Tips Tuesday – Video Promo, WP 5.2, Genesis 2.10, Search Console, Gutenberg

Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!

Tips this week include:

• What the cause was for my site email issues that cropped up after the host move
• An update on how things are going at the new host
• The new quick video blog promotion experiment I ran over the weekend
• Who reached out with an offer because of that experiment
• How my deep dive into the Teachable platform is going
• What’s in WordPress 5.2 that releases today and why we’ll wait to update
• The results of a massive Accessibility Audit on Gutenberg
• Whether Chrome is really delivering a death blow to cookie tracking
• New image and video schema markup in Yoast SEO
• A primer for you to learn more about Structured Data and schema markup
• Why we don’t care that Google shut off slivers of info from Search Console
• More on the 3 new reports in Search Console that will help us with our schema markup and more
• What’s in the release of Genesis 2.10

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Join me Live to Discuss Tips Tuesday

I hope you’ll join for tonight’s livestream at 9pm ET / 6pm PT on the BlogAid Facebook Page. It’s open Q&A time for what caught your attention in this week’s tips or whatever you’d like to discuss about your site success. And, I always have breaking news for the day too. So come join us live for the party.

Replay

BlogAid Happenings

Email Issues Resolved

If you’ve tried to contact me in the last week or so and didn’t get a reply, it’s because my email was missing some records at Cloudflare since moving to the new host.

It’s all been fixed, so please do reach out to me again.

And, I switched over to a GSuites account for Heartwood Art email while I had the tech working on everything too, so that’s all nice and setup as well for better email delivery, especially my newsletter there.

New Host Update

I’ve been with NameHero now for about 3 weeks and I sure am enjoying the 100% uptime!!!

That’s THE main reason I moved from A2 Hosting. They’ve had a lot of trouble keeping the servers up consistently for the past year.

And, I’ve started helping more folks migrate to NameHero already too.

One was about to hit a triple renewal fee at SiteGround.

We did find one caveat with changing to a new hosting environment that I’ve documented for me and my webmasters.

And that’s one of the reasons I’m not recommending SiteGround as often now either. I’m done with their goofy hosting setup. It works, and it stays up all the time. It’s just goofy to work with their non-standard way of doing things.

And I will say one thing about NameHero – their support is FAST!!! That’s been very impressive and easy to work with too.

It will take me a few more months of being at NameHero to fully vet them, but I’m pretty comfortable saying they are definitely a contender for you to consider at this point if you’re thinking about moving.

My affiliate link is on the Resources page, and I offer migration services to help smooth your transition.

Heartwood Art Update

And speaking of, I did send out an email on Heartwood Art with my latest post on the mitre saw station frame build this past weekend.

I’m very happy with the video for it too, even though it did take a week to produce.

And I was able to include prior videos and posts in it, so that editorial calendar plan is starting to really pay off.

READ: How I Develop an Editorial Calendar for a New Blog for more.

And thanks to everyone who subscribed to the Heartwood Art YouTube Channel!!!

If you’re so inclined, please do subscribe to help support my goal of reaching the 1000 mark so I can get the vanity domain and more views to start monetizing that channel.

Video Promo Experiment

For the last couple of Tips Tuesdays I’ve been talking about making quick video promos.

Well, I made one!!!

And you can visit the post I made yesterday about what I learned and what I’ll be doing differently next time too.

I sure hope it encourages you to get busy with video as well. It’s so hot on every platform right now and will get you more eyeballs.

Trying Screencast-o-matic

As I mentioned in that video experiment post, I currently use Camtasia for my screen recording.

I also mentioned a similar software called Screencast-o-matic.

Maurice from Screencast-o-matic was super fast to reach out to me to see if I’d like to try the software.

They have a 30 free trial on it.

So, I have it on my to do list to check into and see how much fun I can have with it and what I can make.

Have you used Screencast-o-matic?

Would y’all like to do a challenge with it or something? Maybe that will be a great motivator for all of us to start creating more quick promo videos.

Deep Dive into Teachable

As y’all know, I completed the scripts for all of the new Gutenberg tutorials last week.

Over the weekend I did a deep dive into the Teachable platform, which is where I plan to launch the course.

I’ve been taking good notes and plan to either do a course on creating a course there, or offering the setup as a service.

It’s a good platform, but it does have a couple of limitations I was not crazy about, like being able to only connect to one email list. That’s not a problem if you only have one course, though.

And, I have to use a 3rd party integration like Zapier to do a limited-time access course.

I planned to make access be 1 month, as I think that’s way more time than you’ll need to learn Gute.

And this likely also means that I will need to manually remove folks from that email list, if I so choose, but there may be a Zap for that too. But I’m thinking there will always be something new to learn about Gute and folks are going to want to stay on that list.

Teachable does have a lot of nice features too that will save me extra expense and time, especially with the affiliate options.

So, it does balance itself out.

I’m also chatting with one of my webmaster designers, who is also setting up Teachable for her clients, about all of the customization options.

Now I’m moving on to taking notes about course creation and I’ll start making the video tutorials this week, I hope.

They say that Teachable is one of the fastest platforms to set up a course. It’s not that much faster for me, considering I’m already familiar with how to do it on my member sites, and this requires learning all of Teachable’s ways of doing stuff.

I’m doing my best for staying on track to release the Gutenberg course in mid May and you know I’ll keep you posted.

That’s all the news from around here. Let’s jump into this week’s tips.

WordPress Tips

WordPress 5.2 Releases Today

It includes more additions to the Site Health Check, PHP error protection, a new Block Manager, and several Gutenberg updates.

Be sure to see my post and video for details, especially before you attempt updating.

I’ll be holding off a few days on my updates to ensure they have all the kinks worked out. You’ll find details about that in the post too.

Gutenberg Accessibility Audit

You may recall my Tips Tuesday posts back in Nov and Dec, before Gutenberg rolled into the WP core that I mentioned the accessibility issues it had.

I also reported a little on the team lead of that department resigning over it, and a few reports of big-time sites getting sued over accessibility issues, none of which even used WP or Gute. So, it’s not limited to that.

There was a call from the WP dev community to have an independent accessibility audit done on Gute. And the results of that are in.

Here’s a super short quote from the entire report that I think sums it up:

“Gutenberg has significant and pervasive accessibility problems, the likes of which amount to a step backwards for users with disabilities over the legacy editor. Our user-based testing – backed by data from our technical review – indicates that the accessibility problems are severe in nature. We feel concerned that Gutenberg’s current accessibility issues will prove problematic for website owners who deploy Gutenberg to content creators in protected populations or for website owners who are themselves part of a protected population. Therefore, organizations which have high risk profiles should consult legal counsel before using it and may want to choose to use the legacy editor instead. ” (pg 33)

So, obviously, Gutenberg has a few accessibility issues to overcome.

This is one of the most comprehensive audits of its type for any CMS and will change all of such open source code for the better, not just WP.

But, the bottom line for Gute right now is that if you have an extremely high profile site like Chic-Fil-A and Beyonce, and are at high risk for being sued for lack of 100% compliance as they were, it might be best for you to stick to the classic editor.

That may affect 0.01% of us bloggers.

And I’m going forward with Gute as this will be addressed as we go.

In fact, some of the bigger accessibility issues are being addressed in WP 5.2 that is out today.

From what I’ve seen, it is time to jump onto the Gutenberg train.

Monetization Tips

Chrome Deals Death Blow to Cookies

The headline on this article is pure clickbate. I read through it and there will be other ways of tracking, like a browser ID. And the toggle to turn that off will likely be just as hidden as the privacy settings on browsers are now. It’s not like we don’t already have them.

I’ve asked my Site Audit Plus clients about this because many of them run ads on their sites. They aren’t hearing anything from their ad agencies.

But then, those same ad agencies had nothing to say about GDPR in the 2 months I asked about it prior to the deadline last year. Then they did a mad scramble to address it in the final week.

So, I’m keeping my eye on this for us and appreciate you letting me know what you hear about it too.

It takes a village.

SEO Tips

Yoast SEO 11.1 adds schema markup for images and video

Yoast didn’t wait long to add more schema markup features to his SEO plugin. Just a week after the 11.0 release came the 11.1 update that added special schema for images and video.

I have updated all of my sites to it, as I think it is safe for the majority of us.

And I’m not trying to be silent with advice about this.

I’m trying to be prudent with my time, as I expect multiple, and frequent updates to this plugin for a while yet.

Yes, I know many of you have questions.

Keep in mind that schema markup is a deep, deep topic and everyone has different needs.

Please know that I can’t respond to individual sites and/or your unique circumstances via comments or email. Doing any justice to it would require a paid private session and an SEO audit.

I will be addressing schema markup in a live session for our DIY SEO course members as soon as the dust settles with the plugin a bit and I have time to do even deeper checks than I already have.

And if that’s not fast enough for you, let me ask this – did you ever check your structured data output prior to this plugin change? I’m betting 99% of you didn’t. And whatever it was outputting got you to this point with ranking.

My goal over the past 2 weeks had been to drop everything when this bomb hit and ensure it would be safe for us to update at all. I’ve done that.

I’ll do more in the coming weeks.

It’s not a fire that most of us need to put out anymore.

So, please be patient with me as I gather real data that will be real helpful to us all.

Structured Data Primer

If you would like at least a primer on what structured data is, also called schema markup, then jump into this post from Google that gives an overview of how to enrich your site with it.

I think it will make you glad that Yoast decided to take this leap and give you more of this candy to feed Google.

Google shuts off GSC in Yoast and others

Some SEO plugins, such as Yoast SEO, provide a way for you to see your Google Search Console errors from within your WP site.

Here’s what I’ve told my DIY SEO course members.

Don’t use the crunch in your site. The data is too limited.

Always go to GSC for full reports.

And after getting into the habit of doing that regularly, my DIY SEO course members can tell you that the sliver of info you get via a plugin in your site doesn’t begin to give you enough info to make good decisions. They don’t rely on that crutch, so losing that info is no big deal.

3 New Reports in GSC

Here’s something we’ll most definitely be covering in the DIY SEO course too.

Google just released 3 new Reports in Search Console. This, right behind a new Discovery report they released just a week or so ago.

The 3 new reports are:

• Unparsable Structured Data Report – this is all about difficulty with schema markup and will go a long way into the data I’m collecting over the Yoast SEO updates too. Here’s the post from Google with more on what this new report contains.
• Logo Report – again, this is about structured data markup, and I am seeing errors with this one. It has more to do with our theme’s output than any issue with Yoast. That’s why I need a little time to dig into all this and gather more data so I can have some suggestions about fixes too.
• Sitelinks Searchbox Enhancements Report – I haven’t dug into this one yet, so I’m not sure what the report covers, but I’ll be asking my DIY SEO course members to start reporting what they are seeing soon and we’ll get to the bottom of it.

Theme Tips

Genesis 2.10 Released

It’s safe to update to the latest Genesis version of 2.10.

The devs have been on an arch to be more aligned with WP best practices and trends. For this release, that means beginning the move to have more of the theme’s settings in the Customizer.

Normally you find these under the Genesis Theme Settings tab in your left admin sidebar. And you still can, but if you click on some of them, they will take you to the appropriate spot in the Customizer now.

The new thing that has been added to the Genesis tab is the ability to find and install plugins made by the Genesis team. And that will certainly help you sort through the list, as a lot of different devs make plugins to use on Genesis. But the list in this new tab comes straight from Genesis.

Now, that’s not to say they are better than plugins made by others, but at least you’ll be able to see the native Genesis ones first.

The 2.10 release also now supports WP-CLI, which is a Command Line Interface that mainly devs use for the type of work they do. But it’s nice for them to be able to access it directly from the site level now.

Wrap Up

That’s a wrap for this week’s Tips Tuesday.

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