Tips Tuesday – Live Interviews, Better SEO, Site Speed and Ranking

Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!

Tips this week include:

• How are you doing and how are you pivoting your business
• Client interviews are coming very soon
• An update on the DNS and SSL hoohaa
• Why so many of my clients are combining a host migration with a site audit to save money
• Theme speed case study is about to start
• Whether or not site speed is a ranking factor
• How speed matters for so much more than just ranking
• A brief history of Google algorithm updates that will help you do better SEO
• WordPress will definitely support native XML sitemap generation in the next release
• An update on the Yoast Video SEO issue and what it took to fix it

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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

I want to know – how are you doing?

Spring has sprung and more of the world is starting to open back up.

And more and more folks are getting CoVid language fatigue at this point.

I dropped that whole vibe about 3 weeks ago as two-thirds of my clients have been either unaffected or are booming.

I don’t watch much TV, but I’m noticing how odd it sounds for some businesses to keep using CoVid related language of “challenging times” or “uncertain times” in their messaging.

It’s sort of like a Christmas ad playing after New Years. 

I hope most of you have also made the switch in your content to the hopefulness that comes with spring, and the growth things that come with summer so you can catch that next wave.

That’s even if you are still dealing with family crawling all over each other and you haven’t gotten back to any sense of normalcy yet.

I believe that’s what our readers are craving from us now.

Pivoting your business

In the past few weeks I’ve helped a few of my travel site owner clients pivot to opening a second blog on a totally different topic and I’m delighted to see them taking off fast with it, as they have years of experience to apply and hit the ground running.

That’s especially true of knowing how to get their SEO honed in immediately too, as that takes longer to catch on.

I did the same thing when I started blogging again on Heartwood Art after having left the site stagnant for 4-5 years.

In about 6 months the SEO started catching fire and it is still the biggest driver of traffic along with my YouTube video SEO catching on fire now too. I’ll have more for you on that in a moment.

So, if you need help pivoting, let me know, I’m here for you.

Or, if you let a site go dormant and are now picking it up again, come get a site audit. I’m positive your security is way the heck out of date, and you might need to get it checked for hacks too. 

Plus, you’re now competing in much more crowded niches than back when you were first blogging and you need all of the speed and SEO and such you can get to run with the big dogs.

Plus, Gutenberg is the new way forward and my Gutenberg Ninja course will get you going fast with that too.

Client Interviews Coming Soon

I’m delighted to celebrate a major win with you!!

This past week I spent a couple of days learning OBS and how to integrate Zoom.

Everything was great until I got to the audio part when a guest was also on the call.

I spent another two days watching every YouTube video I could find and trying everything I could think of. 

No joy.

So, I spent the weekend looking into how to do all of this with vMix, which is what I use to do my livestreams to Facebook anyway. It’s the thing that lets me have the nice green screen behind me and such for Tips Tuesday Live and BlogAid Today urgent news releases over on the BlogAid Facebook page.

I had been using the cheaper Basic HD edition of vMix and decided to spend another $300 to go up to the full HD version that includes vMix Call, which allows just one caller, but that’s the majority of what I’ll be doing. There are even higher priced versions that allow more callers, but I don’t think I need those.

While that may sound like a lot of money, I’ve wasted more than that trying to get OBS and Zoom to work – way more. But that combo would have satisfied all of my needs, so I spent the time.

Most of the issues I ran into all along the way were due to the latest version of Zoom not working like older versions did, which is what all of the tutorials were made on. 

Well, Zoom has made a lot of updates for security lately, and will probably make more. So, that’s another reason for me to abandon trying to make the Zoom/OBS integration work as that combo will likely continue to be too unstable for me to rely on for promoted interviews. 

I’m not knocking Zoom in any way. I’m happy they are improving and plan to continue to use it for my client meetings and teaching the DIY SEO workshops. 

The other reason I’m willing to pay so much for upgrading vMix is that the whole point of this is to get a branded layout on the Facebook stream and have a good way to record in HD. And I can definitely do fancy layouts with vMix, I just never tried anything beyond my green screen needs. 

Otherwise I would just use Zoom meetings and stream straight to Facebook. It doesn’t have any branding options, so I may still use that for quickie guest things, which I plan to do too. And I may use it for streaming Zoom meetings into my private Facebook groups that support the classes I teach.

So, it’s good to have options that fit all of my needs.

Because of all that I learned from working with OBS and Zoom, and my familiarity with vMix already, I was able to get the vMix Call setup done in just a few hours. 

On Monday I ran live tests with Michelle Phillips of Codefetti and found a few kinks in the setup.

Once I got those fixed I ran a live test with Denise Wakeman of DeniseWakeman.com and streamed it into one of my private Facebook groups.

It worked flawlessly. And it only takes me minutes to setup for each show too.

I so appreciate their help and I’m looking forward to doing interviews with both of them very soon. And, I have more guests lined up that you’ll want to hear from as well, plus I’ll be contacting several of you to start my client interview series going again too.

All in all, I am beyond thrilled to once again be doing live interviews. This has been on my wish list since Blab shut down and I know for sure that it will be a conversion and revenue generator for me while making it super easy for you to get the info you want and need too. So win-win for sure.

DNS and SSL Hoohaa Update

The other thing that took up all of my free time this week was still working on the new cPanel changes that are throwing errors with some SSL certificates renewing.

Now, there is no issue with the certificates on the domain and www version of the domain renewing. So your main site SSL cert and HTTPS status are good.

All of the issues revolve around what’s called the Service sub-domains like cPanel, WHM, mail, webdisk, and webmail.

We need the cpanel and whm ones so we can securely log into those accounts with HTTPS encryption. The others we can exclude if needed, except if you need to login to the host to get your email that runs through it. Most of my peeps don’t run their email through their hosting.

So, there is only so much time I’m going to be able to devote to tracking down what’s going on with the other ones.

And I am so glad NameHero support is digging deep into it with me. For years I’ve just been on my own trying to figure out things like this, with no help from cPanel. This host is able to get us that help and get us some answers. So, I’m beyond grateful for this hero level of support for both me and my clients.

We’ve worked out a new migration process so that the SSL certificates and keys are not copied from the old host, or are wiped out after the migration, but prior to pointing the domain to the new host.

I’ll be testing out that process on the next migration request, likely later this week.

I’ll be making a tutorial for my Webmaster Training folks as soon as I know it works.

Get a Migration Audit Combo

And I hope this helps all site owners understand that migration from host to host is not simple like it used to be and that you would do well to hire informed help.

Many of my clients are combining migration with a site audit as so many of those checks overlap. 

And that saves them money.

And we’re all for saving money, right!!

Theme Speed Tests Coming

In last week’s Tips Tuesday I mentioned why doing live interviews has become a priority – mainly to get critically important news out to you for basic theme design best practices and big no-nos, and I’ve got an interview on rebranding your site coming up too, as lots of bloggers are doing that now as well.

And now that I believe I have the bulk of that streaming method worked out, I’m eager to return to doing speed test case studies.

Last month I released The Best Free Caching and Optimization plugin head-to-head tests.

And last month I purchased a new reseller account at NameHero so I could update my Webmaster tutorials for working with WHM, and setting up new cPanels for each site and such.

I plan to use that account for doing the next case study on head-to-head theme tests of Astra, Genesis, and Divi themes.

I’m also going to contact my Webmasters to see who knows about working with Elementor and doing landing page tests with it because it is so crazy load heavy – even beyond anything caching and optimization can cure, and I want the data to prove it. I’m going to test that against the same page created using only Gutenberg.

So, look for more on those tests, and I’ll be making all of the data available to my Webmasters so they can design super fast sites for their clients too.

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

SEO Tips

Is Site Speed a Ranking Factor or Not?

I was so glad to see this post from SEOwl that helps clarify recent statements from John Mueller of Google who said that speed is only a tiny ranking factor.

Turns out, speed is not a ranking factor at all. 

It’s a filter that determines whether your posts are even fast enough to consider for ranking.

Now, here’s what you need to understand about all this.

Google is going to filter first for THE most authoritative post on that topic which also closely matches the search query.

And then Google will filter for other factors like freshness and speed.

So, great content will always trump everything else.

And this is how older posts on slower sites can outrank newer posts on faster sites.

Speed matters for more than ranking

But, if you’re in a crowded niche and there are 10 other posts like yours, you need all of the perks you can get in those filters to get your content shown ahead of those others.

And that is where speed can definitely come into play.

That’s especially true if a good portion of your traffic comes from Pinterest.

A faster site is going to make folks stick around, and even sign up for your optin and follow you on social media.

Speed allows you to have a shot at building a tribe of repeat visitors who share your content too.

That way you are not working so hard to get a new set of 10,000 folks to your site every day or month.

Brief history of Google algorithm updates

Yoast is running a month-long celebration in honor of their 10 year anniversary. And I thought this post they made with a brief history of Google algorithm updates was very interesting.

In 2011 it was all about squelching black hat SEO and keyword stuffing and other sneaky tactics.

In 2015, with RankBrain, the focus shifted to understanding searcher intent.

And between those two things, Google is getting a lot closer to understanding content and the search needs like humans do things.

In the past couple of years especially, I have seen pro SEOs quit who are still trying to work the cracks and game the system with either gray or black hat tactics that are not working as well as they used to.

White hat SEO is all about creating quality content with all supporting perks such as content formatting and schema and such. 

That’s what I teach in my DIY SEO course and we are now into our deep dive of on-page SEO.

Last week we covered SEO for pages.

This week we’ll be covering SEO for blog posts, as SEO for those two things are different.

WordPress to natively support XML sitemaps

Since last year I’ve been reporting that WordPress and Google got into a room to talk about how WP could best natively support generating an XML sitemap for Google to crawl.

I also reported that they called in Joost de Valk to consult on this too.

Well, as reported last week on Search Engine Journal, the day for that becoming a reality is drawing near enough that Google is starting to talk about it publicly.

We should expect it to hit in the WP 5.5 update in August.

And it’s my bet that we will continue to use the XML sitemap generated by Yoast SEO instead, as it gives us far more control over what should be in our sitemap or not.

The WP version is slated to have a switch to turn it off. I’ve even heard that they may try to auto detect if an XML sitemap is already being generated by another plugin. I’m betting team Yoast asked for that.

So, I’ll keep you posted as that 5.5 update draws near later this summer.

And FYI, did you know that Yoast pays for developers to work exclusively on the WordPress core updates? Yep. The WordPress dev team is made up of a lot of volunteers and some of those are sponsored by companies as a way of giving back to the community. 

Thanks Yoast for all of the community support you sponsor!!! We appreciate it!

Yoast Video SEO plugin update

Woot! I’ve got another win to share.

Over the past couple of Tips Tuesdays I’ve been reporting on a bug in the Yoast Video SEO plugin where it was not picking up new video embeds.

Turns out that YouTube changed its API for connection to the site. And YouTube also put a limit on how many videos it would pick up a day.

Well, there was an update for those things in the Yoast Video SEO plugin just days after the YouTube changes.

I just never got notification of the plugin update.

On the Yoast site, you have to register your license for premium plugins, and then you’ll get notification of updates.

I had not taken that extra step to register. So, I was a few updates behind.

And now all is good with the plugin and it’s picking up all videos.

In the DIY SEO course, I’ve been sharing my Search Console and Google Analytics data for Heartwood Art, where I have that plugin installed, and it has been a dramatic increase in visibility due to the extra schema markup.

This is similar to what a recipe plugin does for you too.

So, definitely something worth purchasing, just remember to register it!!!

And no, I don’t have an affiliate link because they don’t have an affiliate program, but thanks for asking.

Wrap Up

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

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