Wordpress SEO - How to Make Your Site Rank Higher in Google - by @todmaffin

Hi, I'm Tod Maffin. Thanks for spending some time with me for this online training session on how to make your WordPress site rank higher in Google. Don't worry if you've ever been to these online training sessions or webinars before. They're usually about 20 minutes of content and then about an hour and a half of sales pitch. There's no sales pitch here. I have nothing to sell on this webinar, and there's not even affiliate links. It's all information that I think you'll find valuable. If you'd like to know more about our firm, of course, I'd love you to check us out. We are at Engage http://www.hq.com/results. And that is the extent of the promotion. Let's get on with it. So back in the dark ages of the internet, you know, 2000, 1999, a lot of people with websites tried to game the search engines. Back then it was Excite and Yahoo, and then Google came along. And the way that they would game it to try to get the search engines to move them higher in the rankings was to do what's called keyword stuffing. This doesn't work anymore, but this is what it used to look like for someone trying to rank for the webpage about Father's Day. They would just put the word Father's Day everywhere. And they are— it doesn't even make any sense. And here's the point. If you're a human reading this, it's almost impossible to read. You still see this out there sometimes on sites that look like this one. This is a real one. I'll just read that first paragraph. Show you to improve your workout in a short amount of time, which enable it to payday loan You stay healthy and the bottom paragraph is even worse. Climbing is a terrific way to stay fit while not having to expend every day fast cash loans at a health club. It doesn't make any sense. And of course, Google hates these now. And when they catch you doing it, they're going to be on to you. Not only won't they put you in Google, they'll actually penalize you, meaning you'll get completely eliminated from it. So how does Google track this down? Obviously, they have an algorithm. They do not have peng— pigeons like they said. They claimed that the pigeons were busy ranking things. On the serious side, whenever people have asked Google, "Hey, listen, how do I get my webpage to rank higher in your search engine?" Google's answer has always been this: Make sure your page would be something that a human would want to read. So in other words, don't just write it, you know, with random keywords, and don't just fill it with lots of ads, don't just fill it with links out to try to game the system. Write it like a human being. If a human being came along and looked at your webpage, would they get actual value from it? So they always said, "Make sure your page reads like something a human would want to read." And now we know why they were saying that. As it turns out, a little while ago, some documents got leaked from Google, and we all discovered that Google actually has human beings ranking your content. Yes, real human beings. There are 1,500 of these people, and they're always hiring in all sorts of countries. They actually outsource this work to two companies, Lionbridge and Leapforce. This is what one of the job listings looks like. So there are about 1,500 of these people, and their job, their day-to-day job, is Google gives them a list of web pages for them to go to, and they manually look at the web page and rank it. That's important to know, and not a lot of people know that. They think that it's just a computer program or an algorithm or a robot going through, and certainly that's the majority of it, but real human beings working for Google are looking at your webpage and determining whether it's valuable. These people are evaluated on what's called a TTR, which means time to rate. So in other words, people who rate slowly are not really well valued there. So they do not spend a ton of time on your webpage. So first impressions count. That said though, they will take some time to do a bit of research to figure it out. This is an interview that someone, one of these Google reviewers, anonymously gave to a webpage, uh, to a website about SEO. If you want to read the article, I've created a Bitly link for you. It's at bit.ly/AGoogleReviewer. Take a look there at the bottom section. The reviewer says, "If someone queried 'release liner,' I would need to do some research to figure out that it's something used in cutting vinyl for signs and the like. At that time, I could determine whether a site is worthwhile or not." So they do take their time. They do actually go there. And because human beings are looking at it, your site design matters. As this person says, and I'll just read the bottom part there, a page where you can tell what the main content is with ads taking second page in the design would get a high rating. A page where ads are confused with the main content, where you can't tell the difference between content and ads, would get a low rating. So if you are trying to game the system because you're thinking you can sneak it by Google's algorithms, you can't, because at some point a human being employed by Google will come and look at your page with their eyeballs and try to determine how well it ranks. So in this session, we're going to teach you how to do it the right way. It's a 5-step process that we use with our clients. Here are the 5 steps: fix, boost, optimize, rank, and then make friends with Google. Let's go step by step, and I'll show you all of the tools that we use at our company. First is fixing the major problems. Almost all websites have problems. Sometimes they're really serious problems, like every page is duplicated on your site. That's usually because you have some links in Google going to www.yourpage.com and some just going to yourpage.com. Google sees that as duplicated pages, and it can cause a huge problem. But there might be other smaller things like no meta descriptions, or no title tags. The tool that we use and recommend is Moz.com. Again, none of the links you'll see here are affiliate links. Just feel free to type them in. So let's pull up Moz.com so you can see what it looks like. Just gonna drag this into my browser here and zoom it up so you can see it better. This is a dashboard that we use with our clients. This is actually Gimpax. Gimpax is a podcast that my wife and I do. It's just a hobby podcast. And it's for people in the disability community. A couple of things to note right off the bat, and we'll get into this in more detail. Notice that even though there's no actual title for this page, the phrase up here, accessible podcast, is the main keywords. That's because those are the keywords that I want to rank highly for in Google. A lot of people will have the word home here, which is the worst thing, or just the name of your company. If you're in the natural foods business in Toronto, You don't want your site to say the name of your company unless it has the words "natural foods" in it. If you want to rank for people searching "natural foods Toronto," these need to be the first words in your title tag. Again, we'll get into that in more detail. Another thing to notice is that when you actually go to the Gimpax podcast page, look at the page URL: disability podcast. Those are the words that I want to rank for. So I've put it in the title tag. I've made it the file name. And notice I've used it as a header tag here. That's an H2. I've used the words here in the body of it. And I've made them bold. And if I were to scroll down the page, I would show you that that's the only place that those— that that phrase actually appears. You can overdo it. Remember back earlier when I mentioned the keyword stuffing where every other word was the keywords. You don't want to do that. Google won't tell you exactly how many keywords will make it too many. Our experience is about 2 or 3 times per page. But the important places to put it are in the title tag, in the filename, in a header tag of some kind, ideally H1, and somewhere at least once, maybe twice, in the body copy. Make sure that one of the keywords in the body copy is above the fold. See how it's, uh, it's at the top of the page and it's in bold. And that's all you really need to do at that aspect. Let's go back to Moz to show you this. Moz is a great tool. We use it for our clients. It keeps track of domain authority, which is how relevant Google thinks your site is, and you can compare it to your competing companies. Our competing companies are other podcasts. They rank much higher. We don't really care. It's just a hobby podcast. You get all sorts of data down here. The area that I'm going to show you is under Search, and it's called Crawl Diagnostics. This shows you a list of all of the issues currently having on your— you're currently having on your WordPress site or any website really that is negatively affecting your Google ranking. It's really easy to see and it keeps track of it. Every week if you sign up for a plan with them, they'll go back and they'll crawl it and they'll show you over time how well you're doing at getting those fixed. So you can see when I first started it on January 1st, that first week, I had 6 issues that were high priority. 49 of them were medium priority. Now, as I record this, this week, there's 1 high priority issue and only 20 medium priority issues. If you work with a digital agency, this is a great chart to show your clients that you're actively working on it over time. Let's dive into this high priority and figure out what that is. If I scroll down in Moz, it'll tell me exactly what the problem is. And here's the problem. It's a file not found error. When I originally programmed the site, I didn't have the SEO in mind. So what I did was I just used the file name "podcast." I've since changed it up here to "disability podcast" because that's the phrase I want to rank for. I don't want to try to rank for "podcast" because I'd be competing against thousands and thousands of other podcasts. But I'm not competing against that many disability podcasts, so that's why I chose that keyword. But of course, when I realized that I should change it, and I did change it to Disability Podcast, that created a problem. The problem is when people went to gimp-hacks.com/podcast, that page wasn't there anymore. So at the time when they did their crawl, when Moz did their crawl, they got a file not found error. You can fix this really easily by doing a redirect. Let me show you what that looks like. I'm gonna go into the backend of the Gimp Hacks site right now. This is the backend of WordPress. I use a tool called Pretty Link. It's right here. I'll show you how to get to it in a moment. You go to Pretty Link once it's installed. It's a free plugin. And I just added this. So I said, anytime someone goes to gimpax.com/podcast, I want you to redirect to this page. It even gives you a bit of tracking on how many hits you've gotten on it, uh, and how many unique clicks that is, so how many actual people, how many people you've caught and saved who've tried to access this one. The actual setup screen looks a little bit complicated, but all you really have to do is put in what the original one was, where you want it to go, and select either temporary if you think you're gonna change it back, or permanent. To install this, it's a great plugin. Hover over Plugin in your WordPress admin, go to Add New, and then in the search box type in Pretty Link, and it's right here. Just click the Install button. Okay, back to Moz. So that's one of the— well, the only high priority issue. Let's take a look at some medium priority issues that are negatively affecting me in Google search engine. So here I can see that 19 pages are missing meta description tags, and here's what they all are. One of the nice things about Moz is you can download an Excel spreadsheet and open it up and use that as a kind of task list for you to go through and repair it. What is a meta description? The meta description is not actually used by Google to rank your site. It's used to display in the search engine to people. So if I Google GIMP Hacks, GIMP Hacks podcast, take a look at this area right here. This is the meta description, and later on in this video I'm going to show you how to change it en masse for across all of your site. But it's important to have one for each, for each page because that way it gives people an incentive to click. Notice that I didn't do that here, and although there is information that Google grabs off the page, it's not particularly compelling. So over time, as you do it, this chart will hopefully go down. You may discover some other problems as well. Let me switch to my site, embarrassingly enough, and take a look at the crawl diagnostics there. There I have 147 issues, 22 of them are high priority. What are those issues? Well, 20 of them are missing, uh, were, uh, page not found. 2 of them are duplicated pages. I should remove those immediately. And some medium ones. I'm missing a description tag on here. I have a duplicate page title here. And 3 title page— 3 pages have short titles. Let's click that and take a look. And indeed, here are 3 pages with really, unfortunately, too short. So I would probably change this to shopping cart, "Take my poll," something like that. So that's the first step, which is to fix the errors on your site. And as I mentioned, we recommend Moz for that. Here's the second part: boosting your site speed. Now, I should mention that I've lifted a couple of slides from a presentation, a great presentation that a fellow at Huddle did, and I'd highly recommend you watch his webinar. It's bit.ly/afastersite. And it's a 90-minute webinar all about site speed. He does it much better than I can, but let me show you a couple of things that he presented and some ways that we can help as well with some free tools. First of all, anytime Amazon experiences a one-tenth of a second delay on their website, sales decrease by 1%. That's a lot of money for Amazon. And what is a tenth of a second? It's between these two snaps. It's very quick. In fact, Akamai, which has stats for all sorts of web servers and site speeds, say that 3/4 of people who go to a shopping site online and experience it being slow will not buy from that site. So what is on your web page and your website that's causing all these delays? I can almost guarantee it's your images. That seems to be the biggest problem because here's what a lot of people do with WordPress. Is they find an image online, or worse, they take it on their iPhone or digital camera, and they just drag it into a post. Well, those images that come off of Google or out of your iPhone or out of a DSLR camera are huge, sometimes many megabytes. You don't need that file size, and in a moment I'll show you exactly what you do need. But this, reducing the size of images on your web pages, will probably be responsible for a 50% lift in your Google rankings alone. There are 3 tools that we recommend for this. The first is done by Google itself. And why does Google give away tools for site speed? Because it's in their interests for their users, people who search, to have a good experience. And once again, just to make this point even more clearly, if your website is slow or your web pages load slowly for whatever reason, you will decrease in ranking. So let's take a look now at this website. I'm going to type in my website address. Let's use gimpax.com. It does take a few seconds, and it's going to score it on a score from 1 to 100. And ugh, on mobile and desktop, I'm doing a little bit better on desktop, 61 there out of 100, but on mobile it sucks. Let's try another website. So I'm a little bit better on mobile here and considerably better on desktop on this website. One of the nice things about this is it puts it in a priority order of what you should fix first. This is the first fix. Big surprise, it's saying that even I have big images. When you click the, uh, show details, it will actually show you exactly which images are taking up a lot of space. So this image, whatever this one is, let's go find out. Ugh, look how big it is. We'll get to that in a moment, but I could have saved some time on that. So this is a great tool to use, PageSpeed Insights by Google. Another one that's really good to use, especially if you're more techie or you want to find out exactly what element of a page is causing you problems, is this one from Pingdom. Here's how this one works. When you load it and you give it a website address, it's gonna go through what it calls a waterfall. Let's try this out on my site and see how well it performs. You just type in the domain name and click test now. By the way, you may have to wait in line. Sometimes it has 3 or 4 people ahead of you. It usually takes a few seconds or so. As we can see, it's already made 104 requests to the server. That's a lot. Even so, my website is 62% faster than all tested websites and has a pretty high performance grade. The load time is only 2.5 seconds, which is not bad at all. But here's where this website is really cool. Take a look at this chart down the right-hand side, and this axis across here shows you the amount of time it took to load, and every single element is in play. Different colors means it's either waiting or it's sending. What you want to do is look for the really long lines. So let's scroll down and see if we can find any long lines. Ooh, ooh, ooh, there's a long line right there. Let's hover over it and find out what happened. Wow! So for 6 tenths of a second, my web page was stalled waiting for this element. What is this element? You can usually find it by here, by looking in this area over here. And this is from Perfect Audience, which is a retargeting service for Facebook and web advertising. Yikes! Let's take a look at what else there is. Well, this one's not so great. This one was waiting, uh, 285 milliseconds. And it's from CloudFront. Let's click on it and find out what it is. Well, it's just some code of some kind. That is the nice thing about this particular website is you can just click on it to find out what the element is that's causing problems if you want to check. Here's something that's a little bit long. It's coming from Facebook and— oh my God, what's this? Well, the green bar is showing us that the green indicates it took almost a full second to receive this file from the server. So what is this file? Ah, it's a picture of me speaking. So this would be a candidate for me to shrink in size. So how do you do that? That's the third step. So first we've covered the insights, second Pingdom. Now let's talk about page images specifically. Okay, I want you to get up really close to your computer monitor right now. And if you're watching this on YouTube and you're seeing this in low res, change the little gear icon so you can see it in as high definition 720 or 1080 that you can manage. Ready? Get your eyeballs really close to the screen. I'm going to show you a picture of a pug. I always use pug examples. So take a look at the clarity of this photograph. You can see his whiskers, you can see hairs on him, you can see lots of detail in his eye. That's because this is a high-res PNG file. But it's huge. It's 2 megs, more than 2,000 kilobytes. By shrinking this down to a JPEG and taking some of the high-res elements out of it, we can reduce the size dramatically. I'm going to show you what the same image looks like when it's down to 61K. You ready? Now, remember, the first image, unprocessed, was 2,000 kilobytes. And this is what a JPEG file looks like at 61 kilobytes. Move close to your monitor, take a good look. It's almost identical. In fact, I'd venture to say you couldn't tell a difference at all. You should be compressing every image on your website, especially those over 60K. One of the tools that we use, we use to do this is called kraken.io, and here's how that works. They do have a pro account where you can get a WordPress plugin that will automatically, uh, uh, compress the file sizes on the fly, but we're just going to use their free web interface by clicking there. All you need to do is scroll down till you see this region where it says click to upload or drop your images here. I'm going to take this pug picture on my desktop and drop it there. Now we can monitor what's happening. Alright, it's starting to crack the file. And it said, all right, the file you gave me was 840K. It's now 294K. That's a 64% saving. Download this file, and there it is. Now, even though this file is less file size, it's still huge in terms of its dimensions. That's the next step we'll talk about. One other quick way to, by the way, to reduce the file size and the image dimensions is by using Photoshop. You don't want to select File Save or even File Export. You're looking for the menu option that says File Save to Web. You get this dialog box, and if you look in the gray boxes kind of on top underneath the pug image there, you'll see that I've selected JPEG and and it's gonna reduce it to 18K, which is great. For some reason, Photoshop has not updated since the days of modems, and so it's gonna give you an estimate of how much time it'll take to download that using a 56K modem, which nobody uses anymore. But you can adjust that and take a look at it. On the right-hand side, you might see Image Size. That's important as well because there's really two components about images. On websites. The first is the number of bytes it takes, so how much room it takes on the server. And as I showed you with Kraken, we can easily reduce that down. But the actual dimensions are pretty big too, and that's unnecessary in most cases. Take a look at this BBC homepage, in particular this image of this fellow here. The image that got uploaded to the server was 300 pixels wide by 600 pixels tall. But the space where that image fits is only 150 by 300. It's half the size. But they still uploaded an image that's twice as big dimension-wise. So the browser says, well, wait a minute. This photo is bigger than the size that I've given it. So it's smart enough to reduce it down. But to reduce it down, it first has to download that entire image as well. So make sure two things. One is that you're exporting it as a JPEG or you're squashing it down so that the file size, the physical size of the file is small, ideally under 50 or 60K per image. A lot of images you can get down to 3 or 4K if they're simple or just have a couple of colors in them. And the other thing is the file size dimensions. Make sure that it doesn't exceed the space it's going to display on your site. There's some other pro tactics as well. You may want to consider using a caching plugin or a provider like WP Engine that we use that caches things automatically. Caching means that the web server will remember things for, for future visitors, so it doesn't have to go back to the actual server. Same with the CDN. We recommend Cloudflare. That's free, by the way. And not to get too nerdy, but there is another important element, and it's called minifying page assets. Page assets are individual files on your web server that tell the website how to display things properly. Let's go back to the BBC page. The main type of file that tells a web page how to display is called a CSS file, and it contains information about the fonts, about the colors, about the sizes, about where to place things on the page. Humans never actually see this file, but they see the work that the file does. You only need and should have 1 or 2 CSS files. The BBC homepage has 7 of them. 33 images— well, you can't really get away from around images— and 39 JavaScript files. Here's the problem. 7 CSS files means 7 separate requests to the server. So you should minify them, and that's combining them into one. This reduces the round trips on the server's end, and it's especially important in older browsers. Again, thanks to the fellow at Huddle who created these slides that I lifted off his really good presentation. You should watch it if you want to follow up more on site speed. It's at bit.ly/afastersite. So those are the first two steps. First is fix the big technical problems. We use Moz to do that. The second is reduce the site speed. You can measure your site speed using Google PageSpeed Insights or the Ping Test tool that I showed you before and take a close look at all the images. Third step is to actually optimize the site itself. We're gonna get into the nitty-gritty of Facebook now, so have a sip of coffee. The tool that we use is called Yoast, and it's free to use. So let's go into the backend again of our WordPress site. To find Yoast, just go to the Plugins section, click Add New, type in Yoast. It'll almost certainly be the first link, and you want to click the button that says Install Now. Mine says Installed because, well, it's already installed. When you've got it running, you're gonna see something here that says SEO. Let's click that so I can get into it. This is going to change some of the settings of individual pages and the web server itself. You can go through this at your own time. What we're gonna do now that this is open is click on a couple of these sub-options. First is Titles and Meta. Remember before when I mentioned this page, the Disability Podcast page? Originally it said GimpHacks Podcast Episodes. That's not really a term that someone's gonna type in unless they know about GimpHacks, and they probably don't. They're more likely to type in Disability Podcast. So let me just pull this down so you can see a bit better. The title tag that I changed it to was Disability Podcast. Here's how to do that using Yoast. You want to go to the section called Bulk Editor, and it's going to show you all of the titles of all of the pages and blog posts that you have. So let's take a look at this post, uh, article. Now this is the title that it displays to humans, and it's a good title for humans: "Three Elements That Created Contagious Engagement for Kane's Arcade." But no one's going to type that into a search engine. If they're just looking for information on engagement tips. So that's why the actual SEO title of the page is Contagious Engagement Tips. And you can see what I've done to all of these. Instead of the human version of 10 Social Media Commandments for Brands in 2015, I want to rank for social media commandments, or humanizing technology, or viral video about kissing. You can change these really easily, and that's why this Yoast tool is great. Instead of going to every single page and adjusting it, you just go here and change it to whatever you want to. So maybe I want to change it to first kiss video, since those are the keywords I think people will type in. Hit save and it's done. The second thing that it can control is those meta descriptions. Again, not actually used by Google to rank your site, but it's shown to the visitors to compel them to click on it. So that's under this description tab. Take a look at this, again, this article here, "Three Elements That Created Contagious Engagement for Cane's Arcade." The text that I want it to appear underneath is this: "Analyzing Why Cane's Arcade Went Viral: Surprising Insights from the Pros at EngageQ Digital." Or in this blog post, "From the Pros at EngageQ Digital, You'll Learn How Technology's Becoming More Human." This is the text that I want people to see while they're on Google. So you can type them all in, in one shot, and at the bottom of the screen, if you want, just click Save All. A couple of other things about the SEO section of Yoast. Let's go to Titles and Meta. One of the unfortunate things about the way WordPress sets things up by default is that it gives you some default title templates. Let's go to Google and type in baby pug blog post. And let's find a blog post about baby pugs. Well, here's one. It's from, actually, it's from Animal Planet. Here's the actual title of the page, "Bath Time for Baby Pugs." But their content management system, maybe WordPress, maybe something else, has also automatically slapped in the category, which is "Too Cute." And then it slapped in the name of the page, which is Animal Planet. Gah. Here it is again on Discovery. Here's the actual title. Here's the category it's in. And here's the title of their page. Now, this happens from content management systems automatically, but it is negatively affecting your ranking in Google. Remember, Google just wants to see the keywords. So I would have changed this to just "adorable pug versus adorable baby" or "bath time for baby pugs" and left out the rest. That's really, really easy to do in Yoast. Let's go to the backend of Yoast and I will show you how to do that. So here, under— again, we're in the Titles and Meta section. You want to go up to the area that says Post Types and change this to just Title. You're gonna have to put two percentage signs before and after so that it does it. By default, it'll probably suggest Title, Page, a separator, and your site name. We don't want that. We just want those. Do the same for Pages, and if you have any other categories like Media or Projects, it's best to say noindex and turn those on. That tells Google you don't have to worry about indexing the web pages that contain a single image, which WordPress creates unfortunately by default for every image on your site or projects or so on. Turn those to noindex so that it doesn't gum up your listing. There's some other things in here that's, uh, quite nice. One is social. That gives you the ability to put some default information So when people share it on Twitter, you can automatically attach some information about you. Same with Google. You can force a specific, uh, a specific image. So if someone shares a page from your website on Facebook and it doesn't already have an image on it, it's gonna put this image in its place. This image is just our logo. And the last section that I wanna show you on Yoast's plugin is XML Sitemaps. We'll talk about sitemaps in more detail in a moment. But you should definitely check this box that says "Enable XML Sitemap functionality." Sitemap is a file on your web server that only search engines go to and check out. A human can go to it, and if you want to see what one looks like, it looks like this. It's pretty boring. But search engines rely on it so they know exactly where all your pages are instead of having to crawl through and click on links manually. And we'll get to that in more detail in a moment when we cover Google Webmaster Tools, but suffice to say make sure this is enabled. So that covers off basically step 3, which is optimizing your site. Step 4 is to rank your individual pages. So now that you've got your title tags properly keyworded using that bulk editor and the descriptions, what about for pages going forward? You have to go to that page every time? No, you don't, because Yoast actually puts that right onto the page itself. Let me pull open a new blog post here. You're probably familiar with this screen on WordPress. Forgive the strange characters with unknown type and stuff, that's just my browser doing that. So let's create a blog post and we will call it "I love baby pugs." Oops, pugs. Whoops, pugs. There we go. And I'm gonna put in some text. Right away there's some things to fix. By default WordPress is going to either put a number here or some words that are just basically pulled out of your title. Well, if you want to rank for "I love baby pugs," then leave it as is, but you probably just want to rank for something a bit stronger like "baby pugs" by itself. One important to note— and then just click OK. One important thing to note— oh, by the way, it's put in a number 2 because I used this as a demo before. So let's say tiny pugs. There we go. One thing that's important to note though, if you're gonna use multiple words in your keywords, and you should, don't use an underscore here and don't do like that. You want to use a hyphen between the words. That's best for SEO. So if you're familiar with this screen, you probably know what it looks like. It's pretty standard, the regular things. But WordPress SEO, the Yoast plugin, adds this to every post and page screen. You can already see it's showing you a little bit about how this will show up in Google right now. But let's start in the focus keyword section. This is what we want to rank for. So I want to rank for this page. I want people to get to this page up high in Google when they type in baby pugs. Right away, Yoast is suggesting some alternate keywords, but I like baby pugs by itself, so I'm just going to click it. Right away, Yoast has given me an analysis of of the page as it exists. So has it been found in the article heading? Yes, it has. Has it been found in the page title? Yes, it has. Is it in the page URL? No, it's not because I'm using tiny pugs in the page URL. So let's just for purposes of this pretend that we want to rank for tiny pugs. Now watch that page URL area. It now says yes, but it says, well, wait a minute. The article heading doesn't say that, so sure enough, we should change this as well. Now we're looking a little bit better. We want to make sure that it's in the content as well. Right now I've just got a bunch of words that don't have anything to do with, uh, we're doing TinyPugs with TinyPugs. So let's add something. Now remember, as I said earlier, you don't want to overload this with keywords. Maybe 2, maybe 3. Couple of other things to know about this plugin. Under the page analysis, it's giving you some really good information. Now the reason, even though we added all of these things, we have green here but we still have orange here, is because under the page analysis says there's not enough words and also there's no images. So this should be important for you as well. The rest of these areas are pretty green. Under advanced, we can tell Google whether or not to follow the links on this page. Generally you want to say yes. And we can say, yeah, we want to index this page. If for some reason you don't want Google to index the page, select Noindex. Why would you want to do that? Well, if it's a page that's only intended for certain eyes, like a client, or it's a page you're not work— you're still working on, you don't want Google to have it yet, so change that to Noindex. And then just like in the main screen of Yoast, you can change individually the title share, the description, the image, the Twitter share, all the stuff that will be— that will by default what people will get if they share this on their social media channels. And finally, make friends with Google. This is really important as well. And the way to do it is to use Google Webmaster Tools. Not a lot of people even know this exists. Let me show you what Google Webmaster Tools looks like. When you log in, you've got to authorize your site. That's pretty easy to do. It's just putting a little bit of code at your site once, and then Google Webmaster Tools will see it. Here are 3 of my sites. Obviously, I don't have my client sites up here. But let's take a look at TodMaffin.com. There's lots that can be learned from here. First of all, this is a chart of how many search queries have resulted in me getting traffic over time, whether or not there are errors. There are some errors, but they're not serious. So we're not getting anything significant. There's some problems with the sitemap. We'll get into that in a second. But I want to show you the data highlighter. If you have structured data on your site, like a blog series of blog posts, you can tell Google to automatically catalog them as structured data. So why would you want to do that? Well, take a look. When I Google the phrase Webmaster Tools, you see underneath here there are two sublinks. These are called site links. Google knows about these, of course, because they're Google. But you can tell Google to do a search for your own thing, your own internal pages that way. Here's how it looks on my site. I've got my main page, but because I'm using a sitemap and highlighted areas, it's picking up these pages as well. So how do you do that? Here's how. It's really easy. Once you're in Webmaster Tools, go to Data Highlighter. And say start highlighting. So let's pick a page that we want to do this for. So I know that my webpage blog is actually a category/blog, which is not great to be honest, but that's for another time. So I'm going to say that that's the page that I want to show structured data on. Google's now asking what kind of information is this. Is it a TV show, a book review, an event, a product? Well, these are articles, and this is the only page that has this kind of structure. So I'll hit OK. Google's now going to load that page up on the left with a panel on the right. And all I have to do is tell it what the different types of information are. So this is a title of a blog post. I'm going to highlight over it. And it's going to say, what is this? I'm going to say, that's a title. I'm going to highlight over this. What is this? That's a date. Do this for a few of them. And after a while, you'll notice that Google will automatically start selecting. There, it just happened right there. Did you see that? Says, "Applying suggestions." So because I've done two of these, Google says, "Wait a minute, this seems to be the same for all of these. They all use the headers, and this date, this always is smaller and below, so these are probably all dates and titles as well," which is phenomenal. And you can see it's categorized, uh, categorized everything. If I had an image, I would put that there as well. Your blog post may have an author, put that there as well. When you're done, click Publish. And there it is. I actually have done this twice, so I'm just gonna delete this one. Let's take a look at the podcast episodes page. So here I've categorized it, but I'm missing this one. So I'm just gonna highlight over that. That's a title. That's a date. Publish. Webmaster Tools is really important. Another nice area of Webmaster Tools is the crawl section under crawl errors. So like Moz, you can see what some of this information is. I also think it's important to check your sitemaps to make sure that Google's found it and make sure there aren't any errors. There are errors on mine, so let's take a look. The errors are generally not with the sitemap itself. It's usually with pages that the sitemap references. But here it's having trouble finding a page that the sitemap references. It's actually looking for another sitemap. Not a huge problem, but still something that I want to do in the future. Finally, under Google Index— no, I'm sorry, under Search Traffic and Search Queries, you can get some really good information of the keywords that people are using to find your website. And you can dive into it. Let's take a look at impressions. So obviously the word "Tod" has the most impressions, but not many people click on it because it's not really me, so they're getting all sorts of stuff. So let's highlight this by clicks. OK, Tod Maffin. If I drill down into it, this is a chart showing search traffic of people on Google who typed in Tod Maffin. Really quite handy. I'd encourage you to explore the rest of this Google Webmasters as well. You can find out where links to your website is coming from. Why do I have 7,000 references? This is actually my ex-girlfriend Beth who has a blog and still has me in her sidebar of her website. So if we go to her website, let's take a look. And take a look down the side, she has me listed. She blogs a lot and that is why there's a ton of things there. But Google Webmaster Tools are really important. So those are the 5 steps and that's almost the end of the video. So here's the checklist. Review your website for design and readability and ask yourself, would a human be okay with this? Would they think it's goofy? Because if they will, chances are a Google reviewer, an actual human being, will come to the same conclusion. Use a tool like Moz or Raven to identify and fix major site technical issues. You want to increase your site speed both by minifying assets like graphics and CSS files and by also taking care of some of those big issues. And then using the plugin Yoast, you can SEO-ize— I know that's not a real word— each new page and each new post from here in. And finally, I'd recommend you use Webmaster Tools at least monthly. And that's it. Hey, by the way, before you go, in case you run any conferences or events, I'm happy to come and do this presentation or any presentation around digital marketing. I do about 40 presentations a year at conferences all over the world. Just go to TodMaffin.com/presentations. And now, because you've made it to the end of this video, I have some stuff for you that I think you'll really like. If you go to EngageQ.com/getthestuff, you'll get a form. When you fill it out, it's very simple, you'll get access to our free SEO audit tool. This is an incredible tool. Let me show you how it works. I've sped this up a little and I've already filled this out. So here's what you do. You put in your webpage. This is the webpage of my friend Hugh Culver. For a living, he trains people on how to be professional speakers for money. In other words, you'll get the money if you speak. You can also add a competitor. This is Jane Atkinson's site. She does the same thing. Now they happen to be business partners from time to time, but they do compete against each other. In this field, it's going to prompt you for a keyword. Remember, that's not just one word. It's a phrase that you want to rank for. They both probably want to rank for the phrase "becoming a paid speaker." Just click "Generate my SEO audit." This takes about 45 seconds and you will get a very detailed, completely for free, as a thank you for coming to this and watching this, this video, SEO audit. I'm going to speed this up so we can get to what happens after 45 seconds. And don't worry when you see the page just come back like this without any information. This does happen. After about 10 seconds or so, your SEO audit will appear right on the web page like this. And here we go, a detailed SEO audit completely for free, comparing your brand against someone else's brand as measured against these specific keywords. So you can see Hugh and Jane are not that far apart. Jane's a little bit better in terms of SEO score. It shows you a little bit of what the web page looks like. We can get some great statistics here. Hugh's page loads faster than Jane's, but it should still load a little bit quicker. I'm not going to walk you through the entire thing, but you can see how detailed it is. Ooh, Hugh doesn't have a meta description tag. Big problem. Take a look at Jane's. Much better. So as you scroll down, you can find out the top words that are being used. Jane is using some good words: speaker, business, wealthy. Excellent words for her business. Hugh's using words like year, continue, and Hugh. Also not great. It gives you a ton of recommendations on the page titles and the text. You might ask how this is different than a site like Moz. This free SEO tool that we offer you, uh, is, uh, just analyzes one page at a time but still gives you a ton of information, whereas Moz does your entire site. But Moz is a paid service. And it gives you some link information, some social information, and a list of tasks you can just print out and start working on it. So that's it. Thanks again very much for coming to the presentation. I hope you got some value out of it. Again, to get access to this SEO audit tool, just go to www.engageq.com/getthestuff. And if I can answer any questions for you, here's my phone number. It's toll-free: 1-855-863-6233. That's 1-855-TOD-MAFFIN. Or you can just email me: tod@engageq.com.