 Alright, my name is Chris. I'm one of the organizers of WordCamp Dayton. I use WordCamp in my business life. On behalf of my clients, I run my content marketing, web design, video production business on a WordCamp site and have been using WordCamp for about 10 years. None of that, however, makes me an expert. I would imagine, I don't know all of you in the room, but I would imagine that you are more expert in your fields than I am. So if you have questions, if you want to expand upon something I say, if you want to dispute something that I say, please jump in over the next half hour or so. But, before we get started, I'd like for some of you just to tell us what you do. If you are not a developer or a designer, what kind of businesses are you in, anybody? Okay, okay, so you're providing legal law information to lawyers? Okay, okay, you are a publisher. You're not in the legal business, you are a publisher. Anybody else? Jackie. Financial literacy and education. Who's the target audience? No, mainly younger people, people that usually learn more about their finances. And one of the ways you communicate that information is on a website? Yeah, that's five years old, but I've been a publisher, so this is my way of reading it. Okay, excellent, excellent. Jackie is a publisher. She came here and the first thing she told us is she's in the financial literacy organization. I say no, first and foremost, you're a publisher, a communicator to get that information to people. Anybody else who's not in the, sir? Call center market. Call center market. What kinds of things do you call people in market? Okay, okay, how do people know to call your call center? Through the website. Through the website. You are a publisher. Look at this, look at this. You all came here thinking that you were in some niche businesses, right? Anybody else? Clean rooms, like for scientific instruments? Yeah. Okay, okay, and the target audience for that service or the actual, can you do the construction or the design? Both. Okay. A lot of my clients are B2B in pharma or in aerospace engineering. They have very demanding requirements for tolerances and cleanliness. They want information. So while the people I work for make all of this very sophisticated equipment, when I talk with them, they, you guys aren't designing machine tools and pharmaceutical diagnostic systems. You're publishing. You've got to share that information in a way the engineers can consume so that they spec your equipment. You're a blogger. You definitely are a publisher. Yeah. And you use WordPress already? Okay. We're going to talk a little bit about how WordPress is still true to its roots as a blogging platform. We've started. It's much more robust than that. Some of the things I'm going to talk about really go to the foundation of WordPress best as a blogging tool. Anybody else want to share what their business is? Define old vehicles. So those are basically one, two, four and eight horsepower vehicles? That's really bad dad humor. I'm sorry. All right. Well, I come from the traditional publishing world, newspapers and older media. And so when people discover that, oh, you know about publishing. And after I started having to answer those kinds of comments a couple of times, it dawned on me that, yeah, I came from the publishing world, but that what all of us do every day or need to be doing is publishing and sharing our information. Because it doesn't matter how good we are at selling old vehicles or static free clean rooms or providing financial literacy information that we're going to have more success and the people we're trying to serve are going to be much happier and they're probably going to come back and pay us more if we meet their needs, we help them solve their problem by sharing what we know. So I start from, well, it looks like I'm not going to start at all, am I? I start from the premise that there are ways to use WordCrafts that move us from all of the other discussions that you've heard so far at WordCamp, which is about how to set up a WordCraft site, how to add functionality through plug-in, how to modify or create custom code to do things that don't exist yet, to, this is applied WordPress. How are we going to run our businesses? How are we going to make money? And importantly, how are we going to do it in a way that's easy? WordPress is supposed to be easy and on many levels it isn't, but there are so many other levels in which it really is easy. And here's why this is important. Most people, remember, I started out as a writer and editor and every time I hear myself saying what I'm about to say, I can't believe that a Word guy is saying this. People respond online and in print to what they see and not what they read. I can write a 3,000-word e-book, white paper, that beautifully explains the latest technology in static-free clean rooms, right? Engineers ought to laugh up everything I write. I show them pictures of the design and the construction and the operation of a static-free clean room. They're going to respond. They're going to click on it. They're going to read it. Hopefully they're going to call. And they do. Why? More than half the people believe what they see. So what does that mean for the way we use our web sector? It took me a long time being a writer and a news reporter and later an editor to figure out. It's a lot more effective than show and not about. How is it effective? Nobody in here said that they run a cupcake bakery. Anybody run a cupcake bakery? Okay. If you show on your WordPress website this image up in the hero space on the homepage, somebody's going to stop and look at the kind of cupcakes you're offering. Or if you have close-ups of the way you decorate cupcakes, I guarantee you you're going to get more traction than if you just write about it. You run a machine shop. You're a manufacturer. You're an auto mechanic shop. And you show how you make something, how your tools work, how you fix things. That's way more compelling than anything that I can write. If you're a DUI lawyer, just put your phone number in this photo on the top of your website, right? Everybody who's just been arrested for drunken driving, it's going to call you. So how do you do that visual presentation in WordPress? Well, many folks are brand new to WordPress, sadly not the 101 stuff. Okay. So the next couple of points are really for your benefit. For those of you who are more experienced with WordPress, bear with us. We're going to get to some other things that hopefully will be new and beneficial for you. But inside the WordPress dashboard, you learned yesterday that there's a media library and you can upload all kinds of image files, right? Photo files and JPEG and graphics files in the PNG format. You can upload PDFs, all kinds of visual assets. If you upload them in there, you're going to have a directory that looks like this. And I'm going to show you how I use this photo, which is a really unattractive sleeping guy photo on behalf of an insurance agent. This is a local insurance agent selling health insurance. So we upload the photo. The next step, this is all, for those of you who are new to WordPress, this is all onboard technology and for WordPress. You upload the photo. You have, for each image file, you have this level of information. And this is where paying attention to the capability that WordPress offers us for publishing is critical to your success in getting the attention of customers and providers. For each image, you want to have a file name. And we're going to talk about this file name in a second. This file name is ridiculous. It's full of numbers and characters. It makes absolutely no sense. It's in there intentionally to show you something in a second. We also have something called alt text and we have a description. And we also have, in this view, we have a link to the actual, in this case, blog post on this insurance agent site where this is displayed with the word. Why is any of this important? Why do you want to pay attention to after you've uploaded your image? Well, one, this file name can convey information to Google about the topic and about the relevance of the photo. Google search can't see images. You can't see a picture when they're scanning sites. But what they can see is the text around them. So this file name really needs to be something that's in English in simple words like sick guy with flu. You're going to see this guy in a second. Not those characters that are generated when the photo was created by the camera. So change that when you're uploading it or change it here in the edit data coming. Change it to, in this case, sick guy with flu.jpeg. Alt text. Anybody not know what alt text is? Yeah. Yeah. If we go to edit more details, you're able to change it inside WordPress. Yeah. Alt text is alternative text. Really important for search. It won't be displayed, but Google can see it. And if you have put certain keywords in there, for example, flu, influenza, health insurance. This one says photo of man with flu illness, health insurance from... And then the name of the insurance agency, Neely and Wade Insurance, Winchester and Lexington, Kentucky. That information is first and foremost important for Google. And Google will use that information along with the words in the blog post to determine how relevant your information is to what the searcher, the customer, has typed in. And I'm going to show you how that works in a second. Does that make sense on what alt text is? Many people don't use alt text. This is critical to help Google find your information and put it in front of customers. So if we were live and I clicked on this link, that's actually the title of the blog article which we're going to see next. Actually we're not seeing that next. We're seeing Google's search results. So I typed in, get a flu shot, avoid winter illness, excuse me, and then Winchester, Kentucky. And I typed in Winchester, Kentucky because I was sitting in Cincinnati when I put this slide back together. But if I were in Winchester, Google would already know that I was in Winchester, Kentucky. And it would pull in as relevant information, information from websites that's near me. In this case, in Winchester, Kentucky, or in Dayton, Ohio, or wherever you're sitting when the search occurs. What did it show me? Well, it showed me information about flu shot, illness, and Winchester, Kentucky, the location. What's the first thing? There's really bad photo of a guy who's not feeling really well, right? That's sitting on my client's website. Underneath it, what does it say? Get a flu shot to avoid winter illness. That's the title from the blog post that Google read. Google matched up the words in the title. Google also doesn't display it and say it, but Google also matched up the words that were in the alternate text, the alt text block. It depends on the terms of service or the license that the photo provider granted to you. And that's really the point is if you're obtaining images online and you're using those from a free site and those that are providing a common use license, you have to really be aware of the terms of use. And some of them may very specifically say that you can't change the source where this came from or they may say that you can't change the file name. So you need to be aware of the term. If you're buying in that photo, and a lot of the photos I use came from Adobe Stock, which is a paid service. I think it costs me like $32 a month for almost unlimited access and their licensing is very liberal in terms of how I can reuse the images, including changing who it's attributed to and where we publish it. So it really depends. Now the other thing to notice here and this photo on my client's website, the URL for the website is right here. It's number one in Google search rank. You have to pay for that. Just based on the way I published the photo within Wordpress. How does that translate then to what the user is going to see? They click on that photo. Guess what? It takes them to the insurance website. This is a blog post using the post publishing tools that are standard inside Wordpress. Once you set it up like you were yesterday, you can set up a blog post like this. You can write to your heart's content. I'm a writer. I write to my heart's content. Always publish with a photo. Why? People are more likely, two thirds of them are more likely to click on and open something. Click on and follow the call to action button because of the image first. The image came up in Google search. Not the word. It doesn't happen every time, but it happens probably eight or nine times out of ten in Google search that the image will be displayed in Google search, not the words. That's really important to know. Every blog post also applies to things that you share on social platforms, but having an image in a strong image will get your readers to click through more than just what we write. Can I see a hand back here? In this case, I suspect, and Google doesn't say specifically what their criteria are in what order, but I suspect because in that alt text field, I had typed in flu and illness and health insurance, and then my search, and yeah, I already knew the keywords, but if somebody were searching for information about flu or they were searching for information about health insurance, they're going to type in those specific words. No, no, no, and we're going to get back to captions in a second, so hold that thought, okay? This is related in no small part to the alt text box, okay? It is located when you go to upload a photo as the photo comes into the WordPress directory, there will be fields that you can fill out there. I think they're on the right-hand side of the window. You can, the question was can you change the file name? You can change the file name at that point. You can add in the caption. We're going to talk about captions. You can add in the alt text. You can also add in a description. Yes. So again, hold the question about captions, but it's the alt text that is important to help influence or try to influence Google search rank because that description won't be seen publicly, but Google will see it. So whatever your keywords are about your product or service, importantly your location, what city is your business in, what cities describe the footprint for your business, how far out do you get in your car or truck to go take care of a customer? Listing that area, Dayton, Ohio, Winchester, Kentucky. That helps Google figure out that, oh, this person selling health insurance in Winchester is close to the searcher. If I hadn't typed in Winchester, Kentucky specifically, it would have given me search results for health insurance information in the Cincinnati area, because that's where I was when I typed it in.