Tips Tuesday – DIY SEO, Keywords for SEO, Site Speed

Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!

Tips this week include:

• The Gutenberg Blocks I’ve been checking into
• A new DIY SEO Booster Program launching soon
• An update on my joyful progress with Heartwood Art
• A reminder to delete WP-Optimize
• What’s up with Google indexing podcast feeds now
• Why you should mix in synonyms and related keywords with your focus keyword
• An update on the disk overage issue caused by Pretty Links
• Major issues at A2 Hosting
• Updates to the GTMetrix site performance checker
• How to test your site speed accurately

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Join me Live to Discuss Tips Tuesday

I hope you’ll join for tonight’s livestream at 9pm ET / 6pm PT on the BlogAid Facebook Page. It’s a great way to get the deeper story on what’s reported in Tips Tuesday. And, I almost always have breaking news for the day too. So come join us live for the party.

Replay

BlogAid Happenings

Another super busy week here full of site audit client work, checking into new Gutenberg blocks, creating a new booster program for the DIY SEO course, and making a new post for Heartwood Art.

Get Your Back to School Site Service Request in Now

If you’re wanting any type of site service, whether an audit or other services after the kids go back to school, best to get your request in soon.

I’m finishing up now with the requests that came in June and early July and lots of folks requested to start their project in early August. So, I’m going to be pretty booked into September in the next few weeks.

So, if you’re just waiting for the kids to go back to school and want to get your site stuff done before the holiday season kicks into high gear, now is the time to make that request and get on my wait list.

Gutenberg Block Vetting

I was hoping to get a few new tutorials into the Gutenberg course before time ended for folks who signed up on Teachable. That time comes to an end on July 31.

I’ve tested 12 new blocks this month and they were either duds or simply replicated block suites already covered in the course that are by developers I believe will stick around.

Thanks to the folks who are in the course on Teachable for jumping on the extension discount and moving on over to the course on the BlogAid Learning Center. 

DIY SEO Booster Program Launching Soon

We’ve got several new folks in the DIY SEO course who took advantage of the summer sale a couple of weeks ago.

And, I know many of you got started on the content revamp work from the last couple of live workshops, but didn’t finish.

So, I’m putting together a booster program full of quick tips to help you make your way through the course, double check a few settings that may have changed, and to get back on the bandwagon with your content revamp too.

Look for emails on the launch in August.

Heartwood Art Update

I interrupted my new workbench build to get out another one of those evergreen, pillar posts and videos made for the woodworking site. It took me all week!

The main reason I had to disrupt my plans was because I could never remember the confusing settings for making pocket holes into woods of different thicknesses.

So, I made a tutorial post and video on it that includes a chart for reference.

And I printed out that chart and put it in my workshop for my own use.

After I finish this current build and post, hopefully this week, I need to stop all building and turn my full attention to making the website itself a money maker.

I’ll have a new post for you on those plans in the hobby to money-making site series soon.

Delete WP-Optimize Now

Just a quick reminder to delete the WP-Optimize plugin if you haven’t done so already.

You can see more on why in last week’s Tips Tuesday as well as what to replace it with.

That’s all the news from around here. Let’s jump into this week’s tips.

SEO Tips

Yoast 11.7 to index podcast feed

Team Yoast announced last week that Google is now indexing podcast feeds and that the Yoast SEO 11.7 update will provide the necessary schema markup to make that happen.

But, their post on it was super shy on details.

I didn’t have time to check into it last week, but it is on my to do list to get the skinny on it for us.

Why You Should Use Synonyms and Related Keywords

For those who are trying to rank for certain keywords and phrases, be sure that you don’t overuse them.

Google’s AI (Artificial Intelligence) is approaching the aptitude of human readers now.

That means you need to mix things up a bit and use synonyms too.

So, if I use the words learn, teach, and classes in a post, Google is going to get the idea that I’m talking about a course.

And mixing it up like this makes the copy more interesting for humans too.

So, go read this post from Yoast to get a better idea of how you should regard keyword density in 2019 and stop going for that green dot on just one phrase.

Plugin Tips

Pretty Links Could Cause Host Disk Space Overages

If you’re subscribed to BlogAid News then you got the post about an unfortunate issue with the big 3.0 update for the Pretty Links plugin.

It was causing some folks to experience massive PHP errors and that error log was filling up into the GBs and causing folks to run out of disk space at their host.

The 3.0.6 update fixed it.

But, you may still need to get rid of that file and recreate it. Be sure to see my post for more. 

Be sure you are following BlogAid on Facebook as that’s where I first announced this issue in a BlogAid Today livestream.

Hosting Tips

Issues at A2 Hosting

A2 sent out an email letting folks know about a big cPanel update they would be doing and I think that’s in August, but maybe it has already happened.

And I took that as the only official word they have released about whether or not they will be sticking with cPanel or not. I guess so, at least for now.

But they are having issues right now with the servers. 

I experienced serious issues with logging into cPanel or updating files while doing a loyalty audit for one of my site audit clients over the weekend.

A loyalty audit is a checkup that my clients, who previously had an audit, get every 12-18 months and I just update things as I go because security and other coding changes all the time.

Plus, I saw that there is still an intermittent issue with browser caching not working.

And my webmasters have been reporting 503 and other errors at A2 all weekend.

Running into this goofiness at A2 just reinforced why I left there and moved to NameHero, where I’ve been running without downtime and glitches for over 6 months now.

Ready to Move to Better Hosting?

See my Migration Checklist for all the steps you need to take to move to a new host.

And if you’re not up for that, contact me and I’ll be happy to project manage it for you.

And you can get my affiliate link for NameHero on my Resources page.

Speed Tips

GTMetrix adds waterfall and browser updates

My workhorse site performance checker is WebPage Test, which is now owned by Google.

In fact, the developer who created it began working for Google a couple of years ago and I guess Google decided to buy it. But, don’t let that worry you, it’s still being run by the original developer.

One of the reasons I like that tester so much is that it was the only one to show HTTP/2 push requests and had the latest Chrome browser emulations. 

That means you get accurate test results for the real world.

Now GTMetrix is trying to play catch up and has finally added HTTP/2 push requests and a better Chrome browser emulation. And it’s a good sister tester if you get a free account with them so you can run from somewhere other than Vancouver Canada. But that’s still the only place you can run a real mobile test from.

So, I’m sticking with WebPage Test for now.

READ: How to Test Your Site Speed Accurately for running performance checks just like I do.

Wrap Up

That’s a wrap for this week’s Tips Tuesday.

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