 is the consortium behind the HTML standard. So they're in charge of making all the rules about how HTML operates for every browser. Different browsers implement them a little differently. That's where cross compatibility issues come from. But generally W3C standards are the ones you always want to uphold. So W3C has a validation checker. So you take a website, you put the address in, W3C goes through and says, hey, this is good, hey, this is bad. This is really important for your Google search rankings. I worked with a company, a local electronics company. Their website's massive. They had 500 products listed. They had no search result visibility. And it's not for lack of content. They had images, they had writing, they had specs, they had PDF downloads, they had all this content. Guess what though? What they didn't know was under the hood, they were throwing tons of errors. Errors make your website look bad. Google doesn't want to recommend a badly built website. So that's where the W3C comes in. So what we did was we corrected all the W3C errors on their website. Within a month, they were rating ahead of Best Buy in electronic search results. Right? Just that minor change brought about that major shift in signals. So W3C standards, major tip there. So next we're going to talk about the building blocks. We're going to talk about the HTML blocks. So semantic HTML is part of HTML5, right? So HTML is your tags, your paragraph tags, your image tags, your link tags. These are similar. These are structural elements. These are all about machine readability. So what you're doing is you're saying to the spiders that crawl your website, this is my introduction. This is a group of elements. These are links, right? So these are all different aspects so that when the spiders crawl your website, they can identify what's in it. You can't force the spider to agree with you. You know, if I wrap my links in an aside, it's going to know that I'm, it's not going to say, oh, that is complimentary content necessarily. It's going to register that you're using that tagging correctly, which isn't great for your scores. So, you know, you can't just force it. But if you do use these correctly, you do get better ratings. So on the right here, we've got a simple layout. Your nav is usually in your header. Your sections are usually in your articles. Your aside is nearby and your footer is usually at the bottom. Text elements. So do you guys know about, have you heard of the graphs, the social graph, the knowledge graph, the trust graph? Not seeing anybody not. Okay. So Google uses different analytics than it used to a long time ago. So it used to use PageRank. Have we all heard of PageRank, right? The scoring system, quality authority, that kind of thing. It was all about keywords, right? So the new graphs that Google is using are the knowledge graph to rate based on based on their knowledge of things. How closely are you in line with what is the standard, right? There's the trust graph. What's your credibility like? There's the social graph, right? And I haven't actually seen it documented. But there is suspicion that there's a sentiment graph. Sentiment being so on Facebook, right? There's six emotions. You know, you can love, you can be surprised, you can be angry. That's sentiment analysis in AI machine learning. So I'm going to get a little off topic here. The text elements denote emphasis based on tone, right? So they're in line with the sentiment of your content. See what I'm saying? Like it's the emotional tone of your content. Am I making sense here? Okay. I know I'm trying to explain something that is just like so out there. So we've got these tags. The B and the I tag were actually deprecated at one point. They're back. So deprecated meaning that people weren't using them. They are not deprecated anymore. They do actually denote something structurally under the HTML5 standards. A little sweep to cover here. Oh yeah, the delete and the insert tag. So this just lends credibility to your writing when you use these correctly, right? Says that, hey, look at me. I'm being specific. Hey, look at me. I'm being honest. I removed this because it was inaccurate, right? Some navigation stuff to cover here. So hyperlinks. We all know standard hyperlink. Those fit within major navs. Menus are more like buttons. This is important for screen readers. Accessibility is a concern on the internet, right? Like everybody is trending towards more accessible websites. Google monitors that, right? So if your website is accessible, it'll get promoted over a similar website that's less accessible. So for accessibility purposes, use a menu with a group of form controls with your buttons. Use nav with major nav links and just a handy tag to know download when you're doing a download. This is really hard to do with all my notes. I'm trying my best here. Right, so the relationship attributes. This is just bonus information. There used to be an author attribute. It's no longer relevant. They are not allowing people to declare their authorship and create an author profile via Google Plus anymore. They're doing it differently. Authorship is determined through the social graph. So, okay, Twitter, right? Twitter, people are sharing their links, right? Google is indexing Twitter at a rate of 10 times. Is it 10 times per second? It's 10 times per second or 10 times per minute. It's a ridiculous rate, right? They're also indexing Instagram. That's the social graph, right? So we used to use a tag called author that was on the link attributes. We don't use that anymore. We use the social graph to prove that we were the author to connect it with our identity. I'm getting a lot of confused looks. Am I rambling a little too fast? No? Okay, good. I'm going to keep going. So images, proper image tags today are denoted not just as images as figures and figures with captions. So this one, not a lot of people seem to know the difference between the alt and the title tag. It's subtle, but if you can do it properly, if you can capture this nuance, it is appreciated by the Google search engine. It's very, very simple, right? The alt is the replacement text for the image, right? So over here, I've got my example. Say we've got June. It's a calendar of June. The alt is June is a summer month with 30 days, right? This describes June, right? So for a screen reader that can't see the image, we have that descriptive text of here's June, this is what June is, right? Then we've got the title. That's a summary of the image. You see what we're saying? It's subtle. It's nuanced, right? So we've got the example of the title month of June. That's the summary. This is the month of June. The alt is what is that, right? So it's a very nuanced understanding. This is big with screen readers. Screen readers are big for accessibility. Accessibility wins major points because not a lot of people are doing it or doing it properly. So it's a great area to explore if you're looking for SEO tips. Figure and figure caption, they're fairly self-explanatory. I'm just going to touch on this briefly. We're doing it for time. Okay, we're good. So input types. So in HTML, there are forms. Forms have inputs. Inputs are text, text area, buttons that can operate the form. In HTML5, we came out with specific input types. These are really important on mobile. Like if you're building, you're not building mobile. That's kind of ridiculous nowadays. If you're building mobile and you're not using specific input types, you're putting a lot of weight on your users. And I'll show you why. So here's a color picker for color, right? So when a user goes to enter a color into a form, they don't have to look up the hex color of a color code. They've got a palette chooser, right? And this appears on a desktop or laptop, as well as on a cell phone. Super handy built into browsers. Same with date time. We don't have to do all of the validation that we used to do on date and time, right? Now we've got a date time picker. It enters it into a standard format. That's fabulous on a cell phone because typing all those numbers out is really annoying. We've got a couple more. This is the email one. So notice it's got the at sign, right? Versus just a number. Just pops the number keyboard, right? Subtle variation in input types. Huge win for mobile users. Huge bonus points. Couple more. The range is handy. Automatically makes a slider. Telephone number, right? No tiny buttons for people to aim for. Nice big buttons. And again, just accessibility, mobile responsiveness, right? Bonus points. The search in the website. So the website's got the dot com ready to go, right? So that covers form controls. I'm going to keep moving. I'm just going to briefly mention these here. Citations. I thought I had an image with this. Citations reference a title of work, right? These are huge. If you're watching the search results that are coming up when you're on the internet, you're going to start seeing, if you haven't noticed already, more and more articles are referencing other articles, right? Has anybody else noticed that trend? Have you seen that? Yeah, right? This is the next big thing, right? If you're not referencing your sources, your writing has very little credibility. So bonus points. If you can reference a book off Google Play, those are all indexed. If you reference a work that is already rating well in Google, bonus points. And you want to use your citation tag for that wherever possible. Just to say, just to say to the spider, hey, look, I'm referencing. This is a reference. Check it out. It'll validate that independently. Block quotes. Those are cool. It's just just a little bonus to be using them correctly. What's up? Yeah, definitely. I think there is an attribute, like you can use the ad. Do you remember earlier when I was talking about the attributes for the links? There might be a valid attribute for that. I don't have them memorized. Just make sure you get it appropriate. But I would definitely use the citation tag. That's what it's there for. Go ahead. So Google, I don't have proof of this. This is my gut. My gut is that Google likes it when you interact with other Google properties, right? So I know YouTube videos on a page rate better than a Vimeo video on a page, right? Because you're referencing a Google property. So books that are indexed or on Google Play are in Google's repository of knowledge. So if you reference something there, they can validate that. You just won mad credibility, right? See what I'm saying? Yeah. So if you want to highlight, there's a mark tag, you gauges with a meter tag. Implementing these doesn't really get you credibility. Doesn't really get you any kind of content score. What it is is it shows you're technically able to do things properly. You're technically proficient. You're building your website well. Right? So they're just kind of little bonus tags to throw in there to say, Hey, look, I do things right. All right. Any questions on semantic HTML? I'm talking fairly quickly. I'm aware. Do my best to pace myself. I get so excited. All right, cool. We're going to keep going then. So website performance. So performance is little things like how does a website load? Does it load quickly? Does it load properly? Does it load everything? And that's measured by page speed. There are several metrics around how fast a website loads. I'm not going to get into all the details of those. I'm going to talk generally about what you can do for WordPress because that's what we're here for. So some considerations are is the hosting provider hosting your WordPress site. So that's your blue host. That's your dream host. That's your what is gator. There's a gator host. Go Daddy. Media Drive. They're another sponsor. So that's who's got the files for your website. Right? Are they providing good access to the internet because different hosting providers have different access speeds to the world wide web, right? They're not all paying for the same traffic. You know, it's the 407 versus the public highway out there. So if you're hosting providers chipping out, putting too many people on a box, not paying for a decent connection, you're going to get poor response times. So at the hosting, it can all go wrong. The other area can go wrong big time is the local network. People are on their cell phones and they only have a 3g connection. You've got a massive website. It's just not going to it's not going to load quickly. There's nothing you can do about that. So that's another area for bottlenecking. And then there's how you build your webpage. So that's things like where is your code loading and how. It's a little complex. We'll get there. So we're going to start talking about some testing tools we can use. These are my favorite page checkers. So what have we got here? It's a wave and a checker for accessibility. If you care at all about accessibility, even from I want to score well for accessibility and get better exposure kind of standpoint, you want to check these two out. Wave will tell you, do your images all have alt tags? Yes, no. Are you using your headings correctly? Right? Like headings should be laid out h1 to h2 to h3 and backup, right? A checker gets a little more detailed. It's just a personal preference. I run things through both because they both have like different warnings and different cautions. So it's worth it to take the time for checking your accessibility. I'm trying to remember which of the two. One of them has settings. So you can say WCAG 2.0, WCAG 1.0 and it'll check specifically versus that standard. So if you have a client, say government of Canada is all WCAG 2.0 standard. So if you had a government of Canada client, you could say check my website and make sure it's all WCAG 2, right? That's the international standards on accessibility. So for some page load times, we've got these two. They'll just tell you quickly how fast does my page download, right? The metric for comparison there is that you want to be three seconds or less to hold a user's attention. The metric Google uses in its Google Insights test is seven seconds or less. So the average page loads in seven seconds. That's not actually good because the attention span is three seconds. That's the state of the internet. But if you're below seven seconds, you're actually ahead of the game compared to the rest of the internet. So you'll get some scores on that. Google Insights will give you specifics on how you're performing to Google standards. That's pretty handy. It'll tell you are your images caching. We'll talk about that later on. Are your images caching? Are your CSS files taking too long? Should your JavaScript be loaded differently? It'll point all that out to you. So if you're more of a WordPress user and less of a developer, it's something you can say to your developer, hey, this isn't being done. Let's get in line with these standards, right? So that one's a good one for that. These two are a little more technical. Any questions? Oh, here, I'll tell you what. I'll put it on my website. I'll put these at the front so you guys can grab them if you want. I'll put them up on my website tonight so you can all get copies. All right, performance tuning with WordPress. So some cool things for images, right? Images are one of the longer things to load. So what you can do with images is compress them, right? Like there are ways that on the back end, you take your image, you compress it like you would a zip folder, right? Everybody knows what zip folders, right? So you compress it like you would with a zip folder, unzip it on the front end, right? Compressed images. Also with compression, you're looking at on a mobile browser, you don't want you don't need a 1200 pixel wide image on a mobile browser, right? There's no there's no point in doing that. So compression plugins will do that all for you automatically. These are the three that are recommended just based on talking to people. We've got some options for you there. When it comes to plugins, I mean buyer beware, check your sources, make sure it's the right fit for you. If you're more technical, you might want more advanced options. If you're less technical, you might want something that's just plug and play. So with plugins, just check out the free versions before you pay for anything. Make sure it's a good fit for you. Otherwise there are definitely many options in the compression market. This is something to look at I think it. Yeah, it is just called lazy load. That's not a right. Okay, so lazy loading. This is really interesting concept for anyone who's not aware. As you're scrolling down a web page, lazy loading is only getting the images you're about to scroll to, right? So that's great. Because then if somebody only goes halfway down the page, you're not wasting time loading all that data, making your pages jitter or wasting their mobile data. So there is a plugin called lazy load. All you do is plug it in. And this happens on your whole WordPress site. It's all set ready to go. So that one's pretty handy. That'll up your page speed score. That'll up your Google score. Yes. Yes. Yes. Compress them all and manage bringing them back. I haven't actually used Cloudinary. I'm going to be honest with you. I know it does and manages image compression. I know it does it on a large scale. There's a, what do they do? There's a motorcycle organization out of Hamilton that's using it. They have one page. This page has like 500 images of individual people on motorcycles. It's a pledge people are taking about motorcycle safety, right? The page loads like that. And it's using Cloudinary. So I can recommend Cloudinary for you, no problem. But if you want the tech details, you're going to have to check it out yourself. Anybody else? Okay. Alright, some last second tips. It's a little more technical. So you always want to load your JavaScript at the end of the page unless it has to be loaded at the top. So what that looks like with WordPress is on a very deep technical level, are they using the WordPress in queue with defer set to true? So when you're loading JavaScript on the back end of WordPress, they use WordPress in queue or you're hard coding it into your theme, then you just put it at the bottom, right? But a standard WordPress theme will use WordPress in queue. And there is an, oh, what's the word for that? Anyways, you can set defer to true. Defer to true loads it at the bottom of the page. What that means is when your page is loading, the HTML loads, the CSS loads, it looks good, people can interact with it and then the JavaScript loads. And JavaScript can be a pretty good chunk of a website. So that way it doesn't slow down the loading of the content that people are going to see. So it keeps people engaged. So loading JavaScript at the end of the page very handy. This is a newer one. So it used to be that more pages was a better score. More pages is no longer a better score. Better scores are going to well written, well organized, well written, well organized and like engaging content. So you want to have videos, you want to have images, you want to have links to other pages, you want to have a table of contents, and then you want to have a gigantic page, right? There's a guy who teaches HTML and his website is indexed third for learn HTML. He's linked to at the end of the presentation if you want to see somebody doing really solid SEO. He actually has a separate menu for every section of his website. He doesn't have a generic nav menu that does his whole site. Every section of the site you go to loads a menu that's different. That way the navigation is really simple and straightforward to the category. So yeah, longer pages versus many short pages. Keywording and relevance are really an outdated concept. It's more about the knowledge graft, the engagement. So minify, if you're looking at a WordPress theme, are they minifying their JavaScript and CSS? If you're building your own, you know, what are you using? Implement the right things, make good choices. Browser caching, I don't know too much about browser caching. I know I have a plugin that I turn on and it works. So by everywhere, CDNs for common elements. Make sure you're not using an overused CDN if you're sharing a CDN. Like I know I was using Tailwind and their load times for stuff coming off their CDN really like, sketchy. But otherwise CDNs get you bonus points. And some references. This is all good, good stuff. This is where I got my information. It's okay, go ahead. So Shay Hao over there. He is the third rated for Learn HTML in Google Search and I've searched from several different locations. So I've searched on my phone, I've searched on my laptop, I searched at a friend's house. He's killing it at SEO. If you want to see a website in action that's doing great things, that guy's got it going on. SiteGround has solid information. They're not just a WordPress marketing site. They really are sharing things of value. So they've got some good tips. The Google rules for optimization. There's also a Google style guide out there that talks about how Google likes to see your CSS, how Google likes to see your HTML, all good things to have. And the Mozilla, the Mozilla list is kind of classic. The cheat sheet's great. The Codex talks a little bit about WordPress optimization. But what you're going to want to do, well, what I find worthwhile from an efficiency perspective is just find the right plugins to do the right job. Some of this stuff I wouldn't want to try to code myself. But WordPress does talk about, you know, here's some things to consider. All right, that's the end of my slides. We have questions, comments, concerns. Go ahead. Microformats and rich data are a whole separate subject. Are you using schema.org? Here's the thing. I really don't like Microformats because I feel like Google is stealing people's attention. So there are a ton of searches I do nowadays where I'm like, what does this word mean? And the definition is right at the top of the Google search results. Some website went through the effort of defining that, creating a website, hosting it, and Google is now scanning that there and hosting it there. So I'm kind of against Microformats because I feel like Google is becoming, I don't know, I don't know what you would call that, but I don't like what they're doing there where they're stealing focus from a website. I don't think that's great, but as far as bonus points go, yeah, you do get bonus points for using Microformats, definitely, right? I know they do it with movie theater times. They've got sales buttons for tickets now. Yeah, ratings, definitely want your ratings. The social graph rates all of your, like, your interactions. So, like, I know that most blogs don't get a ton of shares. They don't get a ton of Twitter mentions, but having the buttons and having the metrics there, it's a little bonus, right? Because it shows interactivity. Any other questions? Yes? Yes. I am still seeing a lot of websites do an author blurb at the bottom, and then that author blurb links to your social media to prove that you exist. Because you got to prove you're a real person. Yeah, yeah, from your bio to your social media or directly to your social media, right? Because an active presence on social media gets you the credibility. Yeah, you could do that. I would do it to a bio and then, like, a web out to all your social media. I have tons of social media, so that's me. You definitely want to link to Google+, if you're not using Google+, like, just do it. It's a chore, but, like, it's bonus points with Google, so go for it. If you want to get rated, or sorry, not rated, if you want to get your site map, there's a word for that, and I'm missing it. When they go through and they crawl your site, crawl, that's the word. So when they go through and crawl your site, if you're not getting the results you want fast enough, like, they're not updating their crawl index, you want to post to Google, post to Twitter or post to Reddit. You know, when I was in college, Reddit would get you indexed within 24 hours. Twitter probably gets you indexed a lot faster if you get a little engagement going on, like, get your friends to like it for you, you know. Anybody else? Cool. All right, well, I'm going to wrap it up then. Thanks very much for coming out, had a great time. I'll throw my cards up here, so you can get, oh yeah, so you guys can, no problem, so you guys can grab those if you want. Come by my website, I'll put up the slides with all the notes and everything on them. Thanks for coming out. Sorry, we ran late. Oh, with Amber, did you have a story of failure?