Hello Happy Site Owners! Welcome to the BlogAid tips Tuesday Podcast for Nov 24 2015. I’m your host MaAnna.
Tips include:
– Last chance to get Black Friday specials
– BlogAid evolving
– Site Success Open Q&A Blab
– Dates on Posts and SEO with Mark Traphagen Blab
– New G+ Rollout and helpful tutorial
– How Google App Streaming is about to change your mobile experience
– What’s new in the Yoast SEO plugin
– A super plugin to rollback updates
– How to make all of your content SEO friendly
– A big visibility perk for folks who blog or podcast at live events
Listen to the podcast
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BlogAid Happenings
In the U.S. it’s the week of Thanksgiving. I have so much to be grateful for. I’ve enjoyed another year being in business for myself. And I believe I have the greatest clients in the world.
I don’t know what it is that I do that continues to attract clients that are putting good out into the world, but I sure hope I just keep doing it.
And I want to say thank you for letting me be part of your process and contributing to putting good into the world by helping you succeed online.
BlogAid is Evolving
As many of you know, I’ve been in deep thought about how best to grow BlogAid with a focus that serves you better.
During the past few months I’ve tried this and that. I got a lot of unexpected traction on some things and then zilch on others that I thought were a sure bet.
I even seriously considered splitting BlogAid into another site with another focus, and starting two other sites that were completely off topic from what you’re used to hearing from me, but would be awesome money makers around things that interest me.
And then it hit me.
I finally found the common thread in all these new endeavor ideas and I see how to take BlogAid to the next level. Over this coming holiday weekend I’ll be drawing it all out on paper and then starting the implementation soon after. My goal is to have it all ready to push out by 2016 if not before. Because when I’ve got that energy wave behind me, I move fast, as y’all know.
I’ll keep you posted on the changes as they roll out. Just know that BlogAid is about to become bigger and better and more helpful than ever.
BlogAid Black Friday and Cyber Monday Specials
If you’re ready to make an investment in your site success, now is that time. Be sure to check out all my Black Friday and Cyber Monday holiday deals.
The price keeps going up daily on the Udemy video courses. And the live classes are starting the first week of December and have limited space, I mean like super limited, like super duper limited. So be sure to reserve your seat.
Catch These Blabs
And speaking of being helpful, I’ve got a couple of Blab shows coming up that you’ll want to catch too.
Site Success Open Q&A – WPblab Ep. 10
Wed 11/25 1pm ET / 10am PT
I know a lot of my U.S. buddies will be preparing or traveling for the Thanksgiving holiday weekend this Wednesday, so we’re going to have an open Q&A for the WordPress Blab this week.
Y’all come and pick my brain for free on any site topic and we’ll get you the help you need.
Dates on Posts and SEO with Mark Traphagen – WPblab Ep. 11
Wed 12/2 1pm ET / 10am PT
And then next Wednesday, put this Blab on your calendar. I’ll be speaking to my go-to SEO guru, +Mark Traphagen link about the SEO impact of dates on posts.
Last week I hosted two info packed Blabs with +David Kutcher and +Mike Allton on extending the life cycle of your content.
And the topic of dates on posts came up in both, but there’s so much to consider on that topic that it deserves its own show. Well, Mark and I are going to delve deep into what Google indexes about dates, including the hidden code.
Plus, we’ll talk about showing dates on posts, including in your permalink, and on the post in the form of an original publish date and last modified date.
We’ll also talk about Google’s Freshness Algorithm and recent changes they’ve made to how it’s used and why older posts still have a fighting chance at ranking higher.
So, definitely a show you want to catch live so you can ask your questions, and subscribe to for the replay as well.
No More This Week in Blab Show
Yep, I’m ending the series. I started this show in support of my Blab Like a Pro course as a way to keep my students updated of the latest Blab changes. It was also intended to be a fun and safe environment for folks to try Blab for the first time and ask questions. I also started a private Facebook group in support of it too.
Well, neither one caught traction. So, I’ll be doing Blabs like this whenever Blab rolls out a bunch of updates, but not on a regular schedule. I’ll keep the Facebook group as the best way to give my students a quick heads up about changes, since Udemy limits me to only 4 announcements a month. And for something in Beta, that’s just not enough.
FYI, I’m in every public Blab Facebook group too, and none of them are very active either. Seems that most folks rather just talk about Blab on Blab whenever there’s a change or to meet other Blabbers.
That’s all the news from around here.
Let’s jump into this week’s tips from around the ‘net.
Google Tips
G+ Rolls Out Huge Update
Big G rolled out a huge update this past week. They’ve actually been rolling out a bunch of small updates in the last several months in preparation for this. And I’m betting even more changes are on the way.
How to use [the new] Google Plus Tutorial
To help you get up to speed with how the new interface works, +Ana Hoffman has a uber helpful tutorial that she is constantly keeping updated as G+ adds things back or makes other changes.
Behind The +1: Meet The New Google+(Plus)
If you want to know more about why Google is making all of these changes to G+, the nice folks over at TechCrunch sat down with a Google insider and chatted about it.
Google App Streaming: A Big Move In Building “The Web Of Apps”
While everyone was ranting or raving over the G+ changes, Google released another big news story. The new App Streaming should radically improve mobile user experience.
“Google will effectively broadcast what you’re looking for within an app, without requiring you to download it at all. There’s no need to worry about whether you want to invest the time and bandwidth downloading some app for a one-time use. If it works as promised, you’ll be able to browse within apps with the same type of experience that you browse web pages.”
There’s lots more to it than that, so be sure to flip over to the article on Marketing Land for more, especially if you do a lot of app surfing on mobile. You’ll definitely want to know about how to make that easier to do.
Plugin Tips
Yoast SEO Update Conflicts
The latest 3.0 update on the Yoast SEO plugin threw some sites into a bit of chaos last week. There were conflicts with other plugins including WordFence.
I dearly love how well this plugin works to improve so many areas of my site SEO. But, it’s a complex plugin. And lots of site owners are now running other super complex plugins too, like WordFence.
In my mind, the Yoast plugin has been especially buggy about that kind of thing this past year. More than once an update has rolled out with major fixes like this right behind it.
Maybe it would be a super good idea for Yoast to recruit a few more beta testers before big releases to help avoid some of this hoohaa. I’d certainly be one of them.
And, the on-page module for this plugin has a whole new look. I guess I’ll be updating 13 videos pretty soon for my SEO courses. Thank goodness he doesn’t make those kind of changes too often!!!! But I am going to wait just a bit to ensure there aren’t going to be more updates on the layout.
New in Yoast SEO 3.0
You can get a quick tour of all that’s new in the Yoast SEO 3.0 plugin in my MaAnna Minute video of it. Including the integration with OnPage.
You’ll also find a link in there to my SEO Video course that has 13 tutorials on the Yoast SEO plugin alone, plus on-page SEO and more.
WP Rollback works great
And when plugins go haywire like that, I use the WP Rollback plugin to revert to the previous version. It’s saved my maintenance bacon a couple of times now.
The only thing I have not tested it on yet is a plugin that also updates the database. I hope I never have to test that, but just letting you know that I have yet to see how well it performs in that situation. But so far, so good.
You’ll find WP Rollback on my Recommended Plugins List too.
SEO Tips
How to Make Every Piece of Content SEO Friendly
On the Content Marketing Institute blog, Neil Patel has a deep post on how to SEO up all of your content.
It starts out by covering Technical SEO, which is why Yoast teamed up with OnPage in this latest release of his plugin. At the very foundation, you need to ensure that search engines can crawl your site. That’s what the term Technical SEO refers to.
He then talks about on-page SEO, which refers to the meat of your content, and is generally the only aspect of SEO most bloggers concern themselves with.
And then he covers off-page SEO, which refers to inbound links and such.
But one of the main sections I want you to pay attention to is Understanding the New SEO. Because it’s not about keyword stuffing anymore.
Here’s a quotation from the post:
“Your page is not optimized for search just based on what content is on the page, but rather the impact the page has on a reader.
Google’s web crawler measures how quickly a person clicks to your website page, how many other people click to the same page, how long they spend on that page, how far they scroll on that page, and where they go after viewing that page.”
Folks, if you’re still chasing that green dot on the Yoast SEO plugin, please consider taking my SEO courses and blogging classes. You’re just wasting your time and not getting all the SEO help that you could otherwise.
It’s way easier than you think to set up effective SEO on your site. In fact, it will add only about 3 minutes to what you’re doing now and have a way bigger bang for the buck.
Live Blog Structured Data Markup
If you blog at live events, then you’ll want to know about this new Structured Data markup that you can add to a running post so that Google will pick up the latest news from you and put it into Google’s new search carousel.
For podcasters and bloggers that cover live conferences, this could give you HUGE exposure.
The post I’ve given you the link to is a little geeky, but I wanted you to be aware it’s coming down the pike and to look for a plugin in the future.
Folks who jump on this early will get the biggest perks.
Wrap Up
That’s a wrap for this week’s Tips Tuesday.
Happy Turkey Day!
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