SEO 101

WordPress 3.0 Preview

Wordpress Core Developer Mark Jaquith, BuddyPress developer John Jacoby and head of User Experience Jane Wells preview the eminent launch of WordPress 3.0, including how it has been catered for SEOs, its security modifications, and more. Our Sponsors: * Producer Brasco: As digital professionals and business owners, we understand the critical importance of a secure and high-performing website. That's why I want to talk to you about Kinsta, a managed WordPress hosting provider that delivers exceptional speed, security, and reliability. Kinsta's infrastructure is optimized for WordPress, ensuring your site loads lightning-fast and ranks well in search results. They utilize Google Cloud's premium tier network and C3D virtual machines, which significantly boost performance. In fact, Kinsta customers often experience up to a 200% increase in site speed just by migrating to their platform. Security is paramount, and Kinsta provides enterprise-grade measures to protect your valuable data. They are one of the few WordPress hosting providers with SOC2 certification, guaranteeing the highest level of security for your website. Kinsta's MyKinsta dashboard offers a user-friendly interface with a comprehensive suite of tools to manage your site efficiently. From cache control and debugging to redirects and CDN setup, MyKinsta simplifies website administration. For SEO 101 listeners, Kinsta offers specific advantages. Their platform is optimized for speed, a crucial ranking factor in search engine algorithms. Their security measures protect your site from malware and hacking attempts that could damage your online presence. And their expert support team is available 24/7 to assist with any technical issues that may arise. If you're serious about your online presence and want a hosting provider that prioritizes performance, security, and support, I highly recommend Kinsta. Visit kinsta.com today to learn more and take advantage of their limited-time offer for new customers. That's k-i-n-s-t-a dot com. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Duration:: 22m
Broadcast on:: 22 Feb 2010
Audio Format:: other

Wordpress Core Developer Mark Jaquith, BuddyPress developer John Jacoby and head of User Experience Jane Wells preview the eminent launch of WordPress 3.0, including how it has been catered for SEOs, its security modifications, and more.

Our Sponsors:
* Producer Brasco: As digital professionals and business owners, we understand the critical importance of a secure and high-performing website. That's why I want to talk to you about Kinsta, a managed WordPress hosting provider that delivers exceptional speed, security, and reliability. Kinsta's infrastructure is optimized for WordPress, ensuring your site loads lightning-fast and ranks well in search results. They utilize Google Cloud's premium tier network and C3D virtual machines, which significantly boost performance. In fact, Kinsta customers often experience up to a 200% increase in site speed just by migrating to their platform. Security is paramount, and Kinsta provides enterprise-grade measures to protect your valuable data. They are one of the few WordPress hosting providers with SOC2 certification, guaranteeing the highest level of security for your website. Kinsta's MyKinsta dashboard offers a user-friendly interface with a comprehensive suite of tools to manage your site efficiently. From cache control and debugging to redirects and CDN setup, MyKinsta simplifies website administration. For SEO 101 listeners, Kinsta offers specific advantages. Their platform is optimized for speed, a crucial ranking factor in search engine algorithms. Their security measures protect your site from malware and hacking attempts that could damage your online presence. And their expert support team is available 24/7 to assist with any technical issues that may arise. If you're serious about your online presence and want a hosting provider that prioritizes performance, security, and support, I highly recommend Kinsta. Visit kinsta.com today to learn more and take advantage of their limited-time offer for new customers. That's k-i-n-s-t-a dot com.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

The opinions expressed on this webmaster-radio.fm program are those of the hosts, guests and callers. And do not reflect those of the staff, management or advertisers of webmaster-radio.fm. Any rebroadcast or retransmission of this program, without the express written consent of webmaster-radio.fm is prohibited. Welcome to SCO 101, your introductory course on Search Engine Optimization. So, turn on your computers, open your minds, grab your mouse and get ready to get back to the basics. SCO 101 on webmaster-radio.fm is now in session. Welcome to SCO 101, this is John Karkett, the SCO Manager for MediaWiz. Ross Dunstah with me today, he's hanging out at the Olympics up in Canada. I'm here on location at Word Camp Miami, 2010. We've had a great day, a lot of wonderful sessions, and I'm lucky enough to have with me three of the core developers for WordPress. I'd like to introduce yourselves. I'm Mark Jake with, I'm one of the lead developers on the WordPress Core. I'm Jane Wells, I'm the User Experience Lead for WordPress Core. I am John James Jacoby and I am a core developer of BuddyPress. Outstanding. I was all presented today, I was at, I think all of their presentations and they were great. Our audience here is really focusing on SCO, so I'd like to get some questions for you guys, really focusing on SCO and how WordPress fits into the bigger picture. You guys are making a big announcement, WordPress 3.0 is coming out this year. I found out today through the presentations that is coming with a new default theme and you're calling it default 2010, I believe. Just 2010. 2010, okay, just 2010. When you created this theme, did you take into consideration in the SCO and what kind of things did you do when you thought about that from that perspective or did you? We did. The main things that we focused on were keeping the design simple and clean and then using really good markup just like WordPress itself. By using the default theme automatically, everything will be formatted kind of the way Google and all the ranking engines like to see it. We took into account the new specifications around page load time, so we designed it so that it will load very fast which will help your SCO rankings. Especially with caffeine coming out that's outstanding to hear. Just the way the titles are used in terms of the H tags and stuff like that. Everything is pretty well optimized, I think. I don't know that there's anything we could have done more to it to make it more SCO friendly. There might be a few things, but nothing major. That's great to hear, outstanding. We've had this process, you've thought about that for the theme. When you're working on developing new features and new additions to WordPress, does SEO come into mind and how do you fit that into your processes? We take a very conservative approach to SEO and in the way we approach these issues. We look at things that are going to have a beneficial impact on a majority of users and specifically things that don't require a lot of user interaction, ideally not. You have things like canonical URL redirection, like trailing slashes versus no trailing slashes, dub dub dub versus not. Take care of those things because it doesn't really require user intervention and it has a demonstrated benefit on Google, have a lesser impact, meta tags, they require a lot of user input, very disinclined, but those sorts of things into core. So where do you decide? A really good example is the no-follow tags and comments. When you decided to do that, where did that idea come from? Was it your community? Was it a specific famous, as you guys said, you guys need to do this, or where did that come from? That came from us just reading the Google announcement and saying it can't hurt my help. You guys follow that kind of stuff? Are you getting a judge from Google? Do you read any other people that you pay attention to, places? Yeah, so we're all friends with MacCuts, and he gives lots of great advice to us directly as well as publicly. We don't get any secret sauce information. It's all public stuff. Yeah, I was going to take you in a room if you were going to talk. Now, our approach to SEO is very conservative and a right-good markup, a user, a great descriptive content, good content. So you guys mentioned in a couple of different sessions that the community is extremely important around WordPress. I personally have tried to contribute a little bit in the community from an SEO standpoint. Just not a lot, but a little bit, but I always seem to be the dark horse child that nobody wants to talk to because I'm talking about SEO. Is there a way for someone to say, "Look, I've noticed this. This is a suggestion." I think it will really help the whole project, the whole platform from an SEO perspective. Maybe you just frame it not in those terms, but in terms of, "Hey, here's some way that your markup is deficient," or it could be improved, it might get a better reception. Here's an ideas form at WordPress.org/extend/ideas where you can make any suggestion you want and we do review them, but I think ultimately if you say, "Please do this for better SEO," I think the broader community doesn't really like that to be a focus, so it would be more, like Mark said, if you can point, there's something that would be good for SEO and also good for the markup and the general security performance, whatever, and that's great, but we would never trade performance and security for SEO, for example. I agree with that completely. Every side of it, that's key. So we're going to take a break here for a second and I'm going to come back and I want to talk a little bit about how social media layers are added to WordPress and how that's impacting what we're doing on the SEO side. SEO 101 will be back right after recess. Afghan 2010, the trade show that you know where affiliates always attend for free makes its way to Denver, June 21st through 23rd, registered today at AFFCOM2010.com. Afghan 2010 is different from those other affiliate trade shows designed for the affiliate manager where you can pay up to $1,500 just on a single registration. That's why AFFCOM2010 offers you an alternative, a show that's free for affiliates, not to mention over 80% of our attendees are affiliates. Afghan 2010 brings you a wide range of sessions, essential for a significant affiliate marketing achievement. Plus we are proud to be working with search engine strategies to present an additional day of all new search engine marketing sessions and tracks, add unbeatable nighttime networking capped off by webmaster, radio.fm's annual affiliate bash and you have the complete affiliate trade show experience. 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How much time do you have every day to recruit more clients, expand your business and add more value to your service? Letwebmasteraudio.fm do the work for you, which shows like SEO Rockstars, SEO101 and SCM Synergy, we can tailor an ad campaign that includes 30 seconds every hour and a 30 minute special every month, plus the banner ads and links you need to reach our built-in audience. What you charge an hour for service is all it takes to get started on the fast lane to growing your business. Contact sales at webmasteraudio.fm for a consultation today. Hi, welcome to the SEO shop. How may I help you? Oh, hi. I'm looking for something from a website. Well, I could slip your website into a sleek web campaign. Okay. Well, internet marketing experts can custom tailor your web campaign with our SEO services and by the time we're finished, your website will have such high organic search rankings that it will turn the heads off of Google Yahoo and Bing. I would love that SEO-shop.com, the experts and professional internet marketing services. Let us research, plan, execute and succeed on your web campaign today with SEO-shop.com. Let your shopping cart overflow because you've found the e-com experts. e-com experts, Mondays at 6 p.m. Eastern, 3 p.m. Pacific or on demand any time inside the internet marketing channel only on webmasterradio.fm. Okay, class, take your seats and no talking. Recess is over and SEO 101 is back in session only on webmasterradio.fm. Hi, welcome back to SEO 101, John Karket. SEO Manager Media is, again, Ross Dunn's not with me today. He's enjoying the Olympics out in lovely old Canada. I'm here on location at Word Camp Miami, 2010. I was speaking with three of the key people over at WordPress that are helping bring it to us. We've talked a little bit about how they bring SEO into their processes and how they view how it can help you overall. I think it's great information that we should all really understand. I like to talk a little bit about social media and how it is being integrated into WordPress. I think I've talked about it on the show before. You guys hate to call it this. I kind of do too. There's a plug-in that goes over WordPress, but it's much more than just a plug-in. It's called Buddy Press, and I like to get John over here. He's worked on this very specifically to give us kind of an overview of how it helps what it does for WordPress and social media. Well, Buddy Press is a plug-in that helps build a niche community off of a WordPress installation, so you end up with a simple site or a blog that turns into being more user-centric than it is necessarily content-centric. You still have a blog or you still have pages of all the things that WordPress provides, but you also have users. You also have profiles. You also have all of the ways that you turn a WordPress site or WordPress installation into a social network in a box or social media in a box. One plug-in that can turn a WordPress installation outside of being a site into something more, into something a little bit more social. You and I personally have talked about Buddy Press a number of times, and it's really at this point really been focused on WordPress multi-user. Is that where it's staying? No, absolutely not actually with 1.2. You are able to use Buddy Press on a single blog installation of WordPress. Since the code merge is taking place, you will have the ability to use it in either circumstance, in either way, so if you wanted to just have one site with a community that's possible or if you wanted to have one site with users with their own blogs and a community of blogs, you'll be able to do that with WordPress 3.0 and Buddy Press also. It's a very exciting time. This is critical to me from the perspective of WordPress growing and being able to be used from an SEO perspective because building a community on your site, the main advantage for that from an SEO perspective is building unique content. People start discussing things, they start talking about things. You're building content on your site, and content unique content specifically is very valuable when it comes to search, and WordPress is great to begin with that because basically it's a blog, you have comments, and people can have conversations, but this social layer is being added to it, I think it is outstanding, very good. I'll move on a little bit because I think that's really good. There was a session here during the show on security, WordPress security, and I've actually given up session with that myself at our local WordPress. There were a lot of tips offered about how to really secure WordPress, how to make it so you're not going to get hacked or someone's going to steal it. Do you guys have anything in the new version coming out or plans to improve a lot of things they say, "Do this, do this, do this," to build that into the core? One of the things that we here recommended a lot is to change the username of the initial administrator account that is created when you install WordPress. This doesn't offer security in absolute sense, but it does prevent people from being able to do automated attacks that just always try and crack the password of the admin user, so you can make it a little bit more difficult for them, and that's something a lot of people had requested, so we're likely to do that. Excellent. One of the ones I heard today was just the base only allowing a person to try to log in ten times or five times, said that, "That seems to me that would be something that would be built in," but right now you have to do a plugin. There's a number of things like that. Are you looking at some of these plugins that people are using on a regular basis and considering them? We're always considering them. That particular problem is very well mitigated by having a complex password of more than eight characters in length, and we have a password strength meter when you go into your profile to cite your password, so if you're using uppercase, lowercase, numbers, and characters and more than eight characters, they're not going to be able to brute force that, so it doesn't matter how many times they try. Excellent. Just from the user experience perspective, putting limits on how many times you can try to log in is a problem because a lot of people, even though it's not a good security practice, use the same password, but in different variations based on what each site requires, whether it's six characters, including a number or eight characters or whatever, so they might need to try eight different passwords to get to the one because they might not have logged in for a long time. If it's cookie, a lot of people never use their passwords, they forget what they set it up as two years ago, and if the software imposed that on all users, that would be bad, allowing an admin to install a plugin and say, "Well, this is how I want my site to work," is a much better, I think, practice. I actually agree with that because I didn't install that plugin because I forget my password all the time, and that would happen to me. So do I. No. But it's nice to see as you guys are looking at people's work in the community, how would you say, you know, there's all kinds of different things being created from, you know, the SEO type plugins, the e-commerce plugin, security. Is there a base, simple process to use to evaluate those, or which ones might be good for the core, which ones might be good to integrate? Usage plays into it a lot. Things that are plugins that are highly used get a lot of consideration from us. That's not the only thing. Others that are also more subjective judgments about how we think they fit in with the project. But we're definitely looking at, you know, the most popular plugins, and also areas of functionality that have multiple plugins attacking that functionality. Excellent. Another example, this is an up plugin per se, but for example, in 3.0 we wanted to add menu management capability so that you could, you know, organize the menus on your actual website using categories, pages, external links, kind of mix them all together and do exactly what you need, which probably will help SEO. Yeah, good. If you can. And because we could also change the page title is the same as the navigation link. So a lot of people use short page titles so that the nav links will be short. But so in this case, you'll be able to name the page whatever you want and have a different label for the navigation, which I think actually will help SEO kind of a lot. So that's cool. But what happened was we were trying to design it, and we kind of had figured out exactly what functionality we wanted. And it turned out right around the same time, WooThemes, which is a commercial theme business released a custom navigation system that they have included in their commercial theme package. And we reached out to them and said, hey, that's awesome. We're about to build the same exact thing. Do you want to just donate that to core, and we can work to improve it together. And then if you want to do enhancements, we'll just make sure there are hooks in it so you can go and keep doing your own commercial thing. And they were into that. So keeping aware of what's going on in the community definitely can lead to inclusion in core. That's great to hear. I use new themes. I love those guys. They put out some really good stuff. They're custom navigation. 3.0. Nice. Good to hear. Excellent. All right. I'm pausing because I need to figure out what another question is. Hmm? All right. Yeah. He'll edit it out. So there were some questions in our last session where you guys sat up and you really did a great job of explaining to people. But one of them came up was the difference between WordPress and Jumolee and Drupal, and why one would be better than the other. And I think some of the answers you gave would be really interesting from our audience to hear. Why would WordPress be your choice over Drumila? Drumila? That would be a good one. We need to do a mashup and we'll have it Drumila. No. Not or Drupal? Some of the benefits that WordPress has are giant install base, a very active development community, a large number of freely available open source, themes and plugins. It kind of famously, last year, they started undergoing a redesign project for Drupal. I think Drupal.org, not actual Drupal 7. Maybe it was Drupal 7, I forget what it was. Mark Bolton design, I think, was doing it and Lisa Riker. And the Drupal community was somewhat incensed when they put up, they decided, well, we're going to communicate with the community through a blog to keep them updated of all the things that we're doing. And they put that blog on WordPress. Nice. And when questioned, why are you not using Drupal for this, they said, well, we should, but we need something that we already know and something that's very quick and easy to use and WordPress does that. If in a year we haven't gotten to Drupal then we haven't done our jobs and you can give us heck then. Well, they're still on WordPress, so I think that's kind of funny. That's outstanding. I've been a fan of WordPress since I first started using it from an SEO perspective. It's, to me, without a doubt, the most fundamentally solid CMS, and I know you guys always talk about it as a CMS, but I do because it really can be used that way. But as the most fundamentally solid CMS out there from an SEO perspective, there's none of them that don't need some kind of tweaks from an SEO, but WordPress is the easiest one to make those tweaks and you have to have a few weeks of all. So congrats. I mean, applause. Do you guys, for doing it, you guys are great. So I appreciate you being on the show today. Thanks for being here at Word Camp Miami and giving us all to do your brain trust. It was wonderful today. So everybody, thanks for tuning in. This is John Karkert, SEO 101. Thanks for coming. Bye. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC]