Tips Tuesday – Instagram NFTs, SEO Plugins, DIY SEO Tutorials, Full Site Editing Themes

Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!

Tips this week include:

• New tutorials in the DIY SEO course
• Get your holiday discount on all BlogAid courses
• I’m making my list and checking it twice for the new live sessions in the BB Hub
• A recap on last week’s State of the Word address and what I was relieved to hear
• Where we are with Full Site Editing compatible themes
• The WordPress Betas continue to roll out
• Issues with the All in One SEO plugin and why I advocate only using Yoast SEO
• Does John Mueller know anything about Google Search or not?
• Why I’m excited about TikTok testing a desktop streaming app
• Why I’m cautiously optimistic about Instagram exploring NFTs for your images

Listen to the Podcast

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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

Happy first day of winter or spring, depending on where you are in the world!

I know everyone is crazy busy for the next week or so and I appreciate your time to still stay up to date with Tips Tuesday.

DIY SEO tutorials updated

Besides our live workshops, the course has several standing tutorial sections, including:

• How to check your theme schema markup output – this is a big one for folks using Astra, Kadence, and GeneratePress themes
• Yoast SEO 
• Google Connections for Analytics and Search Console – the entire Analytics section has been revamped and also now includes how to downgrade from the inaccurate GA4 to the original UA tracking
• Google Search Console – how to use it to see ranking and crawl errors, and all of the new reports they have added recently are in there too
• Bing Webmaster Tools
• Google Web Stories

Folks new to the course should take all of these tutorials.

In early January, we’ll start our Quick Checks which are great for folks who have been in the course for a while to ensure they are up on the latest changes.

This week I’m working on the live Workshop updates, and there will be a couple of new ones.

We’ll be starting those workshops in mid January.

Get Your Holiday Deals

All BlogAid courses are on sale right now – including:

• DIY SEO
• Gutenberg Ninja
• Video SEO Booster
• Webmaster Training

These are by far the best investment you can make for your site success – just see the testimonials from those in the course who are enjoying a 4000% increase in SEO traffic or are able to build their own sites with Gutenberg, or the designers who have increased their business significantly from knowing the tech side of things with site security, speed, HTTPS, and more.

Site Services Update

I sent an email to all the folks on the wait list who are new to me with the updated info about site audits and info to help them self-vet if a “done with you” or “done for you” service is the best fit. 

I’m still waiting for a few folks to reply, even though I’ve already sent a couple of emails.

I’ve also had a couple of folks let me know they could not wait and have already moved on to other services – but decided not to let me know, and of course their place on the waitlist impacts when I tell folks their project will come up. 

That sort of thing happens when the wait list is long. Or, folks have major life events and need to postpone or cancel for now. And it’s pretty easy to forgive those folks for not letting me know as their site is usually the last thing on their minds when such things happen.

But things like this are also why I have to give you a best guess on timing for your project too. So, I appreciate you understanding and I really appreciate the folks who can start early if your project suddenly shoots to the top!!

This past week I did take a little break between projects closing and before opening new ones so I could devote some uninterrupted days to making new tutorials for the DIY SEO course.

I’ll be onboarding a few more clients this week so we’ll stay on track for folks we guesstimated for December.

New site services requests are holding for the Feb/March timeframe, best guess.

BB Hub Happenings

This week I’m busy making the calendar for our live sessions schedule.

We really enjoyed all of the masterminds we did earlier this year, and BB Hub members can watch the replays in your membership area on the BlogAid Learning Center where all courses except for Webmaster Training are housed.

And, we’ll be kicking off our new sessions with our annual Site Success briefing on what you will want to focus on for 2022 to get massive traffic and make more money.

We also have lots of new projects coming after holidays for:

• Code name IDA
• Selling digital downloads
• Membership sites
• Video challenges – especially from coaches who help camera-shy folks

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

WordPress Tips

State of the Word Recap

Last week, Matt Mullenweg delivered his annual State of the Word address to a small, invited audience in New York and I encourage you to watch the replay.

The big takeaway for me is that the upcoming WP 5.9 release will complete the launch of Phase 2 of Gutenberg, as it brings in the rest of the fundamental code for FSE (Full Site Editing) so that everything on your site can be a Gutenberg block.

Full Site Editing Compatible Themes

He also mentioned that there are only 28 Full Site Editing compatible themes at the moment – at least in the WP themes repository.

And the sigh of relief I had during the speech was that WP intended to stay here with development and allow FSE to mature, which will also allow all of the popular theme frameworks we use to catch up – including themes like Genesis, Astra, Kadence, and GeneratePress. In fact, Genesis is already on top of this with their own FSE compatible theme. I haven’t heard word from Astra or Kadence as both of them sell a pro version for styling the header/footer and other areas that FSE will make into blocks.

I don’t think FSE in WP is ready for primetime yet. In fact, earlier this year I predicted it wouldn’t be until at least the middle of 2022. And I’m standing by that until we see more of what Astra and Kadence do.

If I needed a new theme right now or even through 2022, I’d go with the frameworks as they are at the moment and not give it a second thought. They are stable and will continue to be supported for a few years to come.

WP 5.9 Beta 3 is out

And I expect Beta 4 to release this week, if not today.

I’m waiting for the RC1 (Release Candidate 1) to roll out the first week of January before I start updating my Gutenberg Ninja tutorials. And I plan to have those out for y’all by the time WP 5.9 releases to the public around Jan 25.

Be sure you are subscribed to BlogAid News as those are the only folks who will get my upgrade instructions when I feel it is safe to change to WP 5.9.

WP Performance Team Update

I’m not sure what’s going on with the Measurement team.

There is not a word in the last 2 meeting recaps about anything me or others proposed or offered for help with speed testing. The Point of Contact for the Measurement group seems to be blowing off my offers too. And the folks who were so excited about it seem to have had water thrown on their fire as well.

What I’m finding is that some of these folks have their own plans and it really doesn’t matter what anyone else says or offers or does. They are going to go forward with their plans.

They do have a Performance plugin ready for folks to test, which seems insane to me as no one has agreed to any testing standards yet.

Well, the best I know how to do at this time is to set up my own test site for a baseline, and then with the common speed drags I see in site audits and then throw that plugin on there to see if there are any speed changes or if there is anything that borks the site.

I’ll keep you posted.

SEO Tips

All in One SEO Plugin Security Issues

The patches have been released, so hopefully all is well now.

But, if you use this plugin, be aware that it and RankMath are in no way equivalent to the Yoast SEO plugin – and I have the schema markup output test data to prove it.

If you’re using anything other than Yoast because of rumors and myths about its speed, or simply because you like the interface of the others better, or worse, because Yoast has had a glitch now and then, you’re not doing yourself any SEO favors.

Yoast has the same schema markup output as what the Google schema creation tool outputs itself. The others output different schema markup.

And every other specialty plugin you want to use for Rich Results, like for recipes and video, all integrate perfectly with Yoast, not the others.

Now, it may be a bit of a pain to switch, especially from the All in One SEO plugin, so you may want to clone your site to try that. Yoast does have tools to help, but they are not foolproof. 

Plus, the only things you’re likely to pull over are any meta descriptions, which Google doesn’t always pay attention to anyway, or settings on individual pages for nofollow, noindex or such.

All of the rest of the global settings are far too different between the plugins to import, so you’ll want to set those up in Yoast anyway.

And I show you how to do just that in my DIY SEO course.

John Mueller Doesn’t Know Anything About Google Search

I found this post over on NameHero’s Startup blog pretty funny.

Basically, they call out John Mueller for what he is, a spokesperson for Google.

They also cite the recent incident where John was asked about whether there would be another big Google algorithm update before the end of the year. John replied that it’s hard to say in advance. And then the next day a big core update rolled out.

I would not say that is conclusive evidence that John doesn’t know search. It is evidence that he’s not privy to what the engineers plan to do day to day.

And when a site owner complained to John that his site’s rankings dropped within hours of the rollout, John replied that was unlikely as the updates could take 1-2 weeks to roll out.

Well, maybe this particular update didn’t take that long.

The post goes on to say that John has no technical knowledge of how the algorithms work.

The truth is, nobody does. A lot of it is based on AI learning at this point.

I think John has his place as a person trying to answer questions. But like the article says, those of us with skin in the game, and who do our own technical analysis, already know whatever he might say. And we also are a lot more aware of when a core algorithm update rolls out, even if it is entirely unannounced.

To be honest, I’ve stopped trying to cover such news for the DIY SEO group as even the pros have a hard time sorting out the what and why of what they are seeing in their tech analysis. Sometimes we know what Google is targeting. Sometimes we don’t. And sometimes our rankings just got caught in the fray of a broad update and bounce back later.

What we do know is that Google will never tell us the whole truth about what they are up to, and John Mueller doesn’t have a better chance of knowing those things than we do.

If you do want to follow all of the bumps in the road closely, then check out Search Engine Roundtable.

Marketing Tips

Tiktok Tests Desktop Streaming App 

I’m pretty stoked about this!!

I’m already seeing folks do interviews on TikTok where they have 2 folks on the show, and it is laid out like it’s coming from desktop. I assume that is some sort of OBS hookup.

Since I need to wait until January to start my deep dive into TikTok courses and such, I think I’m going to keep an eye on this app and maybe wait for it to become available for some of the videos I want to make, including doing the Tips Tuesday livestream there – and if I can work it out, I’ll do it on both Facebook and Tik Tok, we’ll see.

But, it will also help me do news alerts on TikTok too, instead of taking an image of the news source on my phone and then doing a greenscreen thing over it, which is what I would have to do now.

That’s a lot of work to splice stuff together and such.

So, I really do hope this desktop app rolls out to everyone sooner rather than later, as I think a lot of folks are more comfortable using the desktop setup they already have for making in-person videos now too.

Instagram Actively Exploring NFTs

In the crypto world, everybody and their brother seem to be getting into the NFT game.

An NFT is a Non-Fungable Token and you may want to Google that to learn more about them.

In fact, music and art NFTs selling for millions is what got me interested in crypto earlier this year.

Since then, I’ve decided to stay away from them and the metaverses and go an entirely other direction with my crypto investing, which is more on the infrastructure and tech side. And I’ll circle back to NFTs once they become a utility for things like buying real-world goods, like airline tickets and such.

But, image NFTs are most certainly going to impact the blogging world, especially sites where images are their main draw.

And now Instagram seems to be beating Pinterest to the punch by exploring how their platform can make the best use of NFTs.

They are looking into Collectibles – and those things have garnered 10s of 1000s of dollars for their creators.

But here’s what they aren’t telling you.

Collectible creators are now spending $20k-$60k to get their artwork and smart contracts made, plus the marketing necessary to propel them into being a real money maker.

They are competing directly with gamer-related industries and metaverse-related industries – companies like Nike and Addidas and Disney and Marvel and such.

So, we’ll see what becomes of this on Instagram. Just know however exciting it is, you may not want to be the guinea pig for it. Even Addidas got ripped off by a smart coder who knew how to run end around the limit of only buying 2 of the new releases.

And some hackers are using ignorance of how to be secure with crypto to rip off platforms and exchanges and investors every day to the tune of millions of dollars each hack.

And now you know why I turned my attention to more functional investments for now.

But, you also now know why I’ll be looping back, as this is where image ownership is going. They just need to get the methods and security worked out first.

Wrap Up

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

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