Tips Tuesday – Deep SEO Tests, Printables and Downloads, Bing Submission API, Audience Connection
Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!
Tips this week include:
- The new Gutenberg Tutorials are live
- What I found in the recipe video SEO tests so far
- Why I’m making more videos with my phone instead of camera
- BB Hub Printables and Downloads Mastermind is this week
- The block bot testing has been expanded to more sites
- Why I’m investigating Base64 image placeholders for lazy load
- How the new Bing Submission API will help us fight bad bots
- Why Google is dropping AMP for news posts, and what will take its place
- Why we need only one Rich Result focus per post
- Why proper SEO takes super deep testing, and what I’ve already found
- 22 expert ideas for connecting with your audience
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Spill the Beans Livestream tonight
Do join us live tonight at 8pm ET / 5pm PT on the BlogAid Facebook Page. We spill the beans on this week’s news, breaking stories for the day too, and special info just for those who watch. And the replay is available here on this Tips Tuesday post later too. But the live party is so much more fun.
Replay
Who I Help
All BlogAid posts and tutorials are intended to assist business-minded, hands-on bloggers and webmaster designers who are serious about making money and who want to stay up-to-date with site changes. And our BB Hub is a private member site and Facebook group for my site audit clients that has lots of extra perks and support.
BlogAid Happenings
I hope all of my U.S. peeps had a nice Labor Day weekend.
With the client work being slow, I became a tutorial making manic, including some for my woodshop too. I’m making a shoe rack tower to learn about dowel joinery and tried a gel stain for the first time and love it. Learning new things is so fun!!!
Plus, I’ll tell you about my video fun too!
New Gutenberg Ninja Tutorials
Last week I reported that I had started writing all of the tutorials for the new WP 5.8 Gute changes. And this weekend I started recording those new tutorials. I just love making these!!
I really like all of the Gute changes too and I’ll be getting all of the new tutorials out this week.
And, I’m sending emails to course members as batches of tutorials go up.
So far I’ve released tutorials for:
Start Here
Gutenberg Editor Basics
Images
- Duotone Filter – NEW
Block Based Widgets – New section
I’ve got a few more to do this week for:
- Reusable Blocks and Templates
- Pattern Directory
- Query Loop Block
Recipe Video SEO Test Update
Last week I also reported that I got started running the new case study tests for putting videos in recipe posts.
I started with the WP Recipe Maker plugin, as that is the one most folks use, and because I could not get the Create plugin to output any schema markup with either Astra or Kadence. I’ll be circling back to work with Mediavine about that, as I have a working theory on it. And y’all know how I feel about their coding not playing well with other WordPress stuff.
But, I went to town on the WP Recipe Maker tests.
I have about 10 tests run and I have a mountain of data to go through this week.
But, I already have some working theories on the best ways to add your videos because of it, and I’ll be sharing more on that in the SEO Tips section.
For BB Hub members, see my latest live stream in our Facebook group for even more details on the tests.
Making more InShot videos
Last week I reported that I made my first InShot video for my woodworking site. And now I’ve gotten used to recording on my phone instead of my camera for some things.
I have to tell you, my camera does a fantastic job of taking photos and videos – when I have it set up right. And that’s been a battle since Day 1 with it.
But with my phone, I just put in the tripod and hit record.
I also like that I can record on the phone, save that to iCloud, and use the InShot app on my iPad where I am a LOT more comfortable working.
Right now I’m just playing with it all, but I’m already making plans for how I want to use this for BlogAid too.
I just need to finish getting caught up on all of my backlog of current projects first, which I’m quickly closing in on!!
I have to tell you something.
It’s always been pretty easy to see how to do Pinterest graphics and videos for my woodworking site. But I’ve really struggled to figure out how to make the best use of videos and such for BlogAid.
Our BB Hub mastermind on Instagram, plus learning about this InShot video app has given me all manner of ideas for doing quick BlogAid videos for the hot social media platforms.
And I can’t tell you what a relief and inspiration that has been to clear that hurdle.
And now my creativity can’t wait to be let out of this gate and run my race!!
So, I’m getting in my play time now with my woodworking stuff while I finish up my open projects for BlogAid, and then I’m off to the races with it!!
And I do hope you’ll join me in the fun!!!!!!!!
Site Services update
I’m in the process of wrapping up most all of the clients that I had to juggle for vacations in August and I’m bringing more folks on this week. But I’m currently working with a few new clients who have some pretty big messes on their hands from hacks and/or previous site work that we have to square away first before we can even do the audit and those fixes. Those projects take a lot more time than I guesstimated when I gave you a timeframe when you first contacted me.
So, if you’re on my waitlist, just know that I’m getting to all projects as fast as I can and I have already been in touch with those that we are starting this week, and likely next.
Also, please keep in mind that if you have an open project, time is of the utmost essence and we want to keep it in progress daily. So, do make a priority of getting your parts done asap.
I’m getting new requests daily and we are solidly into January for the waitlist at this time. So, if you want a fresh start for the new year, now is the time to put in your request.
BB Hub Happenings
Printables and Digital Downloads Mastermind this week
I’m so excited to be meeting live with my BB Hub members this week where we’ll all be sharing our tips for making printables and delivering them as optins and more.
We have such a rich village of experienced bloggers and I know comparing notes is going to be so super helpful to everyone!!
Plus, I have a special guest coming for the next mastermind that I’ll tell you about as soon as we get it scheduled. She has brands crawling all over themselves to do sponsored videos. And folks, that is where the money is these days, not in written posts.
And I’m going to do all I can for my BB Hub folks to help them make more money. And that’s what these masterminds are all about.
Block Bot testing expanded
Quick note to say thanks to the 2 BB Hub members who volunteered to let me put the new bot block firewall rules onto their Cloudflare setup.
They are both on Mediavine, and thanks to their checking, we have vetted that the blocked bot list will not interfere with their ads.
I’ll keep you posted as I gather test results over September.
Base64 image placeholders
One of my new clients on Kadence has an odd CLS issue that has to do with the logo image load order.
It had lazy load applied to it, which it should not have.
And I thought me and Emre, who is the dev of WP Fastest Cache had it worked out for any images in the viewport not to have the lazy tag applied.
There is a workaround for using a Base64 placeholder image instead of a jpg or gif.
And I’m working with my new client to see if it will negatively impact SEO or not.
We do have an alternative for it in place now, which doesn’t bother SEO. But it has limitations and I’d like to find a more global way of dealing with this issue.
All this testing is the real power of our BB Hub village. And I’m delighted that my site audit clients are so willing to help me help us all.
That’s all the happenings around here. Let’s jump into this week’s tips.
SEO Tips
Bing Submission API is out of beta
You may recall months ago that I reported that Bing submitted a proposal to WP to have it natively ping all major search engines when you published or edited content. That hasn’t gone anywhere yet.
And, you may recall me reporting in the last few months about the extreme hits we are taking on our hosting resources due to all of the new SEO agencies crawling our sites and giving our info to our competition.
Plus, you may recall me reporting that there is a very serious issue with hackers masking as bingbots and hitting our sites to the tune of 15k/mo.
But there has been no legit way to stop that.
There may be now.
Bing released a new submission API earlier this year. It’s just been launched from beta and I have it on my test list for us.
I want to check the auto submission with it for both publishing new posts as well as updating old ones.
And what has me so excited about it is that this means the bingbot does not have to crawl your site at all because all of the HTML is also submitted. So it can pick up the title, featured image, excerpt, plus everything else in the post via that automated submission.
And we may be able to entirely block the bingbot and foil these hacker hits too.
Google News expands beyond AMP
I’m super happy to hear this news.
Google has dropped its AMP requirement for posts appearing in its News carousel on mobile.
I think all of the big entities that spent thousands upon thousands of dollars to implement AMP finally figured out what I saw right away – and that is AMP will drop your revenue lower than whale poop.
From Day 1 I told my peeps not to use it. And the few who didn’t listen to me found out the hard way that I was right. And they had an awful time removing all that AMP stuff and taking huge 404 hits on all of the missing AMP links on all of their posts.
Is Google Reader coming to Chrome
And I think I know why Google made this announcement. It is beta testing a new RSS subscription thingy in the Chrome browser.
You may recall a few years ago that Google suddenly dropped the Google Reader, which was devastating to all RSS power subscribers, like me. It’s the only way I can keep up with the 80-100 blogs I have to track a week for industry news. No way could I stand all of those email notifications in my inbox!!!
We all switched over to the Feedly RSS subscription service.
I’m going to be keeping my eye on this Chrome thing and see if Google promotes it, and RSS feeds in general.
And I’ll have more info for you as I get it. But I’m not putting it on my test list for now.
What I will be doing is revising my post on RSS feeds, as way too many bloggers have that setup wrong in the first place, which makes it easy for scrapers, or they have turned it off to force folks to get on their optin list, which is a huge mistake, in my opinion.
One SEO Rich Results focus per post
Google wants us to use schema markup to help it better understand the content in our post.
Schema markup are sets of extra tags that help link pieces of content into lumps.
Like all the stuff your recipe plugin outputs.
Instead of looking at each of those lines of content as single things, schema markup lumps them all into a connected set of content under the main recipe schema.
So, when Google sees the word Nutrition in your post, it also sees the schema markup tag for nutrition and understands the hierarchical flow of those tags and that all of them belong to the recipe.
You can see more Recipe schema markup here.
And that schema also includes things that Google considers Rich Results. That’s the stuff you see at the top of Google Search in the recipe carousel for the ones it wants to feature.
And there are all kinds of top-level schema outputs, like for a video, and for the person who wrote the post. Even the post itself has special schema markup to tell Google that it’s a post, and what kind of post, like a Recipe one.
Google eats that stuff like candy.
But it has to be done properly.
Like I said, schema is a hierarchy.
There are only so many branches you can have from the main trunk before Google gets confused.
And obviously, some folks are thinking that the more different kinds of schema they can throw in a post, the better.
Well, it’s gotten so bad that Google’s spokesperson, John Mueller, has even come flat out and said that each post needs to have one SEO target.
So, if you have a recipe post, then the schema focus needs to be about the recipe, because that’s what you want to rank that post for.
If you throw in a video, with all of its schema markup, you could confuse Google, as that is a separate branch.
Proper SEO takes deep testing
Folks, this is precisely why I’m devoting weeks of time to do all of these case studies for my Video SEO Booster course and for the DIY SEO course.
Turn off native theme schema markup
So far I’ve discovered how your theme’s native schema markup output is confusing the heck out of Google, and how to turn that stuff off so Yoast SEO can take over.
Those tutorials are already in the courses. And I’ve passed those fixes over to my Webmaster Training folks too, as they are designers and they need to know for their clients.
Yoast and RankMath are not equivalent
I’ve also discovered that the schema markup that the Yoast SEO and RankMath plugins output are not at all equivalent.
Yoast outputs the same schema markup that Google’s own schema markup generator creates.
That’s one of the many reasons my SEO courses feature Yoast tutorials.
Recipe plugins output different schema
All recipe plugins are far from equivalent too.
Both the Create and WP Recipe Maker plugins output very different schema markup.
I think both of them will be fine to use. But, I’m still testing how they each integrate with Yoast.
Top down integration is key
And that’s the focus of my deep case study tests.
If you use an SEO plugin that outputs schema markup from the top of the post, the top of your pages, and for the tip top level of your site, every other schema outputting thing in the post has to coordinate with it.
Like for recipes, that literally has to be weaved into the full post schema markup output. Not all plugins do that well.
And this is why I’m testing the video SEO so deeply. The video schema markup from the Yoast Video SEO plugin outputs its own branch of tags for Google.
This level of SEO is very advanced.
And I’m getting to the root of what works and what doesn’t.
And, I’m actually vetting the best way to put a video in your recipe post, get all of the schema markup from both, and still have only one SEO focus for the post too.
Get the REAL SEO help you need
THIS is why my courses are like no other.
The info you get is tested, and it works, and you do better than your competition.
My SEO course members are on Page 1 of Google and Bing.
Their stuff is in all manner of Featured Snippets like recipe carousels and how-to videos.
They get 4000% increase in search traffic. Just think what that would do for your optins and ad revenue!
Thank you for your patience as I continue to sort through the mountains of data and keep running tests to prove what works and what doesn’t. And I’ll continue adding these tutorials, with deeply vetted info, to the courses.
Marketing Tips
22 expert ideas for connecting with your audience
Ooooo, I really liked this post from the nice folks at the Content Marketing Institute.
You know, 2020 was a tough year of isolation for a lot of folks, including me. I live alone and all of the IRL activities I like to do got shut down. And that meant no face-to-face interaction for me.
But, I did take more time to chat live with my clients, mainly to see how they were faring and what their plans were to roll with the punches. And I have continued that practice ever since.
I’ve always known about the power of in-person video, especially for live events. Blab exploded the popularity of BlogAid because of it.
But, with the year or so of isolation so many folks have had, live and/or in-person video has taken on super powers. Even recorded videos are doing better. And audio-only platforms are springing up all over.
Folks being able to hear your voice and see your face are super ways to connect directly with your audience.
And if you’re wondering how to best make use of all manner of ways to connect, be sure to read this post for 22 tips that will get your creative juices revved up.
Plus, these tips are great for blog posts, or even social media posts too.
Things like taking questions from your audience.
Calling out someone’s name for sending in the question makes it personal and personable. Everyone can feel that you are actually connected to your followers that way, and they feel more connected to you too.
There’s another tip in the post to talk about your values.
I think my candid, straight shooting style is exactly what draws folks to me, and why so many folks have been clients for over a decade. I show my values to them, even if I don’t talk about them directly. It matters.
And that reminds me of something that’s not in the article. One of my buddies often talks about her cat, or takes photos with him. That endears her to every cat lover.
You just never know what there is about you that other folks will embrace, so share yourself and let folks know just how real you are and that you care about their success.
I know I do!!!
My returning clients are the very heart of my business. So, I’m deeply concerned about your success and helping you with any hurdles you face.
Wrap Up
That’s a wrap for this week’s Tips Tuesday.
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