Tips Tuesday – Tech Neck Dangers, Music on IG, Audit Discount

Tips this week include:

• How Tech Neck nearly put me in the ER
• Kadence wins accessibility test
• Caveat with using trending music on IG
• Why I’m using meta Business Suite to post on IG
• Half price audits for webmasters

BlogAid Happenings

For the past month, some of my clients with open projects may have noticed that I had been replying to you in the evenings.

There’s a reason for that.

READ: How Tech Neck Almost Put Me in the ER

Since mid July, I had only felt well in the evenings, so that’s when I chose to do my client work.

I’m good now. It just took a while to figure out what was causing my symptoms throughout the day, including two scary episodes over the past few weeks.

Y’all, Tech Neck is an epidemic now. And it can become permanently debilitating. Take it seriously.

I’m doing my exercises all throughout the day and taking more breaks. It’s working.

And I’m back to my regular work schedule.

Theme Tips

Kadence Wins Accessibility Test

I am so pleased to see this report from the nice folks at Equalize Digital.

They tested all of the popular WordPress page builders for accessibility.

Kadence was the only theme to be green for accessibility across the board.

If you’re wondering why Genesis wasn’t tested, it’s because it is not considered a page builder.

But, Astra, Divi, Elementor, GeneratePress, and more were tested. And all of them have concerns.

I switched all of my sites to Kadence a couple of years ago and I’ve advised all of my clients to switch to it too. 

Some are on GenertePress, and as themes go, it’s very clean, as far as the code. But, it could use some work on accessibility.

Video Tips

Trending Music Caveats

In our recent Instagram SEO Mastermind in the DIY SEO Everywhere course we discussed why to use trending music to get more eyeballs.

I was very disappointed to find that Meta does not have a way to lower the volume of the music in their editor.

I chopped up my longer Halloween decor videos into Shorts and had planned to use the trending music on each platform behind them.

But, I have a voiceover on those videos and needed to lower the volume on the music.

Can’t do it for Instagram!!

So, I got in my music studio and wrote my own spooky music, which will be more fitting than the bluegrass-style music I wrote and use on most videos. That one fits my branding.

But, it taught me a lesson. 

When I make my Christmas decor vids, I’ll be sure to storyboard them for Shorts that have no voiceover and can have trending music on them. And I’ll likely make new Shorts that cut things down radically to show only what I’m doing with no explanation needed, and put the trending music on those.

Use Meta Business Suite to Post to IG

One of the other things we covered in that Mastermind session was account types on IG, and which ones could post to your business page too. Things have changed and there are more options now.

And, I discovered that if I use Meta Business Suite, then I can post to both my IG account and my Facebook Business page, which is something you can’t do if you post just from IG’s way of sharing.

You can also schedule posts from there too.

I made a tutorial for the DIY SEO Everywhere course members to show how to do it.

Webmaster Tips

Half Price Audits

I no longer teach how to do audits in my Webmaster Training course because there is no way to teach it generically. Every site is different. Plus, what each host allows is different too.

And, things change too often to have any shot at keeping those tutorials updated at that deep, deep level.

There are plenty of tutorials in the course for site security, plugins, and more. But, no tutorials dedicated to all of the conditions that impact speed or specifics on bot hits and hosting resources.

So, once a year, I offer audits to my webmaster members at half price.

It can be on their site or one of their client’s sites.

We do it live so they can see everything I check.

And they should be able to fix any issues on their own but I’ll be available to help them make a to-do list of the proper order to do things.

There’s a LOT to the Webmaster Training, and tutorials get added and updated all the time.

A full audit is the best way to ensure that you’re up on all of the latest techniques and info.

SEO Tips

Poor Lazy Loading Impacts LCP

Google says that using lazy load on images in an improper manner can have a negative impact on your LCP score (Largest Contentful Paint).

In fact, Google.com itself improperly uses lazy load by making all images use it by default.

If that image is in the viewport, then it should not be lazy loaded. 

And that’s what causes the issue with LCP.

This is also why we don’t rely on the default WP way of lazy loading. It’s how they do it – by mimicking how browsers do it.

Instead, we use intelligent lazy load, like the kind found in the premium version of WP Fastest Cache.

See WP Fastest Cache Settings for how to configure it properly.

Why To Let AI Crawl Your Site

Some stores and news outlets decided to stop all AI bots from crawling their sites.

I can understand that.

For one, their content is unique to them, and should stay that way.

Secondly, they are paying tens of thousands of dollars more a month in hosting resources that are being chewed up by those AI bot crawls.

Cloudflare got super serious about providing a way for their Enterprise Business clients to stop those bots because of these issues.

They even came up with a pay-to-crawl scheme for them.

But, us bloggers are not in that boat.

And if we stop the AI crawlers, we will disappear from search completely at some point.

READ: The Business Risk of Being Invisible in Search Engines from the nice folks at Search Engine Land for more.

They say:

“Up to 38% of users now read AI-generated summaries, while 36% skip them for traditional results, per YouGov.”

So AI search results are not completely disrupting regular search yet, but we are most certainly headed in that direction.

Cloudflare has done a good job of helping us track the AI bot hits to our site, including which ones are hitting us the most, and how hard.

Me and all of my clients are keeping watch on that.

And, we can see those clicks in our GA4 tracking too, though they are a LOT easier to see in my EZ Metrix reports. (You’ll find this on my eCreatorsHub.com site.)

Google’s AI Overviews are not the only AI search in play, far from it!!!

I’m getting lots of click-throughs from Perplexity AI, and they are growing month over month.