Tips Tuesday – Track SEO Performance, DNS Email Records, SEO in 2024 Predictions

Hello Happy Site Owner!

Tips this week include:

• New Reauthorize FluentSMTP for Workspace tutorial
• How to track your SEO performance – Basics workshop this week
• New Looker Studio visual metrics private review
• Updated Cloudflare Full Tour of settings video tutorial
• Who can help you get your email DNS records squared away
• The top cause of site hacks is not what you think
• Google drops How-to and FAQs rich results from search – again
• Are bylines a ranking factor or not?
• Search results generated from page content
• SEO in 2024 – predictions from Yoast
• Google begins phasing out 3^rd party cookies
• AI in Formidable forms review

BlogAid Happenings

Everybody is Doing Something New

I’m super thrilled to see so many site owners using the energy of a new year to make a big change!

And I’m even more thrilled that they have contacted me to help them with it!!!

That also means I’ve been slammed with work this month on top of all the big changes I’m making myself.

Site Services Update

My top priority are my site audit clients who have requested their annual audit. We want to keep them on time with those.

So, if you are on the waitlist for January, I’m getting to your project as fast as I can.

If you are due for an audit checkup in February, now is the time to make that request.

The wait list is currently running 3 weeks.

So, if you’re ready for a site audit or you want a consult, or need services, and you want to get it all done before spring, now would be a good time to see the Services page and fill out the appropriate form to get on the wait list.

New Reauthorize FluentSMTP for Workspace Tutorial

Sometimes Workspace emails become de-authorized from the SMTP plugins we use. We haven’t discovered why that’s happening either. 

I seem to be having the issue more than most folks, like 2 or 3 times a year. That’s pretty serious for me, as it affects my membership sites and the critically important notifications that are sent from it about purchase and renewal things.

We’re still digging into the cause.

But in the meantime, I made a tutorial available to my site audit client Hub members for how to do the reauthorization.

DIY SEO Happenings

How to Track Your SEO Performance – Basics Workshop

We’ve hit the ground running in the DIY SEO course this year.

We’ve checked all of our SEO settings and the entire foundation of our technical SEO.

And this week we’ll be covering the basics of how to track your SEO performance.

That feedback is so critical for seeing how well your posts are doing in search.

And we go WAY beyond simple vanity metrics to get the real scoop.

Next week, we’ll be doing a new workshop for how to bring your SEO reports into Google Sheets and run some easy formulas to see your post’s trends for Position, Impressions, and Clicks.

It’s always a good time to jump into the course as everything is recorded and all the tutorials and videos are there for you – it’s not drip content.

New Looker Studio Visual Metrics Private Preview

This past week I did a private preview party for a small group of vendor partners to show them the new Looker Studio reports I’ve been building.

Looker is a visual layout of your metrics and it makes it WAY easier to see trends.

More importantly, it makes it super easy to filter the content for just the info you want to see in the report.

The feedback so far has been favorable.

I’ve still got a few things to add and tweak, and a little bit of research still to do with some of the connectors for social media and stores like Shopify.

I’ll keep you posted on my progress, and for when a public preview will be available.

But I’m super serious about helping site and shop owners make more money this year, and that’s going to mean getting super serious about digging into the amazing feedback you can get from your metrics.

Webmaster Happenings

New Cloudflare Full Tour Released

Cloudflare is ALWAYS improving something or adding new features. 

That’s why it’s so important to do a checkup on your settings on a regular basis.

And my Hub clients get that every year with their annual audit checkups, plus tutorials I make for them to make quick and easy setting changes between checkups.

I also do a full tour of all Cloudflare settings for my Webmaster Training members.

These are designers and site techs who set up sites for clients and/or maintain them for clients.

These full tour videos help them quickly run through all of the setting checks. 

And there are full tutorials on each of the important settings in Cloudflare to reference as well.

Email Tips

Get Your Email DNS Records Squared Away

MailerLite just sent a notification to all their users about the new email DNS records requirements from Google and Yahoo for deliverability.

If you’re freaking out about whether or not you have all of your DNS records for your domain-related email and your email list service done right, contact Dustin at Iridium Hosting for their email setup service.

He did my setup as well as the setup for ALL of my site audit clients.

We’ve had this taken care of for 3 years now – and this is just one more example of how I keep my peeps way ahead of the curves and out of panic mode.

Thank my client Sharon Harding for sharing the MailerLite notification and letting me know that there are tons of bloggers in a tizzy about this.

Please do share the link above with all of your blogger buddies and groups.

And let them know who has helped you get your site ducks in a row way ahead of schedule.

Security Tips

The Top Cause of Site Hacks is Not What You Think

I have always heard that the #1 reason sites get hacked is due to lack of updates on WP, plugins, and themes.

Nope, that’s the #2 way.

The folks at WeWatchYourWebsite analyzed over 8 million WP sites in 2023.

And they found that 60% of the hacks were due to stolen session cookies.

Those are grabbed by hackers from compromised PCs and/or at the web browser level.

Folks, PLEASE get super serious about your online security!!

• NEVER use free wifi when you are away from home
• ALWAYS use super strong passwords (at least 16 characters with all manner of upper/lower case letters, numbers, and special characters)
• NEVER use the same password for any 2 accounts
• ALWAYS log out of your WP site when you are not actively using it. This also lowers your resource usage too, and reserves it for visitors. Don’t be logged into your site while you do other browsing or click links in other emails. Everything open can be accessed if you click on a compromised link.

You should also rotate your passwords once a year as well.

Some folks like using a password vault service. But after what happened last year with LastPass, I’m not sure they are all that secure anymore either.

And browsers, especially Chrome, have created their own password vault that are as good as the 3rd party services, in my opinion.

As for keeping your computer clean, I’m not a fan of McAfee and Norton products.

I find that the native Windows Defender does a pretty good job of checking things.

And I do have another scanner that I use, but it is super technical, so I don’t want to take on the liability and support of sharing it here. I would encourage you to do your own research.

If you use a Mac, they are not as invulnerable as Apple would have you believe. You’ll want to do your own research on how to properly secure and scan them.

The worst offenders for security are the way folks use their mobile devices, especially their phone.

If you’re logging into your site with these devices, be sure you log out of your site when you’re not active in it. 

Your site security starts with you. 

And you need to get serious about protecting everything that comes in contact with your site – including you and your devices.

SEO Tips

Google Drops How-to and FAQs Rich Results from Search

Google does experiments with what it shows in Search, and the way those results look all the time.

I mean literally, all the time. There’s something new or changed every week.

But, there are some that impact our sites being seen and/or clicked more than others.

Back in August, Google said that FAQ results would only be shown for authoritative sites.

And then in September, FAQ results dropped out of search altogether, then returned in November.

If one of your posts made it into those results, that would have appeared on Page 1 of Search. So, this whole section dropping out meant a LOT of click loss for some sites.

As of January 8, the FAQs results are gone yet again.

Around the same time that the FAQs results started getting flaky, the How-to results started doing the same thing.

And now the how-to results are gone yet again as well.

This directly impacts me and many of my crafter and educational clients.

I’ll keep my eye on it for us.

But the important thing to remember is that you have to keep up with these Search appearance changes to know exactly why you may have suffered a loss of clicks. You may not have been hit by one of the core updates. It could be something like this.

Are Bylines a Ranking Factor or Not?

I believe we are being lied to.

The Verge published a hit piece that blames Google for why all sites look the same now.

(You need to see this post even if you don’t read the whole thing – the graphics are wild!! Just keep scrolling and watch it change until you get to the body of the piece.)

In response to a remark in that post about authorship, Google’s mouthpiece, Danny Sullivan, said that “author bylines and bios do not help a site or piece of content rank better.”

Really, Danny?

That’s not at all what I’m seeing and hearing from pro SEOs who have been digging into all of last year’s core algorithm update, especially the big Helpful Content Update in September that was catastrophic to so many bloggers.

And that’s not at all what I’m seeing when I run schema markup tests through Google’s own tester that flags missing author info.

In fact, I think it is so significant for good SEO in 2024 that I’ll be bringing back my Authorship Workshop to the DIY SEO course this year.

Search Results Generated from Page Content

Tips Tuesday Plus subscribers have been getting reviews of AI plugins for WordPress.

Some use AI to help write SEO titles and meta descriptions.

And I told you why those plugins were a complete waste of time.

Here’s more proof.

We’ve long known that Google chooses what it shows in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

And 99% of the time that info is from the page/post content itself. Here that fact is reiterated by Google as proof.

SEO in 2024 – Predictions for Yoast

The nice folks at team Yoast have published their SEO in 2024 predictions and opinions.

I was really glad to see that they agree with what I’ve been telling you about why AI will not kill SEO, it will just change interfaces.

And I was glad to see that they agree, SEO is just as important now as ever, maybe even moreso.

You just have to continue to keep up with the changes.

Monetization Tips

Google Begins Phasing Out 3rd Party Cookies

Here we go!! 

Google has a new tool that restricts 3rd party cookie tracking on 1% of Chrome users.

This tells me one thing.

Google has been kicking the can on this issue since they announced in 2020.

Along the way they have tried various methods to see what else they could do to retain some user data and some measure of tracking.

But every new way they came up with got them into more hot water. Remember their cohorts thing a couple of years ago? The threat of lawsuits popped up within days of the rollout, so they quickly dropped it.

So, this new tool is their next test of way dropping 3rd party cookie tracking as we know it.

While 1% of Chrome users might seem like a small number, keep in mind that Chrome still has 64.73% of the market share and is by far the top browser folks use – to the tune of 3.229 billion users in 2023.

So, that means that 30 million folks are going to see a little pop up that says Tracker Protection.

And what it really means is that your Chrome browser is now tracking you. The full details are not shared with Google, but it can ask some things about your interests.

I don’t have the full details yet.

But I’ll be keeping tabs on how this new tool trial goes and when Google starts rolling it out to more Chrome users.

AI Tips

AI in Formidable Forms Review

Formidable Forms is my plugin of choice for custom forms that are GDPR compliant and don’t add bloat to your database.

Let’s have a look at their new AI component. 

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