 Lle dim yn ymddangos, dyma'n rhys! Hei, peti'r ffordd, mae'n rhys ac rydw i'n ei ddweud i'r gwaith o tales yng Nghymru Llywodraeth C.O. Cyngor mewn gwelio ddu alw erion. Eyna'r mwyfawr y gallwn, mae'n dda i c roi gael, dyma'n dweud o gwelio mae'r gwaith o'r gweithio. Wrth gwrs, maen nhw'n dweud o half gwrdd, mae'r dda i ddweud o'r fwrdd o gwaith, mae'n dweud. They are pretty much the best ones out there. So this is basically other things that you can use. So, to begin with, when people talk about SEO, they generally mean, I want to rank high in Google. Now, Google has very much a love hait, mainly hate relationship with SEOs in general, but they do provide tools to website owners that can help you along. The first tool is Google Analytics, which is free, and basically Google Analytics tells you how many people arrived at your site, where they visited, and where they have left by. This is not strictly an SEO tool. This is a tool generally for anybody who runs a website, and show of hands really quickly how many people are familiar with analytics. So, pretty much everybody. Most people are familiar with it, but here's something you may not know. When carrying out SEO projects, you generally need to prioritise work, and one of the things you do to begin with, which is more user experience, is to try and speed up the site. It can be a case of prioritising certain pages and prioritising certain areas of the site. So, if you go in Google Analytics and go to Behaviour, Site Speed and Site Suggestions, you can find the slowest pages on your site. You can also find the most popular pages on the site, and those are good pages to start prioritising, because they are the busiest pages on the site, and the slowest. It also integrates with Google PageSpeeds to offer some sort of recommendations. Now, some of those recommendations you will not be able to do, because they are pulling things from other services, but you may give you a few ideas on where to start. Some recommendations may be site-wide, and others may be for individual pages. The next tool is Google Webmasters. Again, this is free and is formally known as Google Webmaster Tools. This one gives you a little bit of a technical overview of your site and how Google sees it. So, it tells you how quick it took to browse your site, what was the bandwidth used and various other URLs on your site to check. You can also then provide it with some information how you want Google to see your site. So, you can provide it if you want a WWW prefix or a non-WW prefix. If you've got a .io domain, you probably don't want to rank in Google's Indian Ocean territory, because there's probably not that many people, so you probably want to rank in the western world. So, you can specify the country you wish to rank for, and you can also define what site links show up when people Google you. There is also some ranking data as well. It's probably the best ranking data you'll get from Google without paying them. So, quick show of hands. How many people are familiar with Google Webmaster Tools? Okay, so a few of you. Again, here's my little top tip for it. It's to switch on email alerts, and you can do that by going to the gear icon in the top right-hand corner. I don't know if you can see that. And go to search console preferences, and you can switch on email alerts. When I first, when I did this, it is actually switched on by off by default. Now, this was about four years ago, because it's linked to your Google account. So, it may be switched on by default now. Basically, what this will tell you is it will tell you if they think your site's been hacked, if a manual penalty has been applied. And it will also tell you things like, oh yeah, by the way, you need to update WordPress. Now, WordPress itself will be quicker in telling you to update WordPress, but this is something else that you've got. It goes to the email address that's linked to your Google account, so make sure that somebody is checking. And if nothing else from this talk, please make sure that analytics and webmaster tools are on your site. The reason being is that one of the questions I get all the time, particularly in Manchester WordPress user group, is who do you recommend for SEO? And I've got a few people who I do recommend. SEO's jobs generally rely on interpreting data and making the best use of data. The more data you can give them, the better job that they can do. So, my advice would be if you go away from this talk, make sure you've got Google webmaster tools and Google analytics on your site. Even if you never check them, and even if you don't think you're ever going to use SEO, make sure, just make sure, because who knows what tomorrow may bring. Okay, so when generally you start an SEO campaign, most SEOs will generally tell you to install this tool called Google Tag Manager, which is free. And what this does, it allows you basically to easily add meta tags to your site to validate services. So, you can add things like Google, AdWords, and things like Crazy Egg, which is like a heat map tracking tool, and things like that. It's quite useful because it allows people to add things to your site. I mean, when I say it allows people to add to you, it doesn't allow everybody to add things to your site, so basically anybody who's allowed to add things to your site without playing around with templates and things like that. I will show another tool that does something very, very similar. The beauty of this, there are two beautiful things about this. First one, it has an audit trail. So, you can see what people have been doing to your site and adding things, and you can tell people off if they've been doing something naughty. The other really good thing about this, and this is for people who are generally not very comfortable with code. Quick story for you, I've got a client, one of my clients is an author. He sells his books on Amazon, e-books on Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, I think it's another one, and various other publishing services. His way of converting on a site is he doesn't get conversions on the site itself. His conversions are people leaving his site to go to Amazon, to go to iTunes, and things like that. Now, there is a way to, if you're familiar with code to allow Google Analytics to track it, it is quite complex. It allows you to do quite a lot, but if you want something very, very simple, you can set this up in Google Tag Manager really, really easily. So, if you're not familiar with code, use this instead. Okay, next I'm going to talk about a few tools. Tools are basically non-wordpress related tools that I use. Okay, the first one is one called Screaming Frog SEO Spider, which is free up to 500 pages, and if you want to browse more than 500 pages, it's £99 a year. It is a website crawler and spider tool. So, what happens is you put your website or a list of URLs you want to check into the top bar, which is on the top of this page. I don't know if you can see it, and it will go through your site, crawl the data, or it will crawl the list of URLs you've added. It's a very, very quick way to give a basic overview of all the pages on your site. It will allow you to see status codes, so it will tell you if it's 200, 301, or 404. It will tell you what those status codes mean, so if you don't know that 404 is a page not found or 301 has moved permanently, it will tell you. It will tell you the content type, so if it's JavaScript, JPEG, HTML page, or CSS or whatever, any meta information associated with it, so title tags, headers, whatever, and also where it's linked from. Two reasons I use this. The first one is if I did a migration once, and I had to check that 1,600 URLs were going from one place to the other. I'm quite a stubborn person, and I did it all manually, and it took me about two hours, and then the head of SEO where I was working with turned round and said, oh, here's this tool, and it took him about three minutes to do exactly the same job. So that's quite useful. The thing which I use it kind of on a month-by-month basis is to spot deadlinks that are on your site. So you can go through there, and you can kind of find 404 links. You can find out where they link from, and you can go ahead and fix them. Now, there are a lot of broken link checker plugins out there, and you may be wondering why I would recommend this over a broken link checker. The reason being is broken link checker plugins generally are quite a bit of blow to the database. This is actually really lightweight. If Google can spy on your site, this can. So it's pretty safe, and it's quite lightweight, so I would recommend that. Next tool is a tool called Majestic, which is free for your own sites, but if you want to look at other people's sites, it's £44 a month. What this is, is it will check backlinks that are pointing to your site. I'm quite old school when it comes to SEO, so I'm still like of the keywords and backlinks and everything like that. So it's moved on a lot since I've probably got out of the game. So this basically checks the backlinks pointing to your site. It tells you if they're clean links, so if they're no follow or do follow, it tells you the anchor text, so how they're linking to you, is it through an image, or is it through a keyword, and they also give an opinion on how strong that link is. So they crawl the internet and they have their own algorithms, which are separate from Google's, but they give an opinion on how strong those links are. Basically, every now and again, it's good to see who links to you and if there are any bad links that are linking to you and you can go in and check them. So if you have a load of links with the keyword, say Viagra or something, you know that something's up and you probably want to jump on this. Next tool is a tool called Surplab, which is free, but there is a paid one which starts at $4.99 per bot per month in dollars. This is another one of my old school things. It's a rankchecker. It's a very basic functional rankchecker. My advice would be not to rely on rankchecking. Treat it as a metric, be aware of it, but don't make it the be all and end all of your site. A very quick example, if we were all to get our mobile phones out, don't all get your mobile phones out, but if we were all to get your mobile phones out and check for something like plumbers, for example, you'd probably all end up getting the top 10 results pretty much around London unless you've been looking for plumbers recently. When you all go home and assuming you don't live literally 20 minutes away from the Emirates over there, it will tell you your other rankcheck, it will tell you plumbers from where you are located. It also things that you've looked at and previous search history, so they are very, very personalised, but this is just going to give you an overview of ranks. What I do is generally when I'm writing a blog post or writing a blog page, I will put whatever, if there is like a Yoast Focus keyword, so if I want some sort of Google traffic going later on, if it's not just a news post, I will put whatever the Yoast Focus keyword is into Serplab so I can track it, and it gives you like 30 days worth of data for free. So I just find it really, really useful. The next tool is a tool called Answer the Public and I love Answer the Public. Generally speaking, when people come up to the first line of defence when people say, oh, how do I do a good SEO? They start with the line, oh, create great content, which is really kind of, I struggle with that, and the reason being is it's like saying, oh, the reason, the way in which you can win the 100m gold medal is to run really fast. It's a little bit of a disconnect, it's going from one thing to another, and nobody really tells you exactly how or to create great content, so this is quite a good tool to start with. It's a tool to kind of generate content ideas for your site. So for example, I've got a Pilates client or I've done some work for a Pilates client and you go in here and you put in the word Pilates. It will find keyword suggestions based on Pilates. The other thing it will do is begin to ask a few questions so it will say what is Pilates, where can I do Pilates, various other things, and it produces it in a really kind of nice graph like that. You can then go through all these keywords, this is not Pilates, this is WrestleMania because I was at WrestleMania last week. I'm jet lagged, but never mind. So these are all keywords related to it, and you can go through these and get relevant ideas for pages and blog posts. This is a really easy way to get generated traffic to your site because you're basically answering questions that people have. Over time, people are asking more and more questions and they're asking questions through search. A classic example is how more and more people now are searching using the mobile phone and voice. So you're not going to go Pilates, Manchester, you're going to go OK Google or Hey Siri, where can I find Pilates training, that's a word, in Manchester. So you're going to get more formed question keywords. The way you can see this on a day to day basis is things like newspapers do this all the time because they have pages on their site which are things like what day is Christmas day. It seems like a really strange thing to put in a newspaper, maybe not, I don't know. But the reason being is they want to rank for that phrase and then it will be like OK, oh yeah, by the way, if you want to go to Lapland and see Santa Claus, here's the flights from the nearest airport by the way and that's a way of getting traffic generated to the site because they use all their things. But that's just a quick example and I do like answer the public. OK, link building and outreach, five years ago this was so, so easy. It really, really was because it was basically spamming and it worked so well and anybody who said it didn't work well is a pathological liar as far as I'm concerned. Nowadays there's a lot more in common with traditional PR and that is a talk in itself and I'm not the man to give you that talk because I don't like speaking to people. So these are things that I find useful and these are more like geeky tools to kind of reach out to people and things like that. OK, the first one is a tool called Harrow which stands for help of a reporter out and is free. So what you do is you sign up on this site and you choose your areas of interest and are things like business, tech, environment, sport, things like that. It also does separate by location so there's a UK list, I think there's a European list and an Australian list or something like that. And then three times a day every single weekday you will generally get an email look something like this. And it's basically reporters asking for help on various things. So if we have a look at this, the first one there is how will Brazil's recession affect its IT sector. Now I don't know about you but I know nothing about Brazil's IT sector and I didn't even know they were in a recession. So I can't really offer an opinion about that. However, generally on average about three or four times a month I can find ones that I can reply to and actually give an opinion which maybe were something. And then what will happen will be they will write the piece on whatever their thing is and they'll include my opinion within it and then they'll cite me as a source. And it varies, you know, there are a lot of requests, it varies from simple anonymous requests. I have seen the CNN and the BBC in here so there are some good sources in there. And my advice is if you don't hear back from them either they email you back or there's no sort of link track into all the things like that. Whatever you wrote to them, turn your reply into a blog post. I have been known to outrank the pieces that they've written which they didn't include me, which can annoy them a few times but never mind, should have included me. So yeah, there's that. OK, the next tool, Crystal, crystalnose.com is free and this is terrifying. You have to sign up via either your Facebook or your Twitter or your LinkedIn. And when you do, I was going to do this with somebody in here but I decided against it so I decided to do it myself. It builds a profile on you and your contacts. And then it kind of looks at the language and looks at how you will speak to people and it tells you how to send emails and speak to them. So for example, if you are emailing me, use an emoticon. Now, if anybody's ever received an email by me or checked me on Twitter, I use a lot of emoticons in my emails. So generally emoticons are good because I'm really bad at reading between the lines so a smiley face is a good thing as far as I'm concerned. When working with me, schedule meetings over food and drink. The fact that I picked up a XXL t-shirt shows that I quite like my food and my drink. So yeah, that's really, really, you know, so yeah, when working with me, food and drink, good. It also gives you some predefined templates such as inviting people to an event, asking for advice, asking for a favour or asking for a raise, which is quite interesting. So my piece of homework for everybody in this room is my boss, Alex Moss, is on crystal. So feel free to connect with him and ask him on my behalf to give him me a raise. Thank you very much. Okay, just going to finish off a little bit with some WordPress plug-ins. First one, insert headers and footers. This is one of those plug-ins that doesn't leave any sort of anything to the imagination because it allows you to pull headers and footers into the page, a little bit like Google type manager. I put this in because some people are a bit scared about giving Google all their data. So if you don't want to give Google all your data and still want to add headers and footers really, really easily, use this. The reason why I like this is that this plays really well with Yoast SEO. There are a lot of plug-ins out there that will strip Yoast SEO's data. This one is to use in conjunction with it, and it plays really, really well. Next one, Jetpack, which is also free. Most of it's free. It has a module called the Enhanced Distribution Module. So WordPress.com has a big Piper post. It's like a fire hose. And every single post is publicly available to the best of my knowledge. I guess put in that fire hose and sent out over the internet. What Enhanced Distribution does is it puts your WordPress.org or self-hosted blog posts into said pipe or fire hose. And whilst Google doesn't read the fire hose, many other services do. So lots and lots more people become aware of your blog post a lot quicker. Excuse me. And it helps to get your blog post index a lot faster. So for what it's worth, you might as well just activate it if you've got Jetpack installed. Excuse me. Next one, this is quite a new development called the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project. And this is a plug-in called AMP for WordPress. And Accelerated Mobile Pages is a project backed by Google. And this is an automatic plug-in running on it. Now Google does back a lot of projects such as Google Author Profiles, which is dead. Google Wave, which is dead. And Google Plus, which is dying, you know, so I was nearly there. So all because Google backs it doesn't mean that it's going to be around forever, but this seems to be the one that they're getting behind now. AMP basically is a way to serve content over mobile faster. And Google does seem to suggest that they want to rank sites that have their standard for standards for some reason better in Google. Now, I don't think they're doing it straight away, but they are marking sites and saying this is an AMP backed page. So anyway, what you do is you install this plug-in and you go to any page on your site with the forward slash AMP. And it produces a very, very simple page with little styling and almost no scripts. And it is quick. It is very quick because it's a very quick way to load a lot of content. The problem with it is that it doesn't work well with complicated sites, e-commerce sites. It doesn't really work with particularly well at the moment. But if you are a content-rich, heavy site, you might as well add this plug-in so you can rank better in mobile search, in theory. And what happens is it canonicalises to the original blog URL so you won't have duplicate content listings in the search engines. And you can actually template it as well, so you don't have to use the original styling, but it requires a little bit of knowledge of filters and actions. One of the other standards is Facebook's standard, which is completely different. And there's another plug-in called PageFrog, which uses Facebook Instant Articles and Google AMP pages, so it does both Facebook and Google. And the other beauty of this is if you're not familiar with templating is that it does allow you to use simple stylings. It also allows you to integrate your Google Analytics. Now, I'm not entirely sure if AMP does yet. It should do, and considering it's a Google standard, you would think they'd include Google Analytics, but there we go. So it allows you to style things very, very easily. You do have to activate it on every single blog post, which is a bit of a pain. But again, if you go to forward slash AMP and go to this page, you get a little bit of styling. I don't know if you can see that, but right at the top it's purple and it has my picture instead of the WordPress logo. From speaking to people, some people have had problems with PageFrog and some people have had problems with AMP not validating Google Webmaster Tools. I've got both activated and I haven't had any problems. So it's still quite a new standard, so it's going to be changing. And there's four standards because Apple have one and somebody else has one and I can't remember who. Oh, I think there's like an open standard as well. Finally, check search engine visibility on migration and allow me to indulge myself for a minute because this is my plug-in. And it's free. So another quick show of hands. This box in WordPress. Put your hands up if you have ever ticked that box on a staging site. Okay. Keep your hand up if you have moved from a staging site to a live site and not unticked that box. Oh, there are a few honest people in here. Okay, that's good. Okay, because I've done it so many times and I've put dev sites live. It's great when they get inquiries as well. It's great. It's like, I've got a freeing of dev site. This will tell you basically if the search engine box is ticked and Yoast plug-in does this as well. However, it will also tell you basically if it is ticked or you're aware of it being ticked. The other thing is, should you ever change domain? So if you ever change the site URL. So if you go from dev.site.co.uk to site.co.uk it will check again to make sure it's still ticked. If so, it will ask you that question again. So therefore, you can stop putting sites live with that box ticked. So thank you very much for that indulgence and thank you very much everybody. All right. Thank you very much indeed, Rhys. I suspect we might have quite a few questions on the floor. Quick, if you have a question for Rhys, please raise your hand and we'll get to you as soon as you can. Okay, we'll start at the front and work towards the back. Rhys, just a quick question about the AMP and other plug-ins. How does that... Is it necessary if you go a responsive site would you still recommend installing these plug-ins? Yes. Basically responsive will... depends on how well the site is coded. But generally speaking responsive basically is just the actual full site shrunk down in width but not necessarily taking a lot of the scripts out. So if you've got say like a slider, for example you shouldn't use sliders at all. But if you have got a slider you probably don't want it on mobile because it'll dominate the actual thing. So why would you load the scripts to it? Because generally speaking some people when they do responsive it's just like display none. So they still load all the scripts but they hide it. So AMP will strip out a lot of the things which will make your site a lot faster as well. And say for example if you've got like a WP Rocket or Cloudflare would you still... I still would use it. I'll be perfect. I've not played with WP Rocket or Cloudflare but I would probably still use it because I think as well is that it does cache something on there. It's still quite a new standard. But generally speaking the smaller your site is the quicker it will load anyway. So it kind of makes sense and it's more for scripts as well. So you don't really want to load too many scripts. Sorry is there any reason why you haven't mentioned say Moz or Ahrefs because we come from a very much an old fashioned link building background and we obviously go and undo lots of reputation issues for people and we have to use all the tools and it costs a lot of money. I only use tools that I use. So that's why. I mean I know Ahrefs is one, Moz is another one. From my background I've always used Majestic which is why I mentioned it. So it's not because I'm not aware of them. I would feel bad coming up on stage and saying oh yeah use this tool by the way I've never used it. So that's why. But yeah there's nothing wrong with them or anything and I'm pretty sure they're very very good. As SEM Russia was talking with somebody last night about that's another tool. So there are other tools out there. It's just these are the ones that I use which is why I recommended them. Do we have another question maybe something more from the back of the room over there. Thank you. Do you think it's worth installing Jetpack just for that one feature because it seems like quite a large plug in with loads of things. It's up to you. From my understanding Jetpack is very good if you switch off certain rules if you switch off certain packages except for if a package is not activated should I say it will not run on your site those packages so it's actually quite it can be quite lightweight to the best of my knowledge and they seem to know what they're doing so my yeah it's it's for one thing you may not want to put that on but even if you do it probably won't add a huge amount of blo to your site generally speaking because it's all they are quite light if you take those packages off generally. Okay a further question or okay I get to answer questions now. So AOMP is coming through. That's quite new. I'm going to look into the articles Apple news the open standard are those actually making as bigger difference as we all went when we saw them appear maybe two three months ago or do you think it shouldn't worry about them too much and the core tools are still what it's about. Yeah from what I've seen with first of all the site of load generally are a lot quicker so if you've got a content rich that works really well for news based sites for those ones it loads really really quick and if you care about your content you want your content loading quicker as far as ranking goes I've not the only way I've noticed AOMP is in the news section of Google is that any page any site that has the an AOMP activated it will put AOMP next to it that's all I've seen so far people seem to be talking about it being like it could be quite a big thing but I haven't quite seen it yet but it can take time okay we might be okay for now we might be okay for now further question oh there we go against the wall over there I think we've got time for a few more so review your notes of the presentation maybe we have another question yes sir when you do a search in Google AOMP is like a star or there's a picture or there's extra information which Google picks up what is that so generally speaking those are what they call schema s-e-h-e-m-a dot org it's a way of structuring your data around certain things so the stars generally are for things like reviews so a very very quick example one you can do is and they kind of share a lot of data so things like recipes show up and things like that it's a way of putting data into your site and it's like a HTML language I think at the moment I think there are other ways of doing it and if Google recognises that data it will generally display it dependent on how well it views your site so a good example would be cinemas for example there is a standard for like cinema listings or film listings so it will say right Batman vs Superman is on a 610, 720, whatever time and it lists all the times you say the film name and then you can also link to the review of it so if you think it's good or bad then it will list the star rating as well so that's something called schema.org which you can probably check out but it is fairly straightforward to set up one of Google's tools as well is the rich I didn't put it this in the rich snippet checker which will allow you to view once you've actually structured your page to include schema.org data you can put that URL into this checker and it will validate it to make sure that it looks okay and everything is set up but when will Google get round to your site once you've done that remains to be seen but it does depend on what you're using it for a lot of SEO companies I know got into trouble a few years ago from Google because what they did was they gave themselves five star ratings on their homepage and Google was saying oh yeah this is a five star SEO company and it was so they got in trouble Any more questions? I think in that case then what we might do is wind up because I'm sure quite a few people would like to have a one to one conversation we should probably end up with