 Thanks, Marlesia. Can you guys hear me? All right, cool. Awesome. As Marlesia said, I'm Bobby Kircher. I'm my company's Popeye Internet and I do digital marketing consulting, mostly in SEO and digital advertising. I got my start, I built like my first web page while I was at the University of Central Florida in 1995, a long time ago, and I started web development in 1998 and this year it's like 20 years. I'm like, whoa, how did that happen? Don't let this baby face fool you. I've been around on this planet for a little while. And I started doing SEO even with web development. I didn't really get into SEO until about 2002 when I started building my own websites. Those were like affiliate marketing websites that I was sending traffic to Amazon and other websites and making a little bit of commission if anybody made a purchase off using one of my links. And then I started my company Popeye Internet in 2004. And I'm a Google partner, which means I help clients spend a lot of money with Google, so they give me a little badge that I can use and brag about myself, right? But we're not talking about Google, Google AdWords actually, or Google Ads as they're called now. We're talking about Yoast. Who is using any kind of SEO plugin on their... Okay, cool. Who isn't using an SEO plugin? Ah, quite a few of you. Who doesn't know what SEO is and has no idea what I'm talking about? Okay, good. We've got one person. Okay, all right. That's right. It is search engine optimization. And what search engine optimization does is it helps search engines find content on your website and as a result helps people find your website. So that's what search engine optimization is and we all call it SEO. So if you hear SEO, now you know what it is. Cool. So Yoast is a plugin that is designed specifically for WordPress. It's been around for several years. And it's one of several SEO plugins that are available for WordPress. And I believe at this point it's probably the most popular and the most widely adopted. And it's free. So they have a free version. You can download the plugin, install it right away as many of you have. And you can get started with optimizing your website. Now, out of all of you who have installed Yoast SEO, how many of you have actually configured it and worked with it? Okay, cool. How many of you just installed the plugin and left it alone? Okay, cool. This session is especially for you. It's for everybody, but it's especially for you because there's a lot that Yoast can do. So Yoast is pronounced Yoast. It rhymes with toast. And if you guys don't know who this is, this is powdered toast man. And actually, what cartoon was powdered toast man a part of it? Raise your hand. Rented Stimpy. It's not a Yoast dancer, but cool. Yes, it was a Rented Stimpy cartoon. It was pretty edgy back when it came out. It's not even as edgy as all the stuff that we can see on TV now. But, you know, anyways, toast rhymes with Yoast. He is going to help us figure out how to use Yoast. So Yoast does a lot for your site. And even in the free version, it does a lot for your site. So there are basically two buckets that it helps you with. It helps you with your content on your website and it helps you with your technical SEO of your website. So content SEO and technical SEO. All in the free plugin that you just install on, you know, without any cost to you. So for content, what Yoast does is it helps you optimize your content for specific keywords that you're targeting. It helps you analyze the content that you've written and put on your page. And lets you know how easy is it to read. And if it's easier to read, then more people will be more likely to read it. And that applies to most people, unless you're like a scholarly journal kind of website. For the most part, people will want something easy, take easy concepts for them to read. It gives you recommendations on how to improve your content. It gives you a preview of what your page will look like in the search results on desktop and on mobile. So it gives you a little preview based on the content that you're entering like your title tags and your meta descriptions. It'll give you a preview of what that looks like. It also allows you to optimize how your listing will look like on Facebook. So if you've noticed, you've shared a link on Facebook. It gives you like the little preview with an image and it gives you like a little description of that. With Yoast, you can customize how that looks like within Facebook. So that's a lot of the content optimization that you can do with Yoast. On the technical side, you can control what content you want search engines to find. So for instance, you may have some pages that are landing pages that you use for your email blast that you don't necessarily want Google to index. So you can use Yoast to tell the search engines not to include those pages within the index. You can set your canonical URL. So if you have multiple pages that are very similar but you just want one link to rank in Google, you can configure the canonical URL to be specific to a single page. You can find out what pages are linking to one another. You can create breadcrumbs for your site with a little bit of programming work. You can have breadcrumbs as part of your site using Yoast. And you can link it to Google Search Console to find out which links are broken within your website. So that's a lot that it can do. That goes beyond just installing the plugin and hoping for the best. So there is a premium version of the plugin so you can pay a little more to Yoast. And it's got an annual fee which gives you some extra features for keyword optimization of your content. You can only pick one keyword per page on the free version. On the paid version you get five. You also get some social previews that you don't get on the free version. And Yoast loves to promote themselves within their plugin. If you pay for the premium you don't see those ads anymore. They don't bother me too much but in case that's a thing then you can turn that off. It gives you more control over internal linkings. It gives you a redirect manager for the premium and you can contact them for technical support. So you get a little bit more for the paid version but for the most part you get a lot of features for the free. I would say if you have a content heavy site and you want to target multiple keywords paying for the premium is definitely worth it. If you have a lot of pages on your website and you have to redirect content often that's another reason to pay for the premium. But you get plenty with the free. Plenty of features that you can work with and really take advantage of. So the thing that Yoast does not do it doesn't implement all these settings by itself. There is a wizard but really to control a lot of the settings you have to do it yourself. It doesn't do keyword research for you. So it will not suggest keywords based on the content that you have on your site. You actually have to do the research yourself in order to utilize the tool and make sure that you're using the right keywords. It will not write great content for you. It will give you suggestions on how to improve it but you have to create the content yourself. So you have to bring all this great content in order to make it work. It will not link content from page to page. So if you're like a recipe site and you want to link to other recipes that will complement what you have it will not do that for you. And it won't redirect old URLs. If you delete a page off your WordPress site it will not redirect that page for you. But before we get into the nitty gritty of all of this and it kind of speaks to what I was just saying before you have Yoast you can have Yoast and you can optimize it and you can have it work great but if you don't have unique original content on your website then Yoast isn't going to help you with your SEO. It's having compelling content unique content is really important if you want to just be a part of like the Google search results. And that includes like not copying not using the same content that you could find elsewhere. If your content is just Wikipedia articles that you found or like using almost like full sentences and I've seen this before if you're just pulling content from Wikipedia or from other sites you are not unique enough in Google's eyes. Google will always give preference to Wikipedia content. It will give preference to other websites that are considered higher authority. You're better off just creating great content because we're all unique individuals and our businesses are unique and what we offer is unique. Your content on your website should be as unique as you are. Does your website have backlinks? Does it have quality backlinks? That's important for SEO. So getting links from authority sites will help your website rank for all kinds of keywords. And not all backlinks are the same. We call them backlinks. Not all backlinks are the same. A backlink from the New York Times has a higher authority than a backlink from a small website that your neighbor may have put up yesterday. So having quality backlinks is important. Having a good structured website is important. So having your information organized in a certain way is key. And is your website fast to load? Is it responsive? Those are all things Google looks at as ranking factors now. Especially for mobile. If your website does not load quickly on mobile and Google now uses the mobile first index to index websites if it's not mobile responsive then especially on mobile devices you will not see your site rank as well unless it was optimized for mobile. So you could have Yoast but if you don't have these things then Yoast is not going to help you too much. So if you're missing these things Google will be like this. It will just crawl your site and be like meh. So make sure your content is unique. Awesome. Awesome as you guys are. Reflect that in your website. Reflect that in the content that you have. Cool. Do you guys know this reference? Get the point? Good. Let's dance. Janet Jackson. I see a few nodding heads. Okay. Alright. So first things first. If you don't have Yoast installed go get it. Download it. Install it. And activate it. So we'll get into some technical optimizations first. This is a lot. But these are all the things that you can do within Yoast. You can control the content that your website has. You can control pages that are on your website whether you want them indexed or not. And this will come in handy later when we're going through your XML files. So you can turn features on and off. You can have your tagged pages turned off so they don't get indexed. You can have your categories turned off so they don't get indexed if that's what you need to do. You can create title tags and meta description templates. So you can do a master template as far as what your title tags and meta descriptions will look like. You can sync it up to your Google search console. How many of y'all are using Google search console? Cool. Alright. That's less than half the room I think. If you haven't used Google search console, I recommend you do that soon. Because if you do a Google search for Google search console, you can register your website. And that's one of the best things to do to determine what your SEO looks like for your website. By registering your site through Google search console, you get email notifications from Google as to if you have issues with your site, if your site gets hacked. If it's finding that there's a lot of broken links on your website, you'll get those notifications. And you'll get information on how Google sees your website, how quickly it can load the pages, what pages are in its index. You get all kinds of information that you don't get with like Google Analytics. So if you're using Google Analytics, you get basically information and data on how people use the site. But with Google search console, you get data and information on how Google sees your website. So if you haven't done that already, do so today. And actually you can link your Google Analytics to your Google search console so you can get some of that data into Google Analytics. So other things you can do is you can modify your robots.txt and your htaccess files. You can customize your XML. You can enable your social media open graph data. You can modify that. You can customize your RSS feeds. You can turn off and enable Yoast features for even specific to people. If you have people who are writing content, you can limit their access to things that they can modify. And you can change your title tags and meta descriptions in mass. Yeah, so there's a lot you can do. So those of you who use Google search console, how many of you have created a sitemap or have submitted your sitemap? Okay, like five of you. Yeah, so this is one of the best features that Yoast can provide is creating a sitemap that you can submit to Google. And what that helps you do is that it helps you tell Google and Bing, like these are the pages that are important to me. These are the pages that I want Google to crawl and index. And so there's a generator inside Yoast that can help you do this. But the problem is that you may realize that if you look at your sitemap, it looks like there's a lot more content that you might realize. And to give you an example, this is what a Yoast sitemap looks like. So it creates a bunch of XML files based on the types of content that are on your site. So if you notice there's a sitemap for posts, there's a sitemap for pages, and there's a sitemap for categories and author for this particular sitemap that I'm using for an example. And so what Yoast does is it breaks it apart into these little sections. Here's an example of a sitemap that hasn't been optimized. So if you notice this website, I blurred it out because I didn't want to call them out in particular for their setup. But if you notice, there's a sitemap for Avada, right? So how many of y'all are using Avada theme builders? Okay, not many, okay. So Avada has a bunch of different features that are like extra as in like there's an FAQ. So the FAQ, which is just a single page of frequently asked questions, has a sitemap inside the Yoast sitemap. Also there's like a sitemap for the slider. There's a slider sitemap. These are pages that you really don't want to have indexed because the way that Avada creates an FAQ, even though there's like a list of questions, it actually considers each question its own page. And so Google will, if they find that sitemap and crawl it, they'll index each one of those questions as a different page. And so you end up with a website that has, like if you notice, these are all FAQ questions. These are all individual pages, even though they're all within one page of an FAQ. So doing a site colon, I can see what Google has indexed. And you can see all these questions that are part of that FAQ all have their own individual pages. And so what happens is that Google will crawl these pages and index them. And it's like all these extra pages that Google has to crawl through. And Google won't give you, like, it'll limit the number of times it'll crawl your site, depending on how quickly it loads, depending on how much content you have. So you're using resources that Google can use to find your important content to crawl all these individual pages that you may not even realize that are there. So what you can do is you can optimize your sitemap so that it doesn't index these individual categories. And I'll go through a demo so we can go see how this all works out. So within Yoast you can do a lot of content optimizations. And one of the things you can do is you can set a focus keyword and it'll analyze your content and see how many times you're using that keyword within the content. And give you suggestions on how to improve it. And it'll also give you the suggestions on how to improve, like if it's easy to read or if you need to make it easier to read. And it uses a flesh reading scoring to determine, like, how easy is this content to read. You can individually update your title tags and meta descriptions. So for each page that you have you can make customizations to how that title tag looks like within the Google search results and the meta description. By default WordPress will use whatever the title of the post or the title of the pages for your title tag. But you can do some customizations if you want to improve what that looks like in the search results. So you can preview and you can see a preview of what that looks like in it. You can set a custom image for social sharing, you can update your titles and meta for social. And you can exclude specific pages from the search results. So if you want to just tell this one specific page you don't want in Google you can do that. And there's a special feature called cornerstone content and it updates the scoring. If you set a piece of content to be cornerstone, which is this is a piece of content that you want to have a lot of copy in or a lot of content in. Let's say it's like a guide or an essay on your subject matter and you want to have a lot of content to go along with it. You can set it as cornerstone and it will adjust the scoring based on that. There's always been questions about page builders whether that works with Yoast and it does. Yoast is over the years they've improved Yoast so that it can analyze content even within page builders themselves. So yeah. All right, cool. You guys want to dig in and see what this all looks like and stop hearing me talk about all this technical stuff and we can kind of get into the nitty gritty. All right. Cool. So when you first look at Yoast, it'll take you to the dashboard and it'll give you like a wizard, a configuration wizard that you can go through. And the configuration wizard gives you just like a quick, it'll set some of these settings for you. And it's just a very baseline level kind of wizard. But it helps you get started. And so there's like a in the general section you have the dashboard you've got features. Features helps you turn off turn on and off certain things like, you know, do you want to do the SEO analysis? Do you want to do a readability analysis? Do you want to turn on or off site maps? Like if you use another site map generator within your within your WordPress installation, then you can turn this off. I usually keep most of these things on. And then I because this blog in particular has multiple authors, then I've turned off the security setting to turn off the advanced settings for the authors because they don't need to be tinkering around with it. So and then in this tab here in the webmaster tools tab, you can configure your special codes for to verify your website with Bing or with Google. Yeah. No, no, no, it's all your settings stayed the same. Yeah. No, I you you'll see some things actually just get turned on. So you'll see features like that may have been disabled will be enabled for you. So it's basically using the same plugin. Yeah. And so like you can see all the different ads that are on the right. If you get the premium, those ads will get turned off. So here under search appearance on the left hand side, there's search appearance there. There's multiple tabs up here. And here is where you can configure your your homepage title tag and meta description. Since your homepage gets the most traffic, this is probably a page that you want to optimize specifically for for the site. So this is where you can do that and it'll override whatever setting you have on the your homepage if you use your page as the homepage. So you can control that right right in here. And so here are the different content types and for for this page under content types, you see posts and pages. Here's where you can decide whether you want to keep thing, turn things on or off. And you simplified a lot of this so that if you don't want to see how it asks show posts in the search results. When you turn this off, that removes it from the site map and it also adds a no index directive for the for these posts for the post post type. So that Google when Google crawls the posts, it'll see this no index directive and then we'll say okay, we won't put this in our search results then. Where that's helpful is that if you have a if you don't have a blog, then maybe you turn off the post feature. And that way, if you had any posts that you don't really use or or or don't have, then it won't index them. It comes really helpful as we look into taxonomies and taxonomies here you can see that we have categories and tags and and post format for this blog in particular. And you know for I keep the categories for this blog because we optimize the categories. So if your blog has a category for and you're in your being very specific about it, then you can set this to to stay up. You can keep them in the search results for tags. How many of you guys use tags for your blog? Do you are using them separately from categories or do you know that? Okay, cool. Because if for most people they don't really it's not really necessary to have the tags indexed unless you've optimized your tags. Because what you end up having is just this very thin content page where it's just a page with a bunch of blog posts based on a specific tag. So ideally if you're going to have your tags indexed then make sure that tag page that you've created for it that automatically gets created for it. Optimize it like add content to it so that it's very unique than just actually a list of blog posts. So if you're not and if you're not going to optimize it or maybe you're not you just don't feel the need to turn it off set it to no. So that way it doesn't get indexed because those are all extra pages that get part of your search crawl. And so if it's not really optimized then there's no point in having it indexed. So for post format the same thing it's like if you're just having a page that shows an image or all the images that are on your site or PDFs. There's really no point in having those indexed if the images themselves will get indexed. So you can turn you can you can turn those off in the search results as well. So here with archives same thing you know I apply the same logic here for this blog in particular the authors have specific voices. So they we want to have those authors indexed but if it's just one author then there's no point in having those pages get indexed. And even with date archives you know for this blog in particular dates date the date archive isn't that important so I have this set up to disable this well. So in all of this will will keep from creating all these thin content pages on your site that Google will just crawl and index but it's not going to rank for much of anything or get much traffic. So you're limiting the number of pages on your site which is actually better for SEO. You guys still with me. Okay. Yeah you could you could turn them off individually if you wanted to. So those would be in this in the in the settings for the author themselves. You can disable that for the specific author. Yeah. Yeah. So and that's the cool thing about yours is that you can go. You can optimize all these different pages and all these different categories and all these different post types. And that's what's really so great about it. Like I feel like categories are one of those post types that don't get optimized a lot. I speak to my clients quite a bit about how they can better improve their their their category pages because that can serve as a landing page for even what they're trying to sell or what they're trying to promote as content. For a client of mine who's in that's a newspaper we optimized they really had no category strategy. And so what we did is we updated their site structure so that their categories would get indexed and we're working on trying to get them to write content specific to those categories because people look for news specific to not just an article but like they're looking for like Atlanta news. I'm in Atlanta so it's in their Atlanta papers. It's like Atlanta news or Atlanta events or Atlanta cultural stories. You know those are the kind of things that can get indexed if you optimized your your category pages and your category sections. So yeah and here you can enable breadcrumbs here you can you can even set up how you want your breadcrumb path to appear and even the special characters that you want to separate your breadcrumbs breadcrumbs are can be helpful for navigation and also for Google to find how your website is structured. It also can appear as a rich snippet within the search results. So you can you can actually you can set up categories here. This sometimes requires development in order to to enable it because you can turn it on here but you actually have to put in some code within your functions PHP in order to have the breadcrumbs appear breadcrumbs. OK so if you if you've seen on websites where it you might see like above the content you might see like home and like if it's a recipe site I love using recipe sites as an example for this. So it's like home and you say like dinner and then turkey and you could be like turkey dishes or or dinner dishes or dinner meals and it's all separated by like a special character to separate the categories. And so it's all done in one line and they're hyperlinked so you can click on one of those links and it will take you to the content that's related to that text that you've clicked. I'll give you an example let me show you an example of that here. As far as. Oh just OK so like the so that the difference is and actually I don't even think I don't think this site in particular has it. So the link when you're talking about a link on a page it's like the link within the content itself versus links that would appear up in the top and like below this navigation here this site in particular does not have it. Does that help explain the breadcrumb concept or not not quite OK let me show you another let's see if we have another example here. Of what that looks like if we go to the Moz blog they may have some examples of this. So this is this is actually more of their categories but it's it's a similar concept where it shows like their tools advanced SEO and then there's their whiteboard Friday. And so it kind of shows the hierarchy of this content that's not like links within this page here right and not navigation up here. And so it's like a trail that you follow for for content where the content is organized. It's much like a library when when you go to a library you your your books are organized in certain sections right like you have nonfiction and fiction you have nonfiction biographies right. And you know biographies presidents right so you can go like down the down the line of of what that how that organization is architected. Yeah. And so and even for the web when you're designing when you're organizing the content on your on your blog and on your website it's helpful to organize this content into correct sections right. A lot of times I see blogs appear on the route so like people want to get rid of the blog text as part of their URL structure. And so what that ends up happening is that all your content ends up coming off the route and there's no organizational structure to what where the content is cool. Cool. So let's go. I want to show you guys the how we organize our how the host. Utilizes the content analysis. So if you see here this is the Yoast SEO section within a post. Here's the content of this particular post right and here's the analysis here. So we've picked one keyword. I don't have the premium on this one in particular but this is using. So we're using only one keyword to focus on. And this is a content this is content about roasting pans and our focus keyword is roasting pans. And you can see here the analysis that it gives based on that keyword. So and it's it's in these three colors red orange and green. And so here it's telling me that the focus keyword doesn't appear on on the in the in the first paragraph. It's telling me that the keyword density is too low and that there's no internal links on this page. So those are like that's what they see as key problem areas. These are areas where I can have some improvement. So like medic descriptions and images. There's some issues with those. And then here are are my good results here. So like it does even like a counts the keyword or counts the words in my content. And it says that it's above the recommended minimum of 300. If this was a cornerstone article the the recommended minimum would be at least 800 for that. So I know a lot of people want to try to get all green lights for this. And you know for me I I don't I don't try to get all green because you can spend a lot of time trying to optimize just one piece of content when really you should just be create keep creating content. So this should be a guideline as to how to write good content. But I wouldn't put too much stock into like marrying like trying to get all green lights because you know at some point you have to decide. Is it worth trying to optimize like to the nth degree or is my time better suited just creating keeping like keeping on creating amazing content from our website. So but this is like out of all the plugins that you can get for as far as SEO Yoast does the best job at analyzing your content and and giving you really good suggestions on it. So you know a lot of I see a lot of people I talked to about SEO they want to they're trying to think of the littlest things that they could do but really a lot of it comes down to what what I said in the beginning. Like creating amazing unique compelling content for for your visitors so that they keep coming back and Google looks at things like unique content and good user experience as important factors in ranking. So it's trying not to get too bogged down into the minutiae of like how are you going to get better rankings by looking at these little metrics that may may drive you bananas if you don't get them all right right. So any questions so far the so so if I'm answering this if I'm understanding this correctly. Yeah so by default actually if there's no keywords here then it won't give you an analysis so you have to put in the keyword first to get the analysis in the beginning. So it won't give you any any suggestions until you put a focus keyword as far as the content optimization goes does that answer. Yeah so let me let me let's let's go back. What happened here let's take up the focus keywords and then we can see what kind of analysis that we get for this particular piece of content. So yeah so like here you see that the number of suggestions has greatly been reduced right. But it does give you idea of like how many words your content has like the meta description is long. So we were doing some experimentation with the longer meta descriptions that Google was indexing although they've now pulled back on on the amount of characters in the meta description. So we've yeah so it's giving that suggestion again about that it's over 156 characters. So and then it says no focus keyword is in this piece of content so yeah does that help. Okay yeah only one with oh so you were putting multiple keywords in the ah and then it's like and then it's you mean you you mean yours is only seeing one. Yeah no so so Yoast doesn't do anything as far as like Google's concern and communicating with Google. Yoast doesn't communicate with Google at all. Has nothing to do yeah it has nothing to do with with how Google sees your your rankings. Right yeah yeah so this is just what this this tool does is it's a guide it doesn't do any kind of push to Google. It doesn't do any kind of communication to Google at all. The the the only thing that it does is it changes the code on on on your like for example if you have pages that don't you don't want to get indexed it updates. Yoast updates the content on the page it updates the HTML on the page to write a directive to let search engines know that do not that you're not supposed to index this page. So that's as far as the communication goes with Google. But like entering anything in here for your content analysis it is purely a guide for the content that you have on it within your your post. No no these are just guidelines yeah right well if you're in a very competitive field and you want to make sure that your content is as optimized as you can make it then you might you will probably use one of this use this more often. It also helps you write better content if you're not used to writing content for for the web then using a tool like this will give you guidelines and be helpful in in writing better content for the web. Sure yes so when you say keywords you mean putting keywords in like a keyword meta tag yep that keyword meta tags are just not they search engines ignore it. In fact in fact if you put a bunch of keywords in the meta keyword tag they might think you might be doing some something specific suspicious that you're trying to do it. But those days of putting keywords in meta in in a keyword meta tag those have been long gone for a while. Yeah you want it needs to be in your content it needs to be in your content needs to be like in your title tag how you name your products to use products as an example then you want your product name to have the keywords in in there. But you don't want to and that's the other thing too is you don't want to overdo it either because Google has gotten smarter about how it looks at content and how it understands it. So you don't want to go too overboard with it. So that's why I say like about percentages you don't want to get too nuts about you know percentages yeah yeah. Okay yeah all right sure yeah absolutely I'll have these slides up I have some resources that I that are in within these slides and and I'll have them up online and you can contact me just about anywhere. Under Bobby Kertcher or visit my website at papainternet.com I hope this was informative and not too much of a wind tunnel of information but if you have any questions come see me after and yeah thanks appreciate it.