 So good afternoon. Thanks for sticking around. It's probably been a long day for most of you We're going to talk about technical SEO and I'm going to try and keep it as non-technical as I can The funny thing about technical SEO is that a lot of developers think that SEO is stupid or SEO is hard or SEO is something that they really shouldn't be thinking about all that much and SEO goals for projects are often very ill-defined or not defined at all Every time some major brand re-launches their website Everyone in the SEO community cringes Because they always forget even the most simple basics of things And I think it's stupid because if you're a web developer or a company owner you can make so much money by just asking the right questions up front and by Going into a project knowing what you have to do to maintain the rankings of a website or problem or Hopefully even make them better So you have to realize that a badly SEOed project will never ever get you a satisfied customer If you deliver a website and nobody ever visits that website That customer is not making more money to spend on you making that website better. It's as simple as that I was actually very happy to hear Matt say earlier that we have to think of people as they type something into Google What what will happen when they get to a website? I'm like, yeah, well, there's a plug-in for that So I want to give you a couple of reasons not to listen Because this is what usually web developers do They say this is marketing. It's not development. They say things like that's not what my customer asked me to do This will make us more expensive. This will make us too expensive and Well, some of that might be true. It might make you more expensive, which means that it makes you more money So there's a plus side to that It also makes your customer feel like you are truly on top of what you're doing And you very often hear like yeah, but we need to listen to the customer The problem is that usually the customer hasn't thoughts about most of this enough You need to help them You all are the web natives here, you're here at WordCamp Your customers probably are not the people who you're built sites for are probably not here And if you are lucky you still ask all these questions so There's a lot of questions that I'm going to tell you to ask and tell and explain to you why you should be asking these questions and Then you'll at the end come up with like yeah, there's a lot of things that we know about but that we cannot do It's perfectly fine to say that but it's a lot easier when you do it up front and say okay So we know that this is something that actually should be done But we don't have a budget for it or we cannot do it or whatever Then when you go halfway through the project where you released a new website and Suddenly someone goes hey I'm looking up at old URLs in Google and I'm not getting to the good page on the website And that's like yeah, we didn't do the redirects. We talked about that. Remember. It's here You said that would cost us 5k and I said and and you said that was too expensive. So we didn't do it You can still do it now. We'll still cost you 5k something like that So we're gonna go through the five phases of building a website and the SEO issues that are attached to that What's important to note is that even though these are five phases in development? It's probably best if you ask all these questions up front First of all, we start with analysis simple stuff What does success look like and I know I signed sound like a boring business consultant as I say that But what does success look like it's probably the single most important question you can answer You can get answers from for any customer you ever work for and then what the success look like is not beautiful or It has a shiny slider or it has this color and our logo. No, it's metrics Visitors conversions sales, whatever Determine those metrics and then also determine how people are coming to your customer's website right now If they already have one and I assume by now that most people will already have a website so How are they coming to the site and what are you coming to do and are you replicating all of those possibilities into the new site? And if not, why not and that's mostly the boring part But it is good to ask those questions Then you get to the design phase, which is something that can either take two days or two years or anything in between of course But usually people start right off and like okay, so we want it to look like this That's not how this works SEO Starts with thinking about what type of content will I need to put on this site? To be found for the keywords that I want to be found for and how do I structure all of that into one site structure? I'm going to assume that all of you were in Marika's talk here earlier If not, it'll be on WordCamp TV later on and there's a lot of content that we've written about how to optimize your site structure It is really something that you should be thinking about upfront The amounts of sites that we've gone into and have to fix later on because nobody thought about hey We need to add this we need to add that and then menus that looks very pretty and small in the beginning suddenly turn into Beam offs with 10 or 12 menu items because yeah, we needed to put this in and this in and this in That doesn't work Now I should go through that There's also things that you need to think about when you're structuring that thing because that menu with 12 menu items that doesn't work so well on mobile and Mobile used to be something that you could consider and over the last Year or so we've switched from mobile is something you could consider to a desktop website is something you could consider Google has announced something called mobile first indexing and they've been announcing that for about two years Where in they look at a website as though it's presented on a mobile phone? When they index your site so when they grab the data from those pages They look at the mobile version of your site They announced that and they've started rolling it out So currently about 1% of the sites that we monitor is in the mobile index And all of the sites that are already in the mobile index were responsive to begin with so they worked on mobile But they do look differently on mobile than they do on the desktop It's not something to be afraid of because we've not seen any ranking changes or anything that makes me feel really bad about it But not having a mobile website is not gonna last you anymore And related to that there is something else that's very important as speed How fast should this website be? How much money are we willing to invest into making this the fastest website in our area and Yes speed is something that you can differentiate yourself with from your competition a Faster website performs better for users. It does better in search as well and That and the importance of that is only getting bigger So much bigger that Google is here with an entire booth With a team That those of you who are also in the SEO community will recognize because everyone in the SEO community thinks of that team as the amp team The funny thing is you know what they call themselves here They call themselves the developer relations and WordPress team Because that is the same thing Their WordPress team is their amp team and vice versa How they look at the web is about openness And amp is part of how they perceive the open web can work further If you get a chance to talk to Paul Bacaus, he's here. He's one of the Googlers He has an awesome website Paul Bacaus calm, which is a very good example of What amp can look like? That entire site is only amp There is no normal html version of that site He turned he coined the term for that which is canonical amp and That's what they're pushing towards They're pushing towards all of us building our sites in amp html not a normal html now I used to be very against all of this But I have to say the amp html spec is by far the fastest moving web spec I've ever seen I Pity sometimes that it's not a w3c spec and that it's not as open as some of the other ones But at the same time the specs that are open like that the CSS specs and all the things that we know we can do with all of that took years to come into somewhat of a fruition I Got my first dips with WordPress back in 2006 when I started the website called CSS 3.info I was doing a thing called CSS 3 previews in which I showed people what CSS 3 would look like and how that will work It took eight years For mainstream browsers to go from having that spec out there to actually implementing that and be and allowing that to happen It took less than six months For a large portion of the web to adopt amp and build pages in amp html This is truly a very very fast effort in terms of how web standards evolve So it's something that you really should be looking at and discussing with your clients Because they will be asking you about amp pages sooner or later. It's better if you ask them. Hey, do you know what this is? This is how it works. We can do this and this and this with it then you need to think about international especially here in Europe because As painful as it is to say, this is usually something that comes up in Europe and that they forget about in the US If WordPress had been built in Europe WordPress would have had multi lingual baked in from the start Unfortunately, it does not so it's something you need to think about and something you need to work on But it also means that you need to think about how to tie languages and things on sites together If you have an English site a French site and a German site How are you gonna make sure that all of the important content isn't all three of them and? Are you aware that the content needs to be ranking in keywords that people dare actually use not the ones? You translate it through Google translate because that's not how international SEO works So talk about that with your clients and then think about things like hreflang Now this is about the most complicated thing that we've ever created in the SEO world SEOs go mad over it It's almost as hard as CSS not much higher But it is something that a lot of SEOs make a lot of mistakes with It would probably bet and be better left in the hands of web developers because they can actually read and follow instructions So Please You guys do it and don't ask SEOs to do it because most SEOs I've seen do it They break it Now as you have all these types of content and all these other things on a website There's something else that you need to think about Google is pushing along with amp a system called schema org Which pushes metadata? It's basically telling Google what is on a page The funny thing that most people don't realize is that every amp page has a block in the source code That is like a full Json Ld block of code Which has everything around about that page in a very easily machine readable state What you can do with schema org is almost limitless, especially because it's an extensible thing But if you go to schema org and you look at like what these schemas are that's basically a taxonomy for the entire world It goes from this is a local business local business hairdresser or Something like and you can specify very precisely What is on a page and by doing that you're helping Google and other search engines being just announced even better support for it You're helping them Understands your site better There's also a schema now for breadcrumbs and And actually this morning I got permission from Google. I haven't even told my team this yet I got permission from Google to put the breadcrumbs schema that we can generate in Yoast SEO onto every page Regardless of whether there's actually breadcrumbs on that page Which means that we can show Google the structure of your website without even having the breadcrumbs Now I still think having the breadcrumbs is a good idea But showing Google the structure of your site in a structured way like that will allow them to better understand the structure of your website far More easily then there's accessibility and I can't stress this enough accessibility in SEO go hand-in-hand Think of Google as a blind person and most of what you will do will be right Also you as a community have a responsibility to build stuff that people can use So it is okay for you to say this is the bare minimum of accessibility level that we will deliver It is truly okay to say no we cannot do that like that because nobody who's slightly Who has some form of trouble with using that web page cannot use it? Of course, sometimes that means that you have to make some fallbacks for things and that it is not as easy for someone who is using An assistive device to do that thing as it is for someone who does not use that assistive device. That's fine but have some Basic level of accessibility and when doing that you'll find that Google actually uses most of that as well Now in all of this it's important that you need to allow for growth not just in menus But in how you think about all these things and how you build all this That's why WordPress is so awesome because you can always throw in an extra plug-in and do something extra If you're not using WordPress it becomes a lot harder Now during the development phase there's two things that I think you really should be thinking about first of all If you add plugins to add functionality, that's awesome But think about what they do to your website Think about the SEO impact and the speed impact of those plugins and Some plugins are better than others in terms of how they work for the user But some plugins are also better than others in how they work for Your SEO in How they add CSS and JavaScript and all these things to the front end that you don't really need but that's slow the site down This is a continuous battle And Then there's the thing that I think actually is probably the most important thing that you need to remember today If you only want to remember one thing That is if you're going from website a to website be and The URLs change and you do not make redirects. You have made a mess I'll tell you a nice example. We have a bank in the Netherlands who used to rank number two for the word loan Which is something that's worth quite a bit of money They did a redesign and they forgot to redirect the page they had for the word loan to the new page they had for the word loan They lost that ranking and they never recovered it because they still today have not put that redirect in place and I see all of you go like that. But to be honest this happens on a daily basis With the biggest brands in the world So please talk to your customer about hey, we need to do redirects. These are the old URLs This will be the new ones if we have a list here We can make an Excel file and then you know what there's a plugin that can do redirects where you can import CSV files It's all very useful Okay, and then you go to the later phase. You've developed that thing. You're you're good to go You're going into publication You need to test that website and I would urge you if you're building a slightly larger website to automate that testing process Because if you can automate that testing process you can run it again when you do a small update So if you update with WordPress or a plugin and you can rerun your acceptance testing because you've automated it You can save yourself a lot of time and a lot of embarrassment Now automated acceptance testing is not something that we've done a whole lot off in the WordPress world We're now working on it at Yoast and we're having some very awesome results We'll definitely share about that But it is something that you should really be thinking about how can I test these things without having to test it manually all the time and Then everyone's happy websites launched You're you're all going yay, and then you tell absolutely nobody Or you don't of Course you need to go out there and promote that new website You can be proud of what you build right if you if you're not willing to tweet about or Facebook about a new website that you've launched Then look deeply at why am I not willing to do that for my customer? and Maybe next time don't take that project So help them because the funny thing is that getting links and getting a bit of promotion for a website only Just a few links will already help so much in getting that new website doing well a Few tweets a link from your from your website as a developer can help your customer rank like that If it's especially if it's a smaller business Now the opposite of that the link in the footer back to your own website is not something. I'm the biggest fan of Because it looks weird for everyone It's a bit like yeah, we've built this and I've built this house I'm gonna keep this poster up in front of the house forever and ever and ever That doesn't work But you can make deals about that and if you give them a discount and they and you do something about that That's okay, but please make sure that you discuss this up front with your client Now we've launched that website and then we go into maintenance mode And that it's always boring and the part where everyone makes mistakes Google search console still doesn't have enough users And it will never have enough users until every website on the planet that wants to be in Google is in Google search console so if you have a website and Added to Google search console and you discuss with your customer who will look at those emails and who will action them and Google sends out a lot of emails So be ready for that Especially when you do amp they will tell you like hey You're you've got social sharing buttons on the normal version of this page But you don't have them on the amp version of this page emails like that Now I can tell you that some of them you can absolutely ignore If you want to But someone needs to look at those because there are also messages where it says hey in the last few days We've suddenly seen a spike of 404s on your website. We've seen a spike of errors Look at that go into that fix that That's not something that can wait for two weeks because if it waits for two weeks and your customer loses all its rankings Who's to blame? you Then there's this thing called security that we talk a lot about in the wordpress world accepting contributor days because yesterday The security table was awfully empty But it's really important a hacked website is Absolutely the worst thing that can happen to you in terms of SEO trust me. We've seen enough We've stopped doing our side reviews But when we were still doing our side reviews about one in a hundred sometimes two in a hundred in bad times of those people Requesting reviews were coming to us and they were saying yeah We suddenly lost all our rankings and then we had to look at the website for about two minutes and tell him Yeah, so here's a link to sucary get your get your hack cleaned up. You've been hacked Then resubmit the site to Google and wait for a bit Usually takes a month two months Sometimes sometimes it goes faster, but then you'll be back But that's all we did at that point I know we didn't charge those customers because we're not like that, but this happens a lot more than you think It really really is pretty common for people to say I've got an SEO problem and then you look at the site And you're like yeah, you've been hacked So once you've done all of this you got to go back Into analysis because well you've launched that site and you're maintaining it and you're doing all of that well But things can be done better and I'm always appalled by how bad a lot of development agencies follow up after they've delivered a site because that's when you can Start making real money. You can start saying hey, we've built this for you now We see this going well, but this could be slightly better. Let's do that as with a lot of these things um It's a process and As with any good process talk it wouldn't be Complete without an ugly image But this is a continuous cycle It's also infinite which my designer did very well, I think I Really want to urge each and every one of you to think about these things and use them in your sales process Because I think everyone who does this as a development agency or as a single developer can make so much more money and lead to So much happier clients by doing this right and Yes, that means a lot we need a lot less SEOs in the world But I can tell you that these conferences are a lot more fun than the average SEO conference So that's a good thing There's a couple people here that know Jono on our team a Reese there. I mean this is different, right? It's people like each other here. So More web developers that do things well less SEOs is a good thing for the planet So please follow my advice. Thank you I swear every time I hear this man speak I come away completely enthused by this stuff And yet every time between those talks I kind of fall into the same habits that you just described So it's good to top the fuel level up every now and again We will have questions I imagine who's got a question. I've got one right over there white t-shirt. I Did that to see that corner again We need to get these flowing Hello Thank you for a great talk when doing the reader which you talked about I'm gonna remember that always often we get into the discussion of The pages that disappeared should that go to the 4-4 or should they go to Fun page because the client always wants to the front page and we often says Fulfill well four four is never the right solution because if you decide to delete it on purpose And it should be a so-called 410 Which is a HP status code for this content has been deleted and then Google will take it out of the search results and Will know and will not come back as much so that means that the link leaves the search results a lot faster and by doing that people will not have the Incredibly annoying experience of clicking on a link and in Google and reaching a 4-4 because that is a very bad experience now if you have multiple pages that disappear and you want to redirect them to the home page to me that is a weird thing That usually means that you've not thought enough about okay. What content did we have and where should it go now? So I would urge you to put more thought into it and make sure that the pages do not Disappear I can honestly tell you that in an SEO project. I've never ever seen a site get smaller So one page websites do not exist for SEOs these are not a thing and Almost every website I've worked on professionally has gone from like 10,000 to a hundred thousand pages more likely Then from a hundred thousand back to 10 so Think about that more and if you have to do a redirect a redirect to the home page for a large number of pages is usually a pretty bad idea So please then do it redirect to a page. That's asleep. That's at least Topically related to what the page was on Okay, thank you. Thank you Next one up front here. You can see better than I can then Faster faster faster faster I want a question right over there next time. Okay, sorry Hello tosses my name thing. Thanks for the talk and it's their time where you can stop the redirect Half a year or is there anything you can recommend? Yes, like there's something I can recommend you never you're not gonna like it never Why is that then? Because even after four years Google still comes back It Google and every search engine in the world has a very hard time really forgetting URLs I wish it were different and I think we'll need to get to a future where it is slightly different but We call it a permalink in WordPress for a reason The only thing annoying about that is that what you can change your permalinks So but a permalink is a permalink It is something that is permanently a URL a URL in the HP standard is not something that can go away Yes, but if if we tell Google that this link is for the future the other link doesn't Change they anything in the index? It should it doesn't enough. So there's a Everyone knows that or everyone most developers know a 301 or 302 So for you to temporary for you on this permanent You've also got 307 which is a better sort of temporary direct you've got 308 which is go there and never come back here. I Wish they would support that You take it up with them with their booth There's a question just here. He's standing up already. Hi. My name is near. Thanks for the talk Your story about the the bank and the loan where and when this I'm taking at the angle from another perspective that If you know if the bank didn't do anything about it Then there probably wasn't any real value to that second ranking. Otherwise people would have made some action happen I any comment on that I was at that bank Three months later We didn't have the authority to change it at that point. It was costing them a lot of money, but as banks go Some of these processes are it's sometimes more expensive to put in a redirect then you'd think Yeah, and but more expensive than the value of the ranking apparently it's stupid I mean that this this happens and I There's another good friend of mine who works at a grocery store in the Netherlands. It's blue everyone who's Dutch now knows What I'm talking about They have wrong canonicals on some pages Fixing that will make them more money, but it's the cost to fix it is too high So and their budget won't cover that so no, it's not happening Stuff like that happens all the time. It is very frustrating I'll be fair this even happens on WordPress.org Where we have things that we need to fix and we don't have the resources to fix them I think that too We have one right in the middle This might be a slight plant and you Mention the importance of analysis so you can go back and make business cases for doing more exciting stuff, etc Would you say that the same kind of thinking and principles as you've discussed apply to analytic setups in the same way? Yes, I They they apply to pretty much everything which is why the slides like this are both very beautiful and very bullshitty This this applies to your content this applies to your SEO this applies to your analytics this applies to life That's about as deep as I'll make it today Over this way, please This is Andrea from word lift I Just would like you to bring up a topic that you raised on Twitter that I found extremely interesting about fake traffic and how much SEO tools and crawlers are Generated traffic that is actually not driven by humans But by machines and also I would like to know if you see these as a threat for the industry That is built on organic traffic That machines are taking over's you know humans so let me reiterate what I said on Twitter, which is what you're referring to so John oh, and I were looking at the logs for use calm the crawl logs So Google comes by and crawls your site and indexes all those pages Now Google does that uses a lot of bandwidth on your site, but they sent you visitors in return So there's ROI on on them coming to do that to your site, and that's all good For use to a calm I think it's currently between 30 and 40 percent of all our traffic is crawlers and Only a small portion of that's Google most of that that is crawlers like by do Yandex being And well, then there's the even worse group of things. That's link research tools So what they do is they crawl the web to mimic how Google indexes the web So that SEOs can look at that and then do better SEO Stensibly, that's the thought I Think it's rather horrible that we allow that to exist in the way it exists today The web has always been like everyone can access any page for free and can do all that But that is now leading to us where we have seven servers running yos.com 40% of traffic is literally servers that are running to serve specific bots I Know from my time when I was at the Guardian that we have specific servers for it being like literal entire servers That we're just there because Bing was scraping the site and Bing wasn't sending any traffic Or very little I mean the ROI was definitely negative So I think though that I is something that we need to get better at and we need to figure out a way to do In a more in a smarter way now There is something called common crawl that crawls the web and that everybody can access that data. I Wish they could would all just get together and say okay common crawls They're not gonna do all the crawling to everyone and then all these Tools can then use the common crawl database to build everything on top of that I think that would be better and that is a very open source way of thinking thinking So it's not a surprise that I would think like that But it's it's a tough thing to think about and I Well, I'm not done with my thinking about this yet, but I've definitely Suggested like well, we could just block them in WordPress If we block in where if we as WordPress Community decide to block some of those crawlers we block literally 30% of the web for them So we make their database useless, so we force them into common crawl It's something to think about it's not something that we really necessarily need to do now So right is so if you install your sysio, we do an indexation check to check whether your site is indexable That is absolutely a crawler that does the that same thing There's an ROI there in terms of it Grabs your home page to see whether you're indexable that that's something that you get back For most of these crawlers you get nothing back The web as a whole gets not much back and there are a lot of trees and electricity wasted To do all that. I think that's something that we well, we could probably do that better than we're currently doing Yes, I confess I've never heard of common crawl until you tweeted about it. Who is it? Who's doing it? so it's a group of ex-googles Funnily enough that started it and there's a Relatively cool group of people attached to it So if even Danny Sullivan who's the current search liaison for Google is on their board So there is some some good connections there to people to have actual crawl infrastructure to do things nicely So I think I could actually be something real and we should probably support it So it's good to me. We've got time for one or two more questions. Hello. No, we have one down here Okay before my question. I have two comments regarding deactivating the 301 radar acts and don't forget that Besides search engines, we may have backlinks or social share. So it's important to keep them forever Because they don't hurt. They're just there if they are not used. It's okay Well, they don't hurt if you only have a few of them if you if you keep redesigning your website becomes very annoying So don't do that So regarding the The redirects and missing the redirects when when you you make a new website So I just want to comment that we have seen two of the major newspapers in Portugal Making that mistake and they just break broke all of their history from one day to two to the other Okay, so and my question is regarding HRF lengths So do you think it's okay? So if you have a Shop a WooCommerce shop that you you have in three languages, but it's not really specific For the country do you think it's okay to only keep the the language part of the code and not the language plus region That is how hreflang works so you can set either a language or a language plus region and if you just have three languages and just setting three languages is fine Okay, because I see a lot of mistakes there. So yeah, there's a lot of mistakes in how people deal with that It's it's a bit of a weird spec, but it's not as bad as some people make it out to be But yeah, no just the language is fine and would probably solve a lot of things for a lot of people Okay, we have a question. Where's it gonna stop? there and Then one in the middle and I think that'll be all Hi, Kenneth from Denmark We build a lot of sites which are multilingual e-commerce sites and And Many of them has a Canadian site an Australian site a English site a lot of English. Yes sites. How should we proceed with the? Yeah, with hreflang. Yeah, so you can fix that with it would be duplicate No, it would be a duplicate, but it's not necessarily problematic But with hreflang you can actually fix that so you can say this is the ENGB version This is the ENAU version, etc. Just like the Germans can do DEDE and D What's a CH and at AT? Austria is always like that should be a you, but it's not So if we do that that that would be that would be yeah, but you need to do that on a page level So not unlike the home page, but on a page by page basis, which is what makes it so annoying. Okay Thank you. If anybody's watching us in the live stream from Australia, I'm sure he apologizes for that One more here, and then we're done. Hello. I have a question about red directions What is the better choice if I want to remove or some pages? I want to remove some pages from my website. For example, I used to have Service, but I no longer have it Is this a good thing to just remove those? Pages and forget them or is it a better option to redirect them to another page? If then if you don't have any related surfaces anymore Then I would remove them and set a 410 so that they disappear from the search results If you have related services, I would probably keep a page explaining that you don't do that particular Service anymore, but that you have these other services So give people another option if you can especially if it's a service that you've been advertising and people have been linking to It's a bit of a shame to let them go yeah So if you can redirect them somewhere useful then either like by writing a bit of text and telling them like okay So this is the service we used to have but we we don't do that anymore But we do have this that's a bit more work, but if that leads to a couple more customers. That's usually worth it So I would that's what I would probably recommend in most cases Thank you And folks that's where we're gonna leave it if anyone has any further questions on any of this stuff You may be able to find some people from the Yoast team I'm sure they will be very very eager to help will you give it up, please one last time for Yoast