 Good afternoon. Welcome back from lunch. You are about to hear Robert Nissenbaum. Got it. Robert has been involved in content creation for the web for close to 20 years. His views on content marketing and search engine optimization are against the mainstream, including his belief that keyword research is mostly unnecessary. He's right, kind of. Over the past several years he's been testing his ideas on SEO and what it takes to rank by looking at the goal behind Google's algorithm and how we search and consume content. He's not behind a computer screen. He'll find a pushing his limits as an avid C kayaker. Please join me in welcoming again Robert Nissenbaum. So the first piece of all this is I am not a developer in the slightest sense. As far as I'm concerned, Gutenberg is really all the arguments happening about it. It doesn't really impact me as opposed to whether they're just simply be functional or not. What I've been trying to figure out, which I haven't been able to come up with, a real answer that actually sits well with me, and it goes to my understanding of everything and how we move forward with content and search engine optimization, is why we have Gutenberg in the first place. And most of those arguments tend to center around Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, and being easier for the average person to be able to create web content. On one level, I get it. On the other level, I don't. And primarily because we have more than enough capable editing systems now. There are more than enough plugins that give us the ability to manipulate content the way we want it to do. Beaver builder, Elementor, simple enough. And quite honestly, in my opinion, it would seem to make sense to be easy enough to create something like that as a new editor. That's all we were after, and make it part of WordPress as it is without tearing everything down to the core, creating all of these potential accessibility issues, breaking backwards compatibility in a host of different ways, and creating all kinds of other problems that are in the ecosystem. And while many of them last week at Closer Remarks for Work in Portland was talking about the new Gutenberg editor, for me it goes much beyond that. Again, other than breaking the system, he stated very clearly that we pushed off other projects for Gutenberg. This has been happening over a long period of time. There are bigger issues in my mind when it comes to WordPress and the big one being security. It would make sense to address that before we worry about an editing system that takes up a whole of everything else. There's a potential now for updates to be pushed every two weeks to the core once we release 5.0, and this is coming from Matt himself last week to which he got the updates of Microsoft, right? So, I sit down and try to figure out after all this reading, why Gutenberg? The simplest piece for me as a content creator, how we will consume content, how we currently consume content is changing. This goes both to the methods we use, Facebook, Twitter, social media in general, and it goes to the type of devices, both will be in the big one. Stone Temple Consultant, big name when it comes to search engine optimization. Their study, well, after it was published at the beginning this year, looking at visits to websites in the U.S. between 2016 and 2017. 1.9 trillion web visits in 2016, 2 trillion in 2017, so we're running a fairly statistically compatible number here. Only a 6% change in how content is being accessed, increasing on mobile, decreasing on desktop, but the prediction was also that by the end of this year, it's not unlikely to think that two-thirds of all content being consumed will be done on mobile devices. And the other two pieces that come out of this right now, just read this, the percent on site for mobile devices during this period of time went from 40% to 49%. We're staying on sites via mobile devices far longer. Mobile balance rate has dropped from 52% to 47%. It is clearly this need to pay attention to mobile devices, and P, mobile site speed becoming a actual ranking factor per Google. But beyond this piece of it, that we will continue to consume content in different ways, and it's not limited to mobile. Virtual reality, heads-up displays in cars, smaller appliances, and it stands to reason at that point that if the way we consume content changes, the way we publish content has to change. And it really gets in the heart for me of what WordPress was. It was a content management system. It was a way for everybody to be able to publish content on the web. You think about mobile devices and the use. If we didn't shift to mobile responsiveness, we weren't going to show in searches, most likely. And that's not the first time we've had this change in how we publish content. When smartphones first came out and we were starting to do more and more searches on ease, we built mobile versions and dot versions of websites so that we would show based on the way we're consuming content. The biggest piece at that point, however, was that we're doing this at a domain or the site level. We've gone beyond that. We now have to change how we're bringing up content deeper. We have to have content now at its base level and changing it. So it's like going from publishing hardcarvers or softcarvers, but now we also have to change from small print to large print. And even some of the content, the way we present the content, has to change to fit the new way we're publishing. Gutenberg is far more than a major shift in just creating and editing. It, for me, is our publisher now. And almost seeing that Gutenberg is the evolution of WordPress as a whole. And Matt was asked last week if we'll still call Gutenberg Gutenberg in the years to come. I must think Gutenberg is essentially going to just be WordPress. This Gutenberg editor will just be the new default editor we have. But there's no way we can disrupt the entire ecosystem for just the editor that we already have. And if we're changing how content is consumed, or how we consume content changes, and then we're changing how we're publishing content to match that consumption changes, it follows suit that search has to change as well. Matt got me started thinking about search engine optimization and what this could look like as we're creating content going forward. So this is all pure speculation on my part. There's nothing in any of this that's even remotely, I think, been proven or tested in any which way, shape, or form. So initially, what everybody's saying, well, you should be calling this a theory. It's not a theory because there's not even anything that's been nearly tested. This is pure bring up. And all of this came out of two things. That 10-year background plus in content marketing, 20-plus years of creating content, starting Dreamweaver in 98. So, and all the SEO optimization, everything else I've done over the past decade, and everything was triggered by something that was stated by Morten Rand Hendrickson here last year, during his talk on Gutenberg and the future of WordPress. My goal isn't to say that this is how search is going to change. It's just to give you a glimpse of something I can see changing as we move forward and what Gutenberg allows us to get in the future, or how it opens things up for us in the future. So one thing is that none of us are behind, or most people aren't behind Gutenberg because they don't see what they potentially gained from it, just they see all the problems it's causing. And one of the things to get Matt's data less, we didn't do a good job marketing. And I think that in most situations and circumstances, that if we have a reason to understand why things are being done, we're more likely to get behind something and deal with all the problems and work more cohesively to fix those problems. Morten stated almost 29 minutes in, one more than 29 minutes and two-thirds of the way through his talk, that the web as a whole and WordPress is moving towards this idea that there's no such thing as a web page. And instantly, my thought was, web pages, SCA, because everything we do with search optimization is at the page level. And we use Yoast to optimize that page we've just created. Mod Assessor, Jovain authority and their page authority. And if you're certainly doing away with the foundation for which we optimize our content, then how do the modules play into this? And that's exactly where my thought went, because he adds this three minutes later. We're not going to be creating pages or posts. We're going to be creating blocks. And my light bulb, this is currently our regular editor. This is the default, if you're just playing, this came off the 2018 Seattle World Camp site because we don't have access to anything fancy. We can't use any page builders. This is what we get to start with. This is not difficult to use generally. Maybe to make it look pretty, but I figured it out and I don't know what I'm doing. It's functional. The problem is we create this page and we toss in headings. We toss in a title. I know it's a little difficult to say, but for the basic, we put in subtitles, we put in content, we build all this out. We have now created our article or our page for our website. More specifically, an article in here. And then we go to Yoast, or whatever we're using. We try and make all the little dots turn green, which is a whole separate subject that they don't all need to be green. The other piece we look at when we're doing this are our slug, our SEO title, our meta description. And we now have an optimized page that has pages. So how do we get any of this done for our content? And then it dawned on me. I said, what happens when we go here? And if anybody hasn't really played with it, this is just pure straight editor, just pull back what we have. Your editor title is, tell your story, which is a content block. We're putting all our stuff in one little strip of block because your main page now will be a single large block. We take every little piece and put it in its own block. And this is highlighted just so you can see the different blocks that were used to build the page. So it's the same exact layout that I had before. And of course, after I created this slide, I realized I probably should have something a little different. I would probably take, or it's this paste recipe and then ingredients and preparation are under it and that would have been one large block. And then I would have taken the ingredients and the preparation and made them two separate blocks within that block. So the whole idea behind Gutenberg on the editing side of it is that we will have one base block, which is our content, the article whenever we're publishing. And it will be created out of a series of blocks. And each of those blocks could be created out of a series of blocks. So now we have the ability to treat each individual layer of that article independently. So rather than optimizing this as each one of those, what if we could actually apply all the things we were doing with Yoast to the page as we know it and apply it to each of these blocks individually? What Gutenberg opens up is if we can do that, every single one of these blocks can now be indexed in Google. And if you go back to looking at things like mobile devices and virtual reality, if I'm sitting on my phone, in the grocery store, trying to get my ingredients list for a recipe, the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to do a search and I'm going to get an entire article, which is going to include the ingredients, the preparation, all these things. I don't need it. The only thing I need is the ingredients and I'm going to have to scroll through a search, look for them. And one of the gentlemen over at Bluehost turns around last week in Portland and says, yeah, I have to basically do dual search. Search for the content and then search within the content for what I'm looking for. Google is already smart enough in it to know what devices are being used for search. Down to the OS. Look at your Google Analytics and it will tell you desktop for mobile. It will tell you Safari, Chrome, Edge, Firefox as the browser is being used. So Google knows what access to the device is being used to access. Google also knows your location. They can easily pick up that you're in a grocery store on a mobile device. You're not likely looking for the entire article and for intent it shows you just the ingredients. So now rather than a search showing up this entire article that you have to scroll through, it simply pulls up the one ingredient block, which is all I need at that moment. And when we're talking about other devices like heads up displays, you're not going to be able to scroll through it. Content is going to be consumed differently. We have to make sure we publish it differently. Again, for me the heart of Gutenberg gets into how content is being delivered. Whether that's really what was in the back of the mind in the first place, it's what I see going forward as a huge value for Gutenberg. And if you're searching a desktop it gives me multiple options now. I can get this entire block that I've written, my article, my page and it shows up. But each of those additional blocks can show up as well. One article can show up three or four different ways in a search. And now at the same point we have what's showing in a search is much tied to our domain authority and how authoritative our content overall is. The one thing that Google did back a long ago is that the rich snippets that show up in listings which could come from less authoritative sources directly answer the exact question when was the last time you saw rich snippet appear in a search? It's been a while. I can't remember the last time I've seen one. Which again means these little content blocks could be the replacement for rich snippets and Google's been testing it. And Gutenberg allows us to do that. So again going back to the competitive piece and Wix and Mebley and everything else we're doing an end-around almost because if this is anything that comes to fruition WordPress gives us a much bigger advantage. Because now we're creating individual pieces of content. But this goes even beyond that now and all the extra things that are starting to roll through my head in this. LEGO kits are huge. The best part about these is once you're done building this all nice fancy little thing we can take all those little pieces we can assemble those blocks and build something different. As we add more kits to the collection we get more blocks to use. The advantage in Gutenberg and that's something that's already been talked about is we have these reusable blocks that I continue to create content using things I've already done. Just making content creation going forward a bit easier. So at that point the notice that came down to what happens within WordPress and optimizing on how do we optimize these blocks more specifically and how do we access these blocks. I haven't figured out yet how we're going to be able to access these additional blocks and not be going to codes that. Thought about images that are being that we use in our sites. We have a media library. What if we also have a content block library? Thinking long term. How do we do... Can you sell this together? You can create new blocks by uploading blocks you can create new blocks as you're writing and you can title each of those blocks. If I have this random thought and it's something that comes to mind that I want to write about I can actually create the block ahead of time even if I don't write the entire article and I have to restrain me in the face going... you're lazy. All this stuff I've ever gotten to and now is obsolete. And now I have to figure out how do we use any of those pieces of thoughts. We optimize all our images. Every image gets a URL. Which means we have the ability to change the slide. We get a description which really as far as I'm concerned becomes another description. We can add tags. We can add categories. And we have a real way just on the surface as to what's already being done in WordPress to optimize content before we even look at something like this. And every time I optimize an image it's optimized still relative to the article that the description does include either keywords or exactly what the image is about it would be exactly what the content is about. The slug is very specific. Everything that I put in for titles. Everything, by the way, if you're uploading an image on your website make sure you actually name it exactly what it is not image.123 or whatever it be. Funny story on that. And this film only because I see this all the time. A, if you pin this image once it's on your website it sometimes will pull the image title. Not just the description or the capture what you're using. There was a very large company big name had an image about content theft which had a picture of someone pulling an iPhone out of a woman's back pocket. And when I went to pin the image it said phoneinbut.jpg So if you cannot there's a little side tip for you is to make sure you have your images title. But again when you have this capability to optimize images you can do this with content blocks and it makes it very easy to reuse because now I go into my article that I'm creating where we say add media and I can add block and I can scroll through and find my blocks and have a discussion this morning that we're not just talking about HTML code for blocks which is what I think is being talked about now the entire content we write could be included in that block so I can insert it in my next paragraph of stuff and that creates one other major issue for me this definition appears on multiple pages within my site and so I'm actually using it for an example because it appears on multiple pages and I'm not just talking to most of the time it appears now it's as an image because as small as it is it is still technically duplicate content across my site and while it's small enough not to necessarily trigger red flags to one page one article that are effectively the same taken from a slightly different angle but enough that Google can see them as duplicate content if what content is truly duplicated was just using these boxes and those boxes have had their own URLs and each of those own URLs have been indexed previously I'm not duplicating content the core body is duplicated and it's smart enough to realize that it's made up of other pieces and therefore it's a new article referencing the same content conversation always comes up on updating or rewriting old blog posts reasons going back and forth for multiples and which way you do this put a big piece I come up with articles just as an example always goes in my industry the state of SEO in 2018 and we'll look at what happened in 2017 and reference that for 2018 back to an article we wrote in 2016 saying the same thing in 2016 I said this in 2017 I said that in 2018 I said this but either you're constantly linking back and referencing the old articles and every time I see constant hyperlinks like constant hashtags and something I was reading it gets annoying I just have to put the content block if you want to read more the content block is linked everywhere if I listen or I don't have to link back because it already creates the internal backlink and I can write these articles without the fear of duplicated content because I'm not actually duplicating the core content I'm just reusing it but I'm still even thinking about what Gutenberg can do for us in this because we have this ability now right what if we add an additional code into this infographics embed codes what if we can take our content blocks and allow them to be embedded in the content of others that I have a way to create an article referencing other articles that are out there instead of embedding an infographic and embedding an image I can embed paragraphs of content when we're writing articles and we're referencing others and we do we cut and paste into our article and then we link back to the original source there are a number of times when those links go dead now we have dead links out there there are a number of times we incorrectly put the link in there there are times sometimes without realizing it it gets forgotten that's one thing on your end but for whoever you're linking that content to now it's lost the backlink opportunity it now looks like potential content depth if it's done on purpose allowing content to actually be embedded the same way we embed images we eliminate that problem as well so this potential huge advantage I can see going forward with Gutenberg and it's just the tip of the iceberg for me everything on this is unknown these are all just random thoughts but I'm looking at this again from that whole content perspective that this is a way for us to take advantage of how what we're writing will be consumed and the biggest piece for me at this point is even if all this is 100% wrong for anybody who's creating content think about each section of content even if you're using a third party page builder right? we'll take a text block and then we'll put an image block and then we'll finish our thoughts in the next text block the thought is to create those text blocks as if they work to sync thoughts as if they could stand alone on their own because if this goes and those blocks translate over you've already got a head start and if they don't quite honestly your content will be more readable and it's more likely to be indexed on how things are done now instead of having things split so it sounds like what you're saying is at some point Google is really going to have to understand these content blocks potentially they're out there with structured data which essentially is kind of trying to do the same thing right? so it sounds like structured data might go by the wayside because of the volume that WordPress has in terms of the number of sites out there and when Goomburg is fully alive we start using it that Google might then start interpreting it and using it the way they've been using structured data so you can see your content coming cards and snippets and whatever else they might decide they want to display it I think Morton's presentation might not have been here where he was basically saying like a small business at some point may not even need to have a website just structured data well and that part of it goes to the core the core of this is that you have a situation now where we have to be authoritative on our content within the site itself we have to build up these huge sites, these authoritative sites get all these backlinks in order to have a chance to show in the first place yet when most of us are searching and moving towards this more natural search and AI and voice search we're looking for questions we're pulling out our phones and going how do I find my directions to this or I'm looking for this particular recipe for this or what are the ingredients for that recipe right the idea behind Rich Sniffett's at least as I understood it was that you ask a question and get an exact answer for what you want and that's what holds and it should matter the source behind it if I'm doing research for a larger article on my desktop I'm more likely to be drawn from an authoritative source so again it does give the smaller brands a chance to show up and be found for specific pieces you'd have to be pretty careful with your content then because as we already see going on you can have something taken out of context so if you have a block of something where you're for instance making an argument of some sort and you're not finished within that block then yeah it's that one block of content that could go out around the world do you see that as an issue it is and it really gets down to the other main piece for us is that content creation is a dumb little art for and half the content out there might be horrible and it's not necessarily by default some of us just aren't good writers and the rest of it is we just don't know how to put things and edit them properly so we end up with this disjointed piece it does require better editing at this point it does require better writing it does require better content and in the end even with what we have now if nothing else changed the way search goes better content is going to rank better so again that goes to the piece that I want you more thinking of just exactly where you hit now on the head is that we have to think even now how we're writing and keeping thoughts to be these standalone pieces that just have showed up and the other thing is that we don't index in my opinion every single block I only have to index some blocks by default in a sitemap everything that's within there we have a choice included kind of thing with Yoast all the blocks would automatically be included but we can no index certain blocks or blocks could be no index by default and we just say which ones we want so I can have a heading block have no reason to be indexed but yeah it really does mean we have to pay better attention to our content which I think in the end what we should be doing anyway and Gutenberg just forces the issue even better follow up to her question so I may have talked to you about this a lot you know I talk about this but every paragraph is a block so if we want to keep the context as writers do you recommend longer paragraphs and content in general how long should you write how much enough to get the point across with an amp and actually do a justice if it takes you 300 words write a 300 word block close to I don't care if it runs or not if it takes 6,000 words to get your point across write 6,000 words but each thought within that process has to be blocked together so if your thoughts going to span three and four or five paragraphs it may be one long walk text instead of three or four individual blocks if I have two distinct thoughts that make up a piece I'm talking about why Gutenberg might be one block its impact might be the second block and I don't care if only two blocks make up the entire main content block if I have a recipe piece where I have three or four or five or six different blocks they'll be built that way so how we structure the content once it's been written into making sure it's taken in context and it's a complete block anybody else I see they're really good I just confused you all I said be here all day but they're going to kick me off the stage at some point so I agree with your your foresight I mean it sounds logical to me but I'm also getting a picture of real nasty SCRPs until Google and the others get a handle on it oh without question it's going to be nasty I mean in some stuff we'll fall out of rank some stuff we'll end rank but again and on some level stuff has been plagued with all along anyway by Google I mean the structure data piece of it and then we have rich snippets and then we have this move for longer meta descriptions and we've got back to shorter meta descriptions when I get to the point I was writing you had 155 characters for your meta description and suddenly yours says it's 240 or so and then the next time I go back in after your update I'm like wait a minute what and now it feels like it's only 100 characters and even what content is shown when you share content to Facebook they used to pull the full meta description of 155 characters now it might get sudden so I keep seeing all these little pieces and the shift to mobile and mobile response and all of this is Google playing with different pieces to see what works and Google I think is far more forward looking because we consume content differently and we already know we have to show it differently which again that logic piece which I appreciate seeing is that somebody on the back end has to say well we're missing a piece in the middle and I'm hoping that this is where Gutenberg goes whatever it's broken or I had to comment about well that's not how blocks are actually being set up to be used within Gutenberg it's too tight on the back end that can't scan alone but maybe that's just the first step of this and we've got to get it working and then we can figure out how we separate them out because we need to be able to separate these blocks out that I can write an article which is a block and I can have four distinct points each of which is a block and I can have three distinct points in each one of those blocks so I can set up that block so now I've got 12, 4 in the 1 and everything else there potentially is optimizing it can so again it goes to what should be optimized in not an hour end but also Google sorting out now really what pieces have value so we'll get an algorithm based somewhat on that there's one of the questions that came up previously when I was just talking about this was that we got to get away from this notion of how long or what an article is 300 words is what they use from a ranking piece now that has to go away and I somehow think that has to be antiquated anyway because the point originally and people ask me why are these 300 words because if it's less than 300 words the likelihood is it really can't be that authoritative unless you're only looking for something that can be answered in 100 words and when we're pulling something from a mold of lies just want the 100 words I need I don't want to shift through a 3,000 word paragraph or post to find it especially when I'm looking up to confirm something I'm posting on social media suddenly oh I gotta look that up and I can't find it now yet I can block my desktop and trigger rather than always shifting it's it's going to get messy it's messing with Gutenberg's end it's messing with Gutenberg's end thank you