like, template sites that aren't very user friendly. So, you know, one of the real keys and points is, you know, functionality before design fo me, and in some cases, design actually falls into that functionality. It's like, "Okay, where do you place the, you know, that your navigation?" That is a design consideration, but it's also functionality thing. Like, how do you navigate the site? How is, how are your clients supposed to find out any information on your site? What, what information is there to display? A lot of times you go into it, "Oh, I thought it was just a place to put pretty pictures that and then people would hire me." But you know, what is you got to look and see, what is that actual, the intention for this website?

William Bay:
So do you think when someone's going in to build a new website, that intention has to be, you know, "I want the phone to ring, I want to, I want to capture an email address. I want, I want to get a booking." Is that the sort of intentions you talking about?

William Bay:
Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Because, I mean, you know, if you have just a website with a place to show up pretty pictures, it's pretty much like, you know, you are really just hoping that someone will say, "Oh, these are nice pictures, how do I contact them." And really, you have to look at the web. I, you know, this is my philosophy, and I say "You have to, but really take it with the grain of salt." This is just my philosophy is that if you are a business, and you know, you need the phone to ring or you won't be a business.

Andrew Hellmich:
Yeah, agree.

William Bay:
You know, you need emails to come in, the inquiries to come in. And unless you're asking that ,you know, that you know, you're really just leaving up the chance. If you ask that on your website, you have very strong call to actions like, you know, "Book a wedding", or, you know, "Book Andrew", you know, like "Book William". You actually have those on your site somewhere.

Andrew Hellmich:
Actually I have those words.

William Bay:
Uh hum

Andrew Hellmich:
Yeah?

William Bay:
Yeah. I was actually just talking with, we're right in the middle of a soft launch with, with Josh, Joshua Goal up here. So it's joshuagoal.com, and it's right now it's in the soft launch by the time the podcast will go up, it'll be a full, you know, full launch. And so right now we're just kind of working out the live bugs. We get the site up, and we got, you know, usually, like, a week of soft launch where we look at, you know, any issues that arise out of moving it to the new server. And there's a couple of functionality things that we still have to kind of get worked out. But, you know, we got that up, and it's a live site, so it's, it's just, you know, he hasn't announced it and done a big, you know, to do about the thing. And so he's got, you know, normal potential clients that would come in. And so he actually got a booking, like, right away. And it's one of the reasons is because we put in the in the just below the slideshow, the main slideshow on the main page in the footer is just a thing that says, "Book Joshua."

Andrew Hellmich:
Right.

William Bay:
And so that was like, right away. And turns out it's, you know, one of the, you know, like, you know, probably, like, highest bookings that Josh was ever got out of, you know, like, you know, price wise.

Andrew Hellmich:
Sure.

William Bay:
So packed.

Andrew Hellmich:
Sure. So someone listening to this, William, they might say, "Well, hang on, how does, how does he know? How does Josh know that booking came from the website?" So, is there a way to measure that?

William Bay:
Oh, absolutely, yeah, yeah. This is one of the things I love. And yeah, one of the things I love about, about this is, statistics, trackability, the contact forms is that, and this is a great question. The contact forms that I use, so we use contact forms rather than just an email address that goes to you, right? And part of that is we can ascertain certain information that we want to obtain from them, and we can also, you know, assert, we can also tell that the inquiry came directly from the website, rather than a, you know, like a, you know, word of mouth, you know, by email or something like that. So we track everything and so stuff like, I use Gravity Forms, which is, you know, one of my favorite WordPress plugins ever. And just because of the forms that we can create, and I do unique applications for it. And my, if you go on Flaunt Your Site, if you go to the Q and A section and submit a question, that's all a Gravity Form, and it turns it into a post that I can later on publish. So there's many applications for, some are very geeky. That one just being a very geeky, technical one..

Andrew Hellmich:
Sure.

William Bay:
But yeah, the core is to be able to submit a Contact Form, submit some type of a form, and so I use Gravity Forms for that, and I'm able to track the inquiries and the entries on the backend of WordPress, as well as getting that email inquiry.

Andrew Hellmich:
Sure. So you mentioned WordPress a couple of times there. So WordPress is the, is the style of website that you're building for most people?

William Bay:
Yeah, WordPress is, it's kind of like the engine that runs everything. It's the, like the backend, where, if you wanted to, you know, add an About Page or edit your About Page, you would just go into the backend of WordPress and then click on the About Page and then edit your About Page and then hit save, republish. And so WordPress is really like the engine that runs your website. A lot of people think that it's just a blogging system or blogging platform, but, you know, I've been using WordPress since maybe 05-06, and, you know, using that as a website system, rather than anything out there. You know, there's, you know, some people using a, like, a flash based website system, like Blue Domain, or PhotoBizX. There's a couple others that are out there, and then they'll have a separate blog, which could be a WordPress blog or a Blogger blog, like Blogspot. And what I started doing in, you know, 06 or so, I was, just moved back from Thailand, and was, you know, kind of in the process of creating my wedding business in Austin, Texas. And, you know, lived there for a few years, and so I was in the process of it, and started using WordPress to manage the entire site. And that's when people started taking notice and seeing what I was doing. And, you know, they started seeing that I was creating these sites that were very consistent throughout. So the brand experience was you didn't have this site, like a PhotoBizX, or, you know, some flash site that was full screen and no logo, and then a separate blog, right? That was like two very distinct user experiences and it always felt so removed for me when I started looking at how these other photographers were working. You know, like, how would you feel as a potential customer if you went to, you found maybe, you know, a blog post that you're writing about, and then you wanted to find out, like, "How much this photographer was, and you had to go to this completely different site that looked nothing like what you were just on."

Andrew Hellmich:
You don't, you double check it was the same photographer.

William Bay:
Exactly. Not only that, but it launched into a whole new window. And you're like, "Okay, what's going on?" You get, like, this whole messy, messy user interface experience. User experience is really what that, when that came down to.

Andrew Hellmich:
So..

William Bay:
And so I, you know, WordPress was just really coming on the scene as a, what they call like a Content Management System, which is just a big, fancy word for a way to manage your content. Your, the words, right? The pages that you have, the photos that you have. And so that was just kind of coming on the scene. And so I started really, you know, diving deep into that, beyond what it could do ,for as just a blogging system and, and, yeah, it's, it's been a love affair ever since. So I attend what they call WordCamps, which are these user put on, so like community, user communities will put on these events in in different cities for WordCamp, WordPress developers.

Andrew Hellmich:
Yeah.

William Bay:
So there's actually one coming up this weekend where I'll be doing a little five minute lightning lecture. And, you know, I've spoken at, you know, one or two in the past, and try to hit up as many as possible in the Southern California area.

Andrew Hellmich:
Cool.

William Bay:
And yeah, so it's, WordPress is definitely the way to go.

Andrew Hellmich:
Yeah. Look, I remember, like, you're talking there about that, like the template style flash websites, and they were big sort of 10 years ago. Do you think then that the WordPress and the blog side of things came to, it came to be big part of the photographer's websites because you need the words to get ranked in Google? You can't just have a photo website.

William Bay:
Yeah, yeah, that's definitely there, yeah. The, the blogging, I'm not really sure who, who started that in the industry. I mean, you know, like, Becker talked about it a lot, and there's a few guys that really, you know, like, really purported the.. is that, is that the word I'm looking for? But really, like, champion using blogs as you know, as a photographer.

Andrew Hellmich:
Sure. So do you need to have a blog to rank in Google? Or can you do it just with a website?

William Bay:
It really depends, because I think, see what I like to use the blog for is, what I would call long tail, or long tail terms. So, you know, you got, like, venues and locations and things of that nature that aren't necessarily those big keywords that you're looking for. Like, you know, like in Australia, you might have, like, you know, 'Brisbane wedding photographer', right?

Andrew Hellmich:
Yeah.

William Bay:
Yeah, good luck trying to knock Jonas off the top spot there, right? But like, you know, you have those big, big, you know, terms that you're trying to rank for. And, then you have the smaller, more, I like to be very diverse with, with search. So you're not just, you know, every post that you have, you're not doing, you know, Brisbane wedding photographer, Brisbane wedding photographer, Brisbane, because the way I like to look at SEO is per page rather than site wide. So on one page, it becomes, let me think, for the site, you can't, you can't have a bunch of content on one site with all the same keywords to rank one page. It doesn't work quite like that.

Andrew Hellmich:
So you're saying so Google's not looking at the website as a whole? Is looking at each individual page and then ranking that page?

William Bay:
Exactly.

Andrew Hellmich:
So I have a local, there's a local wedding photographer to me, and I guess I'm a little bit guilty of it too, but she'll have Central Coast Wedding Photographer-, you know, Darren and Mary's Wedding on every single blog post. Obviously changed the names. So does that? Will that help her rank for Central Coast wedding photographer or not?

William Bay:
Possibly, if it's, if the blog is, you know, she's got like, maybe five or six posts on her main page, like her first, you know, her domain, like, if it's, you know, soandso.com and she has like that, and she continually uses that every single blog post, and she's got like, you know, four, five, six posts that show up on the, on that actual domain, like the main page. I like to think of things a little bit differently, though. Because if you do that, if you change, if you change one of the titles in your blog posts will actually shift. So you'll notice more fluctuations happening, rather than if you have one page that's dedicated to say Central Coast Wedding Photographer.

Andrew Hellmich:
Right, okay.

William Bay:
So if you have one page that's dedicated to that and that, you have all your content on that page. So, say it's Central Coast Wedding Photographer is the, is the title, and then you talk about the, you talk about who you are and the style photography. And then you have a next section that says, you know, "Areas served." And you can talk about, like, you know, where you're at in the Central, you know, Coast and then, and then you might have your rates on that page as well. So you have one page is really dedicated to that information.

Andrew Hellmich:
So that can.

William Bay:
Yeah, that keyword, and then that page becomes the page that will be more inclined to rank because of the words that you have on there.

Andrew Hellmich:
Right, okay.

William Bay:
And, you're not, and this isn't a page to be spammy or keyword stuff, right? It's, it's a very natural narrative that you're writing on that page, because it's the information. It becomes like a services page, if you will. Like this is, like, you can have one for portraits, you can have one for weddings. You can have one for, you know, like all that, right? Maybe you do newborns or, you know, family portraiture. And each one of those pages has all that information on it. Also has, in addition to being able to rank for SEO, it becomes a page that, you know, people can make decisions on, right? So it becomes very useful to the user.

Andrew Hellmich:
So does that help, as far as Google's concerned, or that you're just trying to make sure it's a usable website for the client.

William Bay:
For both actually. Like, that's, that's, that's really why I've moved to this with, with a lot of my clients, is to having these pages that rank well. Because now you're looking at something that might be soandso.com/weddings and you can even, you know, get specific. You know, centralcoastweddings is the URL, maybe, right? And so it can be like, you know, soandso.com/you know, centralcoastweddings.

Andrew Hellmich:
Right.

William Bay:
And then you have all that very targeted, rich keyword text that you have. It's not spammy, it's something that's very like Google wants that. And then, and then, what there is to do is, is to build links to it. SEO simplified, it's keywords and links. You need the keywords to indicate to Google that this is what people are looking for, and when those people are looking for it, this would be the page that they would come to.

Andrew Hellmich:
So a keyword being a search term that someone might have typed in to Google to try and find, say, a photographer in Brisbane, they might type 'Brisbane wedding photographers', and that's, that's a search term that you'll hopefully have in your page.

William Bay:
Right. And then, so then you got the keywords, the search terms, right? You got that, and then the second part of the equation is links, and you.. so the links come in as a strength signal to Google. So there's all these, you know, websites out there that you'll want to, you know, be known for Brisbane wedding photographer, right? So we'll just look at that. So what is going to indicate to Google the quality of site that you or someone else has, it has to be something, right? So you have to look in and see what is the quality. Now, they've gone back and forth with certain social signals, like, you know, like Facebook shares and, you know, re-tweets and all that. But for the foreseeable future, what Google's really using, and Bing and you know, some of the other search engines are, are links, people linking to your site.

William Bay:
Right. So is that what you'll see, say, photographers swap links with dress designers, makeup artists, hairdressers to get links to their website

William Bay:
Yeah, you could, yeah. Links are always great. Well, you know, the great thing about links is, you know, from those other vendors, like, you know, the dress designers and, you know, the cake bakers and all that, it really creates a network, you know. I mean, it really is the World Wide Web. I mean, if you look at it as a spider web, all that is very interconnected. If you're out on the fringes, on the very edge of the web, with just a couple, a couple things, you know, connecting to you. You know, you might just have like, one or two webs that touch your little intersection out there. But if you come in closer to, you know, the center of the web, you have more of a, more avenues to get to your site. So you have, not only do now have a higher strength signal that Google can say, "Oh, well, he's got so many, you know, this website has so many different links pointing to the site it has, there has to be some reason it's a popular site." So you have that going for you. Then you also have the referring traffic that you would get from those cake bakers and design, you know, designer, dress designers and all those other vendors that say, "Oh, well, if these guys, these, you know, dress designers are vouching for this photographer, he's got to be or she's got to be, really great, you know, photographer. So let's go take a look at that." So you end up with some traffic that is, you know, potentially, you know, very highly targeted, you know, potential bride maybe.

Andrew Hellmich:
Yeah, sure. So let's say, if we stay with the Brisbane analogy, and let's say, and you mentioned Jonas there, so he's obviously a high ranking, great photographer in Brisbane?

William Bay:
Uh hum.

Andrew Hellmich:
So let's say, yeah, we've got an up and coming photographer. She wants to tackle Jonas, and she wants to rank as high as him, or gets her first page of Google. So, so if she's building this new website, she has to have lots of texts. Is that what you're saying?

William Bay:
She had a fair amount that can, you know, indicate to Google that this is, all right, she is a Brisbane wedding photographer.

Andrew Hellmich:
Okay. So she's got lots of text, then would it ,would definitely help them to get links coming back to her website somehow?

William Bay:
Yep, uh huh.

Andrew Hellmich:
And then to increase the text and the, I guess that authority that you're talking about will that then help to have a blog as well as just a static website?

William Bay:
Not necessarily. I mean, if you're looking at one, if you're looking at one specific search term. So, I mean, if we're looking just strictly at Search Engine Optimization, we're looking strictly at, like, what, how Google would react.

Andrew Hellmich:
Yeah.

William Bay:
Then, yeah. So you would need, you know, enough links that would surpass Jonas's, and you, you just need enough text that would be, what would be considered optimized, right? You have the certain, there's certain placements on the, on the site. So do you have the H1 tag? Do you have the title tag, or the SEO title that you know, if you look on a, on a browser, you'll see some string of words up in the either the tab, if you're on like Chrome or Safari, or it will be like in the browser bar on Firefox or an Internet Explorer.

Andrew Hellmich:
Yeah, it's right at the very top there. I can see on in Safari there, right at the very top, is that the one you're talking about?

William Bay:
Yeah, yeah, right up at the top of the browser window, or in the tab, yeah, that's the, that's what's called the Title Tag. If you're using something like Yoast SEO plugin, that would be like, he calls it the SEO Title. And so then you would just need you, it's also one of those things where you need a balance of natural, you know, keyword usage or search term usage, right? So you don't want to have like, Brisbane wedding photographer, "I'm a Brisbane wedding photographer, Brisbane wedding photographer, I do Brisbane wedding photography", you know. It's you really like, you know, one of things is, is have to make it a natural looking site and have that mixed in there.

Andrew Hellmich:
I think I've actually been to that website.

William Bay:
Yes, there's a few out there. Yeah.

Andrew Hellmich:
Okay, so we've got some good, natural text. It's, you know, we've got our blog going. We've got, we've got the site optimized, we've got our SEO plugin all set up, right? And then, so how do we, how do we get these links back? What do I have to do to get these links? Are these something that I can kind of go to fiverr.com and buy them?

William Bay:
No, no, you never, never buy links. Yeah, no, that's a bad proposition, no matter how you go about it. You know, you can.. and in hiring an SEO consultant to do link building, it's, you definitely want to do your research with them. Some, you know, like some will, you know, farm it out to people in India. And if you've ever seen, if you have a blog and you've seen some weird comments on your site that kind of the English is okay somewhat, but it doesn't seem like it's entirely related to your post? It's maybe someone from India or the Philippines that are, you know, being paid, you know, maybe five bucks a day to, you know, right? You know, go through and obtain links for a, like a kind of a, I don't know if I would call them shady, but maybe just an SEO consultant that doesn't really care for about the level of quality.

Andrew Hellmich:
Sure. So will Google, Google detect that sort of thing if it's written in bad English?

William Bay:
Well, it's a..

Andrew Hellmich:
Or, it's just not good practice for your own website?

William Bay:
I don't think it's great practice for you know, to build your website on, you know. It's, you know, you got to look and see if the, you know, what's that level of integrity? What's that level of, you know, on the levelness that you want for your company, yourself, your website, your reputation? You know because it is, they are linking back to your site. You know when it's all said and done. So if you, you know the great thing about commenting is the ability to expand your communities. You know, there's, you comment on someone's website, say what great photos they have, and you know, you might get an email back saying, "Thanks, I really appreciate that", you know. And then you can strike up, you know, a friendship, an online friendship, you know, like a back and forth, where you get, you know, someone commenting on your photos as well. If you have people that are, you know, doing this for you and you know the level of quality is just not there. The English is bad, the, you know, the comments are off topic, you know? It's, it's, you kind of kill off the that, that ability, that potential relationship there.

Andrew Hellmich:
Sure. So by going out and commenting on other, other websites and blogs, you're actually getting a link back to your own website, aren't you?

William Bay:
Yeah, yeah. That's, that's one method of getting a link to your site. There's, ah, let's see here, let me actually, I wrote a blog post on this.

Andrew Hellmich:
Yes, actually, no, I was on your website or your blog a little bit earlier then, and I saw that you've got a big list of other photographers that have do follow links.

Andrew Hellmich:
Yes.

Andrew Hellmich:
On their website.

William Bay:
I can explain that Do Follow. So the Do Follow, as opposed to No Follow, is, and I'll scroll down and find my, my list of the, you know, best links to get here as I started to speak about that. But so there's a designation called No Follow. And most blog engines, like WordPress or, you know, Blogger, and, you know, Live type, or, I forget what it's called now, but they, they did that initially because they, they thought that blog, you know, people that wrote their blogs wouldn't necessarily want to, well, it was initiated to start to try to reduce the amount of spam that happened on, on blog posts. And spam, like, you know, Viagra, Cialis, and all those, you know, like those funky things that you would see if you don't have, maybe, like Akismet or some other spam blocker, you know, like, you'll just get a bunch of stuff trying to, you know, 'grow your penis', really is what there. And, you know, I don't know how much it works, but..

Andrew Hellmich:
What's that website?

William Bay:
Yes, www.dot. Yes, send all, send all money to wantyoursite.com. Yeah, so they were trying, really trying to combat spam with this no follow designation and what it is, it just says on any links from your blog comments, it says No Follow means that, "Look Google, you can go past this link, but we're not vouching for anything beyond the link." So, if so and so wrote a comment, they get a link there that, that, you know, takes them to their site. But all you're saying with that no follow is "We don't vouch for, for this other site, so we're not giving it any, we don't want to pass any of our authority on to them." There's a certain amount of authority, or, you know, there's this archaic term called Page Rank, which no one really uses anymore, but there, there would be a little bit of a page rank that would pass on, and, you know, it's like, kind of flows out to the other sites that you link from your..

Andrew Hellmich:
So this is also called SEO juice, isn't it?

William Bay:
Juice, yeah. The others like, yeah, you can call it SEO juice. I think it's a little nebulous, and I like to make sure that people like, it's an actual, have it, you know, in a concrete term, it's an authority that you're passing on. Your, your site has a certain level of authority based off of the links that you have to your site.

Andrew Hellmich:
Sure.

William Bay:
So the, the number and quality of links that you have, there's a way to measure that and to define that authority, right? So, so that authority then, you can pass along. You know it was a big deal back in the day, "Oh, I got a link from a PageRank five", or "A PageRank six", or, "Oh, my God, I got like, a PageRank nine site linking to mine", right? That would, that was a big deal, and it was really behind all that is the authority of those sites that you are looking to obtain. So, the SEO juice is really, yeah, is that slang term. But I really like to bring it back to, like, "Okay, it's not this mythological, like, you know, a hypothetical thing, this magical SEO juice. Where does it come from? It's, it's just the authority that gets passed along from the other sites."

Andrew Hellmich:
Yeah, so..

William Bay:
So..

Andrew Hellmich:
Let me get this right with..

William Bay:
Sure.

Andrew Hellmich:
If I went to your site, so flauntyoursite.com.

William Bay:
Yep.

Andrew Hellmich:
And you have do follow links. So, if I go and leave a comment on one of your blog posts as Impact Images, then and I have a link to my website, and because you have a Do Follow, I guess, plug in, you're saying that you're actually vouching for my photography skills. You're vouching as far as Google is concerned, that Impact Images is a, is a great photographer.

William Bay:
I wouldn't say a great photographer, but..

Andrew Hellmich:
Is that too subtle?

William Bay:
I haven't seen your work..

Andrew Hellmich:
Fair.

William Bay:
Yeah, yeah, right. So it would, instead of, like vouching for something subjective, it just saying, "Look, I will pass on my authority to this site".

Andrew Hellmich:
Okay.

William Bay:
And, and really, you have to be a little bit more at the, curate your links a little bit more. You have to pay it, pay attention, right? So you know, if you get a spam, you know, or not, like a spam, you know? Because usually, you know, I mean, if you have a spam blocker, it usually takes care of all that. But if you have a weird comment, you're like, "Okay, this guy's out of here, right?" So you need to be a little bit more cautious with that, whereas before, if you had No Follow, you just let, you know, your comments grow and, you know, not even care. But you know, I mean, you know, it becomes a little bit more personal. It's like, "Okay, yeah, you know what? I will vouch for Andrew. He's, he's on the level guy. I'll give him some of my authority", right? And then, then that's really what you're doing with like that Do Follow or No Follow, remove plugin, something like that.

Andrew Hellmich:
So can I tell if I'm going to someone else's website, whether, whether it's a photographer or a cake decorator or whoever it may be, can I tell whether it's a no follow or do follow link.

William Bay:
Yeah, there's, there's a couple tools out there, some plugins for like Chrome browsers and Firefox browsers. There's, you know, if you do, like, look for an extension. I use one that's part of the SEOMoz toolbar, which has some great stuff that, you know, well, actually, we should probably talk about that for your listeners as well. Because, you know, you can, then we can, you know, look at authority and things like that. But, yeah, so the SEOMoz toolbar has that, and you can turn on a little highlighter that will say, what is no follow or do follow.

Andrew Hellmich:
Okay.

William Bay:
And so when you're commenting, you're going through looking at other people's sites, you might say, "Oh, look, you know, this guy has do follow." You know, he has No Follow turned on, turned off, sorry. And, "Oh, you know, I could probably just, you know, get a really good link here from this site."

Andrew Hellmich:
Cool. So as long as you leave a valid and useful comment, that's the main thing, it's not too spammy, then it's going to work out well.

William Bay:
Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, if you're, if you're going to, you know, get links through commenting. I think you just need to be, you know, like respectful, and especially with photographers, right? No one's looking for unwarranted, you know, commenting or critiques. You know, you don't want to, just like, roll in never been you know, some photographers site before and say, "Oh, you know, I would have let that from the left", you know, or you know, "You need to get a, you know, you need new glass. You need to get rid of that kit lens that you're shooting with there, buddy." But, yeah, I think you just got to be respectful. And, you know, make great comments and, and if you see someone that you want to help out, you know, like contact them or ask them if that you can contact them and say, "Hey, I really like your style. Maybe I can help you with something", you know. And, yeah, I mean, I mean, look, we're, I mean, societies only get better if we do it ourselves, right? If we take it into our own hands. And, you know, offer, you know, to like prop people up rather than take them down because you think their photography sucks or something?

Andrew Hellmich:
Yeah, definitely. I agree.

William Bay:
Yeah. I mean, it's, it's this, all this world only gets better when you know, when we all do.

Andrew Hellmich:
Yeah, for sure. Let me just ask you. Just change track a little bit, William. I did mention in the beginning there about Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest, and.. I know, I know a lot of photographers are using Facebook, and so they coming home from a wedding, they're dumping 50, 60, 100 photos on there, and sort of ignoring their website, of their blog a little bit, and having, you know, relying on Facebook. So Facebook replace, you know, the use of a blogger website, will that help you rank any better? Or is that, is that, what are your thoughts on that?

William Bay:
I like to use, you know, Facebook as a nice little tool. You know, I like to tell people to use that as a nice little teaser to get people back to your website. So Facebook will always be Facebook. It's, you know, Facebook is its own thing. Someday, Facebook may not be here. It might be, you know, something else. You know, Google+ is coming along. You know, that might be, you know, the hot thing that everyone moves to. I don't know. I mean, look what happened with MySpace.

Andrew Hellmich:
So if you build your website, that's always going to be there, because it's yours.

William Bay:
It's, it is your, it is your little corner of the internet, you know. It is your brick and mortar on the, you know, the virtual, you know, I mean the virtual world. It's, it's, you're right, it always will be there, and it's got to be your home base. So no matter what you're doing, everything, it should be Rome, and all roads lead to it, you know. So..

Andrew Hellmich:
So you use those social media sites to bring people back to website.

William Bay:
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you definitely want people to, you know, follow you on Facebook, and you should have those links to, you know, like, where you are on the internet with like, you know, Twitter and Facebook and Pinterest and all that. But like, you really got to direct all that, all that traffic, all those people, back to your site. Because that is like, you know, on Facebook, you can't say book me.

Andrew Hellmich:
Yeah.

William Bay:
You know, on, on Twitter, you can't say 'book me'. You know, it's like your website is going to be your sales tool, your marketing tool. It's really become so much now and in the world of, you know, like, how important it is to people's businesses. That is where you're going to convert people to becoming clients, you know, unless you're just doing a lot, I mean, you should be doing a lot of word of mouth as well. But that, I mean, that is really your home base.

Andrew Hellmich:
Yeah, yes. Okay, so instead of coming home from a wedding and putting 50 or 100 photos on Facebook, put them on your blog, put a few teasers on Facebook, and bring them back to your blog to look at the rest.

William Bay:
Sure, yeah, that's a great, great way drive traffic. I mean, you know, you put, you know, one or two. I mean, I, I know people love to post 50, or, you know, 100 images on their blog posts. And I tend, I mean, coming from my background, I shot large format and, and I really can't see more than 20 to 30 pictures on a blog post before I go nuts.

Andrew Hellmich:
Me too. And I, I feel the same. I just scroll, I'm just feel like I'm working my finger over scrolling.

William Bay:
Yeah, I think you know the, also the world of photography has gotten so expansive that every photo seems like it needs to be put up. And one of the, I think that we need to practice a little discretion with, with our photography. I mean, I came from a true portfolio building background. And also, you know, some of my, you know, some of my heroes and all that were, like Ansel Adams said, you know, "12 photos a year was, you know, about the best of reasonably, like, you know, amazing photographer could do."

Andrew Hellmich:
He'd be turning his grave now, wouldn't he?

William Bay:
Yeah, I don't know. I think he'd love it. I think he would really love this whole digital era. But I think is that, that mentality would still be there. You know, I mean, he lived in the, in the world of you know, 35 millimeter. I mean, he was obviously, you know, like friends with, or contemporaries with, you know, Cartier Bresson and, you know, like Walker Evans. Those guys, you know, those photojournalists that shot a lot, you know. I mean, those guys did, and, you know, he still never really abandons that, that philosophy, that mentality that he had, you know.

Andrew Hellmich:
Yeah.

William Bay:
He loved the smaller cameras, but he never really did get to that level of volume where he was, you know, producing. Maybe it was some of his commercial work, he was producing a little bit more, but..

Andrew Hellmich:
Not 3,000 shots at a wedding.

William Bay:
No, definitely not. Yeah, yeah, I did that once. I'm like, "Oh my god, whoa." I was actually, yeah, shooting digital with this wedding. Like, "Wow", and I think 2,000 of those were from my second project.

Andrew Hellmich:
Someone's going to edit these.

William Bay:
Yes, yeah, that took a while.

Andrew Hellmich:
Yeah.. Look, I do want to be conscious of your time, but I've got a couple of questions I really want to ask you.

William Bay:
Yeah, sure.

Andrew Hellmich:
Let me take it back to the Brisbane analogy again. Let's say, and Jonas again. We want to, we want to knock Jonas off his top. Can I, is there some way for me to see what another photographer is doing as far as SEO is concerned and links, or is it all sort of under the hood, that it's hidden?

William Bay:
No, no, there's, there's a few ways and, well, there's actually fewer now, but there's one that I really love using is a site called Open Site Explorer.

Andrew Hellmich:
Right.

William Bay:
And that's just the way it sounds, opensiteexplorer.org, or.com. I think both will take you there. And that's, that's put on by a company called SEO Moz.

William Bay:
Right. Is that a tool, is it?

William Bay:
Yeah, Open Site Explorer. So what it is, is you can enter your in here, enter any website you're looking at, and it will give you a number of different, different numbers. So we go to like, this authority that I was talking about. We can break down the number of links that are coming to them, to the site, and then, so then those links, those websites that are linking to that specific site, are analyzed. And this is all indexed by, you know, big computers and, you know, all these numbers are crunching and they're looking at the links that are, those are sites, you know, being linked to, and those sites and those sites. And so it becomes like this, just huge index of data. And so the, the what you get presented with is like the number of different links, where they're coming from, internal links versus external links, meaning the links within your own site as versus the links that are coming from other websites to your site, and a number of different other criteria. Then they establish, like, they look at the quality of those sites that are coming and those links that are coming into yours and the quantity, and they come up with a number different number, different factors, number are different you know, algorithm numbers and these are, these tend to be like a one through 10, but it's a logarithmic, so like a one point, let's say a, like a three point something, something will be 10 times as lower than, like a 4.3 so it's not like..

Andrew Hellmich:
It says exponential.

William Bay:
Exponential logarithmic, right?

Andrew Hellmich:
Right.

William Bay:
You know, it goes on this very steep curve.

Andrew Hellmich:
Right.

William Bay:
I failed Algebra so multiple times in high school. So I don't even know what logarithmic means.

Andrew Hellmich:
It sounds like you know it open around.

William Bay:
Believe me, I, the whole like, you know all this backend algorithmic stuff I have no clue about. I leave that, to make the quants in the SEO world, the guys that like love studying this stuff. I just, you know, I do this on an application level, but..

Andrew Hellmich:
So once you got these numbers, can we can use those numbers..

William Bay:
Yeah.

Andrew Hellmich:
To help our site? Or is it just something we can say, "Geez, he's bloody good, isn't he? We're never gonna beat that." Or can we use it?

William Bay:
Yeah, those, those numbers. They're just, they're just numbers, right? They're just, you look at them until, until you have something to compare them to. So obviously, the higher the better. So if you look at Jonas's number, and you look at your number side to side, you can see, "Oh, okay, well, this is, this is, you know, okay, this makes sense. This is just like, he's got this many and I've got this many. He's got this many here, and I've got this many." So, and really, like, you know all other, all it comes down to is, the higher the number, the better.

Andrew Hellmich:
Right, okay.

William Bay:
Yeah. I mean, that's really just SEO simplified, is the, you need to have the terms on a specific page to have that page rank, and then you need to have the, enough links, enough quantity and quality of links to be able to, you know, compete with someone else, with those, with those links. So if you look at Open Site Explorer has the ability to compare different sites.

Andrew Hellmich:
Okay.

William Bay:
And so you have, like, one column would be, maybe you look at, you know, Jonas's, because you want to beat him and, and I'm rolling over my grave now, because Jonas is going to come hot. Good thing, good thing, he's, I think he's left the country. I don't think, he's.. good thing we have this interview after the WPPI, because I’ve seen him there, he would have.. can be hunting down for sure.

Andrew Hellmich:
I'm going to chase him out for an interview, and you'll be in trouble.

William Bay:
Yeah. No kidding, yeah. So I think he's fairly okay right now in Brisbane. And, you know, I mean, with, with him, you know, he's got such a following, he's a..

Andrew Hellmich:
Yeah.

William Bay:
You'll have, no matter what.

Andrew Hellmich:
For sure. So once we've compared our numbers to his, then should I be using those like, should I be then saying, "Okay, he's got, he's got a score of 10 here, and I've got a score of five. I should target that area?"

William Bay:
Yeah, well, I mean, you can look and say, "Okay, so how many links does he have", okay? And then that's really the actionable things. Like, "Okay, I need to put", then you put together a plan like, "Okay, how many links do I start building?" And, and I got my little post here so I can talk about other forms of links, other than comments. Because, you know..

Andrew Hellmich:
Sure.

William Bay:
If you're, if you only have comment links, it becomes very one dimensional. Comment links aren't the best links in the world. You know, if you look in the industry, it, they're probably predominantly made up of comment links. So if you're going to have any level of quality you want, you want to, you know, kind of extend what you have just beyond the comments.

Andrew Hellmich:
Okay, so what else is there?

William Bay:
Well, you got, one of the best ones that you can do are Featured Posts from, you know, like the, you know, there's, if we're looking at weddings, you have like, you know, Wedding Checks and Style Me Pretty, and I'm not sure what this like, if there's one specific down there in Australia, but..

Andrew Hellmich:
Polka Dot Bride and that things.

William Bay:
Yeah, Polka Dot Bride.

Andrew Hellmich:
Okay, so you want to get onto their sites write a..

William Bay:
Yeah.

Andrew Hellmich:
Write an article, and have a link back to your website as the, as a guest blog poster.

William Bay:
Yeah, well, they're more for like, you know, guest posting is great. But for sites like that, that you're mostly looking at features.

Andrew Hellmich:
Okay.

William Bay:
So, you know, you feature a website where you did, you know, or, sorry, feature a wedding and it, you know, like, "Oh, here's all the details to drool over." A lot of these sites are very detail-oriented. You have, you know, something like, like, Moment Junkie, which is really great though. You have, which is, you know, run by Chris Lin and Ryan Brenizer and Kyle Happ you know, they're, they're running Moment Junkie, which is very much all about, like, one image capturing a moment, it's not detail oriented. They're not trying to sell anything off their site. It's, it's like, you know, kind of reviving that, like, what's pure in the, in the wedding industry and wedding photography, but, yeah, like, a lot of them are very detail oriented. So, you know, like, they're trying to sell products, maybe on their, on their site, you know, they're..

Andrew Hellmich:
Well, that's bad, or that's not bad?

Andrew Hellmich:
I mean, it's, it is what it is for them. I don't, you know, I'm like to say what's bad? I, I'm a little bit more pure when it comes to my photography.

Andrew Hellmich:
I can bet as far as links go, that doesn't, it doesn't really matter.

William Bay:
As far as links go, no, it doesn't matter.

Andrew Hellmich:
Okay.

William Bay:
You know but like, as stylistically, you want to find a site that works with your style.

Andrew Hellmich:
So.

William Bay:
Is, I'm sorry, maybe that's, you know, where I was going with that point.

Andrew Hellmich:
Okay.

William Bay:
Or lack of until you rein me back in. But so, yeah, I mean, you got, you know, things like that. You got to look for a site if you're trying to get featured that is stylistically in line with yours.

Andrew Hellmich:
Sure

William Bay:
And then, so that's your Featured Post, you got, you do have guest posts so you have, you have, you know, some area of expertise that you can share with, with, you know, like, maybe, like digital photography review is maybe or not review, but digital photography school, you know, you know, you know, Jimmy from the Modern Tag, like a site like that, where they're teaching other photographers and you have a specific skill that you think you can lend a hand to and bring your knowledge out onto the internet. That would be a guest post so you might write about, you know, like a flash setup that you think people should know about.

Andrew Hellmich:
Sure, okay.

William Bay:
And yeah, and then you have, like, directories. Directories is another, you know, place like Wedding Wire, like industry specific directories. Wedding Wire, Martha Stewart Bride, you know, Fearless Photographers, you know where there's a little bit of a directory to find out, like, who the photographers in the industry are in your area. And social media is also like, you know you want to, definitely want to link, the algorithms for using social media and search like, like, there's a, like a link to your site from something like Facebook or Twitter. They have always fluctuated a bit depending on different partnerships. So, you know, for a while, Twitter was, you know, utilizing, or, sorry, Google was utilizing Twitter's or tweets from Twitter for real time search, and that's no longer the case. Twitter, I think, is like, like, I think Bing is very heavily invested in Twitter now, so that the social media stuff will always fluctuate. And, I mean, if you're going to do anything, Google+, you know, is there, you know, Google has Google+. So, you know..

Andrew Hellmich:
They're very focused on that a little bit more, you think?

William Bay:
Yeah, Google+ is a good one to focus on. I've been, you know, kind of spouting that off for, you know, at least a year now. And now they just released this thing called Our Author Rank, which I haven't even started to, you know, dive into that yet. But yeah, Google+ is eventually going, there will be no separation between Google+ and Google. It will just be Google and Google, it will just become a big social platform with, with search, and that's you know kind of where a lot of the industry experts are saying that it will go and it's, you know, you can kind of believe it. They're putting a lot of money and effort into Google+. So..

Andrew Hellmich:
So, that'll be the new Facebook?

William Bay:
Yeah, I don't know if it will be the new Facebook. Facebook is definitely, I mean, Facebook became something that MySpace never was and, and Google+, I don't know if it really has the that ability to be as socially easy, socially acceptable, social I mean, people really let their guard down on Facebook. And, so I'm not sure if Google+ will ever really be the same thing that Facebook is. I'm sure we'll have some level of socialness, but Facebook was something special. I mean, it's, you know, I mean, I don't see any movies about Google+ coming out.

Andrew Hellmich:
That's true. William, mate, I think if absolutely, my mind is spinning and I'm sure the listeners will just be like, "Whoa." So let me see if I can sum up a little bit of what we've sort of covered today. So I think if you want to have a successful website, you need to have text as well as photos. You need to optimize with relevant pages, make it readable, don't over flood your text with keywords, have your title pages and your H1 and your tags, all that sort of stuff set up with your plugins, and try and get links. But doing it in an honest way and in a way that you're building community and friends really, just do it as a normal human being. I think that's..

William Bay:
Yeah.

Andrew Hellmich:
We're pretty much saying.

William Bay:
That's a really great summation. That really is, you know, you know, like, kind of boils it all down, you know, kind of simplifies it, you know, there are a lot of people tend to think SEO is this big, you know, mystery, but, you know, boiling it down into that is as a really good summation. I like that.

Andrew Hellmich:
And don't, don't, don't try and tackle our Jonas.

William Bay:
Yes, or I will probably feel some heat for that. I don't get up there. I didn't get him there. He did that on on his own, being Jonas. But I, yeah, I, I know I'm gonna, you know, in a online group with them, so well.

Andrew Hellmich:
Hopefully I'll get to him before you do.. and I've got to say before, before you, we find a little bit more about where people can find you. Your, your blog is amazing. I mean, I followed one of your tutorials just this week. And I know now that, after following your Analytics Tutorial, that the, my blog is mostly read at 10AM on a Wednesday. And that was, that was awesome. That was a great blog post you had there. So..

William Bay:
Oh, wow.

Andrew Hellmich:
And you've got, you've got heaps of information there on your website. So let us know where everyone can find you.

William Bay:
Yeah, yeah. Well, just flauntyoursite.com. And, I mean, that's, that's a, you know, that's where to find me. And then the blog is on there. And, you know, we got, you know, our services up there. It's the, I am, the shoemaker that goes shoeless though, or the children go shoeless. Well, I need to get a new update on the site. I'm just, you know, got a couple other sites. So, client work comes first.

Andrew Hellmich:
Yes sure.

William Bay:
So I'm sure there's many photographers out there that don't have family portraits of their kids, so..

Andrew Hellmich:
I'm hopeless for that, I know that.

William Bay:
Or themselves with their kids, if you will.

Andrew Hellmich:
Definitely.

William Bay:
But yeah, so we'll be launching a new site here hopefully in the next six months, if I can make a little leeway. And, yeah, so we got, you know, our services up there, we do custom, custom website designs. You know, we got a lot of functionality that we try and put in those sites above and beyond what you just see with other custom sites. We're looking at, you know, like Custom Client Pages. And how do we get, you know, little bit deeper content for the sites to pull in that wider, diverse traffic. And then we also do, you know, I do a webinar, I try to do one once a month, which will go like four weeks. And they call it Four Weeks to Getting Noticed. And we got one starting up in April, on April 3, which would be April 4 for you guys. And we'll be, I think it's, I started 5PM here on the Pacific Coast, which would probably be 11. I think 11AM on..

Andrew Hellmich:
Sure, I'll put links. I'll put links..

Andrew Hellmich:
Oh, yeah great.

Andrew Hellmich:
To these times in the show.

William Bay:
Sure, sure. Yeah.

Andrew Hellmich:
So, what do you cover in that webinar? That's, is that SEO stuff?

William Bay:
Yeah, yeah, SEO. So it's Four Weeks to Getting Noticed, and what we do is we take it really is, like, it's simplifying SEO. So we look at, you know, the basics, and we look at, like, what plugins do you need. And, you know, how do we set up the site appropriately. Then we look at, look at, at the content level. We look at, and this would be the second and third week, we look at content level on the blog posts. How to write effective blog posts so that we're looking at not only getting traffic, but more diverse traffic to your site. You know, like we talked about not having, you know, Brisbane wedding photographer on every or Central Coast Wedding Photographer on every single blog post that you do.

Andrew Hellmich:
Sure.

William Bay:
Right? Yeah, we're looking at, really, like, expanding and diversifying the search traffic that you get. And then the third week would be those, those, you know, targeted keyword pages like you, like those, those Central Coast Wedding Photographer, the a little bit more appointed terms that you want to get, you know, like actually having people come to your site for. And then, and then the fourth week we look at, you know, take a little bit deeper look at links, and you know, where to get, how we actually go through the process of comparing the sites to others using the tools that I talked about. And, and then during this whole time, we from the first week through the fourth week, you know, we established at the beginning where you're at with your analytics, and we actually track that over the four weeks. So the intention is, at the end of the four weeks, we've actually increased your traffic.

Andrew Hellmich:
Oh, cool. Okay, so these are for people that are actually doing their own website.

Andrew Hellmich:
Ahm, yep.

Andrew Hellmich:
Awesome.

William Bay:
Yeah. So it's if someone the requirement is, you know, people use WordPress, because we all the plugins that we use and the settings that we'll be doing are all WordPress based. So that's just, you know, one of the requirements. But it really is designed to see improvements over four weeks. It's not one of those things were, you know, I'm just selling a bunch of, you know, snake oil. Or, we're actually looking for results here. We're not selling fluff. We're not selling, you know, concepts that may or may not work. We're actually doing the work to make things happen.

Andrew Hellmich:
Right. So you might set a bit of homework to go and write a couple of blog posts between week two and three, then come back and check those, or check in links to see if they're working.

William Bay:
Yeah, yeah, new blog posts, and, you know, we also have them go through and look at old blog posts. So this works if you go back into your archives and and look at, you know, wedding photography from, you know, might, you might say, like, "Oh, I've got this really great wedding that I did at this one spot, and I really want to beef it up so that I can get maybe more work from that one venue."

Andrew Hellmich:
Okay.

William Bay:
And you like, you know, take the, you know, take what we what we do during that week, and apply it to that, you know, particular blog post. Or go through and do your whole entire catalog of blog posts and, and, yeah, I mean, it's, you know, you actually see results for those.

Andrew Hellmich:
I love that you can actually measure that in analytics and make people accountable. That's fantastic.

William Bay:
Yeah, yeah, that's, ultimately, I'm the one accountable.

Andrew Hellmich:
You still got to do the work. They got to do the work.

William Bay:
Yeah, exactly.

Andrew Hellmich:
So what does that cost to do that course?

William Bay:
So, it's 129 US. And then I'll give you guys a coupon code for any of your listeners.

William Bay:
Cool, so we're going to save that for the premium members, aren't we, which would be awesome.

William Bay:
Okay, yeah, great.

Andrew Hellmich:
Cool. Unreal. So once we and where do they go to find out or sign up for this?

William Bay:
That's ah, you can go to flauntyoursite.com, and then let's see here. From the menu on the top, they would just go to Learning. And then there's a Workshops now on the bottom of the menu there.

Andrew Hellmich:
Fantastic. I'll put links to that in the show notes as well.

William Bay:
Oh, great. Yeah, I can send you that link as well.

Andrew Hellmich:
Fantastic. William, mate, it's been an absolute pleasure. And you know, it's just been, like I said, a real eye opener, and my head's spinning, and I'm looking forward to getting stuck into my blog.

William Bay:
It's definitely quite a lot to cover, and that's why I like to, you know, kind of go four weeks, even that four weeks, you get a lot of people with still a lot of questions. And that's why we make these, you know, 90 minutes long, so we have, like, an hour presentation and, you know, learning the things, and then 90 or 30 minutes of questions and, and then, yeah, and then people can email me as they need as well. So it's, it's quite a lot to wrap your head around and, but I thought, you know what? Like, let's, let's do this over four weeks. And really, like, have people grasp this step by step.

Andrew Hellmich:
Perfect. I love it. I love it.

William Bay:
Yeah.

Andrew Hellmich:
I love it. Mate, thanks again for staying up for us. And I hope that film comes back as, with some awesome photos as well.

William Bay:
Yeah, I'm dying here. I just sent it off the other day. I hope you know the turnarounds, you know, pretty quick.

Andrew Hellmich:
Awesome. Mate, thanks again. And look, I really hope we get to meet in person one day.

William Bay:
Absolutely, I'm looking forward to coming down there. I, you know, I surf, so can't wait to, you know, hit up, you know, Gold Coast, and go down through bells and like, you know, go down to the West Coast and, you know, hit up, what is it, Margaret River?

Andrew Hellmich:
Yeah.

William Bay:
Go down to some of those really great, epic, you know, very, you know, just those spots.

Andrew Hellmich:
Yeah.

William Bay:
That everyone knows about.

Andrew Hellmich:
There's no, no shortage of surf over here. You'll definitely be fine.

William Bay:
Yeah, yeah. Looking forward to it. Yeah, I'm looking forward to meeting all my friends down there, and you and, yeah, I've got, you know, quite a, quite a few guys I know down there. So I can't wait to get down to Australia.

Andrew Hellmich:
Awesome. We'll see you when you get down here.

William Bay:
Yeah, sounds great, Andrew. Thanks so much for the interview. I really appreciate it.

Andrew Hellmich:
My pleasure, and I'll talk to you soon.

William Bay:
Okay, great. Thanks Andrew.