Tips Tuesday – Genesis Pro, On Page SEO, Yoast Update, Gutenberg News

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Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!

Tips this week include:

Getting to the bottom of the DNS and SSL changes by cPanel
An update on YouTube API and Yoast Video SEO plugin issues
Deep dive into on-page SEO series of workshops begins this week
Why the price is going up on the DIY SEO course
Why I’m researching best ways to stream interviews
Upcoming webinar on basic theme design principles
Why I’m making video such a huge priority
How to safely update to Yoast SEO 14
The real story in the GoDaddy data breach last week
What the release of the new Genesis Pro launch means for site owners and designers
A free Gutenberg webinar is coming soon

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Join me Live to Discuss Tips Tuesday

I hope you’ll join for tonight’s livestream at 8pm ET / 5pm 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

Who I Help

All tips, advice, and suggestions in this, and all BlogAid posts and tutorials, are intended to empower DIY site owners who are not on hosting that is restrictive in what you can and can’t do with your site and hosting setup.

BlogAid Happenings

It’s been a week full of dealing with vendor support on many fronts here, which I’ll tell you about in a moment.

Plus, I’ve been updating all of the last workshops for the DIY SEO course too, and I’ll share more on that in just a bit as well.

DNS and SSL Changes

As I reported in last week’s Tips Tuesday, cPanel has made 5 changes in the last 2 years about how AutoSSL finds the keys to renew our free SSL certificates. That tool is called AutoSSL.

Their latest way of doing it makes more sense than anything else, but it does not work consistently for folks that have had their site at the same host for a few years and are on Cloudflare. It also does not work well at all for migrating to a new host where old setups and keys are being copied.

The nice support folks at NameHero are helping me to dig into this issue because it has become a support time-sucking nightmare for us during both migrations and new account setups. They’ve had to call on cPanel support to get answers too, as there is very little about it in the cPanel documentation.

I plan to post about it on the cPanel community forum and raise a stink about them not thinking outside the box on this with regard to folks changing hosts all the time and having 3rd party security like Cloudflare.

They’ve made a real mess for everyone.

I believe we’re going to hear more site owners screaming about losing their HTTPS status as the year goes on too, so I’m doing whatever it takes to get ahead of this and get my Webmaster Designers and site audit clients squared away and well ahead of this curve.

While everyone else panics and tries to get help from hosts who have no clue what’s going on, we’ll be calmly going about our business.

Yoast Video SEO Plugin Issues

In October I installed the Yoast Video SEO plugin on my woodworking site, Heartwood Art. Within 2 weeks the SEO on those videos took off like crazy due to the extra schema markup boost.

I’ve been sharing those analytics with the folks in my DIY SEO course too, and they have been just as impressed as I have with the dramatic change.

I just discovered that the plugin has not been picking up the videos in my posts since late February, though.

I contacted Yoast support, since it’s a paid plugin, and they said YouTube has changed their API and limits how many videos can be picked up by the plugin a day.

Well, we worked through trying to resolve that, and that didn’t fix it.

So, they are now looking on my site for the setup I use to see what they can find.

I use a custom iframe code so that it only shows more of my own videos as suggestions at the end.

And that’s also so Lazy Load can work on that iframe to help with speed.

READ: How to embed video using iframe for faster page loads

Plus, I’m using the Custom HTML block in Gutenberg to embed that iframe code.

So, there’s a lot going on here for them to check and compare to posts from Oct to early Feb that are working still.

I’ll keep you posted on what we find. I just wanted to let you know in case any of you were thinking about buying that plugin.

Deep Dive Into On-Page SEO

We finished all of the new workshops in the DIY SEO course for:

Keywords
Ranking Factors
Building a Content Silo

I sent out a survey to all members and they had very positive feedback for the new workshops.

Last week we covered the Special Formatting for all of the various ways to format your content that can get you to page 1 of Google.

And now we are coming into the home stretch with a deep dive into on-page content SEO.

We’ll start with pages and then do blog posts, as they are different.

And then we begin our series on how to do a content audit and revamp.

This week I’m in the process of splitting up the last workshops into some video tutorials to make it super easy for you to quickly reference different processes for revamping content.

First we do an audit, then we make a plan, and then I take you through exactly how to implement that plan. The how-to parts are what I’m splitting up this time around.

Price Going Up on the DIY SEO Course

With all of these new workshops, plus the fact that we do live workshops instead of just throwing you into endless videos, plus having support in our private Facebook group, plus constantly updating the course, it’s definitely time to raise the price on it.

It’s currently $197 and should be at least $400.

Some folks have been in the course ever since it started about 4 years ago and they got grandfathered into the lowest renewal rate too.

Folks who have come in recently have an insanely discounted renewal too, that they are grandfathered into as well.

SEO changes all the time, plus you have to take this stuff in chunks if you have an older site with lots of content. You can’t do it all in just one year. Those are the reasons why folks stay in the course. They are seeing results and they want more of it!!!!

So, if you’ve been thinking about getting your SEO into high gear, now is the time to jump on the boat!!!

When the course price goes up, the renewal rate will too. And you’ll be grandfathered in at the lowest rate.

It takes time for SEO to catch fire – usually about 6 months. So if you start now you’ll be hitting it just right for the holiday season.

And, you know you really need to diversify your traffic stream away from just relying on Pinterest.

If you are a Site Audit Plus client in the BB Hub, or if you’re in the Gutenberg Ninja course, or in the Webmaster Training course, you have a standing discount already.

Just look in your member area for the discount code.

And if you are a Webmaster, keep in mind that the DIY SEO course is on a different membership site, so you do have to register anew. You can use the same login as your Webmaster membership, it’s just a different link to get to the other member site.

Streaming Interviews

My site services client load normally drops a bit this time of year. So, I always plan my big research and testing duties for late spring through the summer.

I give about 3 months of time to these projects.

Last year it was revamping the Heartwood Art site to go fully Gutenberg and get a totally new theme. And then switching over both of my member sites from WishList Member to MemberPress, which ended up being a nightmare from hell that we thought would never end.

And then I ran my first ever summer sales event and was overwhelmed with site service business. So that took up the rest of my free time and I didn’t get any research done that I had planned for the summer.

The big research was how best to start livestreaming interviews again.

Well, that’s top of the list for this year now.

In fact, it has become so important that I’ve postponed most of the in-depth speed tests I had scheduled for May.

Basic Design Principles

As you know, I’ve been suggesting that folks seriously consider Astra Themes as a super alternative to Genesis.

When coupled with Gutenberg, it’s a powerful combo that results in a fast site that you can design yourself.

Well, what me and my designers have now discovered is that folks go crazy on the design aspects and use techniques that result in actually slowing down their sites and lack of good mobile-responsiveness, and zero ADA compliance.

So, with having the premiere Gutenberg course, I feel obligated to address this issue so that more folks can do the basic design and still call in a designer for the final tweaks in a way that the whole thing doesn’t have to be rebuilt from scratch.

This gave me high motivation to switch up my research schedule and put streaming interviews at the top of my list so I can bring in my designers to address these concerns and at least give folks an overview of basic design principles and point out the big no-nos to avoid.

I already use the paid version of Zoom for my client meetings and workshops and such.

I could just record the Zoom interview and have it as a replay uploaded to both Facebook and YouTube, but I had rather stream it live too.

I don’t care for Zoom’s even higher dollar webinar app. I think the setup is ugly and their big honking logo on it is tacky as hell.

So, I’m looking into ways to use OBS for streaming Zoom to Facebook and then putting the recording up on YouTube. It’s way easier on the guest than streaming live on YouTube.

I’m also looking into a plugin that streams Zoom directly to your site. The problem with that is integrating comments, but maybe they have fixed that by now, as the plugin has been out for a while.

So, lots for me to check into and test.

But I’m looking forward to doing client interviews again too!!!! That way you can hear from your peers what it’s like to go through a site audit and all the good things that came of it.

Video is HUGE

The other reason for me to devote time to this livestream research is simple. Video is huge!!!

Livestreams get big reach on Facebook.

That’s not true of YouTube.

So, that’s why I’m focused on finding ways to livestream on Facebook and simply uploading the recording to YouTube. I can do just fine with my SEO on YouTube and get plenty of views there.

Plus, this gives me more umph on the post where the video is embedded, and that’s good for my regular SEO and such too, as my DIY SEO folks have seen as my Heartwood Art site has grown because of it. That’s been my test case for all of this. And I want some more of that video love on BlogAid beyond site tech and how-to tutorials that go out of date in a year.

I hope all of this encourages you to find a way to get into video and then expand on what you’re doing with it over time too.

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

Plugin Tips

How to Safely Update Yoast SEO

I’ve updated all of my sites to Yoast SEO 14.0.4.

So, I’m calling it good to go at this point.

See my post on how to safely do the update.

Security Tips

GoDaddy Data Breach

There was a leak of data at GoDaddy last week that got a lot of press because it affected 28,000 customers.

That’s seriously a drop in the bucket when you consider how many 100s of 1000s of hosting clients they have.

And the SSH logins that got shared are not even the real story.

The story is that one of their support reps got tangled in a phishing email scam. And that was the root cause of the data breach.

As I’ve been reporting in Tips Tuesday for the last couple of months, hackers are drooling themselves right now over so many folks working from home on unsecured devices. And they are causing all manner of hacked sites. One of the exploits to worm their way in is through phishing emails.

So, you need to be super vigilant about any vendor related emails you receive. No matter how official they look, never click on the link. Instead, log into the vendor site and check if something’s up.

Last week I also reported that site hack attacks are on the rise.

If you have not had a site audit, or if it has been more than 18 months since your last checkup, I guarantee that your site security is out of date.

Contact me and let’s get you back to square.

Theme Tips

Genesis Pro is Launching

In a recent Tips Tuesday I reported on the latest Genesis Shapers meeting and that they are discussing how they need to radically change Genesis to get ahead of the curve with Full Site Editing that is coming to WordPress either late this year or early next and how it will completely revolutionize all theme development and design as Gutenberg becomes that full site editor.

I’ve also been reporting in recent Tips Tuesdays on those plans, if you want to see the full back story.

And I’ve been begging my Webmaster Designers to get on the Gutenberg train for nearly 2 years now. In fact, I have given them an insane discount on my Gutenberg Ninja course as an incentive.

Well, here we are.

Genesis is releasing a completely rebuilt version of the framework that will fully support Full Site Editing via Gutenberg.

WPEngine now owns Genesis/StudioPress and that’s where they are releasing it first, to their hosting clients. This will be like a beta run before they make it available to the public.

It is an add on and is not required, nor will it affect current themes built on Genesis.

I think this is insanely smart, as it’s the only way to support the customer and designer base they have now while walking everyone into the future.

If you are a designer, even if you don’t use Genesis, please read this article.

The clock is ticking on the way you currently do design now, and you don’t want to be out of business this time next year because you delayed too long on just how fast Gutenberg is taking over and just how fast end users are gravitating toward using that editor.

Gutenberg aware designers will be in higher demand in the next year too. In fact, that’s the only kind of design projects I have to send to my webmasters these days. And it has been that way for months with more coming.

Gutenberg Tips

The Future of WordPress: The Block Editor is Here to Stay

If you’re one of those folks who has always heard horrible things about Gutenberg, or tried it in the early days before it became actually ready for prime time, you are way behind in your news.

Even WPTavern has had to publish a post to quiet all the folks who said they don’t want to hear so much news about Gutenberg.

Honey, Gutenberg IS the news!

Gutenberg Webinar Coming

If you didn’t get to catch my free Gutenberg webinar back in January, that’s okay.

I’ll be doing another one very soon.

We cover all of your pressing questions about it and show you real-world examples of just how powerful Gutenberg has become and what you can build with it.

I’ll be sending out webinar invitations to BlogAid News subscribers first, as virtual seating is limited.

So make sure you’re on that list.

Wrap Up

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

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