Tips Tuesday – Videos in Canva, Video Ad Money Rises, Site Rebrand or Refocus

Tips this week include:

• Making WP links can be buggy
• Last week’s internet outage
• Create videos in Canva workshop this week
• How a “just do it” mindset helped one client make a great video
• Important update to the Link in Bio page build workshop has been added
• DO NOT turn on the new AI feature in Yoast SEO
• Why I recommend not integrating any AI with your WP site
• Ad revenue moves to video – and surpasses all others combined
• How to get paid twice with video
• YouTube Posts now in Shorts – this is SO exciting
• Cookie Plugin list updated
• Discussion on social and pin plugins
• Where to place your social follow buttons
• A serious problem with media uploads and bots
• Kadence block high resource usage issue
• How to rebrand a site the right way
• Why to refocus a site instead of doing a rebrand

WordPress Tips

Making Links is Buggy

I’ve been doing big revamps on the Heartwood Art site, including creating Content Silo pages that I told you about last week.

Well, I checked on one of them today and half of my links weren’t there. I had included links on images and buttons, but many of them were missing.

I believe I randomly used 2 methods with the link creation box. On some, I simply hit Enter, and on others I clicked the little arrow. Both ways make the link box disappear, as if it had registered the link.

My guess is that the ones where I hit Enter worked some of the time and not others.

Have you had this happen?

Internet News 

Internet Outages

Did y’all experience internet glitches last week? 

It was caused by a Google Cloud outage. 

I noticed that once it was fixed, I got an email about new security features on my Google Cloud account, which is through my Workspace account. I wonder if the rollout of these new security measures is what caused the outage.

In any case, the effects of the outage were regional/scattered and everyone did not experience them.

DIY SEO Everywhere Happenings

Create Videos in Canva

OMG! Making short videos in Canva is so fast and fun!!!

We’ll be doing a workshop this week for them in the DIY SEO Everywhere course.

We’ll be making 3 types of videos using images and text content that we already have.

We’ll also cover tips for using Canva assets and other resources.

Plus, I’ll be sharing all kinds of ideas for how to easily make your own video backgrounds for text too.

This is going to be so fun!!!

Just Do It!!!

I was thrilled to see a post in our Facebook group where one of my clients, Christie Hawkes, shared an in-person video she made. She asked 3 very thoughtful questions that were targeted to your health and well-being.

She got my attention with it!!!

All it took was a little encouragement to help her over the hesitation of just sitting down and doing it.

And the real trick – she didn’t strive for perfection – she aimed for DONE!!!

And now it’s out there in the world, attracting clients for her.

Next up, she’ll be making a similar video for her Facebook/Instagram Story.

You CAN do this!!!!

Just doing it means that you’ll experiment until you find the set and setting that is easiest for you.

Just doing it means that you will try this and that until you get a workflow that is fast and easy.

Just doing it means that you’re more focused on getting eyeballs and helping folks from an authentic place than whether you can make a Hollywood production.

Just do it!!

Link in Bio Workshop Updated

A few weeks ago we did a workshop on how to create a great looking Link in Bio page on your site so you can drop services like LinkTree.

As I was building mine over the weekend for Heartwood Art, I realized that we needed to add one super important block that you can’t even do on those 3rd party services. And it makes all the difference in the world for folks finding older content from your older posts and such too.

I updated the workshop page with info on how to make it and I sent an email to all course members that also included other important changes I’ve made on the HWA site, like creating Content Silos and why I turned off Category indexing. 

AI in Yoast

Yoast has a new AI tool in the latest update of its premium version. 

DO NOT turn this on or use it. 

Details of the harm it could cause were sent to my Hub clients last week as well as DIY SEO course members.

My bet is that they will keep the tool and remove the permanent and potentially harmful thing that it adds.

Y’all, this is going to make all of the Yoast haters come out of the woodwork. But I advise sticking with Yoast for good, tested reasons.

FYI, they mentioned a new llms.txt file that will help AI crawlers understand your site. This, and the AI Tool mentioned above are 2 separate things they added. I’m still checking into whether the llms.txt file is a good idea or not.

AI in WordPress

Y’all remember when I offered a paid subscription to Tips Tuesday Plus? It was all about the extra investigations I had to do into the new AI tools that were coming out for WordPress.

I discontinued that subscription because 100% of them were a big NO to use.

That still stands.

And now that WP has a team for integrating AI natively, I’ll be watching what they come out with, and how to turn it off, if need be.

If you want to use AI to help you create content, by all means, do so. Just do it on the LLM platform, like ChatGPT or others. Don’t do it inside your WP site.

Video Tips

Ad Revenue Moves to Video

Business Insider reports that video ad revenue on YouTube and TikTok will surpass the $235 billion from TV, audio, print and cinema companies combined this year.

Non-video ad revenue is now considered Old Media money and it will continue to decline.

Let that sink in.

Get Paid Twice

If you’re making money from ads on your site, and not doing video, you’re leaving money on the table.

Get paid twice.

Find a way to turn snippets from your existing blog posts into videos that make you ad money from the video and that can send folks to your site to make more ad money and/or affiliate link purchases.

That’s EXACTLY what we’re up to in the DIY SEO Everywhere course right now.

YouTube Posts in Shorts Feed

This is exciting!

YouTube is now going to show Posts in Shorts. And this can show up to non-subscribers as well.

YouTube Posts have been around for a couple of years. But I never paid attention to them.

However, YT has awakened to the fact that other platforms like TikTok, and especially Instagram, show a variety of media in their feeds.

So, I’ll be digging into this for the DIY SEO Everywhere course so we can see how to repurpose the things we’re making for Reels.

Hub Happenings

Perks, tips, and success stories for site audit Hub clients.

Cookie Plugins List

A new list of cookie/GDPR plugins has been added to the Hub tutorials.

It includes those that are in direct conflict with our caching/optimization plugin as well as those that conflict directly with ad agency plugins too.

And it includes a very popular one that is no longer being supported.

Social and Pin Plugin

In our private Facebook group, we’ve been having a discussion about what folks are using for social share, social follow, and Pin plugins.

Social share buttons have fallen out of favor, especially since the share counts have been bogus for years. 

And Gutenberg has an easy to use Social block for the follow buttons.

Most power Pinners use a browser extension for pinning images to Pinterest. But that doesn’t cover adding a specific title and description for Pinterest to each image.

Plus, some of these Pin plugins don’t filter out images in the header or sidebar or such. And they allow for hidden images. Those can’t be lazy loaded and are a site speed issue. Plus, Pinterest frowns on the practice too.

This is why our village is so important! You don’t have to guess your way through what’s best to use!! You get tried and true advice.

About Social Follow Placement

During my Heartwood Art revamp, I chose to put my social follow icons at the very top of my header for both desktop and mobile.

That is not something I would normally do or recommend for folks who are selling things on their site or running ads for revenue.

Social follow links take folks off your site.

But in my case, getting more followers and subscribers on those other platforms is what makes me the most money, especially if they watch a video.

Media Uploads and Bots

Y’all know that I’ve been digging into exactly what AI bots are crawling on our sites. I intend to make a robots.txt file for us to use in Cloudflare.

We already have a robots.txt file at our host. But the problem with this file is that it is a suggestion to bots, not a rule. So, they can, and often do, ignore it.

The one at Cloudflare will be the law. But its limitation is that it only affects crawlers that hit through the domain name, not the host IP. But that will impact all of the AI crawlers, so we need it.

Well, last week I found some rather disturbing crawls, especially for folks who run member sites and/or upload PDFs and such. I have long requested that my clients remove any PDFs from their site as they were a bad bot magnet. But these AI crawlers take it to a whole new level.

The other media issues I found involve attachment pages. Investigating that rabbit hole got super deep, super fast!!!!!!

WP core made some changes regarding attachment pages that were sort of helpful, in that they are not created anymore. But how different plugins treat disabling old ones is a whole other SEO story!!!!

Plus, how you upload images matters – like crazy, for both the SEO and speed of your site.

So, I will have new info coming for my Hub clients on all of this as soon as I can get to the bottom of the rabbit hole.

For now, be sure to see my updated Squoosh tutorial, as it has more info at the end about how you upload your images.

Kadence Block Resource Usage

During audits I always look at the resource usage on the host for things like CPU, Memory, and Database I/O.

The amount of resources you have access to is determined by your hosting package – that’s the main difference in their prices.

When you use too many resources, you have to buy a higher hosting package. Too many times I find that there is an underlying issue that needs to be fixed instead of needing a more expensive hosting package – and that’s exactly how I help my site audits folks save money. In fact, I saved one client $2400 on hosting simply by taking 30 minutes to properly secure her site. The bad bot hits where chewing up all of her hosting resources. Once those were gone, she could drop to a far smaller hosting package.

Folks, most hosts are not going to find the cause for the resource overages. They’re just going to tell you to buy more hosting. And that just gives more room for the rats to run. It’s a temporary solution at best.

Well, in this case, another webmaster reported finding huge resource hits on a specific Kadence block. It’s not one that we commonly use, but I alerted my peeps and suggested another block, which is more common and provides much the same function, to use instead.

Rebrand the Right Way

One of my clients, Sharon Harding, had a second site that had a word in the domain that was attracting all the wrong kinds of traffic. And the site is no longer showing up well in Search anywhere because of it too.

So, she wanted to rebrand the site under a new domain.

Plus, she wanted to take the opportunity to switch to a Kadence theme and revamp the layout of some pages and such.

We made a plan and in just a week or so she was ready to go live.

Check out My Garden Days and see her fresh new site.

Rebranding is definitely not something you can afford to get wrong. In fact, you only have one chance to get it right for SEO, especially if most of the content will stay the same.

Rebranding is a service that I offer.

There are ways to help search engines figure out the change quickly, instead of taking 6 months or more to figure it out in a chaotic way on their own or worse, considering the new site a duplicate content scraper site!!!

And, there are 2-3 options for how it can be set up so that you can make all of the changes on a staging-type site in a relaxed way, instead of putting your live site into maintenance mode and trying to hurry up and do all of the changes.

There are multiple options with how the redirects are done too, depending on what permalink/content changes you plan to make, like deleting a bunch of old content or such.

Plus, you can get help with all of the domain-related email changes and more.

So, if the site you started when you didn’t know what you were doing needs a complete rebrand or refresh, contact me and let’s get it done for you in an easy, fast way that will help you SEO too.

Refocus the Right Way

When Ridgely Brode first came to me, her site, Ridgely’s Radar, was a lifestyle blog that covered food, decor, makeup, and more.

She told me that as time went on, she found that the niche of makeup for women over 50 was what gained her the most traction – and the most income.

She asked me for an audit and rebrand, but instead, we did an audit and refocus first.

That’s because there was so much to fix on her site that we needed to take it in stages that suited both her time and money budgets.

So, we did the audit and got the speed and security stuff squared away.

Then she got into the DIY SEO Everywhere course and learned about Content Silos.

She instantly saw how to arrange her niche content into those silos.

And that instantly gave us the new layout for her home page to feature that content.

Later she opted to switch from Genesis to Kadence too. And she learned Gutenberg Blocks.

She even made her own mockup of her new home page!!!!!! That made the redesign so fast and easy!

Doing the Content Silos also showed her the gaps in her content where she could make more posts and videos that fill her site visitor’s journey with all the info they need. She’s getting more views on related content.

She also used that structure and content editorial calendar to boost her YouTube channel structure and journey too. She’s getting more views on related videos there too.

She’s been working this re-focus path for a year and now it is time to address the content revamp on her site for the off-focus lifestyle posts that are no longer bringing her traffic or money.

Keep in mind that site ranking is now site-wide. And that old content is dragging down her newly-refocused site’s rank.

So now she is going through the Content Revamp workshop series in the course.

It shows how to:

• Quickly make spreadsheets of your content
• Make decisions about what needs to be done with each post
• How to make those changes in a way that don’t bork your site or your SEO

For those of us with older sites and tons of content, the process takes a while to complete.

But, we have a map and a plan. And we can accomplish it in small spurts – like 1 hour a week. You’d be amazed how much you can get done in just that little bit of time!!!!

And all the while you’re gaining more rank and traction on your site.

That’s exactly the path Ridgely is on and I am so proud of all the work she has done.

It immediately started to pay off and that’s all the encouragement she needed to keep going with making more changes.