Tips Tuesday – Short Videos Workshop, Google AI Mode, Rebranding a Site
Things are popping off everywhere this week. So we have a lot of helpful and informative tips today to keep you on top of things.
Tips this week include:
- Workshop to make easy, short videos
- Where did all of the big bloggers go?
- Why authenticity matters more than ever
- New Google AI Mode
- WP accessibility documentation
- How to rebrand a site the right way
- New site setup tutorials coming
- You get what you pay for with web work
- AI training and copyright
- New WordPress AI Team
- AI Site Builders vs real designers
- Digging into NotebookLM
DIY SEO Everywhere Happenings
Make Easy, Short Videos Workshop
Wow! We had such a great time with Stephanie Calahan in last week’s Instagram Strategies live chat!!!!! I KNEW we would be inspired, but Stephanie gave us specific, super easy things to make – and everybody lit on fire to do them!!!!
So this week, I’m putting together a new workshop for us to create 3 kinds of easy and fast videos on Canva with your existing images and content.
Y’all come!!! This is exactly the fun and fast craft lab that you’ve been looking for to get you started with making videos. They are so fast that you will be able to easily batch make them too!!!
Get in the Course!!
There have been 9 brand new workshops and masterminds added to the DIY SEO Everywhere course this year – and more on the way.
We have totally ignored doing SEO to please Google for now. We’re getting eyeballs in every other way, including platforms that use AI SEO/algorithms, which are EVERYWHERE now. That’s why I renamed the course to DIY SEO Everywhere!!
And hit me up for a $100 discount, as I am not making the code public.
Where Did All of the Big Bloggers Go?
I have to read a LOT to keep up with the fast-paced changes of WordPress, site security, SEO, content marketing, and more.
What you read in Tips Tuesday are the things I culled, which I believe will be most helpful to you.
And because my reading list is so long, I did not notice that I haven’t seen blog posts from several of the big content marketing folks I follow.
But over the weekend, I started clicking on all of those RSS feeds in Feedly to see when they last posted.
OMG!!!! Many have not posted at all in nearly a year!!!!!
And these are big, popular folks too, like ProBlogger, Convince & Convert, and more.
Or, they have severely limited their blogging efforts to maybe one post every month.
I found one, like the Content Marketing Institute, that has cut off its RSS feed from readers like Feedly. I suspect it was part of an effort to cut off AI bot crawlers, which I think is a mistake for bloggers like us. I found several other, non-blogger feeds that were unreachable by Feedly now too, and I’m betting it is for the same reason.
I’m not sure where all of these big bloggers went. But I am convinced that anyone who is still teaching traditional SEO aimed at ranking on Google is struggling to get eyeballs on their own content, or get folks interested in those outdated methods – they just don’t work now.
And that’s exactly why I turned the DIY SEO Everywhere course on its head this year.
We HAVE to adapt to thrive.
Authenticity Matters More Than Ever
One of the things we discussed in the Instagram Strategies session was how showing up as your authentic self was more important than ever now.
This post from Chris Reynolds on Jazz Sequence has a VERY hopeful tone about how important it is to keep it real – and human – during a time where it seems like AI is generating all of the content.
READ: Keep the Web Weird to inspire you to be the person who shows up to make a real connection with your human readers.
AI SEO Tips
New Google AI Mode
At their recent I/O conference, Google released a dozen new AI tools.
One of them is AI Mode.
It’s like Perplexity AI, but it uses Google’s Gemini 2.0 to let you not only search, but chat with it to find deeper info.
This is in addition to their AIO (AI Overviews), which displays in regular Google Search, and gives a list of AI summarized responses with links for more info. You just can’t chat with it.
My bet is that both surface the same responses.
And this is the first thing I’ve seen that will give Perplexity a real challenge, as far as deeper research.
Google simply has more links to pull from than either Perplexity or SearchGPT (OpenAI). In fact, it has more to pull from than Bing CoPilot too, so this is going to hurt Microsoft as well.
I’ll be digging into this to see how clicks from it show up in our metrics. Right now, the AIO clicks just say Google. So, it’s impossible to tell where we’re showing up in regular search and what’s bringing us clicks. I think this is going to further complicate sorting out those metrics.
It’s an important thing to know because right now we are trying to tailor our content to be found by AI search bots.
I’ll keep you posted on what I find.
And we will definitely circle back to this, and all AI SEO, in the DIY SEO Everywhere course in a few months too.
Webmaster Happenings
WP Accessibility Documentation
This is more than a few years overdue, and I’m so glad someone is doing it!!!
Rian Reitveld has been an Accessibilities Specialist for 25 years.
And he has started a project to document accessibility guidelines for WordPress.
He’s asking for folks to help him build it. And I sure hope it is a success!!
Rebranding the Right Way
One of my clients wants to do a complete rebrand on one of her sites with a new domain, theme, extra blocks plugin, and revamp of content.
Normally this would be a Rebrand service that I offer, as do my Webmaster designer members. And we have a whole process for switching out the old site for the new in fell swoop.
But, given that my client will be doing the theme and block changes herself, we chose to do this another way.
She has a spare cPanel on her hosting account. So we decided to leave the current site live and set up a new site on her hosting under the new domain and then migrate a copy of the original site into it while converting all of the links to the new domain.
I locked that puppy down so that only she and I can access it – no bots of any kind. That’s going to ensure that even search engine bots can’t find it until she is ready to show it to the public.
That’s important. Most folks don’t realize that your site is live and being crawled by bots the minute you point a domain to a host. They think it is not “live” until they take it out of maintenance mode.
Nope!!!!!
And you don’t want ANY bots hitting that new site until it is fully secured, which I did the minute it was created, of course.
And you don’t want search engine bots hitting a maintenance page either. That makes them put it on ignore for months.
Instead, we’ll connect GA4, Google Search Console, and Bing Webmaster Tools the day it goes live. That will trigger them to crawl the site and index all of that juicy content.
New Site Setup Tutorials Coming
I already have tutorials for my Webmaster Training members for new site setup and rebranding. But, I have a new method that cuts a day off the process as you only have to do one DNS change.
And, the entire process I did for my client is split into multiple tutorials for each part of the process.
This week, I’m going through those tutorials to ensure they are up to date. And I’ll be making a new tutorial that outlines the full set of steps, in order, and links to each tutorial for that task.
These steps work for designers who set up new sites on their dev hosting account as well as on the client’s hosting.
And, they cover the rebranding process if you have the opportunity to set it up on a new cPanel in the same hosting account instead of replacing the existing site.
You Get What You Pay For
For site owners, please know that doing all of this takes about 1.5 hours, even for an experienced webmaster. And that’s part of what designers charge for too.
A true webmaster doesn’t do a cloned site that could get bot hit and is not secured fully. That’s why they are so much cheaper, as far as their fees. But you pay the difference in other ways with your SEO.
Even if you plan to do the theme and such yourself, you still need the backend setup properly – Day 1, not later. You have only one shot to hide that IP from bots, and one shot to lock it down fully while you’re working on it. Doing it later is too late.
AI Notes
AI Training and Copyright
The U.S. Copyright Office has published a framework that describes the criteria they are considering for what constitutes copyright infringement by AI crawlers for the purpose of training the LLMs.
See their fair use analysis for AI training summary.
Y’all, this thing is a beast to read. I’ll see if I can find a shorter summary for us.
But the fact is, the damage is already done. And there is no way that any major AI LLM can back out all the data they have crawled at this point. That would literally gut them to the point of destruction.
I suspect that what will come of this framework is an attempt to define fair use in a way that will allow them to rule on specific copyright infringement cases that will eventually set precedence for future cases.
I can’t see this impacting current copyright infringement for individual users, like someone stealing your blog post content, including images, and calling it their own. That’s 1-to-1 stealing and easily enforceable still.
New WordPress AI Team
Oh dear. I knew this was coming, and I dreaded it, but here we are.
WordPress just announced the development of an AI team.
Y’all remember when I started Tips Tuesday Plus as a way to help cover the cost of researching AI/WP integrations?
The reason I stopped that subscription was because every single thing I researched ended up being a hard NO for us to use.
And that’s when I knew that this day would eventually come.
AI will come to WP core.
There are some big hitters on this team, including
- James LePage – Automattic
- Felix Arntz – Google
- Pascal Birchler – Google
- Jeff Paul – 10up
And they are going to run this the same way they do the Performance Team and Gutenberg, as a plugin first. That approach has barely slowed down the integrations, though. It just serves as a beta tester.
I have no issues with the Gutenberg team, though I think they could have done most of what has happened in a FAR more organized and cohesive fashion, and a LOT faster to get the basics squared away for all blocks.
But I have HUGE issues with the Performance Team, as many of you who have been with me for years will remember.
I just hope that is not the case with the new AI team. And I hope to hell they have a security person testing whatever they propose to integrate!!!!
We’ll see. And I’ll keep you posted.
AI Site Builders vs Real Designers
In a recent WP Minute post, Eric Karkovack asks What Do AI Site Builders Mean for Freelancers?
I think everyone who is tempted to use such a thing, and all Webmasters should read the full post.
Here’s my take on it.
You get what you pay for.
Kadence and other theme providers have already tried done-for-you AI builders inside their theme templates. I have yet to see one work well.
And while you can already get any AI chatbot to create a site for you in minutes, they also look like it. In fact, they look like something from the early 2000s.
Even the ones that can build a WP site look no better than the simplistic styling of GeneratePress, which has FAR superior coding and support.
And that’s going to be the whole problem with these things, as well as AI coded plugins – security and support going forward.
If you run a WP site, you know how often plugins and themes require updating. Most of those updates are bug and security fixes. Sometimes there are new features too.
You can kiss all of that goodbye with AI generated code sites.
For now, we’ll stick with what’s well supported.
Digging Into NotebookLM
I’ve been wanting to do a deep, deep dive into Google’s NotebookLM ever since it became available in Workspace accounts.
My main issue with ChatGPT, and what has kept me from using it more, is the fact that any info I share with it is not only used for training their model, it is not fully secured either.
That’s not the case with the Workspace AI integrations.
At Google’s recent I/O event, they released NotebookLM Video Overviews
This thing can turn documents into narrated video summaries.
Read that again!!!
The first thing I plan to try it on is a Tips Tuesday post.
That will make a super fast way for me to promote it via video.
And you know I’m all about video right now.
And then I want to try it on a post with a bunch of images and see if it can pick those up or not. My guess is that it can’t – but maybe it will be able to in the future.
Think about the possibilities of that.
I think this new tool is the thing that will get me to put checking out NotebookLM near the top of my to do list.
And I’ll keep you posted.
