The Bloggers Guide to Using Google+ Effectively - Wordpress Plugins with Craig Fifield

Hey there, I'm Chef Dennis and I'm here today with my co-host Jean Layton and we're here for the Blogger's Guide to Using Google+ Effectively. I think this is our 14th show in the series and today we're going to talk about WordPress plugins. It's not something that has a lot to do with Google+ but it's something that bloggers all think about and there are some plugins for Google+ that we'll probably talk about those as well. We're lucky enough to have a guest on today, we have Craig Fifield and he has a lot of experience in WordPress and in plugins and pretty much everything that has to do with the computer, so we're gonna defer to him for most things. But if you have questions today, please feel free to ask them in the comments section and we will do our best to get to them. I'm gonna turn this over to Jean for a few minutes and have her say hello, and then we will get started.

Hi everybody! This is gonna be the first one where we're not working from my screen shares about the topic. In so many ways, There are two different platforms for posting. We talked already about Blogger, and now we have a fabulous guest, Craig Fifield, who can help us with WordPress and the complications and indications and plugins that will make our lives simpler. So in so many ways, I just want to listen to Craig, so I'm going to pass it off to him.

Thanks for having me, guys. I really appreciate it. So in my opinion, the first thing that people need to realize that they really overlook a lot is the importance of backing up and having a secure site. So you can do all this work and you can lose it in an instant if you get hacked. So some people don't worry about it too much because they think, oh, someone is just going to put some malware or put in some links and maybe that's not so bad, you can get that fixed.. But I've had sites that were making thousands of dollars a month just get completely deleted. And I thought I had them backed up. And turns out I didn't have them backed up. And then kind of brushed the sweat off my brow and went to the hosting company. I was all excited, like, "Hey, they have it backed up. I remember they told me they did." And it turns out the backup was only for a week, and I hadn't looked at the site in a week. So when they restored the backup, they restored the hacked They restored the deleted site. There was nothing left. It was all gone. If you're relying on WordPress for your business, which many of the viewers probably are, you need to treat it like you would a retail store. When a retail store, if something bad happened like it burnt down, you have business insurance at least to help you get back on your feet. If you lose your site like I did in the past, it's just gone forever. I lost There was at least 3 years worth of posts and content and quite a lot of money went right down the tubes. To start with for that, I recommend Backup WordPress as a plugin that's free. Also Backup Buddy. Backup Buddy is paid, but it's a little bit more full-featured and a little bit easier for the average user if they need to restore their site if something bad happens. But the key with both of them, and a lot of people actually think they're backing up their WordPress site, but what they're doing is actually backing up just the database. So if you're backing up just the database, which is the most common, and something happens like— I actually had one time someone just came in and deleted all the images. Well, I had a backup of my database, and so that was fine, but all the images were gone. So all that content was wrecked. You know, especially today where everything is so image-heavy. You end up stuck if you don't back up your full— you basically want to back up your full directory or at a minimum your database and your WordPress content folder, wp-content. And that will have your images and your theme and all that stuff so that you're able to restore right back to where you were. So once you have backups set, The— and again, take it seriously, because almost every client that I've worked with over the years never does, and, you know, or has it halfway solved. The next most important thing to me is then site speed, making sure that, you know, your site loads quickly for your users and for Google. Google uses site speed as a ranking factor, and whenever you can control a ranking factor, you want to make sure that you do.. And also as far as just people spending time on your site and want to visit and engage with you, the faster the site is, the better, you know, it's going to work for your audience and the more likely they're going to hang around. So in that case, the two plugins for that, I use one called JavaScript to Footer, which a lot of people don't know about. And you have to be a little careful with that one. What it does is takes the JavaScripts that are up in the head usually in the head of your WordPress site and puts them into the footer. And what that does is defer the loading of the JavaScript. So it just means the page can load quicker. So the JavaScript loads last. And then the other big thing, or really the main big thing that you should do is have some sort of caching plugin. And for caching, I recommend W3 Total Cache. And I'm not sure if people really know what caching is, but Basically, WordPress is generating each page on the fly from a database. It's pulling that content out and generating a page. That takes a lot of resources to keep doing that as visitors visit your site. What caching does is just— it lets that get pulled one time. So one page gets pulled and then it makes a static copy so that it doesn't have to keep getting pulled from the database. It reduces the load on your server and speeds everything up. Is this what you guys wanted to talk about? Is this good stuff?

Yeah, that's good. Actually, we have a question here from Candice. Let's talk about it since it's something you talked about.

It is, "How often should you back up or does it happen automatically?" The two plugins, Backup WordPress and Backup Buddy, they allow you to set your own schedule. If you're posting multiple times per day, you want to back up a lot more frequently than me. I have mine just set to weekly. I post so infrequently now, I could probably even set it to monthly. You just have to think about how much data you're willing to lose and how much space you have on your server or wherever you're sending the backups to.

Where should you send those backups to? Is that something you should have a cloud storage for or—

It's probably best— or just on your computer? For the easiest right now, in my situation, I'm just storing them right on the server. But if something— someone was really to get in there, they could even delete the backups if they chose. The best thing is usually to send it to Dropbox. Some people even send it directly to Gmail, or if you have a major site, you can send it to Amazon S3. You can even download them, but the problem with downloading is you tend to forget. Every time you forget is the one you need it.

I'm using Backup Buddy, and I had installed Sucuri as a monitoring service. When I did that, it stopped working.— and I have not been able to get it back. Is that some type of a service you would provide if I could hire you to do that, to figure out why that wasn't?

Not really these days. The only thing I do these days is phone consulting as far as optimization of WordPress. Just basically going over WordPress, your blogging, and all of your social media profiles and telling you what steps you need to take to improve. But I don't really do much of the grunt work anymore.

Who would I turn to for something like that?

Well, I would try— crap, now you're catching me without his name.

Yeah, well, it's just what kind of a service, because I know a lot of people are out there like me, they don't have this technical skill, and they may be able to download a plugin and put it in and set it up, and then as soon as it stops working, we're screwed.

That's me. I have W3 Cache and I cannot get it to function on my site.

Yeah, it's— they are difficult to figure out how to set up, but that's why I'm bringing it up because a lot of people don't stress it. It's— if you can't figure out how to get it to work, you should hire someone to help you because it's that important. If your site is slow, people aren't going to want to visit and Google's not going to rank it well.

What is fast? What would you consider a good speed to be?

I would want to be in the 90s. So most of the speed tools are Google PageSpeed. That will tell you the speed of your site, how fast it's loading. And then when you're testing, you want to use one of your blog pages to test. You know, testing your homepage is a different type of page. Most people are hitting the actual blog pages. So you want to test that. And I would at least be in the high 80s or the low 90s. If you haven't ever tried to optimize, you're probably not. As far as someone to hire, the one that did pop into my mind is BlogAid.net. Mahana, I think that's how you say her name. She's very good, and I believe she does that work.

Great. Thank you.

Okay. When you say backup to Dropbox, I know there is a plugin that does exactly that. Would it make sense to stack the plugins like that, or is it better to just designate Dropbox as the destination?

Yeah, you wouldn't want to stack them. You know, if you use Backup WordPress or Backup Buddy, they'll both go to Dropbox, I believe. So you don't need the secondary plugin there.

Yeah, because that was one of my questions. One of the IT people I've worked with in the past always said use the minimal number of plugins because it can drag down your site. So when you're talking about optimal plugins, how many do you use roughly in a site? I know everybody has specifics, but—

I use as few as possible. So, um, well, let me look at my page right here. I had it open. I have 12 right now, and probably 3 or 4 of those I don't even need. So, but keep in mind my site is minimum, you know, pretty minimal If you are doing— like, you guys both blog about food. If you have recipes and videos, it adds up quickly. But essentially, you don't want to use any plugin that you don't need. And there can be a lot of overlap. So you need to really think that through. And you need to also think through plugins that you only need now and then. So I used— I was just setting up the site for Circloscope, and I had to use the WordPress Importer plugin to import some content.. And then I noticed today when I logged in, it's still just a test site, so it's okay, but the WordPress importer plugin is still there. Well, all I have to do is go in and delete that, and that helps in terms of vulnerability of the site and in terms of speed. So anytime there's a plugin you can turn off, and you actually have to remove it. So I forget if it's delete or remove or whatever. Just deactivating it isn't enough. You need to remove it. If you're not using it. That's another major thing that I see or have seen in a lot of client sites is just loaded with plugins that they're not using. You want to take those out of there. Everyone's a vulnerability and adds to the speed of your site or reduces the speed of your site.

So if you're not using something but you did use it in the past and it's deactivated, it's safe to delete it?

Yep. Yep.

What about these, like my WordPress site, we have these extra themes that are kind of just hanging out that have always stayed there and no one's ever deleted. Are they safe to delete or should they stay there?

If you're not using them, yeah, they can be deleted. The only instance you would want to be cautious, and you would know if you're doing this, is WordPress. So like my sites, I use the StudioPress themes, and so you have a framework and then you have a child theme. So there's actually two themes that you view in the backend that run one site.

Gotcha.

So in that case, you wouldn't want to delete either one of those, but everything else could be deleted if you wanted.

Okay, thank you.

That would be a good thing to do.

When you're trying to first set up a site, how do you choose a theme? And are you looking at speed or are you looking at visuals? What's—

Both. So for me, I look to— so it's difficult for the audience, so I can fix a lot of the stuff, so I go by where most things are laid out. And I look at mostly just the blog page. Where are the main elements and, you know, how am I— you know, to do what I want to do, is everything pretty much in the places that I want it to be or is it going to be easy to move them around? That's what I look at first. And then I'm also looking at just the general usability of the theme. That's what I look at first, but then I'm also always looking at speed because some of these themes that are out there are really bloated and really slow. Caching, if you set it up properly, can solve a lot of that. But I tend to look for— I tend to go the minimal route at all times. And if you really pay attention, for a while my sites in the past were really minimal and they were kind of the oddballs because everyone had graphics and everything all over the place. And lots of scripts and stuff in their sidebar. It was just the way sites were at the time. But if you pay attention to a lot of the design trends today, it's really getting back to minimal. A lot of sites just have one column for their post. They don't even have a sidebar. All of that is being done for usability and speed. It's just when you have less for the user to look at or interact with, they'll interact with what you do have there quite a bit more. And when you have less there, it's much faster.

Is that partially for mobile users? I know sidebars don't tend to show up on your phone. So is that idea of going to the single strand helpful that way?

Yep. It will also help. So that's a big thing that people should be looking at that I didn't even think to mention is that you definitely want to be getting a theme that's responsive and basically built on HTML5. So HTML5 and responsive. Is probably the first thing you should look for in a theme today. What that means is that it should be very well adaptable to iPad screens, to whatever tablet, to mobile phones without you having to run a separate plugin or even— a lot of people used to run a whole separate version of their site for mobile. You definitely want to be responsive for sure.

What's your favorite one right now? What's your favorite theme?

StudioPress. StudioPress has— StudioPress, their framework is pretty much the best in terms of security and SEO and speed, which are the 3 underlying things that most people struggle with. So then if you start doing the extra things like caching and all that on top of it, it starts to be a very awesome platform. And they also have a whole bunch of child themes that style it up pretty nice., and they're, they're, most of them are pretty minimal.

So we have a question, and I'm going to bring it to the screen. How can you tell which themes are bloated? And also, are all themes good for mobile, or only some? I think you've answered that part. You need to find one that says it's responsive and it's in HTML5. But what about the bloated part?

Yep. So this one's a little bit tricky. I can just visually tell when they're doing too much, but if you wanted to test When you're looking at a theme site, they'll usually— the problem is they'll usually have it framed so that you can't really grab the URL, the direct URL to the theme itself that's being displayed. It's a framed URL. So you have to— in Chrome, I believe you can right-click and get it to open. I don't have a frame in front of me, but you can get it to open the frame in a new window. The frame that the theme is in. So then the theme, you should have a theme URL instead of the frame URL. Once you have the URL to the theme, you can then go put that into Google PageSpeed and see how it ranks compared to other themes that you're looking at.

So you always go— Yeah. It made sense to me. I'm not sure if it made sense to Candice, but she'll email back in a minute. So when you test, you're always using Google PageSpeed? You're not using Speedtest or any of those other—

Pretty much anyone's going to be fine. It's really just a relative measure. I just like Google PageSpeed. Sometimes I've used the Pingdom test. Pingdom has their own speed test and it's a little bit— maybe a little bit easier to understand if you're not so technical, the recommendations that they make. But all the recommendations are pretty difficult if you're not technical savvy. So what I would recommend is try to find a theme that's fast, and in most cases StudioPress is. Are, and, um, and then try and figure out caching or getting someone to help you. Those are going to be the biggest things you can do to improve speed.

Okay, so we've backed up and we've cached our site. What's the next thing you see as the most important?

Uh, Google authorship these days. So you want to make sure you have that set up right, and a lot of people still don't. Even though everyone seemed to really run after it and it's been adopted a lot better than a lot of things, a lot of people still have it set up improperly. So the big thing there is even if you think you have it right, you should go test it with the structured data testing tool. And what you should test is not just your homepage or not just your blog page, but you want to test this— it should only— the authorship should only appear on your blog posts. So you want to test all of the pages that aren't blog posts. So you want to test your blog post and make sure it's there. Then you want to test something like your, um, contact page or about page, which is just a regular page. And it shouldn't be there. You want to test maybe a category page and a tag page. And it shouldn't be there. And you want to test your homepage. And it shouldn't be there. If it is, it's set up wrong and you're going to have problems.

Okay, so you would put in the rel="author" and then you would go and test using the Structured Data Testing Tool on each of these pages.

Right, right. Or in a post, right? Yep.

Just to make sure that you've got it set for only the things you've truly authored, right?

Exactly.

And you're right, there's so many people who don't understand that nuance of It's only the things you've written, not the things you've created.

Right, right. So people get confused that, well, I wrote my About page. Well, yeah, you did, but it's, it's not something you published as, you know, like an article. It's supposed to be an article or blog post. That's what it's intended for.

Right, it's information.

Right. And the big problem originally was a lot of plugins were doing it wrong because Google wasn't specific about this in the beginning.. And also a lot of people like me that know how to just go in and edit the code just stuck it in the header so it went sitewide. And so there's still a lot of sites like that that just have it wrong and they don't really realize because what happens is you'll go and test your site and people that don't know test their homepage and it says, "Oh, authorship is set up. It's working." Well, it is working but it's on the wrong page.

So is there a negative impact for having it on pages? That should not have it?

I don't think you're gonna get, um, like penalized in the search engines at all, but you could have problems with authorship showing up appropriately when you want it to. And a lot of people whine about their, you know, photo not showing up when they think it should be. Oh, and that's another big tip on authorship. A lot of people don't understand how to test if it's showing up or not. You need to make sure you're not logged in to Google or use um, incognito mode in Chrome and then search for very specific phrases that you know are only in your posts and see if it shows up. And even then, it's still up to Google whether they want to show it or not, so you may not always see it, but you'll have much better results trying to check if your authorship is set up if you do that.

Okay, and what about rel="publisher"? I saw it, you know, and I have in my post talking about the new beta plugin for rel="publisher." Is that something that tech-savvy people should be working with, or all of us? And do you like it?

So that plugin actually isn't for Publisher, which is the surprising thing. Oh. That's a naming problem. So what that Publisher plugin does— it's called Google Publisher, and it's in beta for WordPress. And what it does is it only does two things right now. It enables you to verify your Webmaster Tools account which is, which is important. But a lot of other plugins and themes allow you to do that, so you don't really need that bit in most cases. And then the other bit that it provides is it allows you to do some cool things with AdSense if you run AdSense on your site. So what I was looking at is it shows— once you have it installed and connected to your AdSense account, it enables you to actually view your site and it'll help you include the AdSense ads right where you want them, which is pretty good for people that aren't tech savvy. You know, if it can enable that seamlessly, you know, that's something a lot of people would have to hire someone for that you might not have to. But in both of those cases, there are other solutions that you may already be using, so you don't really need to switch.

What solutions would you have— I know I have WordPress by Yoast. Is that One of the plugins that allows you to have the Webmaster Tools already connected?

Yep, for sure. And it will also do the Google Publisher that you were talking about. So it'll do Google Authorship and Google Publisher. I really wish they didn't name that plugin that way. But Google Publisher is a completely separate thing. It's very much like Google Authorship, but it's for your business page. And Google— WordPress SEO from Yoast will help you set that up as well.

So is that one— that's one of your tops, right?

Oh yeah, that's— yeah, so I should have said SEO is my most important thing, but, you know, authorship these days is part of that. And to do all that, I would use WordPress SEO, and I wouldn't use any other plugin for SEO. It does everything you need and more. And it's like we were talking about keeping plugins minimal. Prior to WordPress SEO, you would have to have 3 or 4 different plugins to do everything that it does, and now you can just have one. So it's really powerful in that regard. And for the people that use it, let me see if I can open the— one feature I noticed a lot of people don't use that you should use if you use WordPress SEO is if you go into the settings and go under the social menu item. It'll have Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. You should have authorship set up, but even if you don't, you want to make sure you have the checkboxes to add the Open Graph metadata, to add the Twitter card metadata, and to add the metadata for Google+. And what that will do is when you're sharing, when your post gets shared out, it will grab the appropriate content So when the different sharing buttons share to Facebook or share to Google+ or share to Twitter, it will grab the images right. That's what enables it to grab the title of the post properly, all that stuff.

If you tell it to grab the metadata, this plugin allows it to be selected for the social media platform?

No, when other people share it. So if people are visiting or viewing your post, if they click a share button or if they take the URL itself and go over to Google+ and put it in the link field, this is what enables— the metadata is what enables Google+ or Facebook or Twitter to grab the right information and embed it into the post. Does that make sense?

Yes.

So you know when you put that link into Google+ and the little image comes up with the description, they just changed it, but it does the same type of thing on Facebook. It kind of automatically grabs that data. That comes from the metadata that is telling the networks what data, what image to use, what title to use, what description to use.

Okay. So with that, if you If you activated that plugin and didn't do that metadata check-off, what would happen?

In some cases, you'll— well, this is a place where some overlap comes into play. So different plugins do it different ways. So sometimes some of the social sharing plugins will automatically add it because they need it. Sometimes the theme will have it because it needs it. But in this case, I believe WordPress SEO is smart enough to check if it's already there, so it won't really overlap. It's just a useful feature that I noticed recently that a lot of people don't have turned on.

Mm-hmm. Is there SEO for video as well? You're right, you know, we all run videos in our sites. Is there some way to enhance those?

Yeah, pretty much the same type of thing we're talking about. You can either do it manually with another plugin, or you could use Yoast Video SEO, which I think is paid, but it's not, not very expensive, and it does the same type of thing. When you embed a video, there's certain metadata that makes Google understand what that video is, and in this case, it's more about the search results. So very similar to how authorship works, where if you've written the article, your little photo shows up next to the article in Google search. If you have it, uh, the metadata done right using the plugin for your video, your video will be called out in the search results, uh, in a very similar manner. So that's been important, but it's getting more and more important as we get moved to the semantic web where they're using this content and trying to repurpose it, like, all over the place. Um, so the more markup you have, uh, The more markup you have correct, the better off you are, and most often you'll tend to outshine your competition that doesn't have it set up right. And for you— sorry. For you guys in particular, this is true with recipes as well. So when you— the different plugins that you guys use for recipes, most of them seem to have it right now where they use the schema markup to get the recipe to show up with the image next to it in Google search. But that's definitely something if you're doing recipes, you want to make sure that you're getting the image callout and that you have that marked up properly so that the search engines can tell it's a recipe.

Do you have a recipe plugin that you suggest for people?

I'm not a food blogger. The last one I looked at was, I think, Easy Recipe, and I know it was doing it correctly, but I know I looked at one prior to that that was also doing it correctly. But I remember not so long ago, I actually started to think about maybe making one because they weren't doing it right. But everyone kind of has picked up on the fact that the schema markup stuff is very important. So you're doing pretty well if you're using any of the most popular ones. But I would still check. If you're not seeing your image show up for your recipes, again, you want to be logged out or using incognito mode. But if you can't get those images to show up, you need to be suspecting your plugin.

Okay. That makes perfect sense. So it's not your, uh, Yoast at that point. It's your recipe that you need to be looking at. The recipe plugin. Yeah.

In that case, it's the recipe plugin. Yep. And actually, I believe you can test that with the structured data markup tool as well. So if you have a recipe page, you can just plug it in and it will tell you.

Interesting. Okay, so what about comments? Is there a way to make comments flow? One of the things I love about Blogger is that the Google+ embeds bring all those comments into the post. Is there a similar way to make comments more— yep, powerful?

Yep, there's two plugins. One is called Google+ Comments And that just brings in just the Google+ comments into your WordPress post. I think that's pretty limited. You want to have more options, so the, the other one is called Comments Evolved. And what Comments Evolved does is it'll bring in— it'll give you tabs, a tab section for your comments where you can have all your Google+ comments, you can have Facebook comments, you can have your normal WordPress comments for the people that don't want to use those other services. And then you can even have the discuss and— I think it's live fire. So you basically have all of the options in one. I would still recommend keeping it as minimal as you can for your audience, whatever works right for them. So for example, on the Circlescope blog, when we finally launch that, we'll just have Google+ comments, Facebook comments, and WordPress comments. And the, the big benefit is that most people these days, or a lot of people, don't really comment on blogs anymore. They spend their time commenting on Facebook or on Google+ or, you know, in some cases even Twitter or wherever. But it's rare to get the blog comment these days, or much more rare than it used to be. So by providing this, you know, right on your page, you tend to get a lot more interaction. And it's, you know, it's social proof that you are getting interaction. So before, if you didn't have this set up, You could get a whole bunch of comments on Google+ about the blog post that you shared, but if it's not showing up on your blog, all the people that visit your blog think that nothing's going on. Now by having it integrated, you'll increase the engagement significantly.

Does that have any negative effects to your blog by doing that?

There is probably some speed concerns there. So if your site's already slow, I would be cautious about adding something like that because it's a bunch of code and different things going on there. But that would be about the only one. And, you know, it's like I said, you don't want to overdo it. So just because there's every single option for commenting available doesn't mean that's right for you or your audience. In terms of usability, less is more. You know.

I've got a question here from Karen. And she wants to know, one of her blogs is not on WordPress. Can I do this metadata in Blogger?

I know that you can do it manually, but that's going to really be a pain. I don't know otherwise on Blogger. Probably the best thing, if it was recipes or video, what I would probably do on Blogger, unless they have it built in, which I don't know if they do, but I don't think they do. I would probably make draft posts that included the appropriate metadata for, you know, so say, use a recipe as an example. There's just certain tags that go within the code that you could have in the draft post that you can then just copy each time you go to put a recipe up. That would be about the only way I could think to do it on Blogger. But it could be integrated, I don't know, but I haven't heard that.

Yeah, I haven't seen a recipe plugin for Blogger, but the person I would reach out to is David Kutcher. He's the Blogger question answerer. Okay, so I think the rest of the questions are very large, and perhaps we can answer them off air, you know, Where's the best place to learn WordPress is a show in itself.

One place you can go is—I don't know if they're still doing a good job, but they used to do a pretty good job at WordPress TV. It's wordpress.tv. They teach quite a bit.

That's a great thing. Tony has a question: My photo shows up on my Google posts on search but not on my blog posts, whereas it always used to. —so that sounds like there's a—

Yeah, maybe there's something wrong with authorship, or maybe it's just, you know, you should definitely make sure you're logged out or using incognito mode to test. And you have to remember that Google still only shows it when they feel it's necessary. But then beyond that, you should test your different pages and posts with the structured data tool to make sure it's still set up right. Okay.

And is there a way to have our posts on WordPress just flow out without having to manually go off to all the different networks and tag it? Is there something you use for doing that work?

I don't. I believe in doing it manual, but in my research today I was surprised to see a plugin that I don't— haven't heard a lot about, but it seems like it's doing a lot of that and doing it pretty well, which is called Social Network Auto Poster. And it's even posting to Google+, which is surprising because there's no API for that. I haven't tested it, but people seem to like it. That's all I can really say as far as that goes. I can say I, I looked at another plugin called Blue Google+ Blog for WordPress that does it the other way around, so it'll send your Google+ post over to your WordPress blog as if it's a real post, and it'll even somehow take the comments and make them WordPress comments. It seemed like that was getting a lot of attention, and I wouldn't really recommend that unless you know what you're doing, because you're essentially creating duplicate content on your site. So Google indexes your profile posts and treats that as unique content, and then when you have it over on your own blog the exact same way, it's now duplicate content. And that's just— it's not the end of the world, but if you do that with all of your Google+ posts, suddenly your blog is going to be full of duplicate content, and that's not going to be good for the search engines. What you could do with that tool though is it allowed your Google+ posts to show up as drafts in WordPress. That could be handy for some people where you could have it show up as a draft and then do some editing to it before you publish it.

—so it can shift over and bring the comments as well. Right.

But in that case, I would still probably do it manually and just embed the Google+ post. So if you're viewing a Google+ post, you can use the dropdown menu in the upper right to get the code to embed a Google+ post. And you can just put that into a regular WordPress post and then surround that with a little bit of content. Text, you know, describing what your Google+ post was about, and that will do much better for you.

As long as you're doing something like that, it's not exact duplicate, you can use it again, right?

Well, in that case, even though it looks like text on the page, it's not. It's, it's a script that's generating that. So the unique content would be whatever you write about that post. Gotcha. You know what I'm saying? That Google UI is essentially containing that text and it's not seen by the search engine.

Now what about the other way around? Let's say I take posts from my WordPress blog, not exactly word for word, but take parts of them and repost them as a post onto Google+.

I would just be careful of how much. So if you're taking, you know, 50% or more, I would be a little worried about duplicate content. If you're taking less than that, I wouldn't worry about it. But the best approach would be to always write uniquely whenever you can. Well, if I write—

if I lead in— what I'm taking is I'm taking recipes and instructions and I'm reposting them directly to Google with a new lead-in.

Yep. Yes, that would be fine. And I would recommend if when people have the time, you know, especially if your business revolves around this stuff, is every time you post a new piece of content, even if you're reposting in different places, you have an opportunity to change your keywords a little bit. So, I don't know, if you're posting about chocolate brownies or something, suddenly in your— when you post to Google, it can be chocolate fudge brownies. You just change it that little bit and you'll rank for slightly different things. So you can get ranked for both of them? Yep, potentially. Especially if you go for long-tail stuff. I would tend to look at Google as going more for the long-tail. —on your Google+ post.

Just in case somebody doesn't understand what long tail is, can you give a brief—?

Yep. So when I'm referring to it, you know, the long tail is you have the curve of search terms which gets used most frequently, which gets used less, and really the bulk of searches, even though people think it's all about, you know, these core main searches that get tons of traffic, it's really about the search terms that have, you know, 4 and 5 words long. And because there's so many different variations of those, that's what really makes up the bulk of search. And a lot of people don't target those. And the reason they don't is because there's so many different variations. Now, no one variation gets a ton of traffic usually. But if suddenly you nail, like, the perfect long tail brownie one, you could be getting 100 or 200 visitors every single month for that because you ranked number one. And no one else has really optimized a post for that. So it's almost— if you take your time to do that right, it's like really easy wins, or can be, compared to trying to rank for just chocolate brownies. You know, your chocolate brownies with fudge sprinkles. Well, if that's known in like one part of the country, suddenly you could be number one, right? Really easy.

Now when you're saying using long tail keywords, where do I put that phrase?

Well, it depends where you're talking about posting. So on Google+, I would have a heading on the post in bold including the most important keywords. Then I would just write my regular post, you know, the rest of the post totally naturally about the recipe. And, you know, if I'm trying to include sprinkles and I didn't say it before, I might put that in the regular, the body of the post once or twice. Not much more than that. These days, really beyond the heading, you just want to write naturally. So I would always write naturally and then just look, can I change a word here to put this keyword in once? You don't want to look at loading it up with keywords. You just want it to flow. Like if you're writing about chocolate brownies with fudge sprinkles, whatever words are going to come out of your fingers are probably the right ones. It used to be you'd really want to load it up with keywords, but today, as long as it's in your heading and you write naturally, you should be pretty good.

So the heading is the best place for it then?

Mm-hmm. Yep.

Is there a place to find the keyword— I mean, is there a place to do keyword searches now?

Yeah, you can still use the Keyword Planner, which is within AdWords. You have to sign up for AdWords, but you can get some good ideas in there. I haven't investigated many of the other paid tools since the Google Keyword Tool was, you know, taken away from us. Mostly because I know that most of them relied on that. So I'm not sure who's good in that arena anymore. Another good tool, it doesn't show you search volume, but it's called Ubersuggest. And that will give you a ton of long-term, long-tail ideas. It just goes through and shows you all kinds of different phrases that you probably wouldn't think of. So that's a great one because it's free and you don't have to log in. You can throw anything you're writing a blog post on in there really quick and go, "Oh, I never would have thought to use these other words." So Ubersuggest.

Ubersuggest, yeah. Well, we've done it again. We've gone overtime. We do this every week. We say it's going to be half an hour and we end up chatting and, ah well.

That's cool, I like it.

A little more organic, I guess, is the way to put it.

I didn't know if I was going to have enough to talk about and we didn't even get through everything, I don't think.

Oh, well, I think I went back and I looked at— oh, Jetpack, it's the one thing you didn't mention.

Yeah, you know, it's the one thing I hate. It's really bad. Why? The biggest reason is it does— well, it's very cool. I mean, it does a ton of stuff, and that's exactly what the problem is, is it's a big resource hog, and 9 times out of 10, people are using, like, 1 or 2 things from it, and you just have this enormous plugin. It's like 10 plugins in 1, so when it comes to minimizing, it— one of the first things to get rid of is Jetpack and use something else. Even if you're using it for the stats, you don't need the stats in there, especially if you're on shared hosting that's inexpensive. Your site's probably already slow because you're not paying enough for your hosting. If you're adding something like Jetpack, you're guaranteed you're slowing your site down when you don't need to be. That being said, if you're in love with it, it has a lot of cool features. I would just try to use enough of them to justify it. But you know what we didn't talk about that you just reminded me was— and now I forget. What was your other question before? Oh, to the— how to— The beta? No, the— there's a plugin that you can use to check the— Plugin Performance Profiler is a plugin that checks the performance of your plugins. So you'll be able to tell which plugins are using more resources than the others.

That could be very handy. The Performance Plugin Profiler?

Plugin Performance Profiler.

Plugin Performance Profiler. Okay. So is that one of those things that you would put in, do the testing, and then get rid of again? Exactly. Okay. Yep. OK, so you download it. What happens if you download and then deactivate? Does that take it out of the sequence of booting up? Or does it leave a trace? I believe it—

I'm not that savvy. I think it probably doesn't affect performance at that point. But every plugin— well, it still takes up space on the server. So that's going to slow things a tiny bit. But the big risk there is all of these plugins are security risks. Just because you have no idea who wrote this code and what it's doing and what it's open to and maybe shouldn't be. So you should always get rid of them if you can.

Okay, that was one question I had for you is how can a lay user, you know, not a tech geek, know which plugins are safe? How do we know? Do you go by reviews? Do you go by length of time it's been out? How often it's been get updated, what do you use?

I use my backups. So that's really the simplest answer is in an open system like this where everyone is coding these things and you have no idea who's writing these reviews, you just have to cross your fingers. And that's why you really want to have your backups is just in case. And even some of the plugins that have some of the smartest people writing them with only good intentions, they'll leave a security hole that they're just not savvy enough to know about. And people can get in that way. So you definitely want to have your backups. And we didn't talk about security, maybe another time we can. But you should be as secure as possible to avoid some of this stuff.

I think we need to have you back and just do a whole session on security because I know I've had situations that luckily enough I installed a plugin and it defeated things. But when you start getting these brute attacks Yeah, and you hear about them all the time.

People are getting caught up in these, so that might be a good subject for us in a couple weeks to go over that.

We'll have to reschedule you, Craig. Well, thank you so much for coming on, and if you don't mind popping into the event just to see, there are a couple of comments I think that might at least want to say thank you directly. Absolutely.

I will. I have something I have to do right after this, but I'll be in there later following up for sure.

Great. Fabulous. And I think Chef has something to do right away too.

I know I have my kitchen sort of set up. I have to get ready for that for our first show of Around the Kitchen Table with Susan Sarah, so that should be a lot of fun today. I have David Leopold on as a guest. So we'll go take care of that, and thank you all for coming today and for watching us, and Talking about plugins with Craig Fifield, and thanks so much for being on, and we'll see you again next week. Take care.