 I'm going to go ahead and start. It's just about 2.30. So you guys enjoying this? Syed's talk was like frickin' awesome. Like seriously, it was. Like I hope that those of you that sat in on his talk have a newsletter by tomorrow. Seriously. So I'm talking about how to make the most out of Yoast SEO. My name is Niall Flores. I'm from the St. Louis Metro East area. So that just means the arch is my neighbor. So what I do is I design and develop websites that convert, which means that I deliver projects and websites that get the person to have visitors that buy, subscribe, share, comment, get them to do what they want to do, because that is the purpose of the website. Even if you're a blogger in here, you're not doing AdSense and you just want attention, you're wanting a conversion to happen. So today I'm not going to talk about website conversion, because even though I love to, I'm talking about Yoast SEO because I do work for them. I'm on their support team. And so if you are a premium member, sometimes you may see me and maybe you might be a free version person. You might hate me because I work flowed you or something. But we're here to try to help you in everything. So hopefully this will help some of that frustration with the plug-in and everything that some of you have. So you can find me at Blondish.net. And if you do any tweeting, please use my Twitter handle Blondish.net. So my objective today, they're pretty simple ones. Go over some basic SEO tips and go over a few must-dos and basic best practices for Yoast SEO. Some of them you may have heard. Some of you may not. I just kind of like put my little spin on it because I've been using Yoast SEO for probably four years now. So before going into the plug-in, it's better to go and understand basic SEO first. And in order to understand basic SEO, you have to understand Google first. And a lot of people think it's a game and Google hates them. Why is this happening to me? I can never get my site listed right. Well, it's not Google's fault. Google's mission is actually very clear. It's to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. And what they want to do is make it very human. So it's not like they're trying to do a search and it's like some weird term. And you're like, this doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Nothing's coming up. It used to be that way a long time ago. But they've been more refined to, like, for example, Painter Dallas, Texas. And you have all these search results up with even people who have local established businesses and their pins and a map and all these things that used to not exist. They're trying to make it very easy for you to get to these things. And on top of that, you can see these things on mobile. Call them from your mobile phone by clicking on the number, clicking on the map to get to Google Maps. So it's like really awesome. So linking is important. If you want Google to find you, you need to be linking. They follow the links, kind of like a dog. So some of the basic things that they follow you through is your navigation menu, your breadcrumbs. Internal links from one page are post to another or external links from other websites, like if you were featured in an interview or a roundup, which is like a list of links. Like people thought your article was really good. Like for example, on my website, I have two roundups called Monday Mashup, which is like blogging, social media, web design, SEO. And so I pick like the most recent topics that I think are like solid ones that people should be reading. And then I have WordPress Wednesday, all WordPress stuff, community news, themes, plugins. And it's just a little, you know, a hodge podge of awesomeness. So and basically I'm linking to them. So those people didn't really submit their site to like Google Search Console. I've given away for, since my sites are already, you know, on Google Search Console, it's been up for many, many years, 10 years now. They'll get to that website. So how does Google determine what to list and where? Search results are determined by what fits your search terms best. Links to well-written content, links from other websites, also known as off-page factors and content that is shared well. Because we are not in just focusing on regular search and content. We are also looking for social search, what you're sharing on Facebook and Twitter, Google Plus and any other social network. You can even stumble upon. So it may rank better than other websites. So a few basic SEO tips. I'm gonna warn you, I have, these are just lists and everything else. Anything, if I have links and everything, don't worry. I will post them later so you don't have to take any notes and I'll make sure to tweet. You have many of you seen me on Twitter, it's gonna happen. So you'll see all the links, you won't miss a thing, I promise. So write natural and let your blog voice shine. Do not go in there and put your keyword in there and say, I gotta put my keyword in here this many times because you're gonna force yourself to focus on that and you do not sound natural at all. I've had some people like, oh, well it's telling me, oh, am I not getting a green light for this? And you know, SEO and I gotta have more of this keyword in here and you can't do that. You just can't force it because the thing is, yes, Google picks it up but your visitors are the ones that have to suffer through. Finding out why in the world this does not make any sense any longer. So use keyword research to cover topics that bring your niche needs in order to target and bring in reader subscribers buyers. Title, 50 to 60 characters, very simple. Put your keywords toward the beginning of the post. Some of you who've used Yoast SEO probably have gotten me not using the keyword in the first paragraph and it's probably because you either have a short code or an image or something like that there. Don't worry about that, you can ignore that. It's just how that happens. It's trying to say that your image is your first paragraph. That's not a worry, that's just the page analysis tool. Write in an engaging title. So the, something like the definitive guide of WordPress SEO. It's like, oh my gosh, this is really complete guide and everything. I should go there because it says everything about it. That's what definitive gives me in mind. I don't want the guide to WordPress SEO. I want to make it a little more descriptive. So actually that also goes into my cool resource links. One of my friends, she was the keynote speaker at WordCamp Seattle, the beginner one and her name was Kimberly Morris, got the air. She actually introduced this little cool little tool that you can generate blog titles. And for any niche, basically you put the keyword in and you can come up with all sorts of wonderful and colorful titles for research and everything. I really like the other three tools like Google AdWords Keyword Planner. Yo Suggest and Google Trends. That's pretty much aligned with what Yoast actually says on what their tools that they recommend. Google Trends is really good so that you can keep on hot topics like for example, if any of you are doing like fashion or news or anything that has current news, that would be a really good place to go to. More basic SEO tips. Have an about page and a contact page. I would actually go further than this. The reason why you should have these things is one, the about page, it should be telling you what your mission is and generally telling people who you are, what you're offering and then your contact page is a way for them to get in touch with you. Now just swap your email address for every bot in the world to get. Just get that there and plus Syad's talk, that little box, check mark box to subscribe to your list. Man, pimp that out. Get some subscriptions and your leads in. Video, audio and podcast. Image, infographics should be a company by some text. At least 300 words. You just don't put it up there as a blog post. I know there's people who use wordless Wednesdays or something like that and just put a picture up. Put a description with it. And I'm not talking about your made a description for when you describe and suggest to Google what you would like it to be. Put it in your post and you can actually utilize that. For example, if that image may be like marketing, like an infographic, you can use it to guide them where you want them to go. Whether it's another article that's related. If you like this, you may want to read more about it here or something like that. So link to external resources to enhance your own content. Again, where linking is really important. There's been a, I've noticed over the years, a big decline about people wanting to hoard all their own links with on their own website and they're not linking to other people. Google follows links. The thing is, is links can also make you some really powerful friends if you link to the right people. And so it also builds your authority. So yes, you have all your content, but if you're linking to other people, now you don't sound crazy. So make sure your site is mobile responsive. I'm sure you heard mobile, Gaten and everything. And there is a tool and you can find it through Google Search Console. And make sure that your site is mobile responsive. A lot of you are not just surfing. From here I'm seeing we have different size of laptops. She's got several different devices right there. I mean, there's several different sizes and everybody is surfing, whether they're buying something or reading your website, whatever it might be. Make your website responsive so that whatever they prefer, they'll see it. It's also part of accessibility. Site speed is important. Under four seconds page load time is ideal. Under one now? Goodness gracious, that was three months ago. They were saying four on the page. OK, hurry up and do one second. I challenge you to do it today. But I would actually say four seconds is actually really a really good time to go and get your site under. If you can get it to two seconds or one second, great. Especially the front page, start with that first. Last slide on basic SEO tips, promise. So sorry, I have a big list maker. I have a balanced site structure like a pyramid. I'm pretty sure all you guys visually know what a pyramid looks like. It looks very balanced. You have the top, and then it goes out from there. So you have your home page, and then about page, contact. Maybe your services or something like that. And if your web designer portfolio, however it may be. And then from there, you spread to your other content like your blog, and then you interlink those. Have a clear navigation. Don't put everything in your menu. I've had people like even, what is it, on the 2012 theme, they had all these three lines of just navigation links in their main menu. That's ridiculous. You don't need that. It's so they simplify it. Don't 301 direct all your 404 not found pages to the home page. You're losing traffic. People just get confused and go away. I thought I was going here. I guess I'm not. And then they try it again. If they're feeling brave enough to do it, otherwise they just go and never come back ever again. So for example, if your page in Google Search Console that comes up in their crawl errors, say it says, say you no longer have a page on a topic on strictly maybe redained a blog post. And you forgot to redirect it to the new blog post. Then don't redirect that to the home page. Redirect that to the page that actually exists. And if there's no other that exists there, then finally, yeah, you can do that. Or you can make a special page, customize your 404 page, to make sure, for example, I like to do a form. You said, I see that you were searching for this. And I'll get that in my form. That's what you were searching for. And then give you the opportunity to give me feedback. And all of a sudden, that gives me fuel to replace content that you were actually looking for, whether it's from my website. Or maybe I'm saying, well, I no longer do this kind of stuff. But I know somebody who does, who's a really good friend. For example, Chris Lima or something like that would have some awesome article about membership plugins that I'd be like, he's the one to go to. So have a clear permalink structure. Post name is a really good one. I'm glad that it took a long time for them to add it as an option in the WordPress admin. And when they added it, I celebrated, because forever I was typing for post name. And can you keep those questions till the end? Sorry? For our membership plugins, chrislima.com. Post name, it's an option in your permalink settings and your WordPress backend. And if you need to know how to clean your site structure, I am leaving a link up here so you can go into it further. So now that we've got those over, we got to talk about Yoast SEO. It is a tool to help you optimize your website's content to be seen more favorably by Google. When I answer my support tickets and they ask me that kind of stuff, this is exactly what I tell them every single time. It's like my swipe I add in every time. So Yoast SEO, you can optimize several areas. It actually has a real-time page analysis tool. So as you're editing your article, they have a page analysis tool that analyzes it as you go. You can edit your titles and made descriptions. These are a way to suggest to Google that this is the title and description that you really want to be seen listed in Google. You can edit your robot meta settings. And they actually come with a XML site map feature. And they generate it for a post site map, post page, taxonomies. And if you have custom post sites and everything and a plugin doesn't recognize it, you can actually add a filter in to have that piece of site map added to the Yoast SEO site map. It has social integration, especially for Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Pinterest. And as Google Search Console, the free version does have Google Search Console integration. That way you can see all your 404 crawl errors or any other crawl errors that come up in Google Search Console. You can edit your robots TXT file and your HTXS file. You can also optimize your RSS feed so that, for example, anybody who tries to fetch your crawl site and then they post it up, you could put a link in that RSS feed to link back to your sites and they know where the original content came from. And then they also have canonical links. So you can tell where the original content came from. Even if it came out from another website, maybe you got syndicated from Forbes. Well, Forbes is actually, if they have a tool, a canonical link tool, they'll link back to your article that was the same article there. So Google won't dock you for duplicate content. Some of you already have the most current version of Yoast SEO. This is actually the next version that's coming up very soon. This is the release candidate right here. So, of course, the URL doesn't look that pretty because I was beta testing. So when I took the screenshot, I was still testing it out. I just need to do screenshots. So rather than the old one, we've kind of cleaned up the snippet editor area. We still have that, but it seems a lot better. You just click the button and you get the fields separate. It's not so confusing anymore. And we listen to you about that. So here you can edit your title, SEO title, your slug for your permalink, and you're made a description. And that's just the first part of this. This goes in your poster page editor. So here you could add your focus keyword and everything. I actually used one of my articles, existing articles, to put in the data. And so my Convert Drupal to WordPress one. And so basically, this is all the actual analysis of that post. And so, yes, it has a stop word. It's telling me that there's two in there. Well, I actually need it because that's actually how it's supposed to be out there on Google, Convert Drupal to WordPress. So it tells you, I have an image. Or sorry, actually, I have, this post has been recently updated and blah, blah, blah, something like that. So it's, of course, the focus keyword's not going to be in the first paragraph. That's true. So I got a red. So it kind of gamifies how you do it. Some people don't like it, but some people really like it, really do like it, and some people really like it so much that they're that type A personality. Like, I need it to be green. I will get into that eventually. So now that the features and everything, I'm just giving you some screenshots. If you're using Yoast SEO, we actually have given you a better way to enable and disable sitemap functionality instead of the little checkbox. That's kind of hard to click because it's so small. And then when you enable it, the other screenshot to the right just shows you what the sitemap looks like. So you can edit your titles and made us from the individual posts. But you can also edit them generally. So say you really aren't being picky. You don't really need to customize a post. You could just fall back on your general template that you've come up with. And there's variables and everything. There is a way in that back end to be able to, there's a drop down like a screen options. And it gives you all the variables that you can use like for your title, the page separator, your site name, whatever the way that you want it to be seen, you can suggest it that way. You can also select meta robots for indexing or no indexing. You can also, if you prefer, if you are writing totally evergreen content, which means that whatever you wrote five years ago is still valid information today, you can hide the date in the snippet preview, which if you blog and you come up with the search results, some of you've probably seen this in blogging, that there's a date before the description. This allows you to turn that, take that out there, hide it. And you can also control whether you really want the Yoast SEO meta box to show for that post type or taxonomy or archives or whatever it might be. So one of the cool things I kind of mentioned is social SEO, social profiles and open graph. So you can, the great thing about this is it allows you to customize how you want your posts to be seen on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and everything else. So if you actually fill out all this stuff and even if you connect it to like a Facebook admin and Insights, you can even track this kind of stuff. So the other thing is the profiles and everything. Google has what's called a knowledge card and if you've ever seen in the search results to the right on some places like maybe IMDb or something like that. And so you see all this information and all of a sudden you see icons to like Facebook and Twitter and everything to their profiles. That's something. Google does not always issue those to people. Remember, it's a suggestion. So the example of, OK, the previous screenshot if you connect your posts, connect your, do open made up, or sorry, open graph and then fill out everything. For example, I shared this on my professional fan page on Google. And so it tells you my title, the description, and it tells you where it came from and who published it. And when it says it's linked to Nile Floris, it's not linked to my professional fan page. It's linked to my personal fan page. So it knows that I'm a real person outside of my fan page. So next thing, as I mentioned about gamification and the green light, that green light might be really tempting. But please do not live your life by it. It may harm you. It's kind of like putting so many keywords in that really don't belong in there. And it's just really awkward. And it turns off your regular readers and your new readers. You're like, I'm confused. It's not an absolute mess. Right naturally, don't force content or take away specific content just to get all green lights. I included an article. Yo Swyfe did a really awesome job writing it up. And it came at a time we really needed this explained. And I'm pretty sure most of the people who have already read the article before really appreciate that it actually is reassurance that you don't have to have all green lights. It's OK. Yo SEO best practices, titles, and descriptions. While Google ultimately makes the decision of what's the best title for your article is, don't give up. Make sure to set your titles and made templates in your WordPress admin under SEO, Titles and Meta. Sometimes you will need to edit the individual poster page titles if you need it to be different from your settings, just like I mentioned earlier. Yo SEO best practices, XML sitemaps. Enabling the XML sitemap feature is only half the work. I count a lot of people. I have to ask them, did you submit your site to Google? Search Console? Remember Google's following the links. So if you're really new, that's the fastest way for Google following the link if you submit it to them in the first place. Images. Don't forget to label your alt tags in your images. Preferably put your keyword in it, at least one of them. Don't use huge images. Scale or resize them. Label the image file with the keyboard, like just I said. I linked a few things on there. Really handy if you want to learn more about it. On don't block your CSS or JSS files. Unfortunately, people still are having this issue. And that's fine. There's a way to do that. Google can't crawl your site or render it properly. And basically, if you submit it as a Google Search Console, you could actually see the line that they're having issues with. It'll have a little caution right next to that line. So you need to either change it or take it off. Don't block your WP admin or WP includes because they have scripts in there that help your site be seen properly in the right order. Otherwise, it comes out like whenever your style sheet fails. So that's how Google's going to see it. And that's not cool. Write at least 300 words. I know some of you aren't really the biggest writers in the world, or sometimes you're so busy. 300 is the minimum magic number of words you should be writing. This includes for products, images, video, and audio content. Don't just post them alone. Of course, like I said earlier, have a mobile-ready website or make it responsive. Accessibility really does matter. Just because you can surf your own website doesn't mean everyone surfs and processes your website in the same manner. Make sure your website is accessible. I tell you really small texts like gray. There are a lot of legally blind people in this world. I think another accessibility one out of five of your visitors have an issue with accessibility whenever they come to somebody's website. That's pretty serious. So you need to think about those people. And I'm not talking about elderly people. I'm talking about young people. My best friend, she's 35. She's actually legally blind. She can't see gray text. Make your posts easy to read. Well, unless you're like an academic and your target audience is an academic, yes, then fine. Bring out the big dogs when it comes to words. So don't use a lot of big, otherwise don't use a lot of big and fancy words. Your readers need to understand you. And also break up your paragraphs. Very the length of the paragraph. Walls or texts are very daunting. Especially for people who are dyslexic, I'm dyslexic. If you have more than nine lines going, I have to really look at it closely. And it's slower. And it's harder to read. That's fine. That was the last one. So are there any questions? Just in case if you're shy or you need to ask more, I will be in the happiness bar after this. So I guess I could start in the front. A gentleman right here. OK. OK, so he was asking about hiding the date and everything. If it totally like Google doesn't even know it's hidden and everything, Google knows when you posted it, OK? It's just hidden from the description. So you can't hide it from Google. Hide it from Google like, you know, data-wise. But you can hide it from being seen in the search results. So start writing content more around that event, OK? OK, so it's all an updated content, like for example, an event that was like last year. And then he's posting new content and everything. If you really want Google to get to it right away, submit your sitemap index to Google Search Consult on a major change like that. So they bring it up. They'll crawl it. And they'll place that over the other one. Not all the time. Remember, just because you submitted, just because you submitted Google the sitemap once, if you make changes to your website, you should be occasionally, as you change, or you don't need to set, when you submit that for event and you want attention to it, you submit. OK, see me in the happiness bar. We'll talk about it. I'm sorry. The minimum, the max, the best. Google does, she's saying what's the best amount of words for blogging, like a blog. Honestly, it depends on the content. You really have to think about what you're going to write about. Look to see what's out there, see what they're writing. But your minimum, yes, is 30. However, I like some 50, 1,500 is a really good number or more, like I said, Google likes long form content the best. So OK, I'll have to see you in the happiness bar. I guess everybody is going to go down. If you have any questions, you can see me in the happiness bar. OK?