 Let me introduce Jess Toss, who is in the talk. Get optimising on SCM. Hi everyone, thanks for coming. I created this talk because I think when people build their own website or hire someone to do a website for them, they often think that there's going to be a fury of organic traffic on their website, but it turns out that the internet is a pretty big place. Felly, mae'n mwynhau i ddim yn ymddangos. Wysi'n sgwr 10, nid i gyda'r sgwr ar hyn o'r pethau Canacellu'r Fiamau. Felly, mae'n typ y peth wedi bod wedi bod yn yn ôl'r cyfryd i'r cyfryd o'r cyfrannu A'r cyfrannu yr hwnnw i'r cyfrannu. Fe wnaeth yn ddangos gennym digonwys diwrn hefyd methu Cymru os yw nhw'n sgwr ychydig y cwrs maen nhw. Sgwr yn ddod o'ch cyfrannu ddim arnynno'r pethau'r prosesyleu ychwaneg iawn. Felly, unrhyw gweithasion i gael eich cyf grounds codaid, mae'n cael ei cynhyrchu cyllid y dyfodol yn cael'r cyllid cyf-god y mewn yw'r wordpress wedi causa. Y dyfodol yn eto'r yng Nghymru sy'n go Laura o'r cyfr dudef, dwi'n gwneud bod fishfodol gyda'r cyf-god, i ddau'r ysgrin crimgryn i ddechreu'r cyfr-god i ddew'r cyfr-god yn ar-dew'r gyfr-god, i ddewodol gyfr-god ydy'n go. So mae'n ddweud bod yw'n ddweud eich cyfnod i'r cyfnod i'r cyfnod i'r weffrifio. Yn ystod, mae'r cyfnod i'r Google My Business profile. Mae'n ddweud bod y cyfnod i'r 46% o Google searches yn cael eu bwysigol yng Nghymru. Mae'r cyfnod i'r search terms yw heddiw o'i o'r cyfnod i'r gwirio o'r clymau i Blasgov. A yna, i ddweud i'r ystod i'r search results o'r mobile a'r desktop, yn cael ei gafodd o'r cyfnodio'r cyfnod yw'r cyd-dwylliant i chi chi i gael y cyfnod ymgyrch yn ymgyrch gyd. A oes i chi'n wneud o'r cyd-dwylliant i chi'n gwybodaeth, y cerddwyd gan y cyd-dwylliant, y ddweud, y ddweud, y ddweud, ac y ddweud yn cael ei gwybodaeth yn gyfnod, y ddweud yn y same sy'n gyfnodol ar y ddweud. Felly, ychydig y cyfnod i'r website rydyn i'r rydyn roedd Rdyn, os ydych i ddyn nhw'n ddiddordeb ar y pethau yng Nghymru. Felly, mae'n ddiddordeb ar y Pethau Unedig ym Ysbytyd, os ydych i ddiddordeb ar y pethau yng Nghymru, os ydych i ddiddordeb ar y pethau yng nghymru. Yn y cwestiynau, mae'n ddiddordeb ar y pethau local yng Nghymru, felly mae'n ddiddordeb ar gyfer all cyfnodig, er mwyn iawn i'r ddiddordeb ar y pethau. As you've done that it will give you the option to verify your location and this is really important to having an impact on your ranking and building up that trust with Google. So once you choose to verify your location they will send a postcard to your address that you've listed on your Google My Business profile. So if your business isn't actually registered at that address nature will somehow get hold of that postcard that they're going to send you. The next step is to add your opening hours, if that's irrelevant to you, add that onto your profile and encourage people to need your reviews. So apparently reviews on your Google My Business page aren't necessarily a direct ranking factor, but it really helps build up trust if people are searching for you. If they can see you've got a better review score than your competitors, they're probably a lot more likely to click through onto your profile. Lastly, make sure you add some pictures to your Google My Business page as well. One thing which is worth noting is that when you take a picture on your phone, or even some cameras as well, it will store the location in the photo's metadata. Apparently Google can actually see that metadata and see where the picture is taken. So if you've taken a picture at your business location, it will scan this and it's worth adding that geo tag if you can. So once you've got your profile set up, you should start submitting your website onto local business directory listings. This is really important because it shows Google that you're a trustworthy and legitimate business. By submitting your website and business onto these business listings, you're just building up the backlinks to your website ever so slowly. So it's a really good way initially to show that you're a relevant and trustworthy business. If you are a business based in Glasgow, here are just some examples of loads of core listing sites you might want to be mentioned on. Just really basic, but just because you know a handful. One thing to note is when you're submitting your details on these business listing sites, make sure you get your name, address, website and phone number consistent across all of those listing sites as well. So it needs to be the same as it is on your website and as it is on your Google My Business profile. And also don't forget to link your socials to your website because these are backlinks as well and it all counts. So step four is make your website faster. So I think there's actually another talk after lunch today about how to improve your website speed so it's worth going to check that one out. And it's really important that you make your website as fast as possible because Google likes websites to have a page speed load time of less than three seconds. And that's because if your page loads quickly, your users are less likely to bounce off of your page. And it just wants to deliver the best user experience it possibly can to its users. So it is really important. One thing to note is that although they recommend your page speed is under three seconds, the UK average page load time is actually 5.9 seconds. So if you're bringing in under that 5.9 seconds, you're going to be much better than the average UK website. So it's a good place to start. So you can measure page speed using these two tools. There are quite a few page speed testing tools you can use. The three ones particularly tend to pull out slightly different results. So use a couple to give yourself an average and a benchmark. So once you've taken your page speed test, how do you improve those results? These are two really easy to install plugins that you can put on your website. So you've got an image optimising plugin and a caching plugin. There are loads of different versions of this plugin if you have a look. But these are two I'd recommend. And for the sake of spending five minutes installing them on your site completely for free, you can really bring your page speed load times down by a good few seconds. And for the sake of improving that user experience for a few minutes, it's definitely worth just quickly installing them on your website. So step five is change your permalink structure. So when you first create a WordPress website, it will automatically create a URL structure based around dates, which is quite messy and it doesn't do anything to help your website from an SEO perspective. So I really recommend going in and changing your permalink structure. You can use the postname structure or a custom structure. I prefer to have the category and then the postname, and this just enables you to get some extra keywords into that URL without having to do anything. So reach, change your permalink structure. And then step six is install an SEO plugin. So having an SEO plugin on your website is a really simple way of ensuring all of your pages are optimised for the keywords that you want to rank for. So there are loads of different SEO plugins, but my personal favourite is one called RankMath. It's got some really cool features. It's completely free. It's got some features which are only available with the premium version of the Oast. So I know a lot of people really like the Oast, but this was my favourite. And if you're currently using Yoast and you want to switch over to RankMath, it's got a really easy one-click import feature. So all of the data you've installed in Yoast SEO in a click, you can transfer it all over to RankMath really easily. So one of the first things I recommend you using RankMath for is to submit your site map to Google Search Console. So your site map is literally a map of your website. And once you submit this to Google Search Console, you're basically making it really easy for them to crawl and index your website. So to set this up, you go into RankMath in WordPress, post your site map settings and there'll be a big URL at the top. And you can just copy that URL and paste it directly into Search Console. There's just a site map section on the left-hand side and you can just paste it in there. And this step takes about 30 seconds. It's really simple, but it's really important and it's really going to help you rank going forward. So don't miss this one out. So step eight is then to link your Google Search Console account to RankMath to one of your keywords. So essentially this is just a really easy way. You can keep track of all of the keywords, what position you're coming in at in Google Search results right from inside WordPress itself. So to do that, you just go into RankMath, pick the Search Console tab and you can authorise your account. There's a big button which you can't miss. And just follow this step and then that will enable you to keep track of your keywords in one take. And keep track of your positions. So now you're tracking these keywords, how do you start to rank for those top spots in Google? And that leads on to step nine, which is optimising your pages for keywords. So RankMath makes this really, really easy. And basically Google has bots which will pull your website to determine what exactly your website is about, who is that content going to be relevant for and it will look in certain places on your website. And that's why on-page optimisation is really important because you're making sure you get those keywords in specific places and using a plug-in like RankMath makes it really easy for you. So these are just some of the places that Google bots will be calling. So making sure you've got your plug-in, you're using it, is really important. So to use RankMath on-page optimiser, once you have your plug-in installed, whenever you go into a page or post, in the top right-hand corner, you're going to score out of 100. And basically it works as a traffic light system. So it goes from red and birth to green and you're constantly trying to push your page up into the green zone. So if you get a score of 85 or above, this will turn green and then it means your post is ready to publish. So on this page, I'm going to rank for the focus keyword of Q Bardens in winter. So you just pop your focus keyword in there and you should see your score go up ever so slightly. So now I'm at a score of 36 out of 100, but I'm still in the red zone. So it will give you basic steps that you need to follow to bring your page score up. So the first error I need to correct here is the focus keyword does not appear in the SEO title or the method description. And what you can do to edit this is you just click edit snippet and this is a really great way for you to change how your website is going to appear in search results. So here I've added Q Bardens in winter to the title. I've added it to the permalink. I've got it in the description and you can see there's also a colour chart in each of those areas as well. So just try and push that up into the green as much as you possibly can. This is going to really impact if people click on your website, to your website from Google search results. So don't necessarily go stuffing your keywords in there and hoping for the best. Try and make your page sound as exciting as possible so that people want to click on it and read your content. So once you've got those up to the green and you've gone through and corrected all of your areas, you should start to see that the rank map bar at the top has turned green and this means that your post is ready to publish because your page has been optimised for your keyword. It's quite difficult to get a full score of 100 on rank map. You only get a full score if your content is over 2,500 words long. So if you've not quite up to the 100 marks then don't worry too much as long as it's green. That's really great and you can press go. So once you've got your page optimised, it's really important you keep track of that keyword that you've been optimising that page for. So you can do that within rank map inside WordPress or you can log in to Google Search Console and keep track of your position in there. So before this page was optimised it was ramping in around position 14 and then once I've gone through and done the on-page optimisation it's pushed this position up to what it says 4.4 around 4 or 5 position in Google Search results. And that's really important because once you start climbing into those top five spots you're really going to notice your organic traffic will keep increasing. So this is just one page optimised one keyword. You can see I optimised the page in August and then following on the traffic just continued to increase. And so imagine if you did this for every single page across your website the results are going to increase by 10 or 24 because you're constantly optimising your pages for those keywords. So step 10 is to keep adding content to grow your website traffic. So content still remains the best way to rank your website in search results. So if you keep adding content you're going to keep adding keywords to your website and you can optimise those pages and continue growing your organic traffic. If you don't really know where to start adding content to your website I really recommend that you just search for other talks on WordPress TV. People have given some really great talks on content banning and they've given their slides with templates that you can download which are really useful. So that's a really good place to start. And if you're still really struggling to add the content to your website it's really not your thing. There are so many places where you can go now online and basically buy content to add to your site. You can find a content writer on people per hour and even if it's one blog post a month ideally you want it to be a lot more regular and even if it's just a 500 word blog post every month it's better than nothing and people can see that you're continuing to keep your website updated and you're keeping that content really fresh. So that was 10 steps. You can use to get your website off to it as best possible start. So I hope you guys have fun optimizing and thanks for listening. So first of all, thank you Jess. This is where we are going to try and brighten the screen and apologies it seems to have started dim and got dimmer. That feels much the same frankly today. So we'll light another candle or something in a way that I did but anyway we'll try and brighten that up for you. Apologies. In the meantime has anyone any questions for Jess? One right at the back. Now you need to walk now. We need to get it recorded so you're forever recorded on WordPress 2. So when a service is advertised to maintain your SEO as a monthly fee what is actually involved in that? What are you paying for and how much of that would you do yourself? It really depends on who you are get to do it for you. It really depends on the individual basis because some people don't really do anything and they'll just pull you a standard report off some rush each month and charge you for that. Other people will charge to be all to your research to get your content get content for you onto your website and start building links up to your website as well so it just really really depends on who you use and if you've got to use somebody you trust I make sure that they keep adding the content to your website for you but it just depends it's a bit of a... It really depends on the person. Anybody else? I will come to see this talk. I can't have answered all the questions. It's a very quick question. Is slides available that we can download? Yes, sure. I'll put them on my site so you can get them on that. But we'll also make sure on the WordCamp website and I don't know how long it will stay up but we'll make sure we set up the slides and set up links to them so we'll make sure we get those and thank you for that. Just wanted to ask you mentioned about buying content isn't there a danger of duplicating that content and getting people realising for that? Yes, definitely. So you have to make sure that the content is unique. So you really have to... If you want to buy it offline or offer external person it's just really worth doing your research and using somebody you trust and there are lots of dodgy people on places like People for Hours as well where they'll just use automatic website, articles, spinners and you want to avoid that as much as possible because you want the content on your site to be really good and engaging so it's difficult to find a good content so it's not easy but if you want, I haven't seen people that connect with it. So in your right path if you change the title bit does it override the title that you have manually put in? Yes, it will. So if you edit... it will just manually override what's already in there. The last one. There's a school of thought that says that if you design your website well and the content is good Google will analyse it and put up with you in the right place in the ranking. And the SEO is maybe not... If the page of the website is designed well maybe the SEO is not all that necessary. Well, I would... I do agree with you slightly but if you've not optimised your page and one of your competitors has then they're much more likely to come above you in the search position, search ranking position so I think it just depends on what your competitors are really doing. If you've not really got any competitors then it might not be as important but you may as well, it's completely free to go away, optimise your pages do SEO so you may as well get your website off to its best possible start in my opinion. Do you sort of optimise for just one word or two words? Well actually in rank class now you can add up to five keywords in that section so it's difficult to make it green actually with every single two words but yeah, you can add up to five different keywords and even if you just chose one to start with once your website is live you can then keep track of the keywords and search console so if you're thinking oh that one seems to be doing a lot better than the one I've put into rank class just go in and change the keywords and tweak your page and optimise it for that keyword that looks like it's going to start doing a bit better than the other one. Thank you. How does it... if I decide to move to my site map I'm using Google account I've already set up the business and all the configurations with that Google account. Is it just like the Gmail Google account you use? It shouldn't do really I recommend that you make any changes to your Google My Business profile or is that the same? No, I'm using it for a different company so there's another company again that I'm creating for Facebook so I don't know how can I create my business on more than one business on one Google account? Yes, you can. Not on your Google My Business page but just from your Fox Standard Google account that's got your email and you use to log into analytics and search console and have more than one business link on there and there is a theory which is that if you use your business account, your analytics and your search console and keep it all the same that's supposed to help but I don't think it'll be too much for this year so just add your business to that. You mentioned keywords but what about negative keywords? There's an example if you put if you've got 100 different types of t-shirts there's an example and you've got 100 different pages and you put t-shirt on but you only wanted one style of t-shirt to be strong I don't think I'm using the right product for this a negative keyword you just want t-shirts but if you wanted t-shirt on a cup t-shirt on a cup you don't want the cup you don't want the t-shirt how do you get away with not showing how do you put on to your site the negative keywords? Is that possible? Is this safe for you? If somebody typed into your google search t-shirt on a mug and your keywords for t-shirt Is somebody going to go to the t-shirt on a mug? It depends on a lot of different different factors t-shirt I'm guessing it's quite hard to rank for the key word t-shirt on a mug It really depends on lots of different things Obviously you can just make sure that you're using the keyword t-shirt more than on a mug but see The reason I'm asking is my business is okay is I make decorations for cupcake so I will cook cupcake, topper or cupcake decoration somebody looking for cupcake is going to come up with mine and I do cupcakes so okay I see it was a I didn't want to push mine so if you're optimising your website for that keyword cupcake decoration it's technically with the way google wrote for your website it's probably going to know that your business and website is about cupcake decorations and that you're not just selling cupcakes so if you've got your keyword set up, you've optimised your pages for cupcake decoration it should be reading it as that and you might get a few impressions or clicks on people maybe searching for cupcakes and in general if you've got the same cupcake decoration throughout your site enough it should be rankling to that keyword Does google penalise you then for having similar keywords on only pages I've got other 500 products on different pages they're all the same thing they just happen to be different it would be a different thing Are your descriptions the same or are they different they all they could be teddy bear, it could be fam, it could be giraffe, giant but they're all decorations for cupcakes and cakes so If you've got the sites like that are difficult to rank because there's so much duplicate so many duplicate products and content that's going on there so if you can make your descriptions for each one, unique it should be ok but that's basically what you have to do to make sure that each product is ranking as an individual product I've got one final question sorry I paid a company to do citations is in your opinion should I have done that I know what I feel about that If you don't have the time to submit your own website to the business director you can definitely pay somebody to do it for you there's no problem they should provide you with a spreadsheet that gives you all of the login details and it should be from trusted relevant business websites there's somebody I think they're called Citations Builder they do I think they're based in Glasgow as well and they can do citations for you but yeah you have to pay you do have to pay to get the good citations we are here point number 3 where you said you know the address on your website and the business and the customer many a times I come across websites where there is no address you just have to contact them and somebody contacts you how does this step number 2 work in that case you don't have a physical address to listed anywhere on your site maybe you have it on the back but it is not visible to the traffic so if you don't have an address on your website and you can put one on there I really recommend you put it on there if you can do that if you can't I'm guessing are you trying to rank for local search terms no global so even if my address is local in Glasgow it is not going to matter for anyone who is in France so in that case and since you are talking about foundation and building up right from the beginning I am confused how to go about it suppose what should I start with I think if you can if you can put an address on there or you can use an address I would really recommend you put it on your site because it just helps makes it look a lot more like a genuine business really good it might just keep changing keep changing there are traits who do that who don't have an address who have a contact of page then this how does that work I just want you to do well it's really for the google my business profile it's just super important to appear in local search results so if you're not trying to rank locally it's probably not much of a important factor so it might not matter as much for your website but are you wanting to put a view have you got a google my business profile no you want to have one okay so architects near me so in that case architects near me will not be in Glasgow it can be anywhere so for anybody it is their location which matters and where they are generating that search inquiry is from and even if I have a loan present or you know publishing presence and I have learned to serve that community over there you understand what I am trying to say well you can put multiple locations into your google my business listing so you can have more than one location I wouldn't really recommend kind of changing your location every week in your address and your google my business profile but yes you've got multiple locations you can add those into your profile so I recommend doing that okay time for one more I think google is obviously the big player in the search engine market but what about optimising for other search engines like duck duck go and one of that because I think some people are moving towards them from previously issues and things like that I mean it's all traffic so people are using those on the search engines so it is important and you can set it like being on the web master tools and that type of thing and you will notice people find your website that way so it is important to set it up so me on a personal level personal level I just tend to focus on google so I'm not an expert in those other search engines but yes you've got the time to put your site on there get your listings on all those other search engines then why not because you might get some extra traffic on that okay thank you very much Deedon thank you Jess