 SEO it's interesting because the title of this topic. It's not a clickbait scenario but I am I did use an intentional way of naming what I named it because I felt like it was going to get more eyeballs on it. However, the reality is SEO is not magic there's not a magician behind some curtain that's just making this thing appear who got the bunny now or who disappeared this person. There are definitely tricks that you can use to increase your SEO that really feels like it's magic. But there is no necessarily one shot kill or one thing, one step that you're going to take that's just going to shoot you to the top of the rankings of SEO. So I just wanted to put that out there and just be honest and truthful with you all if you're looking to just oh my show is going to tell me the one thing I got to do and I'm about to be at the top of the rankings if I just do this tomorrow and next week I'm going to be number one spot I might want to lower those expectations a little bit because it does take time SEO is a long game play now if you wanted to learn how to get there the quickest the fastest you may want to join an advertising presentation, but SEO, it takes some time. So I'm going to do something really quickly that I like to utilize now since it's here we all know about it if you don't know about it you don't learn about it because about take over the world. That is AI. So what is SEO. Let's ask our AI handy dandy friend chat GPT explain SEO to a fifth grader. I'm going to explain in a short summary, explain what SEO is to a fifth grader in a short summary, because I can give you all the definition all day every day, give you a whole bunch of interpretation and stuff like that. But I like to do demonstrations of technology, while I am explaining something to connect those dots infused to. And it's a way to make your website show up higher in the search engines like Google, think of SEO like a big library and you want to make sure that your website is easy for the librarian, the search engine to find and put on and put on the right notes. So that way, people can find it when they are when they're looking for information by using certain words and phrases making your website easy to use and getting links from other websites. You can improve your websites SEO and make it easier for people to find you online. It's making it easier for people to find you online. If anybody else get you hit you with some jargon term or SEO is all these other things. Yes, SEO search engine optimization is very complex when it comes to really competing. But when you're just starting things off and you're trying to get a fundamental understanding. It's just about you and your web property. Getting online and be and having the ability of people being able to find you easily through the search engine, specifically Google. Most people talking about SEO they're talking about Google they're not talking about Yahoo or Bing or other search engines out there even though those are important and they still have SEO attached to them. Most people are talking about getting to the top of Google. So that right there in the nutshell if you learn anything from this particular conversation this presentation is that SEO was really just trying to get you to the top of Google. So that way you can be found easily be seen easily and then when you get those clicks, people will go to your website and next thing you know you're getting traffic you're getting leaves and sales you're getting readers and watches you're getting all those things because you added yourself in a way that was easily findable discoverable using Google. So with the first part of this SEO tips and tricks. I want to state that the first thing you always need to think about when it comes to SEO and getting your page to talk about Google is Google love speed was all about helping people find what they need the most accurate and fastest way and the way that you're impacting their mission and their goals is by having fast or slow hosting. And this is why website hosting is the first and fundamental thing you need to understand and do when it comes to optimizing your SEO opportunities. You need to be on fast hosting. Some people can say my show I don't have the money or I don't know about hosting, or I already just paid for my hosting for the year you know how we got locked in so now it's all should I use the whole year to do this and learn more. Listen, I'm not here to tell you what to do. I'm just striving to give you some different perspective a different angle looking at it. You're going to fail fail fast fail cheap. If you're going to fail. And typically we fail our way to success nobody just rolls over one day after they gather bad and be like whoa I'm a millionaire that usually doesn't happen. So if you're going to fail fast fail cheap, do not go cheap on your hosting because you will be sure to fail and fail slow and it'll be long and it'll be hard. Just let you know that. So here are some web hosting options that you can go and Google and do some alternatives, but these are some ones that are pretty fast when it comes to website hosting. Not only is your website hosting going to help with the SEO aspect of it it's going to help you with your security as well too. There's so much technology happening just in the hosting alone that has nothing to do with the plugins. That's nothing to do with anything else just in the hosting. Right, most people don't even want to know about everything happening in the hosting. They just want their hosting to work. Do not go cheap on your hosting your hosting. I'm telling you will be compete and beat out most other people that have poor hosting but have a whole bunch of other solutions to try to beef up and speed up their website. You are going to beat most of those people. At least 80% of the time if you have great hosting because a lot of that hosting will cover other things that you'll be adding to try to make up for with plugins. So that's why I'm saying hosting is the number one thing you all want to think about and look at when it comes to optimizing your website specifically with WordPress. And that's going to help you get to the top of the rankings. The next one is going to be caching. And that's why I started with hosting at first, because some hosting companies have their own caching functionality or technology or plugin. And I oftentimes see a lot of people either overlook, or they don't even look into the fact that their hosting has caching and maybe they don't need to download or install a caching plugin on their website, or maybe they need to install the caching plugin of their hosting on their website. So hosting and its simplistic form is just a way for the, and I'm going to use simplicity versus jargon because I feel like people appreciate that more. But think of it as a way that your browser is taking a snapshot of the site. So that way when you go back to what everything is not loading every single time, because things have to load in order for you to see I know we are so used to being in this quick wave, quick fast in the hurry area we're in the TikTok area, it is what it is right, we're just in the TikTok era, but when it comes to this caching functionality, it really does help speed up your website because every time a person comes to your site it doesn't have to load all the bits and pieces all over again every single time that is the most simplistic way I can explain caching in a nutshell. And that's why I said it like a snapshot kind of of your website. If you don't have hosting that has its own caching, I would recommend the first thing you do when it comes to optimizing your site for the search engine is adding a caching plug into your website. Here are some examples of some caching plug into here that you can find in the WordPress repo to be specific these are all really good caching plugins and obviously if they're here they're free, but I'm certain that a lot of them have a paid or professional the thing that I love to do at times when it comes to beefing up my website looking for the right tools the right plugins. I like to not only look in the WordPress repo but look outside of the WordPress repo because you just never know what you're going to find some things you're not going to find in this WordPress repository. So one of my favorite plugins that's not going to be found here is one called WP Rocket that is my favorite caching plugin. It's one of those things that the moment you add it to your website it just automatically starts working like you see an increase in speed immediately and then the more optimization you do to it helps you even more, but it is one of the top Mecca caching plugins is in the top three if you Google caching and WordPress WP rockets going to come up on that list most of the time, and they deserve to I'm just letting you know that it's not free. So that's why I'm sharing with you these right here. So I want to make sure I'm abiding within the WordPress guidelines but at the same time just letting you know that there are options out there that if even if you don't see it here. So go outside of this particular WordPress repo or WordPress.org and just Google and look for other alternatives that you may find on the software site but you're not going to find it necessarily in the WordPress repo. Again caching is one of those first and most important things that you want to do to your website when you are looking to optimize it for the search engines because you want to make it fast, especially for people who are trying to our first timers people who are first timer, they have more patients, but your first time visitors do not have patients. So if your site doesn't load in a certain amount of seconds, pretty much three seconds or less, they're gone, but you can't sell the people who don't see you can't get leads for people who don't see what you're doing so speed is huge caching is one of the first things I would advise everyone do. Let me look in the chat here real quick to make sure we're all still good. I see Sally. How do you know if your host has caching. I would, they usually stated on the plans, like if you even before even buy your hosting plan, they'll have it in the plans. You can also ask the support that's a, I'm probably going to make a do a presentation just on hosting alone. But I don't rock with hosting doesn't have good support. I'm just going to say that right now, do not rock with hosting that does not have good support if I can't ask you the questions I need answered and get a response within a specific amount of time a reasonable amount of time I won't rock with you posting if you ask your support they typically will tell you that they have caching. And they usually transparently show it on their plans because it's an added value bonus it's something that they're like hey, we want you to deal with us because we have x, y and z all these rich set of features caching is typically one that they'll tell you. And just as an example site ground has it has a caching plugin, but they also have their own caching. There are different types of caching I'm not going to go into that you client versus a server side but a Kinsta has caching as well WP engine has caching. So when I'm talking about caching using a plug in I'm usually talking about what they call the client side of caching the front facing side. On the server side of caching that's when your host has its own caching that you don't even need a plug in. It's already doing caching for you, even without you having to have a plug in on the website. Just purchased the plan with hosting yesterday are they good option and you're thinking. I really don't have an opinion on that one to be honest I can look it up. I don't have an opinion I do know that I don't work rock with hosts that I forgot they're in this group that it's not dream but something else, and I'll think of it later but there's this one group that owns a whole bunch of hosting companies, and I just don't rock with them because it's so it's one thing using a hosting that has shared, which there's like manage hosting and shared hosting, I'm using shared hosting but I'm going to be moving to manage hosting soon. I'm using shared hosting just got to keep in mind that when somebody else's website has a big spike in traffic. Let's say they get a million site visitors, they're going to allocate those resources to that website and typically that means you're going to train you have some resources because you're sharing hosting resources. So it's just one of those things where you just got to keep that in mind, but for typically for people that are just starting off a WordPress in their first, second, third or even fourth year. They use shared hosting, it works just fine they're good because they haven't built up a whole bunch of traffic post singer, I don't know about that one, not just yet have heard of it I've heard of host gator as well to and always do a speed test go to Google, the way you will want to do a speed test is you would want to so speed test, you would want to add your website. This is a page speed insights. So you would want to add your website here in page speed insights and add a blank page. That's a little tip for you do not add a page with all the content because you want to weigh it, you want to weigh it with nothing on it just add a blank page put it in here and test it. And that will let you know how fast your hosting is because this is the thing. If your page is slow with nothing on it do you think it's going to get faster when you start putting content on it. That's how you one way you can test your hosting a speed doing a speed test like this with a blank page. Hopefully that makes sense y'all. So we talked about caching talking about hosting you talked about caching right. Let's skip this one. Sorry. And now we're going to talk about image optimization. So image optimization is a way for you to make the image load faster, but still remain in good quality. People oftentimes get image conversion mixed up with like when you're converting an image mixed up with what is the other term I guess I'll say image optimization. Because when you're optimizing the image. You are reducing the file size of it. Like you're getting rid of unneeded data. Right so you're reducing the file size hopefully not at the expense of the quality of the file. When you're converting an image you're taking that image and you're putting it in a different format now our browsers can read different formats like webp. And so this format is even a better way of sharing and displaying your image so if you can convert your image to this format and people's browsers can actually read that format your website is going to load so much faster just because of that conversion. But optimization is a different thing so I see people get get it confused when they're oh and the word I was looking for was compression. That's what I was looking for. There's a difference between compression and conversion both are underneath the umbrella of optimization but image compression is not the same thing as image conversion that's something I had to learn in the past year or two and that starts playing at the clients because I wasn't even thinking that and things start getting really weird and when we tried to teach people this is like optimizing image so just keep that in mind image conversion is when you're taking the image and putting it in a different format. Image compression is when you're making the file size smaller and typically that can happen with a plugin but here's a neat trick that I learned about a years to ago that really helps a lot of times we're optimizing images that the plugin doesn't even handle and that is literally just going into WordPress and cutting the image in half. So if it's whatever size it is this by this cut that in half in WordPress when you have an image you can go in there you can crop it. Just crop it in half or crop it by a fourth maybe don't crop it in half at first just crop it by a fourth. Of that may have to do the calculator because I suck when it comes to math so I just go in there I'd be like is 300 by 500 some weird thing like that. So obviously you don't have to calculate by 300 by five you know. It's 150 but for other things that are weird numbers get a calculator cut it in half and I promise you that trick works it works so much because now you have. You're actually manually cropping the image making it smaller and then you're allowing the plugin to handle the rest for you and maybe the right term is a crop but. Okay so whether you're you're scaling it down you're making it smaller resizing it or it is that you want to utilize as far as the term just understand you can go in there and make it smaller. That makes sense to everybody if that doesn't make sense just put a no in the chat. It makes sense give me a yes. Do you know how many yeses I get is going to be how many air horns I give. I gotta get got another one might got to go down to Marco on this joint right quick. All right we cooking with grease. We cooking with grease okay so we're here with content delivery network CDN. This is one that I put last on this website speed optimization section, because you all you don't always want to add a content delivery network to your website despite with people say oh just put a CDN on it. No, if you deliver content around the world right if you have a global presence, even a regional presence. And when I say regional I'm not talking about this southern hemisphere of the United States or like, I'm talking about if you're in a couple countries like we have some people here from Canada. So if you're from Canada, and you got people in the States and they got some people in Mexico. Okay content delivery network is going to be good for you. But I would say that if you don't have if you're really local with your business, or just statewide I know anybody can come to your website we all know anybody can come to your website because it's the internet right. But if you do business just pretty much within your certain region, you don't always need within your certain locality, you don't always need a content delivery network. What a content delivery network does a really good one is it gives you various will say touch points across the world, where your website is being loaded on different servers across the world so it makes it makes it faster and easier for a person to reach your website. The thing about content delivery networks is they're not all created equal. And some have multiple use cases cloud flares one of the most popular ones. It's the one of the most popular ones I use it I've used it multiple times it's tried and true. It's free but cloud flares more than just a content delivery network. It is real big on security. So some content delivery networks are not going to give you an extra layer of security to your website they're just going to do the content deliver it's going to deliver your content globally. That's the best way to say it they're going to deliver your content to the world the network globally they're not going to do other things cloud flare will give you security and it will deliver your website globally to the world. Bunny is one of my second favorite ones, if not my first actually it's turned into my first at this one time, but I always start with cloud flare because it's popular people know about it. bunny.net used to be called bunny CDN but they started expanding to other features bunny is one of my favorite ones is that it's cheap isn't free, but it is so cheap, it's ridiculous I put $50 on my bunny account so you can you add money to your account your credit. I put $50 on there a few years ago and I'm still at $42 40 $43 last time I checked, because it's pennies it's using pennies now if I had a whole whole bunch of traffic hundreds of thousands of visitors a month or a week. I'm sure it will eat that up a little bit more. But it is pennies it is so cheap what you can do with bunny and it is fast it is really fast it might be fast fast and cloud flare but I haven't tested that so don't take my word if I can tell you is that there's other CDNs out there. All you got to do is say cloud flare alternative bunny alternative you'll find it find one that floats your boat, but just keep in mind. Don't add it to your website if you don't have a global presence or you aren't looking to expand globally, because typically content delivery networks they can do more harm than good. There are another piece of technology on your site that you have to adjust your website for you got to change some settings and plugins on your hosting blah blah blah blah blah. Sometimes your DNS your domain is not just a quick oh i'm just going to press a button and no, at least not over time some things do change so make sure that when you're using a content delivery network you understand that. Even if it's easy to set up, you might have to do some adjustments down the road that can affect things. Optimizing website URLs and using SSL encryption. I think this is something that a lot of us already know to an extent. Again, I don't want to assume everybody's knowledge level of SEO or websites or WordPress, but I believe that most of us, even if we haven't heard of the term SSL. We recognize when we go to a page and we get that warning or that alert do you want to enter a warning warning do you want to enter into this page do you want to be sure procedure don't proceed this is a we're at the path of no return like in the movies where they have that that one point they get to in the movie the the protagonist is it ain't no going back from here they be giving us that warning right that's what the SSL is all about. It's securing your website showing that your website is trustworthy. It's making your website secure it's protecting your website as well, and it has many different type of benefits. So you can use a plug in a WordPress to add an SSL, you can use let's encrypt that's often the one that is a very popular one that a lot of the hosting company so going back to the hosting if you have really good hosting, they shouldn't be giving you free SSL certificate where like go daddy, no daddy was like they were playing around with the SSL I got people off of go daddy because it was playing around with the SSL like they were charging for the SSL part and I'm just like whoa like how are y'all going to charge for this when all the other companies are giving away for free and you can get it for free. Go daddy is a whole nother topic for another day y'all I've had some rough patches with them. Oh they are okay okay so I just saw I'm trying to like pay attention to the thing and read the chat so if I skip something by accident y'all don't get mad at me. If I recognize something I'm gonna point it out. But yeah go daddy was real stingy with the SSL but the whole point is you see this little lock right here this lock the lock and key. This is how you know this site is secure because it's got a lock on it. And sometimes you can't even do e-commerce on your website without that lock. So there's a technical component of it. And then there's the perception of it. The perception wise, the perception wise people perception, they see that lock. And sometimes you get more points for being trustworthy now it doesn't mean it gonna buy from me so don't think oh my show set again SSL and they trust me. I ain't saying I'm just buy from you, or just become a lead because you got that that's just one trustworthy step one point of making your website more trustworthy from a perception standpoint, technical wise, you don't have the SSL, you can't even sell. They won't even let you sell without the SSL right so you need to have that just from a technical standpoint, and you'll get deranged or demoted. Google will say error, it will point out and let you know that hey you don't have an SSL your website. I don't think we can trust you that much so we ain't gonna put you on top of rankings because you ain't got this SSL so you ain't got this thing you can get for free. Look you can get this for free you ain't got time to do that. No we can't put you in our algorithms and our ranking can't have that. So, just get the SSL because it's very important for adding the technical component and the perception component of being trustworthy. And then when it comes to the website URLs this is something that's very important to your permalink structure, which is found in the back end of WordPress. It's typically found right here where it says permalinks in the settings. The good things that Google now, not Google but WordPress now just starts you off with post name before I don't think it did that back in the heyday. Some of y'all been using WordPress forever ever forever ever ever. I've been using it for that long been using it for a few years. So, I would say that I didn't get into it when they weren't doing this part but I appreciate that they started doing this part, because it just makes it easier now if you want to customize your website you have a reason why you don't have your URLs look very clean when you just have the backslash in the name of the page you don't have all this other stuff the date, some weird mumbo jumbo work letters and words and archives. That doesn't look pretty. Right. I want to get pretty up in here. So, using this post name is going to be something that it just it makes your URL look clean look pretty look nice look neat to people, right, and to Google it's a clean structure it can read they can read your URL in a very understandable way, and it just makes it so much easier for everybody for the search engines and for the people. So use this post name, at least 80 to 90% of the time. And avoid using this other weird stuff. I fire you unless you have reasons why you want to use these other structures, I would avoid them. So that's something that is very important when it comes to SEO, you're a permanent structure, how you organize your URLs, I promise you, they matter user friendly website structure and navigation. I'm going to rise into the URL aspect of things because when we have our URLs are typically, especially when it comes to like your navigation, they're paired with a menu, some type of menu item, right, some type of page, your structure, how you structure this from, I would say from left to right, particularly in the states I know, and other countries, I think especially in the eastern people read from right to left. And that's the most part and that's what's good is that now we have so much good technology where it can switch that up on the fly, depending on who's looking at your website. But since we typically read left to right and the Western hemisphere, and we need to top to bottom, you want to think about how you structure your menu that way, because how do I say this without getting to ball into strategy. There's a strategic way and there's a psychological way that that we go about doing things, and that people will interact with the way that we go about doing things. So if you are selling shoes on your website. It doesn't make sense to have your shop page at the end of all the other pages at the end of your menu, you should have your shop page in the second one or the third one. Say you're a servicing company right your agency of some sort, something like that you may want to have your portfolio or your services, but say you say you're like well I really want I really want to give the indication to people that I want them to get to know who we are who I am as a person, then you might want to have the about page second this order, I'm telling you it matters. You may not be able to explain it to your customers aren't going to talk to you or your users aren't going to talk to you in a way that we as fellow business owners are going to talk to each other, they're not going to talk to you that way. But I'm telling you right now this menu structure the way you have this the home about the services, your portfolio photo gallery. All the stuff that order. Oh, it matters. It's very important it matters because people are reading from left to right, and people don't have time we're in a tick tock error. So if you don't have it in a way where it's easily navigatable. I'm not sure if that's a word or not, but if it's easily navigational shirts that's right either. It just got to be easy. So make sure that you structure this menu your navigation in a very clear and concise way, because it doesn't matter. Mobile responsiveness is something that I believe we all are very accustomed of and we're aware of. But I think that we have trouble thinking about it when we are creating our business or a website. Because when we're a user, and we go on a website on our phone, and it doesn't look, it doesn't have this feel where everything looks nice and tight and right. And everything doesn't look all like huge and just out of place. When we're on a person's website and it don't look the way it's supposed to look. Oh we get angry. I'm talking about we get like Hulk smash angry. And we may not verbalize it but we'll leave we'll just leave it will be gone. So this is something that I always tell people like keep mobile should be the first thing I and it's weird if you're not a website developer or designer. It's not that way, but anytime you're building a website. Unless you are an advanced user of development or designing or WordPress mobile first mobile first mobile first, do not let anybody trick you that mobile first is not important mobile first Google has literally said and prioritize, we're prioritizing mobile first. It's mobile first everybody's on their phones. Google prioritizing mobile first. Why would we, as the people striving to use Google to get in front of other people why would we not prioritize mobile first. So mobile first is a huge thing mobile responsiveness is a huge thing. It did how well does your website respond to a mobile version of it and there's a difference between, because I didn't want to get too technical with it, but there's like mobile first, which is more about or tablet responsiveness, which is more about the responsive structure of your of your site like when you're like say I were to make this go down smaller and smaller smaller smaller. Like how does it respond in these different ways. There's that and then there's mobile optimization, where you're really taking certain things out of the website of your site in this mobile version. Not just about how well does your website look when it's in a smaller browser, or when it's being shifted from a large size or small size. But do you still have the same things you think it's still relevant for certain things you have on the desktop version is that relevant for the mobile version or does that hurt the user experience. I'm talking about user experience and another presentation. So just keep that in mind. The responsiveness of it is not the same thing as the optimization of it even though that is a part of the optimization. Please lend me more if you don't mind what you're referring to specifically is it the mobile aspect of it or. Okay, so this right here is if you're using the WordPress editor to write the page. When you click on this preview button right here, it will give you an option to look at it on desktop tablet and mobile. That's all I did was I clicked in this snapshot I click the preview button, and I just clicked on mobile. That's all you see it the way you see it here. So if you're writing your post. I would double check it when you're writing your posts right in the desktop, but then put it in mobile I'm not saying you need to be writing in mobile when I say mobile first I'm not like you got to write mobile and the tiny. I'm not saying right in mobile first just think mobile first. And make sure that when you actually are getting ready to pretty much be on the tail end of your post. Hit the preview button here in the WordPress editor, I believe in elements or in Divi they have a very similar feature, and just look at it what it looks like here, and look at it what it looks like on your actual phone. So here's the WordPress editor at this point in time and I'm hopeful I'm hoping it'll change is this does not give you the always give you the exact match of what it's going to look like in other environments so tested on your phone tested on in here WordPress and even tested here. If I on Chrome if you click inspect. You can actually magically here's the magic right here magically go to different sizes you can they have different sizes that you can test your site on. So here's another little tip right here to so that way you can see how it is going to be in mobile. So same thing here if I were to go to inspect. See is showing me up this is what WordPress the back of WordPress will look like in the mobile, and they had to develop it for this. This is not just out the box oh it's just going to work look like this mobile which is no, you have to literally take some time. Hopefully the content the technology you're using like the blocks the WordPress blocks are using your elements will have their coded well where when it comes into mobile. It'll format itself at least 80% maybe 70% of the way. And then you just got to go in there and do some other things, but for the most part. Yeah, it's not just going to always be because I think that's what people get they mess up at. It's just another website and they think of a square space or wicks on the mobile I don't have to do anything the mobile it's just going to look all nice and neat and that wrong. You got to go in there sometimes you got to hide some things take some things out put some things in its mobile is something that I think a lot of people sleep on. Wait way too often. Okay, so keyword research in optimization. This is a another thing I think that. Sometimes people they over they overthink about, and it's because we've been in such a keyword error that people are just like I got to have this grand keyword plan. Keywords are very important because they are ways that people find us in Google keyword research is important from a fundamental level just saying from a fundamental level because when you're writing your content, you do want to have your content send it around a main topic, even though it's going to have sub topics, you want your content to be sending around a main topic. That main topic is going to be the keyword you're looking to rank for. So when you're using a keyword research tool. This is a keyword research tool right here called over suggests I use this, but I've also used SM rush. I use Google search console. I'm not a fan of Google keyword planner anymore. I use SE rankings and my so I've used all these on here I just stuck with over suggest for now because I like Neil Patel, but at the same time I'm probably going to end up getting a subscription with a dress pretty soon here. But hrefs is more of a this is more of an advanced keyword tool and they do backlinks as well too. I would start off with if I were you something like a uber suggests it is free. They have pay plans, but just to get you started on some keyword research you can type in a keyword. See what the metrics are around that keyword is it something easy for you to rank for is it hard for you to rank for. Depending on you're trying to rank for it organically or pay and then what are other keywords associated with that keyword, that will be your subtopics because you can rank for more than one keyword on your website, but you have to have only one keyword or key phrase that's a better way to say a key phrase or keyword phrase, So keep that in mind. But if you want to take a snapshot of this be my guest. Like I said these are some really popular good tools. Uber suggests is the one that I use and it's the one that I recommend people who are just starting out as beginners use this one start off with this one because it'll just get you started and then you can move on to more advanced keyword research tools. But don't sleep on Google search console. That one is only made for Google it's it but that one is going to give you the best keywords you're ever going to get because it's going to show you literally what people are searching for the queries they're typing into Google to get to reach to your site. It's going to show you that information directly based on your website you ain't going to get information better than that when it comes to keyword research. All the rest of these tools can link to Google search console and Google analytics and they do a great job with scraping and doing what they can do but your best bet is going to be using Google search console, and it's free. Another great tip when it comes to SEO and getting your website to the top of Google is building content and creating high quality content and regularly updating it. And that's the reason why I have here a picture of chat GPT, because I feel like oftentimes people get bogged down who are not natural writers or good writers, or don't like to write at all. They get bogged down with the process of writing I know I have, and it's been that way for a very long time. And I'd love to write but when it comes to writing a post I dread it. I rather do a video or presentation. So now that we have these AI writing tools that can assist us in creating content, and they're really great at assisting, they do not need to be short, nor should they be the main goal, the main piece know it's just an assistant to help you not start from a blank slate. We don't like starting from blank slate as people we have other things you got to do in our day. So using a content creation tool AI tool will help eliminate a lot of the blank page phobia. And then you can go in there you can always ask it to write you an outline to give more details for a section and then you go in there and you, since you're the expert in your field you put your touch on it. And then you also double check it because it's not always going to give you the exact information again it's not a person that doesn't have your experience. I'm just do saying this to say that creating content. That's one of the main ways so you say you do everything else on your website as far as all the other tips that I've given you so far, but you don't create content. Why would Google show you Google has no reason to show you you're not being helpful to the people. At all. So Google has literally no reason to show you if you don't have content on your website. And we're talking about more than just a homepage and the about page talking about adding relevant content usually in the form of a blog post something like that. That's going to get you to the top of the rankings a lot faster than anything else is writing helpful content and then updating it every so many weeks every few months or maybe updating it once a year. It's up to you what your intervals are but don't just let it be stale, like sometimes things change in the world oftentimes things change in the world so update that content. You can use something like chat GPT which right now is free, or you can use something like Jasper, which is a more of a premium tool, I use jazz, I use them both actually I use them side to side, because they pump out. Even though they're made on the same, they're created in the same language model to a degree, Jasper has a different than chat GPT in some ways, I'm not going to get to technical with it. So I just use both of them because they both give me different angles is I have two buddies two assistants I'm like what do you think. Okay, what do you think about it. Okay, like what he said better I like what she said better do that. And so what do I think. Okay, now that we're all three here in the room. That's really, let's think about this. That's how I create content create concepts, not just content but it helps me create concepts, and then that will lead to the content. Let me check my chat here quick. See if I have any other questions, how can I show you pages later with headlines, etc. I don't know what that what you mean Sally as far as being able to show pages. Okay, and it's funny speaking of headlines, going right into the headings, another way of getting your website closer to the top of the rankings, right, that's basically what all SEO is just getting your website closer at the top and trying to be at the top as long as you can is using all tags, meta descriptions and alt tags for your images. So a header tag is going to be with like the h1 and the h2 and the h3 WordPress has the has this when you're using a paragraph block other block plugins have this too. And then make sure that you're using this structure in appropriate way. You typically only want to have one h1 on a page which is usually like the title, and then the h2s are the subtitles and then the sub subtitles or h3s and so forth and so on. I don't usually see people go down to h5 and h6 that's not a general thing h2 h3 is very normal. And then make sure that you just have those you have that indicated on your site. That's how you do the search engines are able to read quickly what the website what your page is about. And then when it comes to meta descriptions, depending on what SEO tool that you use because in order to do this you typically want to use some type of SEO tool. I'm a fan of rank math but there's Yoast, there's SEO press there's many others. There's a lot of difficulty to add your title in here so this is where the search engines know what this is the title of the page. You can change your permalink so say you wanted to change the URL of your page will be able to do that. And then you want to add a description. And I like what I like about this is this literally showing you a preview of what your website is going to look like in the search engines. It's going to have the URL. It's going to have the title, and it's going to have the description. So here is where you want to put those keywords in. So we think tie it back to where how do we want to use those keywords. I know I should only have one main one and then I should have other ones as well too. You want to put your main keyword at the top of the page. So you want to put that joint in your title. And if you can put it in your URL that's helpful as well too. And then you want to sprinkle it a few times with within the page within the content keyword is a few times do not overstuff your page with keywords specifically that main keyword. So put your keyword, your keyword in the heading, put it in the heading, add it in a description, add it in the title heading title description keywords. That's where they're best going to be used and then sprinkle them, especially your other keywords sprinkle them around the actual page in the body, the body text, like I said before, you can rank for more than one keyword on a page. Don't get it twisted, you just don't rank for one keyword there are many keywords that could have people could type into Google that will lead to your page. Now we don't choose that Google chooses that for us and I guess people choose that for them in some weird way but you don't choose say I'm going to rank for this one. And you can say what you want to say and feel how you want to feel, but the reels are Google's gonna be like no we're going to say that you're going to rank for this keyword. This is the word that we're saying and the way that you can help mitigate errors. The way you can help influence Google is by putting those keywords in the right place that Google reads when it cross your website. So again, header tags, meta description, and then your alt tag, which is next. So something similar to the meta description, you want to add some type of description and some type of way of describing this image. What you don't want to do is just have it be the name of the image, and you don't want it to be something that is not going to make sense to a person who has a disability or cannot see the image. And it's just, it's just as picture. Okay, what is the picture about I see four people jumping in the air with water behind them. That could be an alt text on alternative text. Google reads this. Why does Google read this and other search engines read this, because it wants to be accessible. It wants people it wants to show you that people need to be able to access your content, even if they have certain disabilities. So this does go with an accessibility factor as well to not just a search engine optimization factor. And it's something that I feel like a lot of people, they don't do it. Like they add images to their website, but they don't actually add some type of alt text because it does it takes some time. What's cool though is you can set up and I'm going to do another presentation probably the follow up of this one of setting up rank math. I can show you all that you can set up rank math and other SEO plugins in a way where yeah, it'll automatically take the file name. So if you're naming your files way that you would describe the image if you're naming the image the way you would describe it, then it will auto take that name and then add it here. Okay, boom, bam, bam, you're done. You're good to go. You are ready, but most people don't do that. It don't name their image in a way where it's going to make sense if it were to be in a descriptive sense describe the image. So that's another tip right there. If you don't want to have to go in here and do this manually for every image start naming your images in a very descriptive way, at least the ones that you're going to upload to your website. And then that way that the SEO plugin automatically take that name and then boom, bam, bang, give you all image description right there. Hey, we're all about saving time over here right. So this is an example right here of that I took a snapshot for you also you can see that it will add the alt attribute and you can use the file name to do so it's giving you some dynamic capabilities some auto capabilities. I love that I'm a fan of that. But like I said most people don't name their image in a way where it's going to make sense to a person who can't see and they're hearing it they're listening to it being described to them. So you just got to keep that in mind. Let me check the chat here. I think I skipped a couple by accident my bad y'all does Google like a generate text like chat DVD. I mean, it's a loaded question I know what you're saying I feel it don't even I wish I had my rock clip doesn't matter what your name is I used to watch a lot of wrestling because Google there's only so much they can do to stop it there's plagiarism checkers out there. And that's why I always tell people don't just add stuff in the chat GPT and then just put it on your page that that's not smart we got to be smart here people change up a few words now I tell you just to change up the words that you can try to outsmart the search engines. But no put some things in your own words a part of that is being authentic and being genuine. That to me is just being human, ironically when we're using an AI box to help write the content forest. It's just one of those things where I feel that Google because Google is now competing with chat GPT they're creating their own AI system and software Microsoft has already just released their new browser with chat with their with chat GPT right inside of it which is pretty awesome. So Google is trying to compete with that. So yeah they know that the world has changed we're in a place where we don't have time to write everything so we need a set we need help because we don't have time for whatever reason. So as long as you're not plagiarizing you're not just directly copying from the output and just throwing that in your page or throwing that in whatever it is you're doing and just leaving it like that, you don't have anything to worry about. You don't have it because it's not going to be like, you know 50% of this is by chat GPT and the other 50% is by Ray. No, it's as far as what I know, it's not going to work like that. All right, how many keywords can I add to the alt text before it's family. That's a good question. I would say, let's clear conversations here and say how many key words can I add to all text. You see I'm doing this on purpose y'all because I can answer questions but I like to demonstrate that I don't even got to know everything but heart no more I can just go to the thing is up to y'all whether you think I'm not talking about how many keywords can I add to the alt text before it's spammy. So it's basically saying that it's not the most important factor. I would say that there is not there is a limit like it's trying to give me another way of looking at it. Because it's more about context of how you're using the keywords, but like I just said right here, aim for one or two. I just sniffed through all that other explanation and try okay thank you for that blah blah blah blah. What is the answer aim for one or two keywords or key phrases, but it started off with a number of keywords. You can add it's not the most important factor so it try to give you the angle the understanding then it spit out the actual answer so hopefully that answers your question. Schema market for rich snippets. Now this is something that I would say this is an advanced technique, but it's crazy how we are so used to it as users is just, it's different being a producer with it. So if I wanted to how to bake a cake. So like this these images right here, these are rich snippets. And basically, like you see you're seeing the content in a way where it's not just an article. So this is how Google used to display stuff just as an article. Now we have all these. I forgot what the other term is it's rich snippets and something else. Those in the chat please add it in there but we have these we have these ways where now you can see these images with this metadata, this information here, we got the people ask right here. See it's crazy how right before our eyes Google the search engine was changing things, and we were just getting used to it, and then we were expecting it. But as producers, as WordPress users as creatives, we don't even think about adding this and doing this for our own site, but we're so used to it when it comes to searching for everything else, even these videos right here. So skew a markup is all about you getting this new type of real estate, I always tell people think of Google as real estate, it is real estate this is just real estate, you're looking for a way to get on on their platform, and they own real estate. So 80% of the internet is ran by Google, when it comes to search. I think it's like 86% not mistaken. This is a lot of real estate here people. So this is an important factor of understanding like if you're trying to use if you're trying to get this type of let's say view, the way that a person would be able to see your site, you want to get something like this, you want to use schema markup. Sometimes the good SEO plugins will have this for you, you may have to tweak a couple of settings, but they will have it for you. So that way, depending on the type of content that you're writing, or creating, or you're utilizing in your website, you have a better opportunity to get those kind of to get this, these kind of will say results, rich snippets featured feature snippets, just basically the rich results. It's basically the same thing but if you want to get it like this, you got to use some type of skill markup. And you see here, and this and I'm telling you it works because people are more likely to click something like this like recipe they're more likely to click this image, then they are going to click a blog post, like these days, these other ways of seeing it it makes these look boring. And it's not that it's boring it's not that it's not rich of good content. It's just the fact that you're competing now in real estate marketplace, where people have more visibility, because they have these different featured snippets these rich snippets, and sometimes to they have more they have one here they have the video shown up, and then they also have the blog post now they're on there twice. So they're adding they're taking up more real estate. That's how you win this game. And this is what it looks like here on the actual page itself. So this is what it looks like when you're in the settings this to turn it on. And this is basically showing you that you can create a default so if you're on a page or you're on a post, or on custom post types you can create this default, and then per page, you can go in there and you can change out the type of schema you want to use so in this case if this was a blog post we would use the schema article the article. For an event we would use the event. If it were the FAQ we use FAQ so all this does is, when you open it up to edit it right here that's going to ask you what information do you want us to show in the search engines. You just fill out that information, and then you have a better chance of showing up in the search engines. It's just that simple you don't have to know code, or any of the other stuff which typically you will have to know if it wasn't for these plugins and this technology. Okay, so creating and submitting a site map to search engines. This is another way that you are able to get seen in Google probably is one of the best ways because Google really Google knows you exist. But if you don't have a site map. It's going to be hard for Google to say, this is what this is what that is is that we're sometimes Google just start making stuff up because they don't have, they don't have context. They see your content but they don't have context site map helps give you give your website more context. It's just a listing of all your pages on the website and content on your website right and good SEO plugins will create it for you. So you just got to go in the SEO plugin, it has your site map. And then you take that URL, and I'll show you next where you put it, but before we get there. Yeah just keep in mind that you want to have a site map and you want to submit your site map to Google, you want them to know all the page on your website so that way they can crawl your site, and they can represent you correctly as the represent your click right it can represent you the right way. Now, that was a XML site map. Now we're talking about HTML site maps, and this is really good for user experience. So basically what this does is, it takes this creates, it takes your site map, and then it creates, it creates it on a page for you. Basically, have you ever been on a website or web page and then you click on the site map and then it opens up another page and then you see all the URLs and all the pages. That's what this HTML site map is for. So this is more for the users, whereas this is more for Google, the best way I'm going to put it for now. This is more for Google the XML for Google, the HTML version is for users. So you don't have to have this, but it does increase the user experience and Google loves your, you increase in the user experience and they reward you for that. So having this is just double downing on having your original XML site map. And then when you actually have your site map your XML site map, you take that URL, you open up Google Search Console, you create your property and Google Search Console, you go to site maps, and then you just add that site map in there. And then you submit it. And then once you submit it Google will take some time and then it'll start to be able to crawl and read your website and be able to know what's what and where what is, or I say where what is what where is. Okay, I messed that all up, but they're able to know what's what right and where things are on your website. So that is something that is huge when it comes to SEO is does Google even know how to represent you do they know what's going on your website and the right way, or do they have to guess that if you don't have a site map. They're guessing their guess could be correct but do you really want to rely on Google to guess for you. Guess who's back, guess who's back, guess who's back. So tracking and analyzing performance website performance be specific. And keyword rankings with tools like Google Analytics is another great way for you to learn now this isn't an SEO per se scenario, but it is a great way for you to learn what's happening on your website so you can make the changes to better your SEO opportunities. You want to be able to track and measure, so you can make improvement. Okay, again you want to be able to track and measure so you can make improvements, you can see how SEO SEO is working or not working. Because that's what the analytics is going to show you it's going to show you your growth over time. It's going to show you certain aspects on your pages right certain metrics and dimensions analytics is going to show you so you can say okay we just did this we made these changes. Okay, this is the results that happen. Alright we haven't done this and we haven't made those changes that's why this is still happening. You can make decisions when you're actually measuring what's happening on your website 404 errors and broken links we got to fix them. So have you ever been to a page right. And you go to a page and it's like error this page doesn't exist. If it's a good website. They'll have a search bar or they're trying to have some type of button or something there that leads you to go to lead you to go maybe to the homepage or something else, especially if they have a search that's a good 404 page, a good page to help mitigate the 404 Basically, in a nutshell, you want to fix your 404 errors there's so many different reasons why they could be happening, but SEO plugins help you monitor them. So you know which links, which pages are not working on your website. And then you can fix them you can redirect them you can redirect somebody to the place where that was supposed to be so let's just say you change your URL. Let's say your URL used to say something black slash backslash blog. And then for some reason you ended up changing that URL to backslash blog to people are still going to be going to that first one blog and when they go there. It's going to have a for us to be a 404 error. Now if you do what you're supposed to do which is a redirect. Right, which is going to be the next thing we talk about here is that you're able to monitor your 404 and then what you want to do is create some type of redirection so make sure that you're able to say when a person goes here it automatically takes them to the new page. Google loves that people love that people don't like clicking on links that leave them to somewhere where there's nothing there that is not a good experience for a user. So a 404 a monitor some type of monitoring functionality within your tool, it can be a plug it can be something else will help you see which are these pages that are getting visits that aren't working, and then you can create a redirection to redirect those people to the page that they're supposed to be going to. And that's where this comes in right here so this page right here again this is I'm using right math is just my example, it has a 404 monitor, and it has redirections as well too. So I can see which pages are basically 404 like these are errors here, and then I can if I were hovering over it, it would say redirect and I would just click the button, and then it would open this up. And then I can say where do I want to go so this is the source URL, where do I want to go and what redirection type do I want it to be. And it's just that simple, and then you're good now people who go to that old page right now they are going to the new page. And I'm telling you this happens often because we are changing our permalinks like we change our clothes sometimes, like we change our we just change our permalinks as our URLs we just do that. But make sure you're understanding that's causing issues on your website and Google doesn't like those issues. So that's why they're bringing you down, like downtown, bringing you down downtown not a good way for this one because there are some downtown so they're really good fixing those broken links, we have a couple of opportunities we have a couple ways here. So, you have broken link checker finder broken link checker for YouTube. You can just go to the WordPress repo and type in broken link checker. And there you go. You can find you don't have to use a SEO plugin. I like to use, but you don't have to use SEO plugin you can just use a dedicated broken link checker plugin, but broken links are a little bit different than just for a force a broken link could be something a link that doesn't even lead to anything like a 404 is going to be a page right you click on this link here. It's going to go to a page that says this is no longer exist or some type of alert broken links could just be a link and even working like at all so you want to have you want to check for all of your links. Check for everything and the broken link checker is a great way to do that checks post pages and all content all types of stuff. Here's any questions or concerns. Okay, okay, here. And yeah, Sally you're using the broken link checker plugin, but change elsewhere now on the side. Okay, okay I got you I got you but sadly I would ask you do you recommend because I don't use broken link checker myself. Do you recommend this for most people for most cases. Okay, cool. The answer is yes. So speaking of links, we were talking about 404 404s and broken links. Let's touch real quick on backlinks. So backlinks are a way that an external source right external source leads back to you via a link. So somehow they're linking back to you via a link on their page that links back to you. Those are backlinks is a whole you can do a whole presentation on backlinks alone and still wouldn't cover it all in a couple hours. This is one of the biggest ways that Google ranks the ways how important or how prominent your site is is a lot with backlinks. I always think of backlinks like votes right so remember in high school. I'm assuming most of us went to high school but if your home school is okay you had the prime king and the prime queen or you had what was the other thing that they did that had a lot of votes system. Either way was a popularity contest right whoever gets the most votes wins. And that's what backlinks are they're pretty much like votes, like people are giving you the thumbs up the a the Fonzie a give you that thumbs up right. That's what backlinks are and the more backlinks you have for reputable sources, all backlinks aren't created equally. And I would definitely say again this is something that's debatable, but one good backlink from a page from a high quality source website one backlink from the page weighs way more than 10 backlinks from another website that's mediocre and you got 10 backlink one backlink from this reputable site is way is a bigger vote has more weight to the voting power of it and 10 backlinks from a mediocre site. So keep that in mind when you think about backlinks they're not all credit equal. You can get multiple backlinks from a website, you can get multiple backlinks from a page, but they're not all created equal and you really want to think about getting backlinks from reputable sources that also have high domain authority. You want to get those kind of back their hope is backlink strategies a whole different conversation, but you got to earn backlink some people give it to you for free like they just link back to you. Most people aren't doing that because they know backlinks matter. And so they are like, hey, we're going to give you a vote like what you what you're going to do for us what you're going to do for me what's in it for me and I'm giving you to vote. And I know what I give you this vote is going to push you up and increase you. So you got to earn backlinks you got to make some phone calls do some emails and some messaging out do some research and some homework. These tools help eliminate a lot of the research part but you still have to do the outreach you have to reach out to people about adding your link to their website, especially to reputable sources. So in the first snapshot of a picture of that, you're able to see the domain authority so that here's the target page the source page, the domain authority, the page authority so that your websites domain has a different weighing factor of its authority than the actual page itself so you have your website that has a score and each individual page that has a score. So the anchor text so the anchor text is literally what the link is on like what is the text on the page, not necessarily the URL, but the text. And these other ones you see here which are really good. Like when you add you add that you add a link to a text right so like when you highlight a text and then you add that link to it. When you look more natural, and you just putting the whole URL in there like these days like that just looks unnatural and people don't like that look. So just write your content in a natural way, and then add the link in the text, and that will still be considered a backlink. And then the last one is going to be staying up to date with the latest SL algorithm algorithms and guidelines from Google search engine so you can literally Google, and I put the URL at the bottom down here. You can literally Google guidelines and it's developers.google.com slash search or slash updates or slash rankings, and they tell you all the ranking updates. Now most people aren't going to be looking at this because it's not as unless you're SEO kind of sewer or you're infatuated SEO. This is going to be boring to you, but I'm just letting you know that they're that transparent that it exists, there is no excuse as far as not knowing that it exists now that you know it exists, but you may have reasons why you're not going to be paying attention to it. But it's important though because some of these updates, especially in the past two years have changed up has affected a lot of people's money, it may be boring and nerdy just to think about this. But people who and we live in a internet error, people who make their money off of the internet, especially off of Google because Google pretty much owns the internet. There's no money for that when they change stuff in the rankings, some people be doing the tanking like some people have lost thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars on some of these updates, and some people have made thousands to hundreds of thousands of millions because of some of these updates. So the updates can sometimes be really little very small and sometimes they can be really dramatic, especially now that we have AI coming out. They change your stuff up y'all just be honest with you. But that's that's pretty much it.