SEO 101

Wordpress Optimization

Wordpress Optimization, from plugins to avoiding duplicate content and the best uses of Word press for SEOs with Wordpress Expert Joost deValk 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:: 31m
Broadcast on:: 23 Feb 2009
Audio Format:: other

Wordpress Optimization, from plugins to avoiding duplicate content and the best uses of Word press for SEOs with Wordpress Expert Joost deValk

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

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SEO 101 on webmasterradio.fm is now in session. Hello and welcome to SEO 101 on webmasterradio.fm. This is Austin, CEO of Stepport Web Marketing, and unfortunately, my co-host, Jennifer Evans Leicop, Director of Social Media at SiteLogic, can't join me today. I do, however, have a great guest. I've got Mr. Yost Devak, who is a well-known WordPress developer and general online market here. I have Yost here to discuss the best practices for optimizing a website for WordPress. I know that's a hot topic, so I'm hoping enough people can tune in to get a lot of value out of this. Thank you for joining me today, Yost, how are you doing? Thank you. Well, thanks for having me. I'm doing quite fine, actually, awfully busy at the moment, but, well, we're doing good. Excellent. So are you an independent, or are you working for a company, or is yost.com, you're actually doing it? No, it's not. I work for Orange Valley, which is a small, reasonably new online marketing company, well, not really online marketing. So we call it revenue optimization company, online revenue optimization. So that's our business. We basically do multivariate testing, A/B testing, web analytics, and helping our clients get from data to insights, which is, I think, the hot topic of the moment. Excellent. Yeah. I'm Jones for analytics like that. I love data, but I wish I had more time. So it must be nice to have that much time to really focus on revenue, and working on all the things that websites and stuff. It's really great, especially at the moment, since everybody seems to cut down on their average budget and still want to make the same amount of money. We've got a lot of new clients coming in. We've only just started in October, so we're really a young company. Excellent. Well, good luck. I hope things, well, it sounds like you're already busy, so you have something to do. It's turning out to go really well, yeah. Great. Yes. Tell me a little more about yourself. Now, on the website, you mentioned your WordPress developer. How did you get started in the WordPress? Well, like three, four years ago, I started to, it's over four years ago, actually. I started to work at this search marketing company, and I wanted to start a blog at some point. I already had a website, but I wanted to start blogging. I was looking for something that was reasonably SEO out of the box, and I had some good functionality and WordPress just fit the bill, and I started using it, and after a while, I wanted to add stuff to it, so I started developing plugins for it, which turned out to be incredibly simple for a developer, at least, and then I just went on and kept doing that. Excellent. Well, I know that, I'm trying to find them here, so I don't remember them off by heart, but some of the great plugins you have, I have used, and I really appreciate it to some of your, you know, Yo Spread crumbs, that's the one I've used. That's excellent. Yeah. And for anyone who wants some great plugins for their WordPress, Yoast.com/wordpress, awesome stuff. He's definitely got quite the bag of tools there, and of course-- Yeah, it's turning into an insane amount of plugins. Excellent. So I've been reading a bit of your articles and stuff, and that's what really prompted me to call. I was quite impressed with the level of knowledge, and obviously you know your stuff about WordPress. What are the top five most important optimizations to apply to a new WordPress website? Number one would be to install basically any plugin that allows you to write better titles and meter descriptions. Then number two, so that would be all in one SEO or my preferences hat space, but they basically do mostly the same thing. So that's the first plugin I do installed, and number two would be selling the permalinks to something that looks a bit better than the default question mark P is number. And basically once you've done that, you've got a better up to my system than most people have, but of course you can go and do a lot more things like change addings to regular SEO to make your titles H1s and to make sure that your block title isn't the H1 on single pages, stuff like that. Optimizing stuff like the more text you use to link from your from to an archive pages to your articles, because usually it will say read more or continue reading, while that's not really what you'd wanted to say, so it should be said to stuff like read more on an SEO link building, whatever. And then it's just a whole slew of all these little things combined that make for excellent optimization yet, but as well the article you mentioned is quite long and I'm finding out new things to optimize each day, it's just that SEO is this game of a few big things and a couple of hundreds more things you can do on each side. Yeah, I'm actually looking at it, congratulations for winning the the semi award as phenomenal. Yeah, it's a really great article, I was reading through it and and I've got a lot of great tips, we're actually going to be launching our new website, stepworth.com's new website and a pray in a few weeks with and it's basically on WordPress, so this was very timely and that's what really would be going on, I've got to get them on the show, it's fascinating how much there is to it and it's even more interesting that you're still learning new things you can do with WordPress. Yeah, I'm probably going to update this article pretty soon with quite a few new things, because some things have changed and some things have improved to other things. The new canonical links that the search engine has announced last week on SMX, for instance, that stuff that you can play with really nicely. So one of the things that I've always been curious about and I've seen arguments either way actually, but WordPress, as you've mentioned in your article, has a lot of potential for duplicate content because there's so many different ways you can see the same content. What is the best way to, what parts do you want to block, which parts don't you want to block, to the search engines? It really, really depends on how you build your site and your theme. If you install WordPress out of the box right now you get a date archive, a tag archive, a category archive and some pages of the homepage. So that's basically four different ways of getting to posts. I think that's a bit too much. So I usually disable both the date archive and either the category or the tag archive or I make sure the category and tag archive are really different. Because what happens a lot is that people start using both categories and tags and they make a category SEO and a tag SEO as well. And once they do, they've basically cut two completely duplicate pages with the only difference being one is called slash category slash SEO and the other one is called slash tag slash SEO and there's the same content there. So when I try to teach people and myself all the time because I make this mistake too, is to use categories for the broad categorization and then tags for the more subtle, smaller things. But that's quite hard to do well. So would you say that if a person's going to have any issue with that, they should just stick to one and forget the other? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And which one would you stick to? Probably easiest. But I do both, but I try to do what I just explained. So I try to do a category WordPress and then tag WordPress plugins and tag for WordPress themes and the tag for the more specific things. So I stick with categories then, I would imagine. If you had to stick to one category as well, I'd stick with tags because that's easier to maintain in the end, but stick with one or the other, it doesn't really matter. Now one of the things I did notice, you mentioned a headspace and also the all in one SEO plugin. Now the all in one, as you know, right out of the box WordPress immediately says use the all in one SEO plugin, it's like it's one of the most popular downloads, you name it. Is there any advantage between the two, headspace and all in one SEO plugin? I mean, you mentioned it pretty much the same, but there must be something that stands up. Yeah, well, headspace has a lot more options to do stuff like integrating all sorts of statistics, authenticating with webmaster tools, stuff like that. And one thing that all in one SEO does that I really, really hate, it does but it for generate meter descriptions. If you're going to also generate meter descriptions, you might as well just not do it, it's just absolutely no use because Google will be better at generating one for you than you will yourself, so you'd better leave it that way. So I think people should write their own meter descriptions or just don't bother. Well, we're going to take a quick break and when we come back, we'll touch on a few more points on WordPress optimization. Go behind the scenes of SEO 101 with their Facebook fan page search for SEO 101 podcast on Facebook now. SEO 101 will be back right after recess. Hey, have you got the number for Jerry's pizza? Look it up on localpages.com. Localpages.com or what if I wanted a business number in Miami? Localpages.com. Can people find your business online? 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When thinking about PPC and publisher solutions, all you need to remember is ABC Search, quality partners, quality search, ABCSearch.com. SCOC.com is your one-stop site for everything F-E-O. From search engine marketing to pay-per-click management, SCOC.com delivers high-quality SCO services and affordable prices. SCOC.com can help you with SCO analysis, monthly reports, title and meta tag optimization, email support and so much more. Let our professional trainers teach SCO to your staff, get a free quote and a free competitive analysis today at SCOC.com. Welcome back to SCO 101 on webmaster radio.fm. I'm Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepworth Web Marketing Inc. My co-host, Jennifer Evans-Lakecock, cannot be here today, but as we were just touching on, I've got Yoast Devok as a special guest today and he's a WordPress optimizer extraordinaire. And before the break, we were discussing the all-in-one SEO plugin and some of the disadvantages over Headspace. That plugin definitely seems to stick out as one of the best and I certainly listened to Yoast over the top plugin line. When you do install WordPress throughout the bat, it's one of the top plugins recommended is the all-in-one SEO plugin, but by the sign of things, go for the Headspace. So was there anything else you'd like to add on that and I can cut you off at the end there, Yoast? No, not really. Oh, I want to see how does this work pretty okay, I'll be other than that. Another plugin I always install is my own robots meter plugin, which allows to know index, follow certain categories, stuff like that, if you'd want to do that. And it allows for, well, no index following specific pages, stuff like that. It allows for a bit more granular control of what the search engine is seeing, what they don't see. Cool. So tell me, you're being so involved in WordPress over the years. It upgrades quite often. When they do upgrade, I guess occasionally they'd enable the all-new marketing capability. Has the latest upgrade revealed anything new? Well, 2.7 is especially cool because of the new backend and the new admin environment. And the core update stuff, in 2.5 they introduced auto update for plugins and in 2.7 they introduced automatic update for WordPress itself, which is, well, yeah, it makes life so much easier if you run tons of WordPress blogs like I do. So it wasn't to say that there was any marketing capabilities that were added. Like I would imagine they add the odd thing that triggers interest, but it could be that there hasn't been one in a long time, but I'm just kind of curious. Now, not really as far as I know, there's a huge discussion on the mailing list for the WP hackers mailing list, which is the mailing list for all the WordPress developers and plugin developers. There's a huge discussion there right now whether the new canonical tag should be integrated into WordPress core. There's a sort of a bias towards SEO within the WordPress community that hasn't always as favorable as we'd like it to be. Are you involved in that group and influencing the next version? I try to, but I'm certainly pushing it because I think it would be a good thing if it were in there, but not everybody agrees yet. And there's a lot of people who think they know what SEO is and actually don't. Okay. Well, and just so our listeners understand that a canonical tag was something we actually discussed in the last episode quite extensively at Jennifer Lake Automated. And it's very interesting. It's not widely supported yet by the search engines, but they are agreeing they're going to. At this point, I understand only Google has adopted it. And what essentially it does is by putting in a reference within your header, you can actually specify what URL is the default for the page that the search engines have reached. So they've gotten to the page using a URL with some extraneous characters on the end of it, which may be used for tracking. They get to the page and they see this canonical URL tag, they will actually default to what you've specified instead of using that extraneous URL. And potentially, if you had both within the search engine, you'd end up with duplicate content. So I just want to add a little background there, but it's great. Yeah, it's absolutely great, for the record, it'll probably still index that weird URL. And if you search for it with a site colon query, it will probably still show up, but it won't rank anymore. Right. And any page ranks or anything like that, I guess, would be passed along as well. Yeah. It's basically a 301 in a soft way, so a 301 redirect in a soft way. But yeah, it's a very cool, neat feature, and for you guys, in the US, you've got a couple more search engines, but basically here in Europe, we've got nothing else but Google. Really? The market share here is over 95%, so we don't really care about anything else. That's fascinating. I actually didn't know that. I knew it was high, but I guess I haven't done a lot of European work, and I always assumed there were some bigger ones. But some of the major countries, like Russia, of course, has a couple of-- Yeah, Russia has its own. Yeah. But Russia is not really Europe as well. Well, I always think comments are very good. So one of the things that I was really fascinated with in the article as well was the comment optimization. I think a lot of people forget about this. Can you explain? It's a bit of a broad question, I'm sorry, but a little bit what you can do with comments to make them work for you. Yeah, well, you can do a lot with them, right? There's two things about comments in the article. One is how to get more readers involved into commenting on your blog, and one is what to do when you've got too many comments on the post. But I'll start with the first, comments really make your blog into a live environment, and they allow people to give you feedback, which is really important if you want to improve what you're doing. So you have to ask them to comment and not just say no comments or stuff like that, but change that sentence, which you can easily change in your theme usually, to stuff like no comments yet, your thoughts are welcome, I'm citing my own article now, or I want to share your thoughts about the subject, stuff like that, and really engage people to do something and just ask them. And ask them in the article directly what do you think about this and let me know what you think in the comments. Why don't we just, I'm just going to take a quick break here, and when we'll come back, we'll touch more on the comments, because I think there's a lot in that, and I definitely want to make sure everyone has heard about that. SEO 101 is now on iTunes. Write us a review and tell us how much you love us. SEO 101 will be back right after recess. Hey, what's that sound coming from your computer? What's the sound of me making money with Referback.com? They've shown me how to referback.com, show me how to turn clicks on my existing site into cash. Referback gives you free banners, mailers, even your own personal account manager. Oh, can they help me make money off my blog too? Absolutely, your websites, your blogs, they can all be making you money. You can even earn 50% commission on your first month. Put some into your website, just visit Referback.com. Are your domains locked to the max? 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My staff just filled in the little details and now we're having a margarita night. Offshoring.com, fast and expensive, excellent and on time, Offshoring.com. Mobile presence, Wednesdays at 1 p.m. Eastern, 10 a.m. Pacific or on demand anytime, inside the internet marketing channel, only on webmasterradio.fm. Okay, class, take your seats and no talking. Recess is over and SCO 101 is back in session, only on webmasterradio.fm. Welcome back to SCO 101 on webmasterradio.fm. I'm Ron Stone, CEO of Stepworth Web Marketing and joining me today is Yostevok, WordPress Optimizer extraordinaire. Before the break, we were discussing comment tags, or artificial comment tags, I should say commenting on WordPress and just how powerful it can be. And I'd like to continue that and I cut off Yostev but to like to continue, I think it's quite fascinating just how yes, you can also get people interested in replying by asking them, you know, what do you think of what I just wrote. But after that, there is even more to it and of course that seems simple to me. But after that, there was a lot of stuff, like one of them was the comment relish plug-in. Could you discuss that? Yeah, I used to use the comment relish plug-in which sent people an email when they commented for the first time, I've understood since then that's actually against the law in a couple of countries, so I stopped using that because you're basically sending them unsolicited email. So I switched to my own new plug-in which I coded after, which is comment redirect, which redirects people who've commented for the first time on your site to a new page where you can say thank you for commenting if you like my blog, check out this and this and I hope you'll be back, stuff like that. Have you found the redirect, is that only work the first time they do it as well or is it? It only works the first time they use that email address to comment. Okay, interesting. Keeping people in the conversation, I think one of the things you mentioned also is you actually go and try to engage them on their own blog to show that you are more interactive. I thought that was fascinating. It's not a lot of time we have to do that kind of thing, but I think that was a really interesting point. Do you make a difference? I make the time for that and I think I get an average amount of 20 to 30 trackbacks a day and if people, if you don't comment back on those, that amount will go down pretty quickly and if, just try to check out their sites and of course you won't always have the time to check out every comment or site, but if someone leaves a really insightful comment and really has put some effort into engaging in a conversation with you, you should return the favor. Oh, I totally agree. I think it's wonderful. I think it's very interesting you make the time to do that. I think that everyone has such busy days and they go, "Oh, no, I just don't have time for that." But like you said, it's something you've got to do. You've got to get that kind of engagement. I'd rather do that on all my articles than write an article more each week. I think the conversation is what it's all about. It's not about me blasting something into the ear. Excellent. One of the things, we're getting into the show here, but one of the things that interests me was you have on your WordPress blog, you actually have a social network, a line of social buttons that people can click on to add your article to social networks. Is that a plugin or is that something you customize? I was just curious. It's my own sociable plugin. It's actually my most downloaded plugin, search for sociable on WordPress. I think it's still somewhere in the top 10 of most downloaded plugins. It's actually quite popular. Great. Thank you. And the last thing, are there any other great online WordPress resources for our listeners to subscribe to? I mean, yours is obviously one. I would recommend to anyone. Is there anything else or any other places people should keep an eye on to keep in touch with the SEO and perhaps any other thing else that's being added to WordPress? SEO, I'm afraid not too much. There's not really that much competition in that space, which is both good and bad, I think. Let me think. We've got this. It's really bad, but I forgot his name now. I'm an English guy who is really good with WordPress as well. Yeah, just search for WordPress SEO blog and you'll see that there's not too much there. That certainly answers the question. Well, thank you very much, Yoast, it was a pleasure having you on today. And I think it's wonderful to hear more about WordPress. I mean, it is so powerful and it's finally being acknowledged that way. I mean, as there's so many blogs out there, I know many SEOs that are now insistent upon using it for new websites as their content management system. Yeah. I think that's pretty amazing. So I think you maybe end up with some competition soon. It's sounding like... Oh, yeah. I hope so. I mean, the amount of work that comes out of that is incredible. So if someone thinks he's up to you to the game, please do start and contact me. I know I might move some work your way as well. Excellent. Well, on behalf of myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Step With Web Marketing and my, unfortunately, absent co-host, Jennifer Evans-Lekock, Director of Social Media at SideLogic. Thank you again. And give me a listen to SEO 101. We hope you tune in next Monday at 5 Eastern Time or Too Pacific for our next show. [MUSIC PLAYING] The level of connection you feel in your home dramatically influences your experiences there. 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