Tips Tuesday – Yoast SEO 11, Gutenberg, WP 5.2, HTTPS Redirects

Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!

Tips this week include:

• How and why to update to Yoast SEO 11 for better schema markup
• A Content Revamp How-To Workshop this week for the DIY SEO course
• A tutorial coming on how to export Yoast premium redirects to the Redirection plugin
• An update on the Gutenberg course progress, and it’s a big milestone!
• What I discovered about Yoast and Gutenberg
• Why I’m staying narrowly focused on video creation for my hobby to money-making site
• What’s in the re-introduction of the Genesis Authority Pro theme
• Why the release date for WordPress 5.2 was pushed back a week
• What’s up with cPanel offering forced HTTPS redirects

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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

One full third of the year has passed. Are you where you want to be in your site success?

I made a plan for BlogAid for 2019 and I’m hell bent for leather to stick to it.

And to do that, it’s been a week of long days and nights at my desk, but I do have plenty to show for it and I am on track!!

Yoast SEO 11 Post Updated

I finished all of my tests for the impact of the Yoast SEO 11 plugin update, which takes over full schema markup output on your site.

My post for it has been completely updated, so even if you’ve read it, read it all again.

And, you’ll find the steps to take before and after you update Yoast, plus special instructions for different themes and plugins.

Please realize that I can’t test every theme and plugin available. You should check with your vendors for their reaction to this Yoast update and ensure everything will coordinate.

There is no one-size-fits-all process for this, as all sites are different.

And I hope you were able to attend my livestream on Sunday evening for a discussion of this update.

If not, you can watch the replay here.

DIY SEO Workshop and Bonus Sessions

We will be having our last regularly scheduled workshop on Content Revamp How-To this Thursday at 3pm ET / 12pm PT.

But, I can already tell we’re going to need some bonus sessions for Google’s new Discovery feature and for the changes in Yoast SEO plugin.

I’ll announce those in the coming weeks.

And don’t think that it’s ever too late to get into the DIY SEO course.

All of the video courses are available, including the ones for the Yoast SEO plugin. Correct configuration of that is more important than ever now.

And, replays are available for all workshops.

Plus we have our own private Facebook group for asking questions any time.

And we’ll be doing more live sessions throughout the rest of the year, as SEO is always changing.

Export Yoast Premium Redirects to the Redirection Plugin

I’ll have this post out for you on Thursday, ahead of our DIY SEO workshop, so you can use it in your content revamp homework.

I know several of you are feeling so confident with your SEO skills now that you are wanting to step down from the Yoast SEO premium plugin to the free version.

You’ll want to check any redirects that paid plug made first. There may be a few you want to keep, and I show you how.

Gutenberg Course Update

I’m thrilled to share with you that I’ve completed the scripts for all the tutorials!!!

That includes the new theme reviews and new features coming to Gutenberg very soon.

I’ve started my crash course on the Teachable platform to check out all of its functions and for how I will be delivering this course there.

After that I need to gather back up the tutorials I made for that WP 5 / Gutenberg flash challenge I did back in December, prior to the release of WP 5.0.

That had all of the site functions and things you need to make a list to check in Gute to ensure you can replicate everything you’re doing on your site now, plus what will become of your current content when you start using Gute.

I’ll also be putting my different packages together to suit your needs of how you want to take the course, for things like cloning your site and doing the course there, or starting with a clean slate so you can also try out different themes that were made specifically for Gute. That’s how I’ll be doing it, as I need to completely revamp my woodworking theme.

And then I start making the video tutorials, quizzes, and skill builders.

So, I’m shooting for mid May for the release.

I know this has taken a lot longer than I expected, and I appreciate your patience. But I didn’t realize just how much has changed in the last 4 months with Gutenberg and there was a LOT more to cover in the course.

The main thing is, I’ve made it real-world ready. This is not an introduction to Gute kind of thing. It’s all about ensuring you start creating real content for posts and pages right off the bat, and all the way through.

It will most definitely be worth the wait.

Yoast and Gutenberg

Once I get the course live, I’m going to circle back to the new blocks from Yoast for specialty SEO on how-to posts, FAQs pages, and more.

Those things are part of his massive change to the Yoast SEO plugin and he is taking full advantage of the modular data format in Gutenberg blocks.

They allow all manner of special things to be applied to them that will seriously impact the future of the web, like:

• Voice search
• Special schema markup
• Layout
• Styling

Gutenberg is definitely the way to go and I’m excited to be offering you this course to help all of us make the switch sooner rather than later.

Heartwood Art Update

I was able to get a super good start on my next storyboard video, which is building the frame for my mitre saw station.

And I’ve got two more to go before I can get back to work on building the rest of the mitre saw station.

They will be for how to use a K3 Kreg Jig, and how to safely cut plywood on the floor.

It’s super important for me to just halt the build and get these videos done, as they are cornerstone content that I will be linking to on most all other builds.

And, creating the Gute course, keeping up with the DIY SEO fires, and doing client work had to stay the priorities this past week.

That’s why it’s called a side-gig, right!

I’m itchy to get back to making sawdust, though, and hope to be able to kick out these next 3 videos soon so I can get back in the shop before it gets too hot!!

And, I miss having activity to post on Instagram!! I was having such fun with that. But, I’m still having fun following several of y’all there.

So do come follow me at @HeartwoodArtCreations.

Even without having too many posts and having a lack of consistent activity, I am getting some traction on both YouTube and Pinterest. So, that’s encouraging too!!

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

Theme Tips

Re-Introducing Authority Pro

About a month or so ago the Genesis Authority Pro theme was made fully Gutenberg ready.

But this past week the home page was updated to be fully blocks instead of widgets.

That’s going to be a big trend with all themes throughout this year, not just with Genesis themes.

Widget-ready home pages still have their place, and we can still use our existing themes with Gute.

But, when you consider getting a theme revamp, definitely go ahead and future-proof it with one that is mostly or all blocks.

Phase 2 of Gutenberg intends to convert as many widgets as possible to blocks. And every plugin dev that has a widget component is going that direction too.

So, we’re not fully there yet, but we most certainly will be by this time next year, I bet.

Some of us remember when widget-ready home pages were a new thing. It’s going to be like that, just with a mix of blocks and widgets for a while.

I’m ready to make the leap to all blocks for Heartwood Art, but not yet for BlogAid, even if I do start using Gutenberg for the back end.

And yes, Authority Pro is one of the themes I review in the new Gutenberg course.

WordPress Tips

WP 5.2 Release Delayed to May 7

Due to so many open bug tickets (40+), the release of WordPress 5.2 has been pushed back a week from today to May 7.

The RC1, or Release Candidate 1, is available for testing today. An RC means that they have frozen all new features and are just working on bug fixes.

This release will include all Gutenberg improvements prior to Gute 5.4, plus bug fixes that are available now in Gute 5.5.

Keep in mind that many new core WP features start as a plugin. That’s the way it was with Gutenberg. But unlike most of those plugins, it will never be complete and dissolved. It will always be a work in progress and will always remain as a separate plugin with features that eventually make it into the core.

That’s why there are different version numbers for it compared to WordPress itself.

And to help future proof my Gutenberg course, I’m actually using the Gutenberg plugin to make the tutorials, as there are features already in it that will likely be rolled into the core by the time I release the course. I’ll be making a separate update notice at the top of the course explaining all of that.

I’ll have more for you on what else is coming in WP 5.2 either later this week in a standalone post, or in next week’s Tips Tuesday.

HTTPS Tips

cPanel will offer Forced HTTPS redirects

This is kind of funny to me in that it is coming so late in the https game.

In the next cPanel v80 release, they will include an interface to force all hits on the http version of your site to go to the https port.

While established sites have already made arrangements to be HTTPS one way or another, new sites are being created HTTPS by default on most hosts.

However, that doesn’t mean that a forced redirect has been applied.

I’m thinking this new cPanel option ought to be on by default for newly created cPanels that will have new sites placed on them.

But then, if you are migrating a site to a new host, and you already have the redirect, you would want this off.

The real issue here is that most site owners won’t even know about this feature to turn it on or off.

They’ll just see that their new site is already HTTPS from the get go and call it a day.

Folks, there’s a LOT more to having your site fully HTTPS converted and setup well than just getting that green padlock.

There are lots of security and SEO considerations too, not the least of which is setting up HSTS, which is the security header Chrome now requires to be submitted to their safe preload site list.

And there are other security headers, like a CSP, or Content Security Policy, that you must have if you run ads on your site to ensure you never lose your HTTPS status.

I can hear some of you saying now that your ad agency plugin takes care of that. Well, not if you’re using certain caching plugins. The way they output the CSP code doesn’t work with all caching plugins, including my top pick of WP Fastest Cache.

And if you’re using a plugin to handle all of your HTTPS stuff, it’s simply redirecting every single link, I don’t mean to just pages and posts, I mean every link in them too, and all of your images and such.

Instead, converting your database to all HTTPS links is the way to go.

See more on my HTTPS Services page for myths about SSL and HTTPS and see what you may be missing, including how to future-proof your site for all the security headers and such that will be required down the line.

If you’re a designer, learn how to set up sites securely and with full HTTPS setup from the get go, or convert existing sites in my Webmaster Training courses.

Wrap Up

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

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