 All right. So once again, hello everyone and welcome to today's online workshop. Today's topic is what is SEO? SEO is short for search engine optimization. So I'm Ben. Nice to meet you all again. I recognize some people, but it looks like we have some new people here joining my session as well. So good to have you. I live in Japan. I've lived in Japan for over 30 years. I've been a WordPress user since 2014. So about eight years or so now. I initially started just building sites for myself and my church and like different community projects. But then a couple of years ago, I started working as customer support for WordPress. That's when I really got to dive into WordPress and understand how it works. And then this year I've joined the training team in the WordPress project. And I am here to create education resources like these online workshops and also to help other volunteers. So that they can create educational resources like this as well. So I enjoy helping people with WordPress. And if you're interested in hosting these workshops, do get in touch and I can tell you, I can share with you how you can get involved also. Anyway, just some ground rules about online workshops. These online workshops are intended as a space for us to learn together. So you can ask questions at any time. The Zoom chat, I have that open. I'll be monitoring that. And I don't have to be the one answering questions either. So if you know the answer to a question somebody else asked, go ahead and add that to the Zoom chat and hopefully we can all learn from each other through these sessions. Just as a reminder, the sessions are recorded and they will be uploaded to WordPress.tv so that people who couldn't make this session can also see the content. And once again, if you're interested in hosting these workshops, I can show you how you can get involved also. And yeah, hi Sue. Sue from Life in Secular Recovery. So thank you for joining us. Okay. So I have another question I want to ask people. How familiar are you with SEO? So one is I've never heard of it before. And today's the very first time I'm hearing about SEO. And then 10 is I'm an SEO specialist and I work with SEO every single day. Maybe you help client websites get better SEO. So in a 1 to 10, where would you say you are? Right, we have an eight, a three, a two, four or five, three, a three, six or seven, eight-ish. Wonderful. So a good spread of experiences here. Or five. No one had said one yet. So it seems like we've all heard of SEO before. But maybe we're not exactly sure how it applies to our own sites. And so I myself, I think I'm maybe a seven or so, six or seven. So it looks like there are people here who might even know more than me. So do join in the chat. And if you have information you can share or even information you can add to what's in my slides. I'd be happy for you to join. Which reminds me, I do have my slides and I usually share this with folks. So let me get the link for that. All right. So I'm going to go through these slides on the screen here. But if you want to go back a few slides to see what I said or and if you want to click on the links in the slides, I've just shared those in the zoom chat here. And they'll be available after the session as well. So if you just want to focus on the presentation, you can come back and check those slides later. Right. So generally, how do people find our blogs or websites? I say blog here, but the same thing applies to websites. How do people find us? And I think there are mainly two methods people find us by first one is through surgeons and results, like Google and being in Japan, we still have Yahoo. And then there's everything else. So word of mouth, maybe people see your website address on a flyer. Maybe they just subscribe so they don't even go through the search engines. So people come to our sites through two different doors. And today we're going to be talking about talking about people coming to our site through search engine results. If you're interested in all the other methods, people join our site or come to our site. I did do a online workshop recently. I've left the link there in the slides. Ideas for getting more views on your blog. So if you're interested in that aspect of getting more visitors, do check that presentation out also. But today, we're going to be looking at people who come through search engine results. So I've broken my talk down into four chapters. And the first one is how do search engines work exactly. So in able to optimize for search engines, we need to know how search engines work. The second is what is SEO and why is it important? Thirdly, what can I do to make sure my site is ready for search engines? This will be our biggest topic today. And I have, I think, almost 10 different things you can do to improve your SEO on your website. And finally, as a bonus, I'll be introducing just briefly a couple of other types of SEO which you can look into further after this session. So yeah, before we jump into the content, did anyone have any questions so far? They wanted to get off their chest before we start. Doesn't look like it. We're all ready to dive in. Cool. Okay. So how does search engines work exactly? So search engines stand bot to your site. And I have a little character here and pretend this is the search engine bot. And they don't actually look this cute. They're just programs. But search engines send these robots or send these bots to different websites to check out these websites. What is the content about? Where do they link to? Almost like a person looking at a website. Not exactly the same, but they do come to websites and crawl. So we use the word crawl here to say people look through your website and to pick out information from it. So bots come to your website. And the main thing is they click through links on your site. So that helps them navigate through your entire site. Look at all your pages and all your posts. So links are really important to help bots through your site. And as a bot looks through your site, it figures out keywords for your site. So in this example here, this site is looking at this pink site. And it goes, alright, so this site looks like it's a store filling clothing. And then it looks at the descriptions of the different products. And it says, okay, I've seen the word cute and modern appear a lot of times in these descriptions. And then it looks at the site footage and says, ah, the store said it's in Sydney, Australia. And so what the bot is doing is when it's looking at your site, it's trying to pick out the different keywords here. You can't say this is the keywords for this site. You can't really specify these are my keywords. So what's going to come look through your site and figure out what the keywords are on its own. But anyway, once it figures out what the keywords are for your site, it then records those in the search engine database. So in this example, this bot connects this pink site to the word store clothing cute modern Sydney in the database. So now, if anybody, so whenever somebody starts a search query, and they look up different words, Google and the search engines aren't exactly traveling all through the world looking at all the websites to find what's going to be a close match. What it's doing is it's just looking at its own database and all the data it already has stored there to figure out what might be the best result for this person's query. So in this case, if this woman here is searching for modern clothing stores in Sydney, the bot looks at the database, it goes, okay, I found the store that matches most of the words. This, this woman hasn't specifically searched for cute, which was also in the database, but that's okay. The bot's going to try and find results that are closest to what this person is looking for, and then recommend that in search results. So that is an overview of how search engines operate. One other thing I did want to point out is search engines keep look for keywords they travel through links they look for keywords that's one of the most important things they look at. But there are other aspects of your site search engines are looking at and they sort of give your site a score and sites with the highest score, they're going to rank higher in search engine results. So for example, different things as what we're looking to what other sites do you link to. So, what external sites is your website linking out to, and then also looks at who is linking back to your site. So, it can collect that information from your site directly, but as it travels through other websites in the world. It's keeping in note of how many people are linking back to your site, and if those sites out there are credible. So their score, those sites linking back to your their score, and your score is sort of interconnected here in a sense. Something else bots are looking at other images and videos on your site. What are these images about. It's also looking to see if your site loads quickly. So does the layout look good on mobile devices as well. So not just desktop but in in a vertical mobile screen is the site looking okay. Is the site secure does it have a secure certificate on the domain. These, these are just some of the other aspects a bot is looking at when it gives your site a score in its database. All right, so let me pause there. Does anybody have any questions so far about just generally how search engines work. I had one question about linking. How important like is HTML or like that type of tagging in that results when there's certain when the bot searching initially. Do you mean like HTML tags in your links specifically. Well just in the website itself, like how it's coded. Because I understand is SEO does like you know, h1 h2p tag button maybe. And it also has like an accessibility right so that you have something to do with ranking as well correct. My understanding is so you're talking about the structure of say pages and posts and the headings and the paragraph tags. And my understanding is yes it does look at that. So for example, headings should be in order so you should have one h1 tag, and then you have h2s under that, and then h3 should be nested inside the h2. If you had like multiple h1 tags or if these heading levels weren't nested correctly, then the search engine is going to say that's a miss like a badly formed site and give you a lower score. So what you're saying is important that the tags you use in the structure of your page is definitely important. And there's also another type of tag called meta tags, which we will talk about a bit further so I think there are two types of HTML tags to the content tags which as you say are important, and then meta tags which will look in a moment. But yeah great question thank you. So we have a few people drop things in the chat here. M says bots also try to navigate the overall page content to understand what it is about. So if the heading structure doesn't make sense that lowers your ranking are great so that's that's the same as what I just said here so it is looking at your structure. If it doesn't make sense, it lowers your ranking. Jean says 15 years ago, we were told to mutually exchange links with other sites. So our sites would have more link backs. All right, so that's talking about the second point here, which other sites link back to you. So search engines have evolved a lot since 15 years ago. There were at the time, different like companies, not companies out there, but you could pay money, and then they would put links to your site and a lot of places. And so you were sort of buying those link backs. Search engines are smart enough now to pretty much identify when you've purchased links like that. And so if you're if you're doing that, like paying for link backs. That's actually going to negatively affect your SEO rank. So what you want to do is build those link backs organically. And I'll talk a bit later about how you can actually do that. So like sharing your links with your friends and asking them to link back to you I think that's still a very good way to create link backs. Paying for those link backs or using dodgy services out there to say they can raise your SEO ranking if you pay them a certain amount. We should be avoiding those. We should be growing these links organically. All right, and you say credibility counts. Yes. All right, so now that we know the overall structure of how search engines work. Let's just take a moment to review what is SEO and why is it important. So I brought this over from Wikipedia. Wikipedia says search engine optimization SEO is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or web page from search engines. So it's improving the quality of people who come to your site through search engines. And it improves the quantity of people who come to your site through search engines. Now, when you say quality, there are a few aspects to this. So first of all, there are bots out there who are just cabling the internet doing bad stuff. You don't want those to come to your site really. What you want are people who are interested. There are also people out there who click on the search engine result. Take two seconds to look at your page and decide it's not worth them staying so they go back to search engine results. And those people sort of don't stay very long. And so what you want to do is you want to improve your site so that people stay longer on your website. And that's another aspect of raising the quality of visitors, the quality of website traffic to your website. SEO is performed because a website will receive more visitors from a search engine when websites rank higher on the search engine results page. So even if you just look back to your experience using search engine results, you generally don't click into the fifth and the sixth and the seventh search engine result page. If you don't find something on the first page or maybe the second page, then you'll probably change your search query and look, try and figure out a better word to look for what you're, to find what you're looking for. And so it's important that our sites end up on the very first page of search engine results. Or like the top three results even on the higher we get in search engine results, the higher chance we have of people seeing our site and landing there. And so this is like important for business websites. If you have a business website or a store or a brand you're trying to promote working on SEO is definitely important. And even if you have a private blog, there are small, simple things you can do to improve your SEO score, even just a little. And if you continue to work on that, you don't have to spend tons of time. But if you can slowly improve your SEO, then gradually you should expect to see more people come and visit your site. So why is SEO important to me? If you rank high in search results, you will most likely get more visitors to your site and your story or your website or your business will reach more people. And that's really why we have websites on the internet because we want to reach people with our brand or with our products or with the story we post on our blog. And so SEO is important for every type of website, I think. That's all I wanted to say about SEO. Did anybody have anything else to add as to why SEO might be important or any thoughts you might have about that? Nope. All right. So now let's jump into the juicy part of today's workshop. What can I do to make sure my site is ready for search engines? And we're going to look through quite a few things here. I might pause after each point so we can ask questions and share information because we are going to go through a lot of stuff here. So visibility settings, blogging frequency, content quality, keywords, linking, metadata, site maps, excerpts versus full posts and other technical factors. So first of all, the most important thing you can do for SEO is make sure your site is visible to the internet. So often when we create a new site, we might turn on a construction in progress type page. So when people visit your domain, they don't see your website yet while you're still working on it. They see like a landing page. And so whenever you launch your website, just make sure you've turned that plugin setting off that your site is actually visible. WordPress also comes with a built in search engine visibility setting. So I've left a screenshot here. If you go to settings and then reading and then scroll to the bottom, there's a setting here called search engine visibility. If this is ticked, you are discouraging search engines from indexing your site. So if that is ticked, then it's most likely you're not going to show up in search engine results. So it's okay to take that while you're working on your site initially. But once you've launched your site, make sure this setting is off because we want your site to be visible. All right. That's all I had about this point. Did anybody have any questions or comments about this? You can also, I believe, enable that for single pages when working on those. Ah, you mean like the privacy setting within the page? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Oops, let me see if I can. There we go. Let me see if I can just launch a site quickly to show people what we're talking about there. Um, so it's, if you add a new page, once there's something showing at the top there, let's, let me just turn this plug in off. So it doesn't bother us. Yeah. All right. So what you were talking about there is if you make a new page over here under page settings on the status and visibility, we have public. If you click on that, you can change that to private. Um, and if you do that, only site admins and editors can see the page. So, so it's no way to box on index it, right? Correct. Correct. While it's private, um, they won't be able to see the content. Um, so, yeah, that's what you can do for individual pages and posts. If you're going to use this setting, though, make sure you turn it back to public because it can be easy to forget to change this setting again. So just always make sure it's public once you're ready for search engines to index it. Yep. Any other questions or points? All right. So that's, that's the very first point. Oh, okay. M has sent us a bit of information. Bots can still see a private page. They just want to include it in their search results. So M, are you saying they can see the existence of the page or they can, can they also see the content of the page? Depends on how. Okay. How the pages may private. Because now that you mention it, like people who aren't an admin can still access the URL of a page. If this is set to private, people can still access the URL and they'll say, this page is private. So people know that page exists. They just won't be able to see the content. Um, M says it depends on the theme. Okay. So private pages. So the good thing is, so what we want to remember is, um, bots can still still see private pages. They can still see they exist, but whether they'll include it in the search results. Um, but they just want to include it in search results. All right. Thank you for that information. The next one is blogging frequency. Um, and search engines generally like sites with fresh content. So if a site hasn't been updated for five years. Um, but there's another side with just as high an SEO score and it's always putting up new content. Then that new side that that side with new content is probably going to rank higher in search results rather than that side that's just being left alone for five years. Um, so there isn't like a magic number here. It's not like you need to blog every second day to make sure you get to the top of search results. It's important that you have a frequency that you stick to. So if it's a private blog, depending on what your frequency is, um, just trying just keep consistent with that. And the other reason why I bring up blogging frequency is if you have a business website, it's, it's easy to let your website just go stale. So like if your products don't change that often, or there might not be a need to update your homepage regularly. Even in those situations, it's still advised that you set up a blog page on your site so that your site consistently has new content. And that will help improve the SEO score. So you could blog maybe about your products. Every time you have a new product, maybe publish a post about that. Maybe the history behind your products or the history behind your brand. So you can find different topics like this. But yeah, what I wanted to say was even if you have a business website, it's still a good idea to have a blog where you have new content coming up regularly. All right, any questions about that point. And M said, the way you write content also matters. That is important. And that comes to our next point, content quality. When when search engines look at your site and look at your content, they are looking at the quality of content as well. So Google recently, I think the last year or two published a EAT guide by. And what this is, is it saying search engines look at the expertise of your site of your content, the authority of your content, and the trustworthiness of your content. So expertise means, are you an expert in whatever you're writing about. Authority is, do you have authority to be talking about what you're writing about. And then trustworthiness is, is the information you're sharing. True, like is it can people really believe what you're writing about. So the way to increase your expertise, I guess, is to really study about that field. Publish multiple posts about that content that people engage with and appreciate authority. So, for example, we all respect say university professors that talk about the field they're really knowledgeable about. And so generally university professors have authority in that sense. But you do your post have authority as well one one way a search engine. But look at that is, do other people link back to you to your content to base find authority in what you're writing and introduce your content on their sites. So, for example, when you link to other content as well, you want to make sure you're linking to content that has authority content written by people with expertise. Rather than just any old blog on the internet. We want to be looking at the EAT of the other content we link to, and because that will, in a sense, connect to our SEO ranking or so. And then trustworthiness is the information was sharing trustworthy. So like, are you just writing things or do you have references you're bringing information from. For example, in my slide before I had the link to Wikipedia and I said this for Wikipedia says and then I sort of talked about that. You can do the same thing with your content website content as well, link to some other resource to make sure your data is trustworthy, and then write more content about that adding your thoughts and your perspective and sharing that with people. Another thing is, when looking at the quality of your site is your content shareable. So if lots and lots of people are sharing your content and linking to your content, search engines will generally think that must be good quality. It's not the only thing that determines quality, but it is another aspect to other people share your content. And that's why, for example, viral YouTube videos come up higher in YouTube search results. Because the more people share it, the more people are watching it. Google thinks it must be good quality content and so they raise it in the search results. And the same thing can be said about your site. So when you write something is it, is it funny? Does it have good taste? Is it catchy? And what your audience is looking for is it's something they will then share on their social media or share on their sites. This is just another aspect to keep in mind to make sure you're always publishing good quality content. So Sean, you commented here, we encourage our clients to share new articles relating to their field on their blog page. For example, an insurance agent would add new information about changes in insurance to their blog page for their site. Yeah, so that's it. So that's sort of combining the blogging frequency we talked about a moment ago and content quality. So let's use talk here. An insurance agent would add new content about insurance because they're an insurance agent. If they started posting about homemade cookies, then you're like, but they're an insurance agent. Like, why, why do they have expertise in homemade cookies? So, so sticking to a field and publishing about that field helps you create quality content. On the other hand, if you're a chef or a cook, or you just have a food blog, you like to share food stuff on, then blogging about homemade cookies is definitely a good topic to go with on that site. And this is another reason why some people have multiple blogs or multiple sites. If they have expertise in multiple fields, rather than sort of jumbling them all into one site, some people just create different separate sites for each of those fields, which helps search engines understand what the expertise of each site is. Thank you for the example, Sean. MC's reading level also matters. If it's too complex, viewers drop. Readers stay longer on content written in plain language, search agents notice. Right, so that's probably like, if you write an academic paper on your blog, then only academic people are going to be able to read it and stay on it. Whereas if you write, whatever you're talking about in plain language, then even the average person will find an interesting stay there. And I think search engines tend to like longer articles because people stay there. But if it gets too long, then I think that's a, that's a bad thing for search engine scores well SEO scores. Yeah. If somebody else knows a bit about that, you can write that. I think I've heard before. Longer articles are better. But if it's too long and takes an hour to read, then it will be better if it's sort of splitting to a couple of posts maybe so people can read it in shorter amounts of times. Ethan says TLDR TLDR is short for too long didn't read. And so Ethan, I think you're commenting having a TLDR at the top of the post saying this is what this post is about also helps. So people don't have to read through all the text to figure out what it's all about is that what you're meaning here. Well, we wait for Ethan M says it is good to create a summary section with a long article so people can scan if wanted or read entire article and you can say yes. All right, so we think you're both talking about a similar thing here. I think in the last few years we've noticed a lot more web pages have like a table of content at the top, which are linked to the different headings in the post. And me personally, I really like that because I can scan the headings and decide like what section I really want to read. And I've heard people with accessibility issues also use that they can scan an article and so rather than read like waiting to get through the whole article waiting for their screen reader to get through the whole article. They can skim through headings as well. And so yeah, longer articles are better for SEO score but also have a way for people to skim through it and jump to the section they really need to improve their experience. And says that is why headings are so important. Yep. And you can jump through headings using a screen reader or other assistive technology. Right. Okay. I'm glad we're all on the same page. We all have similar information. Before I move on, was there any other question people wanted to ask before we jump into other topics? All right. Next one is keywords. And keywords came up in how search engines view our site. So search engines scan through our site content to pick out keywords, which they then store in their database, which they use to present our sites in search results. And so what this means is when you write the content on your site, you want to figure out what your audience is going to be looking for. And for example, some parts of the world, they call tomato sauce, they say tomato sauce and another part of the world, they say ketchup. And so depending on your audience, you might want to write all your articles using tomato sauce, or you might want to say ketchup and everything you do. If you start to mix those in your site, then it search engines have a hard time deciding what the keyword is if you're using different words to say the same thing, then it sort of reduces the impact of the keywords in your site. So when you make your site, figure out who your audience is going to be, and what words do they use, what will they be typing into search engines to find your site. And then you want to use those words in your site content. You want to use it naturally. You don't want to. It's called keyword stuffing. You don't want to like put tomato sauce everywhere on your site. But where it comes naturally, you do want to add those keywords. So there are a couple of tools out there that help you figure out what keywords people might be searching for. Many of them have a paid plan. So I haven't been able to find a lot of good free tools, but WordStream is an example of a free keyword search tool. What you would do here is you would type in the domain of another site that has similar content to what you're presenting. So you would type the domain of a similar blog or a similar company or a rival company's website even. And then this would give you a hint of what words they use or what words people use to search for content on that site. So for example, Be Sun's blog, this is my personal blog. So for example, if you're going to start a new blog and you find my blog is similar to yours, you would type my blog domain in to see what keywords people use to search for my blog. So let's just see what happens here. So there are a few settings you can change here. I'll leave that as is for the moment. All right. So we have here. Let's see one of the most prominent keywords people use to search for my content is life work. Work community or work life. I do talk about work life balance on my side to this. And so this is probably why that sort of popped up as a keyword here. I'm also a community manager. And so that's why we have manage or manager or community come in the top here. So you start to see a trend here of what people use to search for my blog. And that gives you a hint. Do you want to use similar keywords on your site to compete with that site? Or are there other words you can use that aren't getting picked up here, which will give you like an advantage over that website. So there are two ways to think of it. Do you want to attack using the same keywords and so climb above the opposition or do you want to use separate keywords so that you find a unique niche to your audience and use those keywords to rise in search engine results. So. Keyword research. We could almost do an whole online workshop about that as well. So I'll leave that for the moment. I just want to say where would you use your keywords? So. Keywords. First of all, in your stuff. Google ads, right? They have kind of a keyword planner to you, which is free a free tool. Google ads. Did you say? Yeah, they have like a, you know, they'll have a keyword planner in there, I believe. Oh, okay. Before. There we go. My browser is in Japanese is why you're seeing that. That's it. Here we go. All right. So you're seeing it in Japanese because I'm in Japan, but this is the link. Let me drop that in the chat here for people. Everyone in the meeting. Like generating Google ads, but it will help you on some keywords. Okay. Well, that's great to know. I'll add that to my slides for future presentations as well. We have Google ads keyword planner. All right. So where would you use keywords? First of all, your site title. Choose whatever is going to be your main keyword. And if you can include in your site title, that'd be really good included in your tagline at least. So WordPress has a tagline sitting. You want to add your most prominent keyword in your tagline. And then you can add keywords to your page and post titles. Search engines will prioritize what your content is titled when they decide keywords. You can then use keywords in your excerpts in your content headings and then in the content itself. So this is generally the priority in which you want to use keywords. But whatever you do, don't don't keyword stuff. So like, don't put five and six and seven keywords all in your tagline. Because that will come across as unnatural. You want to find just natural places where you can use these keywords and then stick to the same keywords across your whole site. All right. I'm looking at the time here. There's a bit more I want to get through. So I might move on to the next slide. If you have questions, drop them in the zoom chat and we'll get to them a bit later. All right. So linking. We did talk about this a bit already. So I'll keep it brief. First of all, search engines travel through the links on your site to understand the structure of your site and to look at more content. So if you publish a post, try and think about how you can link back to similar posts already on your site. If you can create these internal links on your site that that helps search engines understand what content on your site is important. What posts or pages might have more authority, etc. And also when you link to external sites, try and choose sites that follow the EAT guidelines of quality content. So don't just link to any site. Have a quick look to see if it really is an authoritative site. Does it have trustworthy information and make sure it does come up with a good EAT score even in your own mind. And that will also give credibility to your links to them. So linking is important. We also briefly talked about HTML tags at the very beginning of this session. And I wanted to bring up metadata. Metadata is data on your website that generally people won't see, but search engines will see. So it's sort of hidden behind the scenes a bit, but it does give critical information about your site to search engines. And specifically, metadata descriptions is information shown in search results. So for example, if I search for homemade baking. Let's see. All right, so you'll see these search results have a bit of a description here about the content of the page of link. And so this is meta description. And this is what sites use to show in search result. So I've listed at the last point here. Metadata is automatically generated by WordPress in many instances. So it's not that easy to edit it directly. But all the major SEO plugins out there do give you a way to edit this to modify this metadata to gear it towards your site content more specifically. So I've listed a few links here about different SEO plugins. Some of them have paid plans as well. So what you can do on the free plan might be a bit different. But one thing you can do is WordPress generally uses the excerpts of your pages and posts to create the meta descriptions. So even without plugins, it's a good idea to handwrite your post excerpts. If you don't write a post excerpt, it just takes the top paragraph or something from your content. But if you can actually handwrite your post excerpts to include the keywords, then your keywords would show up here. And search engines would have a better idea of what your content is really about. So I have a question here. What is the best character length for meta descriptions? Does somebody have the answer to that? I do know if a meta description is too long, Google is just going to cut it. Oh, like this one here, this meta description here has dot dot dot at the end. It looks like Google has sort of chopped the description. So there is a length. I don't know the specific number, but I think if you use an SEO plugin, they can help. Okay, M says here. Did you say 70? Yeah, I think it's like 50 and 70. 50 is like green light and then over 70 is red light. You know what I mean? Like a Yoast plugin, for example. Yeah. All right. And M says, I think it cuts at 120 to 150. I think the number also depends on like desktop search results and mobile search results. But yeah, you don't want to make these too long. Generally just a sentence or two will help. I hope that helps you salad with your question. All right. Yeah, perfect. Another thing is a site map. So site maps don't do search rankings, but they do help search engines navigate the content on your site. They understand where your pages are, where your posts are. And lately, search engines are also looking for say image site maps or video site maps. And so they're trying to find the multimedia content on your website as well. Most SEO plugins will generate a site map for you automatically. So it's not something you have to code yourself. But I just wanted to note here that it is something search engines use. So if you ever come across settings in your plugin about site maps, this is what the site map is. It's like a map to help a search engine figure out where all your content is on your website. All right. Now, this is an easier setting folks can edit on the WordPress website. On WordPress, depending on your theme, your theme might give you the option to show an expert and sorry, excerpt of your post or the full content of your post. So for example, on your blog page, you could show the full content of all your posts on the blog page or you could limit it to just excerpts and then have a read more button. And I've seen some people like to put their whole posts on their blog page. But the short answer is it's best to just use excerpt. You should just use excerpts and leave the full content of your posts to the post page itself. And there are a few reasons for this. When a search engine looks through a site, if it finds identical content to another page on your site, it can sometimes demote that as duplicate content. It will definitely demote it if you've copied it. If you've copied somebody else's web page entirely, then they'll look at which is newer and then they'll demote your content as duplicate content. So it's a good idea to avoid having the exact same content in multiple locations on your website. And also you want people to travel through your website and look at new content. So if you put all your posts on your website, they'll only ever visit that one page and they won't go exploring to other areas of your site. So keeping post content to excerpts in different pages and asking people to come visit your post page is a better way to get engagement. It's better for SEO. And it also helps pages load quicker, like a page that's not just on your website, but also on your website. And it also helps pages load quicker, like a page that has to load 100 posts and all the post content is going to take a while to load. So yeah, whenever possible, keep it to excerpts and just keep the full post content on the post itself. So I have a question here. Will there be a recording available after this session? Yes, there will be. And I'll let you know in the meetup group when that is published. All right. And I think I did have one more point now. Other technical factors that relate to SEO. So first of all, site speed is important and Google in particular has become they're viewing site speed more and more important when ranking pages in search results. And it's sometimes difficult. So if you live in a area with high internet speed, then even complicated websites tend to load very quickly. But what you want to consider is that there are people in the world who don't have as good an internet speed as you do. People in developing countries might still have very slow broadband and you want your site to be able to load quickly, even for people like that. So some aspect of site speed is determined by the host you use. So looking to your host, there are different external sites out there that compare hosting speeds. So see where your host ranks in those. Does your host have caching enabled? You can enable caching on a plugin with a plugin, but if your host enables it on the hosting platform, caching can be a bit quicker that way. So we won't go into details, but that's something you can look at. Another thing you can look at is WordPress themes can sometimes change your loading speed drastically. So some really snazzy themes might use like 10 plugins and it looks really nice, but on a slow internet connection it takes ages to load. So try around with a few things. The visual representation is also always good, but also consider the speed of site loads when using that thing. And another thing to keep in mind is sometimes the theme on its own is fine or a plugin on its own is fine, but once you combine three plugins, it could change the loading speed of your site, but if you combine a particular plugin with your theme, that can make your site load slower. So if you're finding your site is sort of loading a bit slowly, try to figure out when that started to happen. Was it after you installed the new plugin, or was it after you changed themes, or what that might be the cause there. So Ethan here in the chat has been dropping us a few links about testing your site's loading speed. We have pagespeed.web.dev and also gtmetrics.com. I've used both of those in the past, and this will also give you what on your site. It's causing it to load slowly, which will give you a hint as to why give you a plugin. Is it a theme? Is it content? Is it your server? Those will give you hints there. Em says images are usually the bandwidth hog. So compressing those help a lot with load speed. Yes, and that is the second point on my slide here. Images should be optimized. Images like especially with the modern camera and the phones even where you can take really high quality images. So good that even people with the best monitors still don't need that high quality. Like people who are looking at your site on their phone can very well make do with a very compressed version of your image. It doesn't have to be that good. So optimizing images is important. And this last one isn't really much of an issue anymore. I think most posts make sure your domain is secure. Oh, you think I was like this? Okay, well maybe not all hosts. But you'll notice a lot of websites now at the top here start with HTTPS. You can see my Google slides that with HTTPS. Make sure your site starts with HTTPS. With the S, the S for secure. If your site doesn't have the S there, then you'll want to look into issuing an SSL certificate for your domain to make sure your site is secure. And another thing about security is if your site has multiple admins, make sure everybody has a strong password to log into the WordPress dashboard. You can have the best security system on your site, but if your WordPress login password isn't strong, then people can easily log into your site that way or hack into your site that way and mess things up. So make sure your WordPress login password is extremely good. All right, and we have a few more points in the chat. E-W-W-W plugin is my go-to for WebP. So that's an image type, I believe. And then let's encrypt is a free SSL. So if you don't have SSL issued on your site, let's encrypt would help you get that for free. And then 2FA, so two factor authentication. So when you log into your WordPress account, if you have 2FA enabled, it means after you enter your password, it asks for like a login code or a message sent to your SMS or something, just that second point of authentication before somebody can actually get into your site. Yeah, that's a lot. Now, I do have a few more slides I want to get through. So this session is going to run 10, 15 minutes late. If you have to cut out here, that's okay. The recording will be posted afterwards, but I just did want to let people know we are going to run a bit late because I think this is a really important topic and there's a bit more I want to share here. Let me pause. Any questions or anything you want me to explain once more before we move on? Sally, thank you for sharing your tips, favorite resources, very much appreciated. And those extra links, Ethan and Amy, you've shared. I'm going to add those into my slides. So when I publish my slides later, you'll all have it in the slides then as well. So yeah, thank you for sharing. All right. So finally, we've been talking about SEO, search engine optimization. And I just wanted to conclude with other types of SEO as well. And what I mean by other types of SEO is that we've been talking about general SEO and more specifically, there's also something called image SEO, video SEO, local SEO, and multilingual SEO. And there might be more as well. But I just want to briefly touch on what these other types of SEO are. So yeah. So first of all, image SEO is optimizing images so that they rank higher in search engine results. And what I mean by that is, for example, with Google, you can click on images and that takes your search query here and gives you image results. And so image SEO is setting up your images so that they rank higher in search results. And the reason you do that is because you want people to click on your image and come to your site. So images are another way for people to get to your site. And we talked about optimizing images before. So images should be optimized. Image file name should be descriptive. Images should have alternative text set on them. There's a lot more we can go into here. So what I wanted to mention was I've actually scheduled an upcoming workshop just about image SEO. So if you're interested in finding out more about SEO, I'll be running the same session twice. At different time zones on December 2nd and December 8th. So do come and join us there and we'll talk all about optimizing your images for search engines. Finally, I have a question here. When naming an image, is it better to use dashes in between words or underlines? I would have to look into that. I don't think they are that different. But other people might know that. Let me take that back as a question to look into. For this image SEO workshop. Ethan said alt text, ALT, which is alternative text. Description is more what the search engine would see. All right. But I will look into that. Do dashes and underscores really have an impact? That's an interesting question. Tell me, you've seen both ways where you've been told dashes. Okay. Let's see. Leave that with me. All right. Similarly, you have image SEO. You also have video SEO. Video SEO is to help optimize your videos so that they rank higher in search engines. And this you can have like YouTube video SEO, which is like specifically YouTube to get your videos ranked high in YouTube. And you can have YouTube video SEO which is like specifically YouTube to get your videos ranked high in YouTube. But sometimes when you search for something Google will also like just in general search results show videos here. And so there are different things you can do to make sure your videos are highlighted higher in search results. Again, we won't go into a lot of details here but choosing a good video host including a transcript. So videos as both can look at transcripts, which is easier than they can decide for what's actually being said in the video. So including a transcript always helps with SEO purposes because bots can understand what the content is about better. Use an engaging thumbnail image and use keywords. Again, keywords what people are going to be searching for in the title and meta description. So why do we see videos in search results? And so that's because Google on YouTube. Yes. But in other parts of the world, Google isn't the main search engine. So for places like that you may want to consider what your main search engine is and how they show results, etc. But anyway, like, okay, if I am targeting a Japanese audience then you know, because in the United States we go well 80% of all searches are Google. Like how would you think about that in SEO term for Japanese audience? Yeah, it's a good question. In Japan, yeah, like in Japan we have Yahoo search but what I've heard is the Japanese Yahoo actually draws on Google search. So Japan might not be a good example. Like places like Russia they have their own search engine and China they have their own search engine. So there are a couple of countries like that. But yeah, that is another point to look into. Sally also says transcripts help with accessibility as people consume information in various ways. That is definitely right. A lot of these SEO practices do overlap with accessibility practices. So if you do SEO right, you're doing accessibility right as well probably. But accessibility is another interesting topic and it's on my list to get to someday in the near future. So maybe in the new year we can have a whole session just about accessibility. All right. Local SEO is optimizing your site to show higher in local search results. So nowadays when you do a search result sometimes your search engine will ask you to use your current location. And what that is saying is it wants to look at where you are to give you search to give you results about say shops right near you, physically near you or destinations physically near you. And so some people don't like sharing their information, their location information. That's okay. But some people do share their information. I am a person who doesn't mind sharing my location with search engines. So I would share my location in my local search results about places near me. And so this is something to keep in mind. If you have like a physical store like a bread store or a flour store then people on the other end of the world finding you in search results might not really help your business. You want to target people in your neighborhood or in your community. And so there are a couple of things you can do to make sure you rank higher in those local search results. One simple thing you can do is make sure your content information is in your footer or your widgets or your contact page. And when I say contact information I mean your address, your physical address. Make sure that is there because search engines will pick up on that and say oh okay this is a local store so I want to give it in local search results. Another thing you can do is post localized content. So when you publish posts post about events in your community or in your neighborhood or different maybe outreach activities you've done in that neighborhood and if you have localized a local content like that search engines will pick up and give you a better local SEO ranking and then also getting local backlinks so having your neighborhood store link back to you or having another community next door link back to you if you can have local sites link back to you as well all right and then multi-lingual SEO so local SEO is talking about geographic location like right near you multi-lingual is targeting different languages so if you have a website that is targeting like two or three or multiple languages then you want to set up each section of your website to rank high in that community or that languages search results so this really plays out in say keywords so the keywords for this language might not be the best keywords in this second language so you want to do keyword research keyword research each language individually to figure out how you're going to improve in that language so a few tips about multi-lingual SEO include only one language in each of your web pages if you start adding adding different languages in the same pages easy to create but from an SEO perspective it's not the best method so if you're really going to target SEO in different languages you want to split out your web pages so that each page only has one language in it translate metadata as well so we talked about that in data hidden behind the scenes that search engine see you want to translate that to select the out text on images you want to translate that information as well for each language multi-lingual SEO yes so on this multi-lingual like let's say you have a bilingual website in French, Spanish and English so you're saying include only one language in each page do you agree should you translate like manually with someone who speaks that language or are plugins like pretty accurate right so you'll see how I've listed a few plugins at the end there plugins attack multi-lingual sites oh no sorry attack isn't the right word plugins help you create multi-lingual sites in many different ways so some plugins generate an automatic translation of your content other plugins just give you the framework and then you have to actually translate the content there are other plugins that send your content out to translators and the translators manually translate your content and send it back so depending on the plugin you'll use the method of translation is different I think the best is if you're fluent in that language if you can actually translate the content yourself that's going to be the cheapest and the best quality but not everybody can speak different languages fluently so then you'll want to look at the cost of these different translation services and what's going to be the best for your particular setup okay so you're saying that then for SEO searches you're going to use a different page with a different language and then you'll rank in that language for those pages yeah so yeah so we talked about metadata a bit one piece of information that's in the metadata is what language is used on that page so if the metadata says English but your page has Spanish and French and English all in the one page and that's going to confuse a separate page and each page in the metadata says this page is French this page is Spanish this page is English then search engines will be able to pick up on that easier and target it for each language's search results and these multilingual plugins will help you set up the metadata pretty much automatically yeah is that hell yes thank you we have multiple languages so this is very interesting thank you I can do a google search about multilingual SEO if you search for multilingual SEO you'll find a lot of other people who write content about this and they'll give you hints as to what might be the best method for you I don't think there's like one answer that fits everybody there are different ways of setting up a multilingual site so just coming into the zoom chat here to see if I've missed anything alright so Sally says there's an entire WordPress make accessibility team that can help when I do that presentation on accessibility so yes thank you very much for the information Em says the key is to use plain language in your content so that it translates easier but you can also declare the language for sections or phrases oh okay so and what you're talking about there's probably the metadata and usually in the top it says what the whole page is but there is a way to specify what the language is for each section I'm guessing plugins will help set that metadata up Jean says great session thanks Ben and everyone else yes that's been well 75 minutes I hope you've learned new things from there, thank you to everyone who contributed or the links and information you shared I learned new stuff as well so if you want to connect with me even after the session is over if you're part of the WordPress Slack group then you can click on this link you'll find me as Beaton Evans I am also on Twitter so if you want to connect with me there we can do that as well and finally the training team recently created an individual learner survey and what this is is we're trying to survey what everybody wants to learn about how best you learn what sort of resources what sort of learning types work best for you so if you have a moment do fill out this individual learner survey for us and we'll be happy to enjoy it alright so thank you once again thank you Ethan for turning your video on and giving me feedback as well thank you Em for the information you sent and just thank you everyone for your engagement in this session once the recording is up I'll let everybody know but yeah that's all for today so have a great day or great evening bye