 How's everybody doing? Awesome. Cool. We're going to talk about optimizing WordPress for SEO. Who's doing their own, basically managing their own website and content in their own WordPress site? Cool. And you're all handling your SEO on your own as much as you can? OK. Who doesn't know what SEO is? All right. Everybody knows. Everybody has a general idea. Good. So WordPress, out of the box, is really good for SEO. It's very clean. If you remember the default themes over the years that you install and run, and you can actually have a website up and running pretty quickly, it's one of the wonderful things about WordPress. And it's like why WordPress is powering about a quarter of all the websites on the web. However, we love to tinker. We love to play with our websites, make it look pretty, make it look unique, which, yeah, that's what we are. We're all unique and we want to make our websites look unique. But sometimes when we get unique, we start tinkering and start throwing things on our website that really slow it down, or don't have a lot of text showing, or we just do things that make it even more difficult for search engines to find the content on our website. But if we tweak it, then we have big happy face, right? Then we really make it an SEO-friendly platform and website. But first, this is assuming three things about your website. We can do all kinds of tweaks to the website, but really, you need to have unique and compelling content on the website as it is. And when I say unique, I mean content that is yours, that belongs to you, not content that you've sourced from other places. Also, having backlinks pointing to your site, Google looks at backlinks as an authoritative vote, if you will, to let Google know that, hey, this content is getting linked too often. There must be a reason for that. So having good quality backlinks from reputable sources is important. Also, that you're not currently under a spam penalty, that you haven't done some SEO trickery or hired a black cat SEO to do your SEO, and that you're not under a spam penalty, but there are fixes for that. So a little about me. I am a digital marketing consultant. My company is Papai Internet. My name is Bobby Kircher. I wrote my first computer program on an Apple IIe, like when I was eight, I think, and I learned a valuable lesson about text and naming files, and I had an extra space in my file, and I couldn't get it to work because I had an extra space in my file, and that still applies today. There's a difference between having hyphens and spaces and special characters in between your file names. So I started my web design career in development in 1998. I started doing SEO in 2002, and I started my company Papai Internet in 2004. So I speak Spanish, and my mom's Cuban, so I grew up speaking both Spanish and English in my house. I love improv. That's one of my favorite things to do when I'm not behind the computer, and I collect roadmaps and vinyl records, and I'm a super fan of RuPaul's Drag Race. Work! All right. So I love that. So why is SEO important? Why is it important for us to think about SEO and optimize our websites? So SEO helps people find your website. How many times have you looked for your website, and you're like, why am I not showing up? I can't find it. Why am I not there? So designing a website and optimizing it is important for search engines to find it, and then also, as a result, important for people to find it. So today, we're going to cover configuring WordPress. We're going to talk a little bit about SEO plugins and other tools that you can use, and then, if we have time, do some Q&A after. So let's start with configuring WordPress. But if you do one thing to configure your WordPress, and you don't take anything away from my talk today, the one thing you should do, if you haven't done already, is uncheck this box. This box is probably one of the clearest things that you can see in the WordPress admin. This just explicitly says, discourage search engines from indexing this website. And if you have that checked, then you should uncheck that. Number one. So I'm going to get into talking about permalinks and slugs and what's important about that. If you're familiar, this is the permalink settings that you find under within the Settings menu. And this has been updated within the last few WordPress iterations. Here is, back in the day, if you notice, there was the plain setting. Just about every website, or WordPress website, does not use that setting anymore. But there are still some that linger. I'm sorry. No, sorry. Yeah, I apologize. These texts may not be the largest. But if you notice that there is a custom structure, and that's where you can really set your post name and change your blog, URL, and your settings there for permalink settings. And so using post name, which is pretty common, allows you to utilize the slug within your posts and pages. So here's a look at what the slug looks like when you're editing a page. If you notice this page is about Marko Island beaches, the permalink structure shows the slug as beaches. And I have this organized in a way where it is using the page hierarchy for the slug. Some thoughts about slugs, like some rule of thumb kind of things, is to make it easy to read and share. These are going to be the links of your pages and posts. So you want to make sure that it's easy to read and easy to share. You want to utilize keywords that is about the topic of the content, but you don't want to overdo it. If you start keyword stuffing it, it'll look really funny, just visually to your own eyes, but also look really funny to the search engines. Once you set your slug, just try to set it and keep it without changing it. But if you do have to change it, let's say you threw a bunch of keywords into your slug and you want to clean it up a little bit, you can use 301 redirects to point the slug to the new slug. So WordPress is a really good job with categories and tags. And I see with quite a few WordPress setups, people like to go a little crazy with their categories and tagging. And some people don't understand the difference between the two. I've seen people use tags as categories and categories as tags, so let's dive into the details. So with categories, I like to think of it as a pyramid. It provides an organizational structure for your content. With the categories, it's like when you think of a news site or a library, libraries are organized by types of books, fiction, nonfiction. And then even within fiction and nonfiction, you have biographies or you have novels. Thinking about categories is like thinking about how you organize your own library. And within these little categories, you can turn these into landing pages, so you can optimize even the content on these categories that you're classifying your content as. And within that, you can set your category titles, you can set a page title attribute, you can set your meta descriptions, you can add unique content to those pages and use that as basically a landing page for the content that you have on your site. With tags, you're getting into specific details about the content that you have. Think of like a recipe site that has a category for desserts, right? And the ingredients for that dessert would be like a metaphor for tagging. That way, let's say you're in your kitchen and you open your fridge and it's like, I got a bunch of avocados. What can I make with avocados? You can go through the tag of an avocado and see all the different recipes you can create with avocados. It doesn't necessarily have to be dinner, it could be an appetizer, it could be all kinds of meals that you can create with it. So with tags, it's more honing in on the type of content that you have. And not all sites need it. Your site may not need tags. And if you don't need tags or if you've used tags that are just becoming unwieldy, you can no index those tags so they don't get indexed by the search engines. Cool. So mobile is a big deal. It powers half of all Google searches are now on a mobile device. Who has a cell phone in here? OK. How smart is your cell phone? Is it a flip phone or is it a? And how many of you are actually using your phones to do searches on the web, like to use Google? Awesome. OK. Yeah. So as our devices are getting faster, these pocket computers are becoming more of a go-to for performing searches and doing the things that we want to do on the web. And Google knows that. So this number is probably going to continue to grow. How many of you are using your mobile device more than your home desktop do you feel? OK. So a few of you. Google understands this. Google knows this. And it is now pushing for their mobile first index. They're looking at the mobile version of the site as the default index for the search results of the mobile version of your site. So it's considering the mobile version as your primary version of your site. How many of you are using M dots for your mobile versions? OK, good. That means you all have mobile responsive websites. Do you all know what I mean by M dot? OK. So back in the day before WordPress and for other websites, before themes were coded as responsive, you would put in a plug-in to show a mobile version of that page. Do you remember those? OK. So some websites actually have an M dot for that version or a separate version of the website that would show an M dot domain name dot com or domain dot net. If you have that version of a website, then that website is going to be indexed first before the desktop. So it's important to have a mobile responsive website, a website that performs well within a mobile device. So one of the solutions that WordPress and Google have offered is using AMP, which is Accelerated Mobile Pages. It's an open source initiative. It's available via plug-in through WordPress. And you can go to ampproject.org for more information. Me personally, I don't recommend it for every website. There's a lot of configuration you have to put into place to make sure that your content displays the way you want it to. So work with a developer. If you decide to go to the AMP route, work with the developer. If you notice doing Google searches, especially for news sites, and you notice this lightning bolt that you see there in the news pages, that means that website is serving an AMP page. And they do load quickly. It really isn't for everybody. At least I can say it's for everybody quite yet. Who's done a site speed test on their website? Cool. Dude, you guys are on it, man. You understand this a little more than most. I don't know exactly what you're doing with it. OK. Cool. So it looks red. You're like, what? OK. So there's this three-second rule that most people who land on a website, if it takes longer than three seconds to load, they'll probably bounce. Here's something about this fact. This was done by Akamai a while ago. This was back in 2009 that this was determined. That's almost 10 years ago. Yeah. It's hard to believe, right? This still applies today. And there's still a lot of websites that don't follow this rule. I use a tool called GTmetrics. And here's a result from a website that I've worked on that shows the load times for that site. You can see it's got D and E's for their grading system. But the big number is that 9.7 seconds that you see there for the full load time. That's a really long time. And especially on a mobile device, when you're on mobile versus desktop, I mean, me personally, I'm like, I want this page to load right away. Waiting 9 seconds for that page to load, I'm probably going to go elsewhere. And Google understands that. And Google wants to have everybody to have a good search experience. So they really look for a fast loading website. So here are some places where you can check for your site speed. GTmetrics is one of my favorites. Webpagetest.org is also a good resource that really breaks it down, down to the different types of content that's loading. Google PageSpeed Insights is also very good. And you can also check within your Chrome settings if you go into your developer or go into Inspect and look at all the different developer tools. There's a lighthouse within Chrome now, where you can do an audit and a speed test. So some of the ways that you can help improve your speed is look at your code. The theme that you use, are you using a theme that was coded well and clean? There's a lot of themes out there. One of the great things about WordPress is that, and it's such a huge adoption, is that there's so many plugins and resources and themes that you can use. But not all of them are made equal. So take a look at your code or work with a developer that can help you look at your code and see how clean it is. Also, if you have plugins installed, are you using them? Are you fully utilizing them? Are you a plugin collector? I may use this later. So I'm just going to keep this on and active and see maybe one point. I'll use it. Don't. If you haven't used it yet and you're not planning on using it right away, disable it. All of those plugins will impact performance and speed on your site. Also, is your theme responsive? Is it rendering really nice on a mobile device and loading quickly? Another reason why this is update, another reason why speed is important is because of Google's speed update. They announced this in January. It's coming July 2018. Thanks, Jessica. Good morning, everybody. How's everybody doing? Awesome. Cool. We're going to talk about optimizing WordPress for SEO. Who's doing their own, basically managing their own website and content and their own WordPress site? Cool. And you're all handling your SEO on your own as much as you can? OK. Who doesn't know what SEO is? Everybody knows. Everybody has a general idea. Good. So WordPress, out of the box, is really good for SEO. It's very clean. If you remember the default themes over the years that you install and run, and you can actually have a website up and running pretty quickly, it's one of the wonderful things about WordPress. And it's why WordPress is powering about a quarter of all the websites on the web. However, we love to tinker. We love to play with our websites, make it look pretty, make it look unique, which, yeah, that's what we are. We're all unique and we want to make our websites look unique. But sometimes when we get unique, we start tinkering and start throwing things on our website that really slow it down, or don't have a lot of text showing, or we just do things that make it even more difficult for search engines to find the content on our website. But if we tweak it, then we have big happen face, right? Then we really make it an SEO-friendly platform and website. But first, this is assuming three things about your website. We can do all kinds of tweaks to the website. But really, you need to have unique and compelling content on the website as it is. And when I say unique, I mean content that is yours that belongs to you, not content that you've sourced from other places. Also, having backlinks pointing to your site, Google looks at backlinks as an authoritative vote, if you will, to let Google know that, hey, this content is getting linked too often. There must be a reason for that. So having good quality backlinks from reputable sources is important. Also, that you're not currently under a spam penalty, that you haven't done some SEO trickery or hired a black cat SEO to do your SEO, and that you're not under a spam penalty. But there are fixes for that. So a little about me. I am a digital marketing consultant. My company is Popeye Internet. My name is Bobby Kurcher. I wrote my first computer program on an Apple IIe, like when I was eight, I think. And I learned a valuable lesson about text and naming files. And I had an extra space in my file, and I couldn't get to work because I had an extra space in my file. And that still applies today. There's a difference between having hyphens and spaces and special characters in between your file names. So I started my web design career in development in 1998. I started doing SEO in 2002. And I started my company, Popeye Internet, in 2004. So I speak Spanish. My mom's Cuban, so I grew up speaking both Spanish and English in my house. I love improv. That's one of my favorite things to do when I'm not behind the computer. And I collect roadmaps and vinyl records. And I'm a super fan of RuPaul's Drag Race. Work! All right. So I love that. So why is SEO important? Why is it important for us to think about SEO and optimize our websites? So SEO helps people find your website. How many times have you looked for your website and you're like, why am I not showing up? I can't find it. Why am I not there? So designing a website and optimizing it is important for search engines to find it and then also, as a result, important for people to find it. So today, we're going to cover configuring WordPress. We're going to talk a little bit about SEO plugins and other tools that you can use. And then if we have time, do some Q&A after. So let's start with configuring WordPress. But if you do one thing to configure your WordPress, and you don't take anything away from my talk today, the one thing you should do, if you haven't done already, is uncheck this box. This box is probably one of the clearest things that you can see in the WordPress admin. This just explicitly says, discourage search engines from indexing this website. And if you have that checked, then you should uncheck that. So number one. So I'm going to get into talking about permalinks and slugs and what's important about that. If you're familiar, this is the permalink settings that you find under within the Settings menu. And this has been updated within the last few WordPress iterations. Back in the day, if you notice, there was the plain setting. Just about every website, or WordPress website, does not use that setting anymore. But there are still some that linger. I'm sorry. Do I make it bigger? No, sorry. Yeah. So I apologize. These texts may not be the largest. But if you notice that there is a custom structure, and that's where you can really set your post name and change your blog, URL, and your settings there for permalink settings. And so using post name, which is pretty common, allows you to utilize the slug within your posts and pages. So here's a look at what the slug looks like when you're editing a page. If you notice, this page is about Marko Island beaches. The permalink structure shows the slug as beaches. And I have this organized in a way where it is using the page hierarchy for the slug. Some thoughts about slugs, like some rule of thumb kind of things, is to make it easy to read and share. These are going to be the links of your pages and posts. So you want to make sure that it's easy to read and easy to share. You want to utilize keywords that is about the topic of the content, but you don't want to overdo it. If you start keyword stuffing it, it'll look really funny, just visually to your own eyes, but also look really funny to the search engines. Once you set your slug, just try to set it and keep it without changing it. But if you do have to change it, let's say you threw a bunch of keywords into your slug and you want to clean it up a little bit, you can use 301 redirects to point the slug to the new slug. So WordPress is a really good job with categories and tags. And I see with quite a few WordPress setups, people like to go a little crazy with their categories and tagging. And some people don't understand the difference between the two. I've seen people use tags as categories and categories as tags, so let's dive into the details. So with categories, I like to think of it as a pyramid. It provides an organizational structure for your content. With the categories, it's like when you think of a news site or a library, libraries are organized by types of books, fiction, nonfiction. And then even within fiction and nonfiction, you have biographies or you have novels. Thinking about categories is like thinking about how you organize your own library. And within these little categories, you can turn these into landing pages. So you can optimize even the content on these categories that you're classifying your content as. And within that, you can set your category titles, you can set a page title attribute, you can set your meta descriptions, you can add unique content to those pages and use that as basically a landing page for the content that you have on your site. With tags, you're getting into specific details about the content that you have. Think of like a recipe site that has a category for desserts, right? And the ingredients for that dessert would be like a metaphor for tagging. So that way, let's say you're in your kitchen and you open your fridge and it's like I got a bunch of avocados. What can I make with avocados? You can go through the tag of an avocado and see all the different recipes you can create with avocados. It doesn't necessarily have to be dinner. It could be an appetizer. It could be all kinds of meals that you can create with it. So with tags, you want to, it's more honing in on the type of content that you have. And not all sites need it. Your site may not need tags. And if you don't need tags or if you've used tags that are just becoming unwieldy, you can no index those tags so they don't get indexed by the search engines. Cool. So mobile, mobile is a big deal. It powers, half of all Google searches are now on a mobile device. Who has a cell phone in here? OK, how smart is your cell phone? Is it a flip phone or is it a? And how many of you are actually using your phones to do searches on the web, like to use Google? Awesome. OK, yeah. So as our devices are getting faster, these pocket computers are becoming more of a go-to for performing searches and doing the things that we want to do on the web. And Google knows that. And this number is probably going to continue to grow. How many of you are using your mobile device more than your home desktop, do you feel? OK, yeah, so a few of you. Google understands this. Google knows this. And it is now pushing for their mobile-first index. They're looking at the mobile version of the site as the default index for the search results of the mobile version of your site. So it's considering the mobile version as your primary version of your site. How many of you are using mDots for your mobile versions? OK, good. That means you all have mobile-responsive websites. Do you all know what I mean by mDot? OK, so back in the day before themes for WordPress and for other websites, before themes were coded as responsive, you would put in a plug-in to show a mobile version of that page. Do you remember those? OK, so some websites actually have an mDot for that version, or a separate version of the website that would show an m.domainame.com or domain.net. So now if you have that version of a website, then that website is going to be indexed first before the desktop. So it's important to have a mobile-responsive website and a website that performs well within a mobile device. So one of the solutions that WordPress and Google have offered is using AMP, which is Accelerated Mobile Pages. It's an open-source initiative. It's available via plug-in through WordPress. And you can go to ampproject.org for more information. Me personally, I don't recommend it for every website. There's a lot of configuration you have to put into place to make sure that your content displays the way you want it to. So work with a developer. If you decide to go to the AMP route, work with the developer. If you notice doing Google searches, especially for news sites, and you notice this lightning bolt that you see there in the news pages, that means that website is serving an AMP page. And they do load quickly. It really isn't for everybody. At least I can say it's for everybody quite yet. Site speed. Who's done a site speed test on their website? Cool. Dude, you guys are on it, man. You understand this a little more than most. OK. Cool. So it looks red. You're like, what? OK. So there's this three-second rule that most people who land on a website, if it takes longer than three seconds to load, they'll probably bounce. Here's something about this fact. This was done by Akamai a while ago. This was back in 2009 that this was determined. That's almost 10 years ago. Yeah, it's hard to believe, right? This still applies today. And there's still a lot of websites that don't follow this rule. I use a tool called GTmetrics. And here's a result from a website that I've worked on that shows the load times for that site. You can see it's got D and E's for their grading system. But the big number is that 9.7 seconds that you see there for the full load time. That's a really long time. And especially on a mobile device, when you're on mobile versus desktop, I mean, me personally, I'm like, I want this page to load right away. Waiting 9 seconds for that page to load, I'm probably going to go elsewhere. And Google understands that. And Google wants to have everybody to have a good search experience. So they really look for a fast-loading website. So here are some places where you can check for your site speed. GTmetrics is one of my favorites. Webpagetest.org is also a good resource that really breaks it down down to the different types of content that's loading. Google PageSpeed Insights is also very good. And you can also check within your Chrome settings if you go into your developer or go into Inspect and look at all the different developer tools. There's a lighthouse within Chrome now where you can do an audit and a speed test. So some of the ways that you can help improve your speed is look at your code. The theme that you use, are you using a theme that was coded well and clean? There's a lot of themes out there. One of the great things about WordPress is that, and it's such a huge adoption, is that there's so many plugins and resources and themes that you can use. But not all of them are made equal. So take a look at your code or work with a developer that can help you look at your code and see how clean it is. Also, if you have plugins installed, are you using them? Are you fully utilizing them? Or are you a plugin collector? I may use this later, so I'm just going to keep this on and active and see maybe one point. I'll use it. Don't. If you haven't used it yet and you're not planning on using it right away, disable it. All of those plugins will impact performance and speed on your site. Also, is your theme responsive? Is it rendering really nice on a mobile device and loading quickly? Another reason why speed is important is because of Google's speed update. They announced this in January. It's coming July 2018. Thanks, Jessica. Good morning, everybody. How's everybody doing? Awesome. Cool. We're going to talk about optimizing WordPress for SEO. Who's doing their own basically managing their own website and content in their own WordPress site? Cool. And you're all handling your SEO on your own as much as you can? OK. Who doesn't know what SEO is? All right. Everybody knows. Everybody has a general idea. Good. So WordPress, out of the box, is really good for SEO. It's very clean. If you remember the default themes over the years that you install and run, and you can actually have a website up and running pretty quickly, it's one of the wonderful things about WordPress. And it's like why WordPress is powering about a quarter of all the websites on the web. However, we love to tinker. We love to play with our websites, make it look pretty, make it look unique, which, yeah, that's what we are. We're all unique and we want to make our websites look unique. But sometimes when we get unique, we start tinkering and start throwing things on our website that really slow it down, or don't have a lot of text showing, or we just do things that make it even more difficult for search engines to find the content on our website. But if we tweak it, then we have big happy face, right? Then we really make it an SEO-friendly platform and website. But first, this is assuming three things about your website. We can do all kinds of tweaks to the website, but really, you need to have unique and compelling content on the website as it is. And when I say unique, I mean content that is yours, that belongs to you, not content that you've sourced from other places. Also, having backlinks pointing to your site, Google looks at backlinks as an authoritative vote, if you will, to let Google know that, hey, this content is getting linked too often. There must be a reason for that. So having good quality backlinks from reputable sources is important. Also, that you're not currently under a spam penalty, that you haven't done some SEO trickery or hired a Black Hat SEO to do your SEO and that you're not under a spam penalty, but there are fixes for that. So a little about me. I am a digital marketing consultant. My company is Papai Internet. My name is Bobby Kircher. I wrote my first computer program on an Apple IIe, like when I was eight, I think. And I learned a valuable lesson about text and naming files. And I had an extra space in my file, and I couldn't get it to work because I had an extra space in my file. And that still applies today. There's a difference between having hyphens and spaces and special characters in between your file names. So I started my web design career development in 1998. I started doing SEO in 2002. And I started my company Papai Internet in 2004. So I speak Spanish. My mom's Cuban. So I grew up speaking both Spanish and English in my house. I love improv. That's one of my favorite things to do when I'm not behind the computer. And I collect roadmaps and vinyl records. And I'm a super fan of RuPaul's Drag Race. Work! All right. So I love that. So why is SEO important? Why is it important for us to think about SEO and optimize our websites? So SEO helps people find your website. How many times have you looked for your website and you're like, why am I not showing up? I can't find it. Why am I not there? So designing a website and optimizing it is important for search engines to find it. And then also, as a result, important for people to find it. So today, we're going to cover configuring WordPress. We're going to talk a little bit about SEO plugins and other tools that you can use. And then, if we have time, do some Q&A after. So let's start with configuring WordPress. But if you do one thing to configure your WordPress, and you don't take anything away from my talk today, the one thing you should do, if you haven't done already, is uncheck this box. This box is probably one of the clearest things that you can see in the WordPress admin. It just explicitly says, discourage search engines from indexing this website. And if you have that checked, then you should uncheck that. So let's go back to the first thing that we're going to talk about. So let's go back to the first thing that we're going to talk about is permalinks and slugs, and what's important about that. If you're familiar, this is the permalink settings that you find under within the settings menu. And this has been updated within the last few WordPress iterations. Back in the day, if you notice, the plain setting, just about every website, or WordPress website, does not use that setting anymore. But there are still some that linger. I'm sorry. No, sorry. So if, yeah, I apologize. These texts may not be the best, the largest. But if you notice that there is a custom structure, and that's where you can really set your post name and change your blog URL and your settings there for permalink settings. And so using post name, which is pretty common, allows you to utilize the slug within your posts and pages. So here's a look at what the slug looks like when you're editing a page. If you notice, this page is about Marko Island beaches. The permalink structure shows the slug as beaches. And I have this organized in a way where it is using the page hierarchy for the slug. Some thoughts about slugs, like some rule of thumb kind of things, is to make it easy to read and share. These are going to be the links of your pages and posts. So you want to make sure that it's easy to read and easy to share. You want to utilize keywords that is about the topic of the content, but you don't want to overdo it. If you start keyword stuffing it, it'll look really funny, just visually to your own eyes, but also look really funny to the search engines. Once you set your slug, just try to set it and keep it without changing it. But if you do have to change it, let's say you threw a bunch of keywords into your slug, and you want to clean it up a little bit, you can use 301 redirects to point the slug to the new slug. So WordPress is a really good job with categories and tags. And I see with quite a few WordPress setups, people like to go a little crazy with their categories and tagging. And some people don't understand the difference between the two. I've seen people use tags as categories and categories as tags, so let's dive into the details. So with categories, I like to think of it as a pyramid. It provides an organizational structure for your content. With the categories, it's like when you think of like a news site or a library, libraries are organized by types of books, fiction, nonfiction. And then even within fiction and nonfiction, you have like biographies, or you have novels. Thinking about categories is like thinking about how you organize your own library. And within these little categories, you can turn these into landing pages. So you can optimize even the content on these categories that you're classifying your content as. And within that, you can set your page, your category titles, you can set a page title attribute, you can set your meta descriptions, you can add unique content to those pages and use that as basically a landing page for the content that you have on your site. With tags, you're getting into specific details about the content that you have. Think of like a recipe site that has a category for desserts. And the ingredients for that dessert would be like a metaphor for tagging. So that way, let's say you're in your kitchen and you open your fridge and it's like, I got a bunch of avocados. What can I make with avocados? You can go through the tag of an avocado and see all the different recipes you can create with avocados. It doesn't necessarily have to be dinner. It could be an appetizer. It could be all kinds of meals that you could create with it. So with tags, you want to just, it's more honing in on the type of content that you have. And not all sites need it. Your site may not need tags. And if you don't need tags or if you use tags that are just becoming unwieldy, you can no index those tags so they don't get indexed by the search engines. Cool. So mobile is a big deal. It powers half of all Google searches are now on a mobile device. Who has a cell phone in here? OK. How smart is your cell phone? Is it a flip phone or is it a, right? And how many of you are actually using your phones to do searches on the web, like to use Google? Awesome. OK. Yeah. So as our devices are getting faster, these pocket computers, right, are becoming more of a go-to for performing searches and doing the things that we want to do on the web. And Google knows that. So, and this number is probably going to continue to grow, how many of you are using your mobile device more than your home desktop do you feel? OK. Yeah, so a few of you. Google understands this. Google knows this. And it is now pushing for their mobile first index. They're looking at the mobile version of the site as the default index for the search results of the mobile version of your site. So it's considering the mobile version as your primary version of your site. How many of you are using mDots for your mobile versions? OK, good. That means you all have mobile responsive websites. Do you all know what I mean by mDot? OK, so if you maybe, so back in the day before themes for WordPress and for other websites, before themes were coded as responsive, you would put in a plug-in to show the mobile version of that page. Do you remember those? OK, so some websites actually have an mDot for that version or a separate version of the website that would show an m dot domain name dot com or domain dot net. So now if you have that version of a website, then that website is going to be indexed first before the desktop. So it's important to have a mobile responsive website that performs well within a mobile device. So one of the solutions that WordPress and Google have offered is using AMP, which is Accelerated Mobile Pages. It's an open source initiative. It's available via plug-in through WordPress. And you can go to ampproject.org for more information. It is not, I don't recommend, me personally, I don't recommend it for every website. There's a lot of configuration you have to put into place to make sure that your content displays the way you want it to. So work with a developer. If you decide to go to the AMP route, work with the developer. If you notice doing Google searches, especially for new sites, and you notice this lightning bolt that you see there in the news pages, that means that website is serving an AMP page. And they do load quickly. It really isn't for everybody. At least I can't say it's for everybody quite yet. Site speed. Who's done a site speed test on their website? Cool. Dude, you guys are on it, man. You understand this a little more than most. I don't know exactly what you're doing with it. OK. Cool. So it looks red. You're like, what? OK. So there's this three-second rule that most people who land on a website, if it takes longer than three seconds to load, they'll probably bounce. Here's something about this fact. This was done by Akamai a while ago. This was back in 2009 that this was determined. That's almost 10 years ago. Yeah, it's hard to believe, right? This still applies today. And there's still a lot of websites that don't follow this rule. I use a tool called GTmetrics. And here's a result from a website that I've worked on that shows the load times for that site. You can see it's got D and E's for their grading system. But the big number is that 9.7 seconds that you see there for the full load time. That's a really long time. And especially on a mobile device, when you're on mobile versus desktop, I mean, me personally, I'm like, I want this page to load right away. Waiting nine seconds for that page to load, I'm probably going to go elsewhere. And Google understands that. And Google wants to have everybody to have a good search experience. So they really look for a fast loading website. So here are some places where you can check for your site speed. GTmetrics is one of my favorites. Webpagetest.org is also a good resource that really breaks it down down to the different types of content that's loading. Google page speed insights is also very good. And you can also check within your Chrome settings if you go into your developer or go into InSpec and look at all the different developer tools. There's a lighthouse within Chrome now where you can do an audit and a speed test. So some of the ways that you can help improve your speed is look at your code. The theme that you use, are you using a theme that was coded well and clean? There's a lot of themes out there. One of the great things about WordPress is that, and it's such a huge adoption, is that there's so many plugins and resources and themes that you can use, but not all of them are made equal. So take a look at your code or work with a developer that can help you look at your code and see how clean it is. Also, if you have plugins installed, are you using them? Are you fully utilizing them? Are you a plugin collector? I may use this later. So I'm just going to keep this on and active and see maybe one point out. I'll use it. Don't. If you haven't used it yet and you're not planning on using it right away, disable it. All of those plugins will impact performance and speed on your site. Also, is your theme responsive? Is it rendering really nice on a mobile device and loading quickly?