 You should have an introduction with somebody. Hi, I'm David. Hi, thank you. Well, yeah, my name is David Zimmerman. I am an internet marketing consultant. I've been doing marketing consulting for websites, focusing on search marketing for probably about 10 years now. Started my own company four years ago. You can tweet me in reliable acorn. Eventually I'll get back to you. Not that anybody's on Twitter anymore, but I am. I have to admit I don't like the title to my talk. It's so negative. I think what happened was when I was pitching this, I was having a rough week. Because sometimes it feels like I get paid to fight developers. They say, oh my god, here's another SEO coming to screw up my beautiful site. And they don't want to do it. I delivered an audit, comprehensive audit for a company last year, literally last year. They haven't implemented item number one yet. This is what I do. I fight developers for a living. But I don't want to fight you guys today. Like, I think we're on the same team. The websites we're building or marketing for our clients make a difference in their business. We're not just building something, posting it. We want to do something a little bit better. We know if we can deliver a better product to our clients, it could make the difference between success as a business and failure. We know if we give them a good website, they're going to come back again for another bigger website. And this time they'll actually have a budget. We want a better product. And from my perspective, I want you to give them a website that will last them longer. Because the last thing I want to do is come into your website, crack it open, break it. And then you have to come back in and clean up my mess after me. I am no developer. I don't want your web development business. I don't even want the website maintenance business. I want you guys to do that. And I want you guys to not hate me when I come and say, hey, we have to change this. So everything I'm going to talk about today is from the perspective of companies who build websites for clients so that they can be ready for a productive SEO campaign. Every time I talk about SEO, I feel like I have to stop for a moment and define things. This is because every old fool on their LinkedIn profile says they do SEO. Every CMS promises to be SEO friendly. Every web host promises an every SEO boost. So let's stop for a moment and define SEO. It's really simple. SEO, search engine optimization, is about helping people find what you have to offer. In this case, they're using the search engines to do it. But all we're doing is connecting the person who's looking with what the business has to offer. Now, SEO is not a few things. For instance, SEO is not all web marketing. Even my longest-term clients will say, David, you're our SEO. Will you do our Facebook marketing? Well, OK, I can do your Facebook marketing, but that's not SEO. That's different. I can help you with your email marketing, but that's not SEO. Let's make a distinction between different kinds of marketing that do different things. In this case today, I'm talking about organic search marketing, not paid marketing, not all web marketing. I'm talking about a specific way of marketing website through SEO. Second, SEO is not for everybody. SEO does a great job responding to demand. If someone knows your product or service exists and they're looking for it, SEO might be a good solution for you. If your product is so new to market that no one knows that solution exists, if your product is so unique that no one knows to search for it yet, then SEO might not be the marketing solution for you. Let's be realistic about what search can do. If that's you, congratulations. You're awesome. Hire a PR company. You don't necessarily need SEO. You kind of need SEO, but don't think that's going to create demand for something that people don't know to look for yet. SEO is not trying to trick Google. No, it's not. Stop wasting your client's time trying to figure out what this week's secret is. And if you can just get the secret this week, you will dominate number one bologna. There are certain basic things behind SEO that if you do, you're going to outlast the fool who's chasing whatever is cool and hip this week rather than doing the good, best practices that will last. Don't get distracted. Don't waste your client's time chasing after the latest SEO fad or rumor that if you do this with your website and turn around three times real fast, you're ranking number one. No, let's focus on the best practices. And fourth, SEO is not set it and forget it. SEO done well is a long-term campaign and an investment in a website. And it's not just because Google makes 700 algorithm changes a year. Because of the 700 algorithm changes, most people don't notice any of them. It's really because Google likes fresh stuff. And you've got to be maintaining a website and constantly updating it if you want to get there. But there's always more opportunities, right? We can't just do SEO and walk away and call it SEO. Because there's really never ends the number of things we could be doing to help market a website through search. And so let's not pretend that once you do this and you set up a site, I've SEOed it. Congratulations. Bye. That's not SEO. SEO basically comes up to four basic things. First of all, can you measure it? Second of all, can the search engines crawl and index the pages of your site? Third is, what does your website say? And last, who's linking to your site? There you go. That's SEO. That's all we've got to do. Thanks for coming. Have a great afternoon. We're done. But, alas, when we're building websites, we have to consider all four of these items. So let's start at the first one. Now, I know some of you are like, David, I appreciate that SEO was really about measuring. But it's way outside the scope of what people are paying me to do. Your job is not to be their analytics consultant. In fact, sometimes your clients are like, you know what? I don't even care about analytics. Just don't bother to install it. Right? No. We aren't doing anything unless we're measuring it. And measuring SEO has nothing to do with rank. Well, it has something to do with rank. But I really resent when SEO gets resorted to rank. Anybody can objectively and accurately track rank anyway. Really? I mean, come on. Let's get over rank. Let's go to traffic. But like traffic in and in itself doesn't really matter. We want traffic that becomes business. And if we're not measuring it all the way in, we're not doing a real SEO, well, any marketing campaign for that matter. So the first thing that is painful for me when I inherit a site is that analytics aren't set up. And I'm thinking analytics. I mean, I'm just talking just the free Google Analytics. Like, we shouldn't let a site out of our door without setting up analytics on it. I know your clients, sometimes they don't even care. I know some of your clients won't ever use it. But the fact is they might not want it now. But if you've built a better product for them, they're going to wish they had it later. Do them a favor. Just set it up. It's not hard. I mean, put in Monster Insights. Done. Right? Set it up for them. Bonus points if you can install Tag Manager. Because then, when I'm doing other marketing, I'm not cracking open the template files to insert my codes the next time you try to update, break the site, and you get a call, and they blame you because you built the site and whatever. Let's avoid that. Tag Manager will help. Now, this is a great plugin for Tag Manager. This is one I use best if you hard code Tag Manager in. It's just not ideal, I get it, but it would be better because we don't get full functionality with Tag Manager even with WordPress plugins. So put in Tag Manager, and now it's a bucket. And I, as the marketer, I can add and subtract marketing analytics as I need it. I don't have to bother you. I don't have to break your site. There's all kinds of other things I can do with Tag Manager. If you've taken the time to install it, now you've installed it, I don't have to bug you with a name boring updates. When you've got bigger things to do, you don't hate me. The client benefits. We're all happy, right? Oh, and don't forget Search Console. It's easy. Set it up. You're going to benefit from it, too. Hopefully, you have an arrangement with your clients that when you build the site, you're not just like, there, you have an agreement that you're maintaining it. Analytics Tag Manager or Search Console will help you maintain your client's sites. Second of all, goal. What is this website trying to accomplish? I know sometimes people will call you, they just want to brochure a site. They kind of don't know what they want. They don't have a budget. So you just throw something together. Do your clients justice. Help them think through what they want to accomplish. Are they trying to sell something? Are they trying to get sales leads? Are they trying to inform people what is the purpose and design the site according to what they want to accomplish? Oftentimes, your clients don't know what they want to accomplish. You will build a better product for them if you help them think through that. And you will avoid me having to come and break your beautiful design to help the client accomplish things. Now, I might think this is not an SEO thing. Well, I'm sorry. I'm going to diverge myself for a moment. The Bible says to do this. Yeah. This is probably one of the best books I've ever read on anything web. And the basic premise, like a brain dead monkey could be able to come to your site and you should know what you want to do. Make it obvious. Help the person think through the business, think through what they want to accomplish so that anybody will know exactly what they want you to do on the visit site. Just don't make me think. Read the book if you haven't. But you might say, why is this an SEO issue? This is the latest version of Google's manual review guidelines. If you design websites, you need to read this. In fact, tweet me and I will get you a copy. I went to Kinko as the date was published two months ago and printed it out and read it again. This is the fourth time they've released this. This is as close as we're going to get to understanding the core parts of Google's algorithm. You see, Google right now is driven by machine learning. But in order for the algorithm to be machine learned to decide which websites rank above others, they have to have a data set to pull from. For that data set, Google hires a series of people who manually review search engine results. And they manually read pages to decide, is this page of the highest quality, the lowest quality, or somewhere in between? Wouldn't it be great to know what Google is considering a high quality and a low quality site? Read it, and you will know. When it goes to what it talks about goal, one of the biggest, in order to have a highest quality site according to the manual review guidelines, the best, highest quality sites are the ones that accomplish its own purpose best. A low quality site does not help the user accomplish the purpose of the website. So you, as a designer, need to understand what the purpose of the website is if you want Google to consider the site as a high quality site. This is not that hard of a read, but it's well worth your time. We can't separate, at this point, site design from SEO. So let's make sure when we're designing our sites, the client knows what their goal is, and you design the site as best you can to help accomplish that goal. The first thing that SEO is measuring, the second thing is whether or not Google can crawl and index your site. And this is where we all take a moment and thank God that we're at a WordPress conference where Google has a real easy time with WordPress sites, except if you don't allow them to view your site. This button, you know how much money I've made from audits from well-meaning developers who forgot to uncheck that when they launched the site? Yes. You can prevent me from making money by making sure you are not discouraging search engines from indexing the site. The guideline says it's up to search engines to honor this request. I'll tell you what, Google definitely honors that request. It can be the robots.txt too. I know somebody who accidentally forgot to remove the robots exclusion from the robots.txt to launch the site traffic drops. Oh my gosh, what happened? Oh, oops. I forgot to update the robot. Google listens to that. That's really probably the biggest crawlability problem on the WordPress site because we're still doing server-side language. Google's easily able to understand WordPress. But we have to consider mobile when we're building sites today. This is kind of old news for you, I think most of you. But as of two months ago, Google is at a mobile-first algorithm. So that means when Google is evaluating websites to rank, it is looking at the mobile site first. If you have a poor mobile experience, you will never rank even on a desktop search because Google is coming from a mobile-first perspective. Now, what this means is not just we need responsive websites. What this means is we've got to change the way we think about designing a site. We should build the mobile site first and build up to the desktop site. Usually, we're used to saying, here's the beautiful desktop site and here's the mobile. But if we change the way we think and we take mobile-first and we build up, this will affect a lot of things that will benefit you from a mobile perspective. So start by thinking mobile-first even as you're doing the design. Some of your clients won't get it. Explain it to them. Most traffic from Google, not the vast majority, the majority of traffic from Google is mobile across almost every industry. So don't make mobile an afterthought. Don't take a desktop site, crack it, break it down, and make it mobile. Think mobile-first. Google has a wonderful tool, the mobile-friendly test. Is this page mobile-friendly? Yes or no? Test. Throw this in every URL. This is a URL by URL basis, so you'd have to test what I do when WordPress. I will test an example or two of every page generated by every template file. Just throw it in. Yes or no? Mobile-friendly or not? And if it's not, it'll tell you what the problems are. It's pretty simple. On a more scalable fashion, thankfully, because you've installed Google Search Console, everybody's got, yeah, yeah, yeah. Under search traffic, mobile usability, the accomplished kids got no shoes. I have seven mobile usability errors on my site. That's a little more scalable way of looking at the problem. And it tells you more. On some pages, I have content wider than screen. Some of my clickable elements are too close together. More data. Measure first. Figure out what's better. Second, use these tools to decide whether or not you need to make mobile improvements. While we're talking about mobile, we can't help but talk about speed. As of last month, Google is not only evaluating our mobile site to decide how to even our desktop searches. It is measuring our desktop searches based on the mobile speed of our sites. That's why we should start from a mobile first perspective in design. Because then we are adding stuff for desktop rather than removing stuff for desktop. That will help your sites load faster. According to Google, you get three seconds. That's it. No one's going to, well, not no one. But most people are not going to wait longer than three seconds to view a page. You've got 50 requests in 500 kilobytes per page. Is this the next slide? No, this isn't the next slide. That might mean some things need to be cut. That might not be a bad thing, right? Clients have to have this and have to have that. And this department has to be satisfied. And this division, and God forbid the CEO get involved, we're getting all this up. Let me get back to you in a second. 50 requests, 500 kilobytes per page. That's rough, but it's doable. Because I just took Google's mobile dev certification, which I highly recommend. One of the big points they make in there is that the fastest element loaded is the element you didn't add to your page, right? And sometimes the best thing to do is just say no. Listen, you won't benefit from that extra slider. Ain't nobody waiting for 17 slides of 10,000 pixels. The image is right. Nobody's waiting for you. You can have the most beautiful page, and no one's going to wait to view it. So let's cut things down, make it as fast as possible. Not only for SEO, but for all of our marketing channels, right? Email marketing. Most of email is consumed on your mobile device. If you're called to actions to go to your site, ain't nobody going to wait longer than three seconds for that page to load. So you just wasted your money with your email. God forbid you paid search, right? It is a worthwhile investment to improve your page speed. Hour by hour, the biggest improvement you can make to any of your marketing efforts is make your site run faster. Google has a wonderful tool, PageSpeed Insights. Again, URL by URL basis. And it will break things down by mobile or desktop speed. Culver's kids got no shoes. Got some work to do on my home page. If we all run our own site, let's admit none of us would. But what I like about this tool is it takes time out of the equation. Time is a function of how good the connections. I got to give gigafiber at home, right? I'm fast. If I judge based on how it feels like things are loading, I'm not getting an objective analysis. This is a score between 0 and 100. I've seen a score of six on time. Yeah. That's where that 17-page slider of 10,000 pixels came from. But it will tell you what you need to do to improve your page. Now, this is a page by page basis. Again, with the WordPress site, I go through a couple examples of every template file and as rendered in review and see how these page speeds go. Thankfully, you've installed Google Analytics. If you go into behavior, site speed suggestions, here is a list of your page speed scores in one nice, friendly place for you to begin to improve. Nice. Now it's a little more scalable program. The nice thing about this process of pulling this report is now my contact page here is the worst. 77 isn't too bad, but I'm just saying it's not too bad because I'm speaking to you guys about page speed. I need to work on it. But I bet you if I improve the 77 on my contact page, I will accidentally improve all the other pages. Just how things work, right? Start at the bottom, work your way up. I was working really hard this week to finish off my re-certification. It expired on Monday, but I wanted to get it all done for you guys. I tell you, Google's Academy has a lot of great stuff. And their mobile site certification, oh man, I am not a real developer. You guys will get so much more out of it than I did. It is well worth your time. They spend so much time talking about page speed improvements and what you can do. Talk about how to use Chrome developer tools to really track where your problems are. Worth your time if you're building sites. So I highly recommend it. Talking about crawlability and index, make sure your site can be updated. I know some clients have to have this or that and you end up cracking the heck out of WordPress just to accommodate their ultra demanding needs. We all know, if we can't update WordPress, we're leaving big security holes. And Google will kick websites out of the index if they believe they've been hacked. And the process of being reinstated is not fun. It is actually, I think it's harder than when you get banned for doing bad SEO. Google has recently started hiring an entire team just to manage reconsideration requests from hacked websites. So please make sure your sites can be updated, right? Maybe that means you don't use WordPress. I say that out loud, I mean, I love WordPress, but it might not be the solution if your client has to have certain things, certain ways and you end up cracking open WordPress to such a point you can't be updated. So that might be a better solution for them. Or maybe they just need to realize that what they're asking is totally not worth it, which is probably most of the time the case. But yeah, can't do SEO on a hacked website. So SEO, measuring, crawling, indexable. It's also about the content. Now, I could talk for many hours about what to write on your site, but we're here, I wanna talk to you as developers. And some of you, the content on the site is kind of way outside the scope of what you do when you deliver a site. So we're not gonna talk about what words to use, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but there are some elements on how you design a WordPress site that relate to content that we need to consider. And the first one is just the existence of words, right? I know we all like pretty pictures. I do too. But Google ultimately is about the words. And we have to put words on the page if we expect to get traffic from Google. Google doesn't know what the picture of the lawnmower on your page means. Does it mean you sell lawnmowers? Does it mean you mow lawns? Does it mean that you repair lawnmowers? Does it mean that you are filing a clash action lawsuit against Troy Bilt because of their lawnmower? The picture does not tell 1,000 words. It says whatever the person thinks it means, you need words on the page to reassure your visitors that they have reached the proper page. The Bible says so, so do it. Now, I mean, one of his points he makes is that pages, words alone, I mean, sorry, images alone do not convey the intent of a page. Even if we're not talking about SEO, you need words on your page. Now, what that means for us who are building websites is we need to accommodate for the existence of words on the page. Make sure in your design, there is enough space for no less than 500 words. And it's bare minimum. I do more than 1,000 words on a page, ideally. But the good news is it doesn't have to be one big block of 1,000 words. Break it up, make it look good. You don't have to have one big vomit of 1,000 words. But you need that much content if you wanna be competitive in the Google. So, while we're talking about words, we have to talk about duplicate content. And true confession time, I have used a duplicate content threat against developers, maybe like you, to strike the fear of God in you so you finally do what I'm asking you to do. I'm so sorry, I lied to you, right? There is not a duplicate content penalty. But when Google sees the same content repeated on every archive page by date, the date page, the month page, the year page, every category to which you've added that blog post is also has a complete copy of the blog post. Every tag that you added, now you've multiplied the content a million times on your site. And when now, Google has to decide which of these pages does it wanna serve up? I don't want Google to decide. I want Google, I wanna tell Google which page to do. Because I know I want them to go to the main blog post page. So, this involves how we deploy WordPress, right? There you go, there's the function, the excerpt. Make sure you use that on all your loop pages so that we don't see the entirety of the blog post in every, I mean, don't even get me started. Like, I had to cut this talk down from five hours to 45 minutes because I wanted to talk about everything but I couldn't. But everybody likes, whoever the idiot was who said, if you just tag your post, it's good for SEO, I won't punch them. That's the stupidest piece of advice I've ever heard. Thank you. So, like, but I'm not going there. If you save your clients from their own stupid advice and use the excerpt. Now, if you aren't able to change the theme, maybe you're downloading a theme someone's paid for, then you can go into every individual post and use the more tag and it'll only show that on the archive pages. Once you do that a few hundred times in all your blog posts, you'll want a new theme and you'll want the excerpt in your loop. But you can work around the inability of things. While we're talking about content, let's talk about schema. Schema is simply a way to encode things using HTML, some JSON too sometimes, so that Google understands the intent of what this page is about. And there's at least three forms of schema that every website can have. There's the organization schema. Who's behind the site? There's the website schema. Believe it or not, there's a schema to tell Google that this is a website, right? It's not a PDF, it's not a video. It's a website. Just to be clear, Google, this is a website. Hey, it's free, it's easy, add it. Breadcrumb markup. Real easy to add, especially is, ghost. You will have to do a couple changes to your template files in order to include breadcrumb markup using the ghost method. Which is great, but ghost also adds website and organization schema to your site. So it's, everybody likes ghost because they like the little red, green, yellow, whatever, I don't even care about that. I think ghost is good just to use for the schema. There's a couple little extra steps you have to take, but there's really no extra development work just to get some basic schema. Let me get back to you. Google has the structured data tool, which is amazing because what you can do is you can put a website in here, a webpage in there, and it will read all the schema, and if there are any warnings or errors, it'll tell you what this is. The best part about this is you can just copy and paste HTML here. You don't even have to have the page live, and it will tell you if it's valid. Now, there's all kinds of other schemas to put that are worthwhile, a little extra effort, but worthwhile. Local business schema. You've got some numbers and phone numbers, addresses on your site. The local business schema tells Google, this is an address. This is a phone number. This is the name of my company. This is where we are. Little extra work, but you can even throw it in with JSON and it's done. You can do, what's some other schemas that we like to use, article schema. Every blog, it's not that hard within the post file template to go and update the post so Google understands that this is an actual article as opposed to a landing page or something else. And Google actually says they will give you a benefit. They rarely say it, they say there's a benefit for using article markup. Do it, just while you're building it, throw it in there. This tool will help you get there. Review schema. It's a great schema to add. Warning, Google is actively cracking down on people abusing review schema. So if you are selling a service, don't use product schema. If you are selling a product, don't use business review schema. There are also other guidelines that Google explicitly states that you need to follow when adding review schema to your site. You have to have a form on the page that displays the review schema to take in reviews. You have to display all reviews taken in by that form, good or bad. If you don't, you will get a nasty gram. Thankfully, you'll know you got the nasty gram because you've installed Google Search Console and that's where you'll receive it, saying you are in violation and you need to remove it. That's the nicest nasty gram you'll get from Google. Just remove it, you'll be fine. But listen guys, Google, SEO is not about tricking Google. Get over it, let's just do it right. Another scalable way since you've installed Google Search Console is you can go under Search Appearance Structure Data and you can see your site-wide all the schema Google's finding on your site. Every WordPress site known to man has this top line validation error. Who cares, doesn't matter, just ignore it. I've actually tried to solve it. Now it's back for some reason, not worth my time to figure out. But the important thing is in my case, organization schema, local business, breadcrumb article. We've got two different kinds of breadcrumb, awesome. I didn't even know I'd do that. Anyway, point is this is a little more scalable way to make sure your schema is installed properly. Last thing about content, eat. Expertise, authority and trust. We first encountered eat again in the manual review guidelines. If you wanna read about what makes a website have expertise, authority and trust, there you go. Happy to give it to you, just ask, I'll give you a copy. But basically help your clients know what makes their website different. I know you guys pick good clients, good businesses. Help them brag a little bit. They don't wanna brag about themselves, but help them. Incorporate their certifications. Incorporate testimonials and reviews. Incorporate where they went to school. Incorporate the conferences that they participate in. What makes these companies have expertise, authority and trust, build it in to their site. They will benefit from it. So SEO, all we're talking about. Can you measure it? Can Google crawl and index it? What does the content say? Finally, the most important ranking factor is links. What's my time? We're good, okay. So this is where I get to wax eloquent for a moment. Here, what makes Google better than, remember Alta Vista, right? Is that Larry and Sergey had a bad high school experience. As nerds, they were probably pretty conscious of the fact that they weren't the most popular kids in their high school. And they took what they learned about what makes someone popular in high school and they made a search engine with it. What makes the kid in high school most popular? Is it that he says he's popular? No, that's probably actually opposite, right? Before Google, it was the website, you said, ooh, I'm the most popular, I'm the most popular. That made that the best website. But Google, Larry and Sergey said, no, no. It's not what they say about themselves. It's what everybody else says about you, right? Another analogy I like to use is you go into a room and they're full of plumbers. Which is the best plumber? Is it the guy that has plumbing on his hat, on his shirt, on his business card, on his truck? Or is it the guy that everybody says, he's the best plumber, right? This is what links do to help a website rank in Google. This is what made Google different. It makes Google by far market leader. Now, link building could again be a whole really long topic. But we're talking about developing websites and what we do with links. This may be outside your scope because you're probably not responsible for what other websites say about your clients' websites. But how you build your URLs will affect links. Sometimes I'll get a site and there'll be a complete redesign, rebuild, and every URL is different. Great. Now, all the new URLs have no credibility because nobody's going and saying, that's the best webpage on that. When you launch a website, please. Please! Don't forget to install the 301 redirects, right? A 301 redirect says to Google, hey, I know the page was here, it's here now. Thanks. And Google will pass the link credit from the old page to the new page. If you use a 302, no authority gets passed. The user still gets to the page, but the link credit does not. Make sure it's a 301 header redirect. If the page resolves to a 404, all credit evaporates. So, please, when you launch a new website, ideally you keep all the URLs the same. I have worked really hard on some websites just to make sure the URLs don't change. Sometimes you can't avoid it. So just be sure you install 301 redirects for every old page to the new page. Yes, it's paying the butt. Yes, it's really difficult, but it is the number one source of traffic decline after a new website launch I've ever seen. Typically. Sorry, number two, number one is I turned off robots. And that's clearly number one. Number two is no redirects. So, please take time. I'm happy to help you through that. There's some tools that you can use to help, but it needs to be done. Canonical URLs. Again, this is a moment where we all thank God we're working with WordPress. This is really pretty easy with WordPress, but the idea here is that some sites add parameters to URLs in order to, for instance, sort items on the page or sort different pages or render the same page. Point is if one piece of content can be seen from different URLs, we have a canonical problem. We need to do, with the solution for this is a canonical tag that is inserted inside the HTML that says to Google, we know you're on the sort by price page, but the real version of this page is this product category, okay? So you have to take a little extra step to add the canonical tag to the page so Google can decide, again, sorry, we don't want Google to decide which is the right page. We want to tell Google what is the right page. And that's where Yoast is awesome because if you install Yoast, it'll do the canonical tags right for you. I have seen some WordPress sites hacked so badly Yoast for some reason couldn't put the canonical tags on the page, but most of the time Yoast just adds them for you. Again, another benefit of Yoast outside of the red yellow green, who cares? But yeah, so that's SEO. It's really not that complicated, guys. It's measured crawl, content, and links. But remember, this is just the beginning of SEO, right? We are not delivering SEO'd sites to clients just because we built them, even we use all these best practices. There's a lot more to it that we have to engage in, but if you help me by installing some of these things, not only will your client benefit from the marketing efforts more quickly because I'm not spending the first three months going backwards, but you won't hate me for breaking your website by trying to fix these things. Now, I've talked about a lot of the tools here. I was trying to figure out an easy way to give you these tools. I have a little audit on my site. This will just literally send you a list of all these tools if you want to look at it. Even Luke's contributed a tool to this little audit. Yeah, I won't narc him out. I promised I wouldn't narc him out. So that's SEO and developing websites for SEO friendliness. Now is a great time to offer some questions. Criticisms, you want to vent at me for being for that guy who just totally decided, yeah, that's the question. Yeah, right. So the trick with Google search, okay, you're asking about the reliability of data for a Google search console. And I notice I use the old version of Google search console. The new version is getting better every day, but it doesn't have nearly the data. I use the old version still. Google search console's data is really only accurate if you're using the canonical version of your site. So if your site redirects to triple W, that's the version of your URL you should use in Google search console. If you converted your SSL certificate, and now you're running HTTPS, you need to revalidate with the HTTPS version of your page. You've got to do that. Well, we'll get to the secured sites in a second. I'm sure, I'm sure. But the data there is going to be the best data you can get of how Google understands your site. Sometimes it says some weird things, and I try not to panic. Like the 404 errors is one of the best pieces of that. Google is encountering a 404 error on your site. We now know the implications of a 404. Any link juice doesn't get passed. That means our link is harder. Sometimes Google comes up with these crazy 404 errors. Like what the heck, man, where'd you get that? They're actually going way back in their archives from 20 versions of the site ago and saying, I wonder if this page still exists, right? Is that a 301? Fixed. Right? No, 301. 301 it. In case there's, because Google for some reason thinks that page exists, so you want to get Google to the right page, and you want to get any credit of any links that might be to that page. So don't just know index a 404 page, even if it's incorrect. I've found also 404 errors in Google Search Console are often one of the easiest ways to find out your website's been hacked. Right? Go into Search Console, look for Louis Vuitton handbags, and yep, there it is, a little viagra in Cialis sometimes too. Yeah, that's another benefit. Looking for ranking and impressions and clicks, I find very helpful. In fact, that's the only place I trust for rank. But that's because I don't have a lot of confidence in any ranking tool. Ranking, I don't want to get on a soapbox about ranking tools, but there's a reason why Google gives a rank average of 3.6. Because you never rank three, and you never rank four consistently, you're moving around, and the best estimate Google can give you is 3.6. So that's more accurate than authority labs or Moz, because you don't really rank four ever frequently. You're gonna rank an average. It's also based on actual searches. So if no one's searching on a term, Google won't have data for that term. So that's another reason I like to use it, is because that's the realistic check of the CEO who is playing the, what about this word game? And what about that word? And I thought about this word today, and I'm gonna think about this word, and nobody's looking for those words, dude. And just get away from thinking about what about this word game, and do stuff that actually matters, rather than, oh, my buddy ranks for this term. Well, great, good for him. Congratulations, I bet he's not getting anything for it, but whatever, he feels better, great. What else, yeah. All pages, all pages that you wanna rank in Google. Some pages are probably less important than others, right? You don't really care if your privacy policy ranks, but your privacy policy is probably one of your longest pages on your site, right? You need a privacy policy. But yeah, I would know less than 500, please, yeah. Yeah, sorry, you had one, thank you for waiting for me, yeah. Yeah. Right, so it's hard to draw a broad stroke here, and we're starting to see how one hand at Google doesn't know what the other hand is doing, often times, there's all kinds of friction within Google. For instance, Google used to say, add schema using Google Tag Manager. And then recently, Google searched, this structured data testing tool wasn't able to see the structured data you added using Google Tag Manager. And then finally, Google said, nope, don't use Tag Manager to install schema anymore. So it's like such a big company at this point, no one knows who we're talking about. So I wouldn't know what to say about who's right or wrong. In my experience, that weird one that all WordPress sites have, an error, what is it, do you remember? Ignore that, that totally doesn't matter, right? I wouldn't worry about that at all. If you are really, really bored and your client has really, really deep pockets and really wants to pay you to fix that, fine, man, fix it. It won't help, but fix it, it won't help you. I've also noticed that Google tends to be pretty forgiving with schema. I forget which one, but I think an error means, eh, not best practice. A warning means, nah, it's wrong. So it's okay to have an error. If you have a warning, that's what you need to fix. So I think it's a local business schema suggests you have an average price. I don't wanna put a price on my site. And so I get an error saying you need to put price. I'm not putting that on my site, sorry. No, if it's an error, it's fine. If it's the warning, it's the problem because then, but I've seen schema rendered by Google that had warnings too. And that's just because sometimes this tool, whoever developed that tool in their 20% time or whatever, at Google isn't talking to the search quality team and the search engine is able to better understand it than even the tool. So I would use the tools at your disposal to troubleshoot and get as much together as you can. But if for some reason you can't fix a warning, okay, then it's better to have it on there with an error. And sometimes Google's actually able to pick it up. So I wouldn't remove it unless it was incorrect for some reason. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I get it. This is the fight I have on a daily basis, right? Hopefully the marketing team is smart enough to understand the implications of adding a crap ton of code, right? But if you're not being paid for the marketing, here's the rope, hang yourself. I mean, I would almost rather them do that than giving them access to change the code and make it worse, right? And I mean, a friendly warning to say that, hey, you know, this could be seriously affecting the way your pages load, which is forget about if it's a Google ranking factor not people's gonna be frustrated. You might know more data about those people but you're gonna have less people waiting to start to load to even see them. So I think a friendly reminder of, hey, add all you want, but remember, we can't add everything. But I think you would be happier knowing that they wouldn't be able to be cracking your code and breaking your site and not bothering you with annoying requests to add this code and what if it's installed wrong and we're gonna do it again and we're not moving that, we're not doing that one anymore. So now remove it and replace it with this one and that's annoying. So let them have tag manager. And yeah, you're giving them a rope and they may hang themselves with it but hopefully the marketing team's smart enough to understand the implications of this and unfortunately, sometimes they're not. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We weren't selling you a tarp first. And I don't know if you can see, but not quite. And they only have one yard. But they were like this, you know, the city and come see our yard in this city but none of the, none of the cities were actually where they were. Yeah. This seems like a really bad idea. It does. It doesn't seem like a good thing. And the guy was like, no, this is what we do. And I was like, I feel like this is what people did 10 years ago and it's probably frowned upon now. And the guy was like, no, no, no, we're doing this. I was like, this is gonna take me a week to do this. He's like, no, no, just do it. It's like. Yeah, sorry, I'm so sorry, you know. Let me apologize on behalf of crappy marketing agencies with really bad out of date playbooks. But duplicate content, and we didn't, like I said, I didn't wanna get into how to write content for websites in this talk and really focusing on development. But yeah, I mean, duplicate content applies to, like the rule I always say is, because naturally when I say, we need to have more words. They say, great, how unique does it have to be? And the answer is, if you have to ask, it's not enough. Right, if you have to ask, it's not enough. And I mean, Google's not dumb, right? They're figuring this out. So yeah, that's a really, really bad idea. At the best case, Google's just gonna say, why do I wanna serve this site up? Because it's the same old crap on every page. At the best case. I was like, I'm excited. Now, as a strategy, adding more content to a site tends to be very, very effective. And if there's only one thing I can do with the site outside of some of these technical things, is keep adding more content to a site, as long as it is able to do it in a scalable, unique way. Yes, that's just cutting corners. That's the strategy of trying to trick Google. Yeah, that's a pretty good one. Yeah, well, Google's not gonna serve it up. No one's gonna find it. Don't worry about it. Just take the money and take the money for the stupid advice and yeah. What are some other questions? Anybody have any other questions? Yeah, I'm sorry, content in an iframe? Yeah, Google does not like content in iframes. You can't track content in iframes through Google Analytics because Google Analytics can't pass through the iframe for security reasons. So, oftentimes people will try to sneak around the idea you need to add content to a page by putting in an iframe. Now you can do scrollable divs and stuff like that. But even that, Google says don't hide your content like that. So, that's probably not the best idea. Yeah. How is Google doing with JavaScript? Yeah, that's, oh yeah, thank you. How is Google doing with JavaScript? This is the number one fight I have with developers, right? Some developer, so I'm gonna vent on you for a little bit, right? So, do you go to your doctor with your WebMD article and say, but doctor, there's an article in WebMD and I clearly have this. And every developer who said, see David, Google can read JavaScript. This article says so. Loaning, right? It can, to a limited degree, but you have to take so many extra steps to ensure that it does, that it's not the best solution. It's not quite ready for prime time yet. I mean, besides the fact that like, why on earth would you want to develop a website in JavaScript except to say that you could? I don't get it. Yeah, all right, all right, all right. We have a throw down here, a throw down here. But, there was a great, great video. All right, all right. This is what I came for. There's a wonderful video in Google I.O. of this year, like two months ago, Google I.O., where Google basically tells you what you need to do in order for Google to read JavaScript. That's from John Muir, who is head of Google search quality out of Germany, and he's kind of basically saying, don't do it, if you do it, do it this way, but there's so much extra work you gotta do that it's probably best not to. But there are, I'll admit, there's more things in this world than this, yo. And if you don't want to get traffic from Google, that is a great way to build a website. But there's so much extra things you have to do. I would rather build it from a server-side code base and make it easy. I don't want Google to have to do the extra work, and I don't, you know, there's so many ifs and that's such a new technology, things change. I think from that, you'd probably understand the video more than me, but the video basically said you had to revert to older versions of Angular for it to work and stuff like that. So it's like, I'm not a bleeding edge kind of guy. Let's let the technology settle. And in a few years, that might be the better solution and that's totally cool. But right now I wouldn't do it. There's, you know, there's, but you don't have to take my advice, you just gotta pay me. Yeah, right, right. Yeah. You know, I heard that and I heard someone ask a question about that and this is where we get into SEO debates and I'm not gonna get in an SEO debate with a fellow SEO. That talk was super duper. And I say that for someone who can't sit in SEO talks because they make me really, really mad. But that might be the only thing I disagree with him on that. But better than nothing, right? For usability, from a user's perspective, I mean, we're not trying to trick Google here, right? So let's not try to sneak around Google and do this. Technically Google doesn't go through iframes, but Google might in this case, since it's a Google product, understand that it's its own iframe, maybe. But I've understood that it's better, Google would prefer the API method. That was the way I understood it, but if I couldn't use the API, didn't have the budget to it or something like that, then I'd bettered nothing. But I don't claim to be a local expert. I would defer to him if he has experience in that and he thinks it works, go for it. We're all done. I'm gonna be in the happiness bar in a little bit. So hang out with me. I wanna like a glass of water too. Thank you guys for showing up. Thank you.