 Good morning, and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Library Commission's weekly online event, webinar, webcast, online show, and we could be whatever. But we are here every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time, covering a variety of library topics, activities. The show is free and open to anyone to watch, both the live show here Wednesday mornings and the recordings, which are posted onto our website. We do a mixture of things here, presentations, book reviews, mini-training sessions, interviews, basically anything. If it's library-related, we are happy to have it on the show. We have guest speakers that come in, and we have Nebraska Library Commission staff that sometimes do presentations. And today, we have a mixture of that. Once a month, usually the last Wednesday of the month, we have our tech talk with Michael Sowers, who is our technology innovation librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Hi, Michael. Good morning, Krista. And he comes on once a month to talk about generally more techie-related things, tech news of the month, anything interesting that's happened, and pretty much every time brings on a guest. Yeah. Yeah. And this week, we have with us JD Thomas, who is going to talk about WordPress and SEO management and all the stuff that I don't know anything about. Well, something that I know about WordPress, I know that. So I'm just going to hand it over to you, Michael, to talk about what you've got JD on the line. Thanks, Krista. And good morning, everybody. As Krista said, I'm Michael Sowers here at the Library Commission, and this is our tech talk episode this month. And for, I believe, the second year in a row, we have JD on New Year's Eve. JD, is that correct? Was it New Year's Eve last year? It was the last session of the year. I'm not sure if it was New Year's Eve. Yeah. Well, it was at least a week of New Year's. Yeah. And so that weekend and Christmas week are always the fun times to say, are you around? Can you please be on the show? So JD, last year, I remember, talked about SHOGUS, a tool that he had put together. And so what we've got this time is talking about search engine optimization or SEO when it comes to WordPress. As many of you know, especially if you're from Nebraska, we here at the commission run a WordPress installation for both our blogs here at the commission and for a current count of 70 public library and library system websites across the state. I run WordPress myself for several personal sites and for some other organizations. And I will say by way of introduction is JD is the guy I ask a question of when somebody asks me a question and I don't know the answer. And this SEO stuff is something we've been looking at a lot lately doing here with both personally and at the commission. So JD, basically what I'm going to do is I'm going to hand it over to you. Tell us a little bit about your background for those who have not met you and go ahead and dive right into our topic of the day. Okay. I'm JD Thomas. I work with information today. I'm a publishing company in New Jersey. I manage all of our WordPress Linux and a lot of the Windows based websites. I also do consulting for WordPress for small organizations and nonprofits that are trying to create a better presence on the web. WordPress is open source and free to use for anyone. So it's a great place to start if you don't have a big budget, that sort of thing. And out of the box WordPress is fairly SEO friendly. By that I mean the site, the websites that WordPress are structured well. Depending on your theme, they have all the elements you really need to get started. But they're not really social media friendly. And that's why today we're going to be talking about both the SEO and the SMO as social media optimization and search engine optimization. Because SEO really focuses on out of the box experience and having your site's content show up in search engine results and how they look and whether or not Google understands that this page is the direction to your library. Or this page is your hours of operation. WordPress does that pretty well, but it can do better. And to do that we're going to be talking about the WordPress SEO plugin from Yoast. That plugin only works on self-hosted WordPress sites or WordPress sites that your administrator can install plugins for. Michael, do you guys have this one that you're available to your multi-user? We just installed it for the commission websites. We have not installed it for the libraries yet. It's nothing else because nobody's really asked for it. But we'll see how that goes after today. Okay, hopefully it will be available for people who want to use it. Because this really lets you take fine detailed control of everything. I mean literally everything. I'll walk you through all that. To install the plugin, it's pretty easy. If you've got your own WordPress site and your self-hosted, just go to your install plugins, go to option on the left, search for WordPress SEO by Yoast, and click the install button. I already have it installed on this site, so I'm not going to do that. But if your site doesn't allow you to just kind of install, you may have to download the plugin as a zip file and upload it through the system, or you may even have to FTP it off. It depends on how your WordPress site is implemented at the server level. Before we actually look at the plugin, I want to show you what links look like when they're shared to places like Facebook when they're not optimized. And I'm going to use the library commission post for that. There's a post here called what's Sally reading. And if we look at the way the metadata on the page on the post looks. Oops, hold on. I'm going to do the wrong one. I'm going to see that there's no description. Hold this up a bit so you can read this. There's no, sorry, let me scratch this wrong page. So this is that post shared to Facebook. And what I wanted to show you is that that page does not look like a regular link the way they look if you share them when it's fully optimized. And the reason this page shows up this way is because these images are tiny. So Facebook can't spread it across the top of the link and has to kind of fill in the gap here. This is what most stuff looks like on Facebook two years ago, three years ago. But they've changed since then and they've given you more options to let you make your posts stand out more and be more engaging. Let's go back to the plugin. I'm just worried that I'm not going to have time to go through it all. So I want to go back to here. On the WordPress plugin itself, once it's installed, you have all these options that I'm showing you on the left. First thing you want to look at is your titles and metadata. And this is key if you're running WordPress as a blog. One of the drawbacks with WordPress as a blog is that the home page is constantly changing. That's why I was at the Encompass blog earlier to look at it. So on this home page, there's several posts. And when you share this page to Facebook or on Twitter or any place else that's doing searching, it's going to change every single time if there's been a new post. But it doesn't have to. If you go to the Home tab here, you can actually specify the title of your website for the home page, which I'm using just my site name. And you can specify the description that will appear. So no matter what, if somebody shares the home page of my website, no matter what post is recent or what post is up there now, it'll always look like this when shared to Facebook. And you can do the same thing to set your defaults for all your different post types, for different pages. The gray area here, maybe we're going to get to that later. And if you have any custom post types, they'll also appear on here. This is important because you've got people that don't take the time to or don't have the time or don't have the inclination to create these descriptions themselves when they post things. This lets you set defaults, so at least you have something there. So it's not empty. And I want to show you on here some variables that are available to you. If you click on Help in the upper right corner, and click on Basic Variables, you'll see a lot of stuff that can be filled in for you on the fly. Like, for example, if I take my post description, sorry, my meta-description template for my post types, if I have that set as the category description, no matter what, if I haven't overridden it on an actual post, it'll at least show the category description with it, so it'll have some idea of what the post is about if it's shared. I'm just looking to try to play with me because I'm kind of, you know, retentive about this stuff, so I always store this stuff on my own. You can also use these options to hide the SEO features from post types. I wouldn't do that. There's kind of no reason to. Let me save this real quick. And in addition to the post types, you can do the same thing for your categories and your tag descriptions. These are for posts that are, pages on WordPress that are automatically generated based on posts, so we take a look here at these categories that are used for education and training. So this is all the blog posts on the Encompass blog, categorized education and training. If we set the WordPress SEO category description, we can actually include that so if somebody shares this page, they get a real description of that type, of that content, rather than just the most recent posts at the top of the page, which, you know, could be anything at that particular moment. Let me show you here. So JD, can I ask you a question? Absolutely. That's fine. I'm kind of thinking this through because I have this plug in myself and, like I said, we have the commission, but we're not really taking complete advantage of everything. So in most cases, we writing, let's say, we'll use random library, Acme library, they've set it up so that when they write a new post, it will share that post out to Facebook. And in that case, it will pull the title of the post, it will pull the description of the post, and that's what you want it to do. But what we're looking at here is if then a patron wants to share the home page of the library, which is a blog, if you don't set this, it will pull content from whatever the current first post is. Whereas setting this stuff will overwrite it, so it's basically more saying, like, this is the library's website. I'll show you. I just want to make sure I'm understanding what those settings do. So right now, we were to share the library commission's home page for the blog. This is what we get. It's not very meaningful. If you specify that information down here in this section, this is what would appear no matter what was on the home page at the time it was shared. OK, got it. OK. And then the taxonomy pages, these are the archive pages, like I showed you, like this page. You're looking at the category archive. So if you actually specify a category description, like I've done for these two categories, it would actually show that description when that category was shared. And there's lots of variables you can play with. The basic ones are the ones that matter most. These are the ones that you can just, you know, use in this way to go and update a category at a later time. You don't have to go back in here and change your stuff. So what do I have under father? Oh, for author archives, you can do the same thing. Date archives, these sort of things. So I think that covers the titles. I'm going to, at the end of this, I'm going to share a link. It's actually on my home page at www.techfund.org. There's a bunch of links there that give you more information about the stuff I'm talking about. One of the key ones there that I recommend everyone read is on titling. Titling your pages has a huge effect on both your search engine, optimization, and how engaged people are when they see it on social media. That's that tips on page titles. It's excellent. So after the titles, no matter we have our social data, this is where WordPress SEO from Ghost excels above anything else out there. There's nothing that compares to this. People who've used WordPress for a long time tend to have, you know, their favorite SEO plugins or favorite stuff, but nothing out there does what this does out of the box so easily. If you look here, you can see at the top there's three tabs, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. And for each one you can check whether or not to include that metadata in the posts and pages. Now I'm going to actually not be talking about the Google+. Since this plugin came out, Google+. has kind of gone back from using the schema.org market metadata. So I'm not going to get into what that is. But Google+. now is using OpenGraph, which is the same thing that LinkedIn and Plug and Facebook use. So whatever you specify for Facebook is what's going to show up on Google+. So you're going to say you want something different, which is sad, but it works. So for your Facebook, this is the same kind of thing we were just talking about under the Tiles and Metas for the home page. This stuff here, but under Facebook, this is what we specify for what we want to appear when somebody shares the home page to Facebook. And that includes an image. I chose to use this image just so you can see it. But there's an image here, and we're going to get into sizing later. But that image is just a generic one that has my blog URL on it and a little WordPress screenshot. I use the same image down here for the default. This way, if I don't use an image in a post, I just quickly post it in a couple of senses on the fly. I don't have time to find the right picture to use for it that I can legally use. It'll default to that. Okay, JD, I'm going to ask you another question right here because this is the issue we've been dealing with lately. And so if you can't tell us what we're missing in a sentence or two, I don't want to completely derail your presentation. But we installed this because there were times where an image wasn't being included in a blog post and it was pulling kind of an image from the footer of our theme. So we've kind of created a default image to be used when an image is not in the post. So exactly the situation you just described. What we've noticed though in the last week or so is that image is working if somebody is logged into Facebook but if they're not logged into Facebook and they look at the post, Facebook displays a blank area instead. Are you familiar with this at all? No, I've never seen it. Okay, well then I will talk to you completely separately about that. Sure, yeah, I'll have to look at it. If you send me a link, I'll look at it and then you can talk to me about it. Did you specify to use an image size similar at least in these dimensions where I'm showing you? Because that will affect it. If the image is too large, you won't show, actually that's what it is though. If the image is too large to turn to file size, it won't show to non-logging users. I can definitely tell you it was not larger than what you've just highlighted there. Okay, good. All right, thank you. No problem, okay, sure. So this is the Facebook stuff. How you want stuff to appear. Twitter is more fun. Now, I don't know if people are familiar with Twitter cards. Twitter cards are little representations of the content in the link that's shared via Twitter and it has two modes of WordPress for summary with large image and just a summary. I'm going to show you examples of that here. This is just a regular summary of this link. So it's got a title, it's got my name, my Twitter handle, the description, and a little picture. This version is the same information, same post, well, slightly different actually, but this is the large image representation. So it gives you a lot more room to have a big picture that people like, pictures the Twitter information we have here and then a description. And I'll show you where all this stuff came from. So this is a post that I posted. It's actually called Social Media Image Sizes December 2014. But when that link is shared on Twitter, it actually says optimal Twitter image sizes because I'm talking to people on Twitter. The Twitter information is there as well as Facebook. So when it's shared on Twitter, it talks about Twitter. If it's shared on Facebook, it talks about Facebook. This is that same image, the same link shared on Facebook. And I'll show you how to do that in a minute. Now, to have Twitter cards work, you have to enable this here, and you also have to validate your website's URL through the Twitter card validator. It's not too hard to do if you just take the URL of the web page on your site, go through the preview. It'll show you what it'll look like. And in my case, it's already whitelisted here. All techfund.org domains are whitelisted for Twitter cards. If you do one that is not validated, I think you can probably take this. It should prompt us to validate it. So here, it's telling us that it's got information here to build a Twitter card. No image is the right size for it, so it's not going to show up. But this NLC blog, it's got Nebraska.gov. It's not whitelisted. So, Michael, at some point, you want to do this. Just your request approval is going to ask you a few questions and notify you when it's ready. I just put it on my to-do list. Awesome. Okay, so yeah, once that's done, then your Twitter cards will show up like this. Until it does, you'll just get the link here with none of the information below. Okay, and I said Google Plus. Oh, the site Twitter username here. If you're the only person working on your site, just put your stop there. If you're in an organization like the library system, you want to put the library's Twitter account here. And then in your individual profile, you're going to put your own Twitter account. This way, it knows that you wrote a particular article for the site. And on Google Plus, all there is there is a spot for our Google Publisher page. I don't use this to my personal site, but if you actually have a Google Plus page, just put the URL there. But again, the Twitter Google Plus specific metadata doesn't really work. Used to, doesn't anymore. Now, XML site maps are an awesome feature of WordPress. This feature has actually got me to switch to this plugin once upon a time because it was built in. Used to be, if you wanted to have an XML site map for your site, you needed to use a separate plugin for it. This way, it's all in one. What an XML site map is, is essentially a directory in XML format of all the content on your website. All your posts, all your pages, all your individual photos, categories, tags, and a site map is used by Yahoo, ask.com, Google. Pretty much every searcher out there now uses this to help them maintain your directory of what's on your site. So when they see something new, they know it's time to go to Michael Sauer's blog and find this page, index it, and add it to our search engine databases. There's a link on that page of links that I'm going to show you later that tells you how to submit your site map to Google Webmaster Tools. This is an awesome way of making sure that Google knows about everything that's on your site. And also, you can find out from that tool whether or not there's problems. Like, if it seems like there's five URLs in your site map, but they're not reachable by Google, something's wrong. And you might want to check in on that. The links are not very important, but there's a couple of things I do use this for. I remove stock words from slugs. The slug is this part of URL right here. And they can get pretty long because WordPress spaces them on the title of your post. So if you'll see here, that example, there's no site map here. But the stock words are things like A, B, and good for those. They're not very value-you SEO-wise in the URL, but your keywords are. So kind of to back it down makes it a little bit easier to index to the search engines. And the other feature, this is very important if you have a lot of images on your site. Google Image Search is becoming very popular, very important source of traffic for some sites now because Google's really gotten the hang of linking this photo to this article. The problem with WordPress is each attachment on your website, each photo, podcast, every media element, has its own webpage generated automatically by WordPress. However, if you check the box here, which is redirect attachment URLs to parent post URL, WordPress will automatically redirect those pages to the parent post. There's a big event in your post pictures for your Christmas party. If those pictures are indexed by Google Image Search, when somebody clicks on the picture of your punch bowl, rather than going to a page just showing a picture of your punch bowl, they go to your blog post or article about the party. This helps you get people to the right place. Are you going to say something, Michael? Yeah, JD, no. The question is just backing up a sec to the removing stop words from slugs. I get it, but what's the benefit? Shorter URLs. Okay. That's the key benefit. Shorter URLs. And keyword density URL, that's kind of a complex thing I wasn't running on. Sure. Your URL, we talk about this actually for service things, there are various places on your page that matter a lot. For SEO purposes, because they're not spoofable, really. Your page title, there can be only one. Kylin. There could be only one page title, so what you say in there is more important than what you say in the body of the article. The article could be talking about five or six different topics. But whatever you put in the title tag, that's presumed to be the main overall topic. Right. And your URL goes hand in hand with that. We are doing a blog post about cutting diamonds, but you don't mention diamonds or cutting in the URL. It's going to assume that it's not going to rank as well for diamond cutting. Right. But the software just makes the URLs longer and they reduce the density of your keywords. Okay. If you don't get rid of the software, it's actually, when you cut the dashes, it's ten words long. It'd be better if it was six. So basically you're eliminating the words that it's not going to bother indexing anyway. Correct. But therefore increases the significance of the words that are left. Exactly. Got it. And most people don't rewrite slugs anyway. I do that a lot if I want the slug to be, but in general people are not going to do that. So by having the system do this automatically, it saves a little light in your URLs. Now the canonical settings, again, I'm not going to touch on any of the other things here. Most of them are not recommended, not necessary, and are only for weird specific cases. If your website operates under an HTTPS, SSL, you can use this tool to force all traffic from websites that index things to use the security URL versus the insecure versus the HTTPS. This, I found the only time I use this is on e-commerce sites where I want people to always be coming in via the HTTPS for the SSL. Under the associated they might be transferring a credit card or password but in general you just want to leave it as default so whatever your website is, it will stay that way. If you change it later, it will change everything for you. In turtle links we are going to skip this because more and more things are handling this for you. Breadcrumbs are these things right up here. Where it follows a path so there is my home page and general information and social media and then this particular article. Those are useful for search engines because they help them understand the structure of your site. They are building kind of a visual tree of your site and those breadcrumbs help but most of those are handled by the themes now. Very few modern themes don't include that kind of navigation because it is so important. If it doesn't, if your theme does not, there is a little code you can use down here, a little snippet to add a function from this plugin to your theme that will do it for you. It is pretty cool. Most people don't need it. Unless you are using a home written theme or something that was written in 2010, you are probably safe ignoring that. RSS WordPress SEO plugin allows you to do a little tweaking to your RSS feed but you put some content before or after. You can put it in here but for example on the end compass blog, you can put a note in here about go here to view the archive of past webinars. That sort of thing. I put this down at the bottom this way the RSS feed is read by the RSS reader always has a direct one back to my home page. Import next for these are to allow you to bring in data from old prior plugins and most importantly to back up your settings. Once you have got your WordPress SEO plugin configured export those settings or come down to the zip file called settings.zip that will let you easily re-upload it if you ever have to recover from a disaster you change to move to a different website that sort of thing. Those are all the settings that we have already gone through earlier. Now this tool is ideal is infinitely useful for anyone who's going to install this plugin when they haven't done any SEO work in the past. It lets you both edit your titles and descriptions for all of your content. The first page is the title so any titles that you want like for example here is one I posted back in May. That's the title of the actual post that appears on the page but when it was shared I wanted it to say marriage equality which is Pennsylvania rather than that specific thing. You can do this all through your whole thing, make all your changes and save them and then you can do the same thing over here with descriptions. You can see I actually do all my new files so here's one where a draft I write up. These are all the handcrafted descriptions that I've done. If I wanted to change it I would just write over here and save it. The file editor that's built in to WordPress SEO lets you edit your robots.txt file. If you don't have one it'll offer to create one for you. This is just a very basic robots.txt file so it tells it I want all search engines to ignore the different folder of my website. I don't want anything in there indexed which nothing should be anyway. It lets you tell search engines where to find my site maps. You can find all five of them here and use those to index the site. It also lets you edit your HTML files. If you've never wanted to edit your HTML file it probably needs you shouldn't. You can do things in here that can take you down entirely. And we'll second that statement. If you know what you're doing it's an extremely powerful tool but it's also kind of touchy. One wrong line here can cause your website to actually literally crash and give an error message and not look for anybody. Some of the stuff is we're going to be going to go there. And finally there are some things you can get for this plugin. These all cost money. The premium SEO feature gets you tech support for this plugin. This plugin is released through WordPress Codex with no support. There's a forum on there that can ask people questions and there are a lot of people willing to answer you. But if you want paid support you need the premium version. If your site is basically videos this extension lets you optimize your pages for videos. Say you share their page to Facebook the actual player with the video will show up on there the way it does if you share a YouTube video or something from the NIO. News SEO is stricken for news sites. It allows you to create the extra metadata that Google News wants from publishers to help them index news articles on sites. The only one I think might be of interest to libraries would be the local SEO. This lets you kind of connect your website to the Google Maps system. It helps make sure that your data is in the right format for Google Maps to pick up at 1, 2, 3 Main Street. This is your library and kind of makes that little connection there. You can do it in other ways but this makes it easier. I'm not sure if you're paying for it. It really depends on whether or not you need it. And that's pretty much it for the extension. Do you have a question before I get out of the WordPress SEO? I'll just remind everyone at this point because I know he's going to switch gears a little bit here. If you've got any questions, please feel free to raise your hand which we would love for you to do. We'd love to hear your dulcet tones. Or you can type into the Q&A and we'll do that. Is that nothing so hard? Just to give people a chance to type and I think I'll ask this question here. You've kind of gone through all those settings. I know at least a lot of our users for the libraries. Obviously there's a range of willing to do lots of individualized work and we have a website. If you are going to install this, what are the three things you would say, these are the boxes you should check if there's nothing else. Okay. The titles and metadata, getting your defaults in here because if the person is doing nothing then you need to have this in here. That's number one. I would say the social stuff because sharing this out to the world is not just your staff's thing. You may have patrons, just any visitor that comes along and wants to share it. So in the front page settings enabling the metadata for the different social networks, those are important. And then finally the last thing I would say that's critical if you're not already doing the XML site maps. It makes a huge difference. I've seen websites that had 300 or 400 pages between posts and pages with only 30 or 40 of them indexed by Google. In a month or two, they were all indexed. They were released all but a couple. It just makes a phenomenal difference. Because you're meeting search engines halfway. You're not telling them, hey, I've got stuff here. Try to find it. You're actually saying, okay, here's how to get to this. Here's how to get to this. So those are the three that I would do. Okay. Great. Any questions from the audience, Krista? Not yet. Okay. All right. I guess it's all making sense to everybody. So, all right. Let's, what do you got next? Okay. Next, I was going to go before you. I'm going to actually show you how this works on an individual post. But before that, I just wanted to touch on the image sizes. Because before you start your post, if it's something you're working on, you should already have an idea. You should assemble your materials before you start writing the WordPress. You should have your image if you're going to be using image or multiple images. You should have all the content ready. So, there are some sizes that matter. To share it best on Facebook, you're going to want an image that's 1200 by 627 pixels. Now, that's very precise. It doesn't have to be that precise. You're looking for that dimension. It's almost twice as wide as it is tall. If you use something that's not like that, Facebook is going to grab the middle of the picture. If you did a 1200 by 1200 pixel square thing, it's going to cut off the top and bottom. A quarter off the top, a quarter off the bottom, and show you the middle section. So, if you know that what you care about is in that middle section, that's perfectly fine. But if you've got the time, make it 1200 by 627. This size is magic because it works on the Facebook mobile devices. It works perfectly on the website. It just works. Twitter has phone things. Twitter prefers your photos to be 506 pixels by 253. Now, again, this is a ratio that matters more than the actual dimensions. As long as it's minimum of 440 pixels wide, it will work on Facebook. I mean on Twitter. Twitter advertises a maximum of 1024 pixels wide. It's not true. So, right now, they say that, but I've seen them show plenty of stuff that was much, much bigger and just scale it down. I think they just put that there because they prefer that you not go over that because then they have to resize it for you. So, this shared image link size here is what you're going to want to use in your WordPress posts. And then the same thing with Twitter photos for your large image on your Twitter cards. You can also see those here. This image is much bigger than 1024 by 7 68, or sorry, 1024 by 512, but it worked anyway. So, giving those sizes in mind, we're going to go to a post. And I'm going to show you the one that I use as an example here because it has the different social media options customized. So, here's the actual post. And then below a post, once you've got this plugin installed, you're going to see this. You're going to see a general page analysis tab advanced and social. The pages that the general tab starts with a snippet of what if you look at this, it looks like a drill or a Bing search result. And that's what it's meant to look like. It's going to kind of give you an idea of what people are going to see in search results so you want to make sure it looks nice. The second option is your focus keyword. Now, whatever your page is about, whatever you think people should be searching will define you. So, if we're going to look for Michael Sowers, it's going to tell us whether or not we've done a good job of optimizing the page for people searching for Michael Sowers. And we have not. We're not using the heading, we're not using the title, we're not using the URL, we're not using the content, we're not using any of it. But, for what we're using, we're fine. I'm happy to be a bad example in this case. Just try it on yours actually, if you can find you easily from your home page. But yeah, so, I want this image, I want this post to show up when people search for social media image sizes. So, I want to make sure that I have it in all the places that search results look, which is the article heading, which is this right here. It's also the title. It's also the page title, although you can use a different one here, specify it. I'll show you that. It's in the page URL. I actually made sure that social media image sizes is in my slug. And it's in the content. It's right up here. And it's in my description down here. This matters because people don't search for individual word. The whole keyword idea that used to be prevalent in SEO is wrong. It was fine for a while, but people used it to gain the system and Google dropped it, Yahoo dropped it, being dropped it. Nobody cares about your keywords anymore. And people don't search for individual words very often. They search for phrases. They, you know, Nebraska Library Commission, they search for that. They don't search for Nebraska and then library and then commission. So, you want to make sure that your focus keyword here is really a phrase. It's what you think people search for. So, when filling out this page, this general tab, this is stuff that if you only do one thing when doing a post, do this page. If you don't put it in SEO title here, you'll just pick it up from the page. So you grab the title up there. But I actually wanted one to say something a little different. This has this update for December 2014. Your meta-description, if you don't fill this in, it's going to grab WordPress SEO will automatically grab the first 150 characters of your post. That's okay sometimes. But if you're doing a post that's, you know, covering several different topics and the first item is just one of four topics you're covering, then definitely take the time to put a description here that will show people what is being covered. You know, page analysis. This looks through your page and tells you whether or not there's problems. One of the things that's telling me I have a problem is they don't have any subheadings to see my key work. That's okay. I don't want one in this case. My keyword density is kind of low. Keyword responds two times in the post. And I don't have any image on the page that contain all tags that gain the keyword or phrase. Again, this gives back to the fact that it's very popular. If you do have photos on your page, make sure that you have all tags or then captions, that sort of thing will help. And then it gives you the flash reading. It tells you whether or not your page is going to be too complicated, too complex. You have a lot of long sentences. You have a lot of big words. I don't write to that. I don't worry about what it says, but I kind of like knowing that if it's considered okay to read, I feel better. Then it just tells you whether or not your keyword or phrase appears in those various places that we looked at over here. It's worth reading about. I don't necessarily go back here and make changes based on this, but it's just more information to help you understand how your page is going to be seen on the web. The advanced tab, this can actually be disabled for individual users or for using multi-site multi-user system. You may not want everybody to have access to this because it's got some pretty powerful stuff. It shows the individual pages indexing. I can tell Google that I don't want this to index. If I had a page that would say total numbers for staff members, I might not mind it being publicly on the page because there's a number, but I don't necessarily want it to be indexed. That's a bad example, but I'm sure you can think of things that you'd rather not show up in Google search results. We're not going to talk about follow-no-follow. That's a whole controversial thing. You can also do a few things like exclude your page from the open directory and from Yahoo. These are not things I deal with. I want my content to show up everywhere. If you're using the breadcrumbs feature I showed you earlier, you can set up a different title here to show up in that breadcrumbs spot that would change this particular text. Whether or not to exclude the page from the site map is auto-attack based on your settings we looked at earlier. Again, you may have a page that you don't want to begin the site map because you don't want it to be indexed. Let's show it a little bit more. Site map priority, we didn't talk about that earlier in the XML site map features, but site maps, the schema uses a ranking from 0.1 to 1 for priority. If you've got a website with pages that change frequently and pages that don't change that's where this comes into play. If you've got a page that say you're code of the day and it's a different code every day set that to highest priority because it's going to be changing every day. If you've got a page that essentially an archive list of old events that's probably a low priority, it's probably not going to change all that often. Your default is 0.8 and then your default for individual pages and posts is 0.6. These are recommendations that you're passing on to search engines. They're not going to be necessarily followed exactly. Canonical URL this you generally want to leave this blank in situations where you're posting content in multiple places search engines like Google particularly will penalize you for that because they see you copying somebody else's content. By putting in that original sources URL here, say I took an article but say I took this post right here because I'm speaking here and I took this post and I've reproduced it entirely on my page. I copied and pasted this into a new post. I go into that post and put that in the Canonical URL and when Google searches my page it'll know that I'm not claiming credit for that. I'm saying that this post over here at nclblogs.rescue.gov is the source of this and I don't get punished. You can also do this within your own site. If you've got an item that's posted under both events and children's events you can make one decide which one's the master which one's the primary and then when you repost it elsewhere just specify a link to the original one. And then if a page question? Yeah, thank you for noticing when I turn to my mic. Okay, I get the Canonical URL. Thank you for explaining that. That helps me a lot. And you're saying Google won't penalize you and we'll just use Google as our example here. Does Google do anything with that information besides not penalizing you? Is it completely behind the scenes or does it? It's behind the scenes. It doesn't prevent that page from being indexed but it will never let your page rank higher than the original source. Ah, okay, good. There we go. So it's not necessarily obvious to the searcher but it does have an impact in the rankings. Right, like for example if you did a search using the site tag in Google so you can search only the contents of your site. But if you do that and even though your Canonical URL is pointing to a site that's not your site, that page will still show up. Oh, interesting. Okay. But if you were to search for a phrase that's in there, your site will always be lower than the original. Wow, okay. Now, to which I will also add being a good librarian that we necessarily shouldn't just copy and paste other people's contents and list of Canonical URL, please at least give credit if nothing else and consider all copyright implications. Okay. Absolutely. The other thing is Google punishes you for copying and there are problems several years ago where Google was infiltrated with what were called scrapers. People were taking content from other sites and publishing whole new sites on it and throwing ads in it and it was a huge mess. There's been several things that have happened in the last couple of years, updates to Google's system that prevents that from happening. But Google ended up penalizing a lot of people that they didn't really want to penalize because they were in a situation like the library where it's using content from a state organization at the local level and vice-versa. So they implemented this system. This is what your data jail free card lets you duplicate the content without looking like you're applying. Well, you know, looking like you're cheating. In trying to come up with a reason I would ever use this I kind of your example is it. For example, for this show, the Canonical URL would be what Krista writes on the commission site but I might copy and paste it because it's my episode of the show. It's my own personal blog. I would want to make the commission sites the Canonical in the case I'm completely okay in copying the content but making sure that the commission version is the more official version of it as the original because that's where we really want people to end up anyway. Exactly. Now there's also a there's a trick that if you follow the discussions on what Google is doing because Google's not exactly transparent when it comes to their algorithms. There's also a some people believe that if you throw the reproduced material inside of a block quote tag, you won't be penalized. Just saying. Well, I block quote a lot but I also generally block quote like a paragraph and then link back to the original. And that's what it's meant to be. That's what people should but there are people that will throw up stuff and throw a block quote around it. I actually have editors for publications that I deal with that are under that mistaken idea that it's okay if it's a block quote. I would argue reproducing a whole thing under a block quote is more of a copyright problem than a search engine problem so don't do it anyway. There's multiple reasons. And the last thing on this page and this is something that if you don't want to touch your hdx profile and you really shouldn't. This is your friend. If you've got a page that has been used all over Facebook, all over Twitter but it just doesn't exist anymore. It doesn't need to exist. You've got a program that was finally popular for a few years and it's wound down but that page is out there. If you use the 301 redirect here, you can send the people anywhere. I'm going to show you that. If I tell this page that I wanted to actually go to there and just update that. So for right now if I go to my home page and I click on that article right here, I end up here. You wouldn't normally be doing this to throw somebody to a different website like this but you can. Usually you'd be doing it to send people to a higher level on your site. There's a page that's for a program that's been discontinued instead of people getting that page and getting confused. You could keep that same URL alive because it's out there but send people instead to a list of your programs. Understand? Yeah. And we'll also tell search engines the 301 there tells us that it's been permanently moved. It's not a temporary thing. The site's not experiencing problems that from now on whenever somebody wants to get this URL, they should be going to this URL. And your browser will take care of all that for you. This is all done at the server level so it has nothing. It doesn't matter what browser the person's using or anything. And this is the last section of the plug-ins options. This is where I did the talk about earlier where you could tell it that if you share the post to Facebook I want this title and this description. And this image. I'm going to start using this one right here. It's kind of headbooked in Facebook. I'm going to share it on Twitter. I want to have this title in this description. I use the same description for all of them. But on Twitter, I wanted to use this or a collage of photos. And they did the Google Plus thing just for this session in case it ever comes back to working like this. But for right now, this is not going to work. If I share this to Google Plus, instead of seeing this, it's going to see this. It's using open graph data. And that's really it for the WordPress SEO thing. I think that's it. Any questions? I'm going to throw a comment in here because I've been using this Yoast plugin for a little while and I think I'm going to play around a little more with some of the settings you talked about earlier. But I've had a similar conversation with somebody so I kind of want to get my opinion of this on the record and then JD, if you've got an alternate or agree, I'd love to hear it. The second part that JD kind of went through where you've got the general, the page analysis, the advance of the social. There's a lot there and I know a lot of the users of WordPress that I deal with, it's enough to write a blog post. And you are adding work on to this. But this plugin can get you some pretty good default set. And then when it comes to individual posts, in my case I almost exclusively just quickly flip over to that social tab that you were showing right there at the end and make sure that the right picture I want showing up in Facebook and Twitter is the right picture showing up. And that maybe adds 30 seconds on to writing my blog post at the end. You don't have to set another title. You don't have to set a separate description. I've decided I want to kind of take control of those images. So it doesn't necessarily I guess I want to apply to people you can take advantage of as much or as little as these options as you want. You don't have to say well if I install this every time I write a blog post I got to spend another 20 minutes figuring all this stuff out. Correct. And I did I left off something that I shouldn't have. It's very important. If you look over here on the side, the featured image Yes. WordPress has supported featured images since I think 2.4, 2.5. And some themes use the mind does. This featured image shows up up here behind the title. Whatever you put there is going to be the image that WordPress SEO uses for all of these things. So as long as you have a featured image you don't have to worry about specifying anything on the social tab. Okay. You just saved me work. So as long as you specify a featured image and not all themes use the featured image because the featured image is available. If you don't see it in your WordPress install go up here to screen options and check featured image. Okay. Wow. You just saved me. The theme I'm using only uses featured image if I select a particular post type and folks listening, if you don't know what I mean by post type don't worry about it. So that's if I just set my featured image unless I want a different image for Facebook or Twitter, I don't have to fill those two fields out. Correct. Wow. Thank you. This page I'm showing you. If I look at another post one where I haven't gone all granular this post on here. Because I've been doing it three times. You're just saying it once. I did a different one here for what that is. I did a wider one here for Facebook for that post. But yeah, you don't have to specify anything on the social tab unless you want to override what you're seeing here. Nice. The combination of your featured image plus your title here and your description. If you are happy with that and you think that's perfectly fine on all platforms absolutely you're done. No need to do anything else. Cool. Thank you. Worth the price of admission. No problem. Worth twice the price of admission. Yeah, well, let's not go there. Okay. You've answered my questions. You've made my life a little easier. I like to remind people that we will answer questions as long as there are questions. We don't have a hard cut off. Are there any at the moment? No, nothing has come through. If you have a question type into questions section or if you think this was just everything was totally answered. That's great. If you're completely overwhelmed that's okay. I think a lot of this is going to be go into your WordPress play with things see how they work to figure out, yeah. And as I mentioned in the beginning for anybody who's listening that is doing the Nebraska libraries on the web project, this is not currently installed but it can be and I can turn it on for you if you want. So just drop me an email and say, yeah, I'd like to get this turned on and I'm going to consider this the instructional video for said plugins. I'm not going to create my own. I think J.D. has done a wonderful job although we tend to do 5-minute instructional videos in this one's an hour. But hey, there's a lot here. So, nothing coming in? J.D., anything else you want to mention or show us before we wrap this up? I was going to mention our WordPress and libraries Facebook if anybody has any questions or anything that's the best place to ask. I tend to monitor that pretty closely and answer stuff. It doesn't have to be on SEO anything WordPress related. There's people there that are eager to help. I've used it myself trying to figure this stuff out so there's a lot there. Well, J.D., thank you very, very much. We're going to go ahead and take control back and I've just got one other WordPress thing I want to talk about. So, Chris is going to switch our screens over here and bring up WordPress there you are. Firefox, excuse me, but it is WordPress. So, here's just the one thing I want to talk about briefly mainly for the benefit of those of us using Nebraska Libraries on the web. I'm currently running WordPress 4 and WordPress 4.1 is available and we will be upgrading to that probably early next week if nothing else because I don't want to make changes in the week down for a long weekend. So, right now this is just an example post on Nebraska Libraries on the website and what I want to show you real quickly here is here's an image and what people have been familiar with if I click on this image is this pencil and the X. The X where the pencil takes you into the image detail where you can change things like a line size and what you're linking to and this is what we've been familiar with. The one change I've noticed in WordPress 4.1 which I'm showing you here on a image on a website my own personal website that's running 4.1. When you click on the image they've actually added some new icons to that so you have the X for move and the pencil for edit which does take you into the image details but the coolest thing I found is they've added the four buttons to change the images excuse me alignment right here so you can change to align left align center align right or no alignment kind of in a single one click result as opposed to having to go into the edit image change the alignment and click update so they've removed some clicks very very handy I found where you've put that image in your text and you put it in the wrong place and you just want to change that alignment so there's the one extra new WordPress thing that I wanted to add to this and I will probably chop this out and make it its own little instructional video for our project website so with that I'm going to go ahead and declare this tech talk over unless any other questions have come in while I was talking Crystal do a quick check of that and I'm thinking nope alright so Krista I'm going to hand it back to you to wrap this the episode up cool alright great thank you Michael thank you JD that was very like lots of information but very helpful and I think very detailed like you know the showing where everything was I think like I said get into your WordPress sites play around with it explore it once you start using it you'll see what it can do and I think that'll really make things kind of click yeah with people so alright so that will wrap it up for today's show it has been recorded so we'll be available on our website down here in our archived Encompass Live Sessions page we'll have links recording and any of the web things that were mentioned JD's page with all of his links I've got there WordPress anything related so that will wrap it up for today if I hope you'll join us next week when our topic is extreme customer service at your library extreme okay alright currently public library here in Nebraska has done some maybe some big changes to how they're doing customer service basically a whole change in philosophy at the library and the director Matt Williams and assistant director Christy Walsh will be here online with us from Carney to talk about what they've done at their library cool so hopefully you'll join us for that any of our other future shows also we are on Facebook as we were talking about Facebook so if you do have any if you are a Facebook user go ahead and like us there you'll get notifications as you can see here reminding you when the new show is coming out when recordings are available so you'll be able to keep up on what we're doing on Encompass Live via our Facebook page then that we are good to go thank you very much and we'll see you next time on Encompass Live bye bye