Tips Tuesday – Site Setup Tutorials, Substack Win, Video Updates
Tips this week include:
- New Site Setup tutorials for webmasters
- Hitting the top of Substack rankings
- Why to use Substack strategically
- Cloudflare toll on AI Bots
- Yoast Video SEO price increase
- Update on llms.txt file
- How I’ll be spending my summer of creating content
- Why there will be less competition for us on YouTube soon
- New TikTok USA version coming
Webmaster Happenings
News and tips for Webmaster Training course members.
New Site Setup Tutorials
Webmasters and designers have to create new sites all the time, whether for a new domain or a site/theme revamp.
I have a whole new method that makes creating those sites super fast and super secure.
A whole new tutorial seciton for New Site Setup has been added to the course with a checklist of all the steps with links to new and/or existing tutorials.
Those tutorials include ways to lock a site down so that only the webmaster and the client can access it. No bots of any kind can get to it.
That’s especially helpful on dev sites, but can also be used on new domain sites until it is ready to launch. You most definitely don’t want Google, or any other bots seeing your under-maintenance page and then having to wait weeks or months for it to update its crawls on your site.
In fact, I just took one of my Hub clients through a rebrand where we set up the new domain as a new site, migrated the old site into it, and then locked it down until she did the theme, branding, and content changes.
Once we did all the steps to fully launch the site and let search engines know what happened, she was ranking on Google within 2 weeks.
Having a qualified person take you through the process matters!!!!
DIY SEO Everywhere Happenings
News and tips of help for DIY SEO Everywhere course members.
Hitting the Top of Substack Rankings
I am so proud of our DIY SEO Everywhere member, Angela Legg, for breaking the top 100 rank on Substack with her Diligent Woman publication!!!!
Angela was a former Hub client but her real traffic was not on her WordPress site as much as it was on Substack. So, I helped her go all in on Substack and properly sunset her WordPress site while protecting her SEO.
And she’s using the same SEO techniques to help her get to the top of Substack.
I’m thrilled that move paid off and now she has all of her follower communication in one place too. It’s far less to keep up with and track and she’s getting far more conversions to her paid courses as well.
Use Substack Strategically
There are ways to keep your WP site and use Substack in a strategic way to gain more followers.
You don’t have to give up one to do the other.
In fact, doing so is a bit of a gamble because Substack does not have a way to fully backup and restore your site, and I have seen folks lose their entire Substack over a buggy settings change that has to do with how the podcast stuff is integrated.
And, it is a separate email and notification list, and it’s illegal to port folks from one to another.
Plus, you don’t want to get hit with a duplicate content penalty or have Google consider your Substack as a scraper site.
So, you would most definitely want to get a consult before going all in on Substack.
But, there’s no issues with using Substack in addition to your site, just like you have used Facebook and Instagram and even YouTube to augment your reach.
Plus, Substack has a FAR superior notification and social interaction setup than any of those others do. In fact, Substack is all about engagement.
So, if you’re looking to get started with Substack, get my 2 Substack Guides that take you through the entire setup of getting your personal account and starting your own publication.
There are TONS of settings and these Guides will get you through them in a hurry and help you avoid mistakes.
Cloudflare Toll on AI Bots
You may have seen the news that Cloudflare has introduced a way to exact a toll from AI bots that want to crawl your site.
I sent an email to DIY SEO Everywhere course members with my advice on using it or not.
As for the ad agencies urging their peeps to use it, my opinion of them has fallen sharply over the last few years, and what they advise just lowered that bar even more.
Yoast Video SEO Price Increase
The folks at Yoast make a lot of SEO plugins beyond the one that most of us use.
And one of them is specifically for putting extra schema markup around the videos you embed on your site. It also provides lazy loading, which is super important for page load, as well as SEO markup around the video placeholder image.
I sent an email to DIY SEO Everywhere course members with why I’ll be dropping this plugin due to the new SEO focus with my sites and tips for whether or not they should be using it due to the SEO focus on their site.
I also told them about the new video plugin I’m using instead, and its benefits.
You CANNOT go without any video plugin or you’ll tank your site in other ways.
Update on llms.txt File
This post from Yoast gives us an idea of where we stand with the development of an llms.txt file that is specifically made for AI bots.
An llms.txt file is sort of like a robots.txt file, which helps guide regular crawl bots.
This new file will help AI bots not get stuck on the noise contained in an html document that has nothing to do with the content, and more to do with design and layout.
Basically, there is no standard for this file yet, but they are working on it.
And there is no evidence that AI crawlers are paying any attention to it yet either with the few sites that are currently using it.
What the folks at Yoast say is that it can’t hurt to have it, even in these early stages. I’m not sure that’s 100% true.
I plan to wait until there is some standard for it and we see at least one of the major AI platforms agree to use it.
I’ll keep you posted.
Just know that showing up in AI search results is our new goal. So, I’m watching with interest on this, and anything else we can do to show up prominently in AI search.
Summer Break
As usual, we’re going to take a break from live workshops in the course for a few weeks to allow everyone to enjoy their summer and/or to make your content plans for the holidays.
Plus, some folks need a bit more time to put into practice all of the new video stuff we’ve covered, me included. Learning is one thing, doing is another, and that takes time.
How I’m Spending My Summer
My cousin’s granddaughters are super artistic and we’ve got some fun things to make and paint in the woodshop for holiday decor. So, I’m really looking forward to spending more of the summer with them as well.
The eldest helped me shoot the first half of this video on my new mower.
She did a fantastic job!!!!!!
She’ll be helping with video for the woodworking stuff too.
And, I’m almost finished with the tutorials for a new YouTube channel that will not have a website associated with it. I’ll let you know when that has published.
Join Us
Now is a great time to get into the DIY SEO Everywhere course!!!
You can easily get caught up on the new tutorials and hit the ground running with us when we start doing workshops again.
Video Tips
Less Competition for Us on YouTube
YouTube announced that it will be scrutinizing monetized channels on July 15 to find those that are obviously pumping out videos that are either mass-produced or near replicas of existing videos.
And they plan to remove them from the YouTube Partner Program or ban the channels.
They call these videos “inauthentic”. But creators who are losing revenue call them “clip farmers.”
I think that the key word for us to focus on is inauthentic.
YouTube wants to show real people doing real things or artistic content created by real people.
And I think this will impact Shorts the most.
And that means we, as creators, are going to get seen more because YouTube will not be overwhelmed with video junk.
I also think that means higher pay for us because we’ll get more views too.
Substack auto clips https://on.substack.com/p/live-video-on-substack-smarter-simpler?utm_medium=newsletter&_bhlid=bc2f26665972a93625a6004dd18f8ba8c9216087Live video on Substack: smarter, simpler, more discoverable
New TikTok USA Version
Over the weekend I saw videos that TikTok will be creating a new app called either M or M2 that will only be available to folks in the U.S.
It’s rumored that the lead investor is Oracle, which is the entity that handles all of the U.S. data for ByteDance now.
The change will happen in September-October.
I already had plans to put Shorts on TikTok, and I want to know how this change will affect the Creator Program, as the point of doing it for me is to get paid.
I’ll have more details for you when I can verify the info.
