2022·08·16 · 33:46
10 years of Yoast
This is my YoastCon 2019 opening talk, where I explain what “SEO for everyone” actually means to us. I walk through how SEO has evolved from a purely technical discipline toward something that spans discovery, indexing, and ranking, and why voice search had already changed how search engines work even before most people were using it. With 9 million sites running Yoast SEO at the time, I also talk about what that scale means for how we think about what should be free versus premium.
0:04 our first speaker is the founder of Yoast and while he is no longer the CEO he remains really important to our company so give it up for Yosef oh so good morning I've got some very very exciting exciting things to share this morning and so I'm really looking forward to it but I wanted to explain
0:35 with in the very beginning like what is it that we really do we say SEO for everyone we say that a lot but when we say that what do we even mean what we mean is that we want you to be able to compete with everyone we want you to we want you to be able to make a website and make it found by search engines and on social networks we don't care whether you're Disney or Microsoft or a local
1:09 shoe store even though the local shoe so we don't even really care whether you can afford the assessee of premium every feature that we think is really important for you to be able to rank your website is in the free version of us SEO of course your sessio premium has its benefits and it will have more benefits over time but the benefits will always be things that save you time and
1:40 to make things easier for you to do if we really think something is truly important for you to rank your website it'll be in u.s. SEO free that is what SEO for everyone means to us and apparently it's working because as of this moment we have 9 million websites using us SEO worldwide which is an absolutely mind-boggling number it also makes me afraid every time we hit the Update button because if we break
2:14 but because that number is so large I think I'm allowed a slight bit of arrogance on that part so let's go in and redefine SEO it's only a bit of work right in the last few years voice search has started popping up and as I said a year and a half ago voice search has already changed all of search not because everyone is now using voice
2:46 search but because all the search engines are getting ready for a world where voice search is the default so everything has been changing in that regard and that has changed a lot about how we think about SEO now traditionally we split up SEO and two things in technical SEO and content SEO and while these two things are very different
3:18 steps of the SEO process it doesn't really fit well with what it really is that SEO is so we're going to try and talk about it a bit a bit differently while still admitting that there is a technical side to SEO and the content side to SEO I think we should split it up like this first of all discovery where is it in traditional SEO this would be called
3:53 crawling we'll talk about that in a bit then there's indexing what is it search engines grab the page and later on they start indexing it then they start analyzing what's on that page how do these pages relate to each other what are these different versions doing and then there's ranking how good is it how important is that page how many links so I'm gonna go through all these free phases and try to explain what we're
4:25 doing right now to help you in all of these phases and the first one is also I think the most exciting thing that I can you see discovery of content has historically been done through different means first there were search engines that had direct URL submission you had to submit your site to be crawled by a search engine then there came search engines that follows links and have
4:57 PageRank and and used those links to discover new pages later on we added XML sitemaps to that process to show search engines like this these are all the pages on our site and in the last few months something else has been added to that and that's api's and that's where I can share this really exciting announcement that we're working with both Bing and Google to build something
5:30 new we're building an option to allow you to log in from your plugin on your site to our customer portal my Yoast and if you make it make that connection later on this will be life I hope by the end of March we'll send your new published posts your updated posts and your deleted both posts straight into Google and Bing so if you hit publish within one minute
6:01 both search engines will crawl that page because we will send them to ping about that new page being there it's no longer a process of us updating an XML sitemap and then the search engine grabbing the XML sitemap checking the last modified days is searching through that it's a straight we have the URL we ping it to the search engine this means that your changes to sites will be indexed within seconds so
6:33 in a minute of you posting you'll be able to search on your content something that really only the largest publishers we think this is pretty mind-blowing because this basically means that off those free portent problems discovery is now a solved problem you can connect your site to my Yoast you can build a new site and every new page that you publish will be in the index done of
7:05 course there's spam mechanisms on there and etcetera so we can't guarantee any rankings or anything because we don't have anything to do with that but we can tell you that we'll send the data to now the next step is also very very interesting because there's a lot happening in that regard indexing is really changing a bit why is indexing changing well it used to be about
7:37 content and metadata we had pages with titles meta description those of you or have been in this industry long enough might even remember meta keywords and all these other very weird things that we stuff then over time we added things like canonicalization trying to show that while we have ten different version of a URL only this simple version should be in Google or Bing then we added rendering on to that where search
8:09 engines started to actually render out those pages to see what's on those pages onesearch when users see them a change that is very very important because it it really makes all the difference in how people interact with that page it's also one of the main reasons for breakage on a lot of sites still because a rendered page looks different in the search engine than it does for normal users then we have things like href Lang
8:40 and a lot of other concerns will have a later speak later on which is speaking about something else in a straw flying if your interest Natura flying we have a great course on that but it's basically the worst specification ever to come out of search engines all of this is very important for adding new stuff to that for a basic
9:12 we've solved the chronic economical ization if you're not doing multilingual then we've basically solved it all if you are doing multilingual I'm basically going to be honest and say wow there's stuff to do and other CMS's might at this point in time do it better I'm going to go into ranking first and then we'll get back to the combination of these things because ranking basically consists of a couple of things it's quality of your content
9:44 it's your authority how many external links you have it's internal links and site structure probably one of them still the most actionable parts of SEO and it's quality quality quality quality quality I can't say that enough so quality quality of content is becoming more and more
10:16 important because all the other things are solved up until now a lot of SEO was making sure that your stuff was found by the search engines in the first place but because because we're making all that step so very easy your quality matters more than ever before and your site structure and your external links start to matter more weirdly enough so
10:47 we've been working on a project called the recalibration project if you follow us online you might have seen our videos about that and or read one of our posts where we're recalibrating our SEO analysis within the plugin and the question we ask is what is quality can we define that better can we do actual scientific research something that in the SEO community is always hard because there's so many things that you have to take into account we're currently beta testing that and there is
11:18 already more than a hundred thousand people running the beta test and so far the results are very good I'm very positive so we'll probably flick it on in a while from now if you want to try to beat a you have to be quick because of the next release we're probably disabling to be tougher for a bit so if you want to be in an enable it and go in
11:49 I dare say that with the things that we're announcing today and tomorrow about what we're going to do in 2019 we will really take away the last hurdles for getting your site into Google Bing and all those indexes your content will be discovered your content will be ranked especially if you're on WordPress and I'll give a shout out to the guys here a front for from Mac Cerf who built our type of three years SEO extension
12:25 because that is almost nearly as good so your content will be discovered and your content will be indexed but will you get it right and the question there is how do you get stuff ranked in 2019 now I'm not gonna do a talk on how you should write the best content because other people here can talk about that way better but I will tell you this Rich
12:56 Snippets are everywhere the ten blue links that we all knew in years past have really really gone if you search for recipes your results always look like this there really is no recipe result that anymore where you don't get the Rich Snippets and it's important to
13:29 understand how this works there's this wonderful thing called schema.org that we talk about a lot but it's probably hard to understand if you're not straight into it but this is a definition of structured data this is how can we define the content on that page in a way that a search engine can grab it when you see this you know what it is because our brains turn out to be very good at recognizing stuff you recognize what the this is fairly easily
14:04 just because of contextual Clues turns out search engines are pretty darn stupid so they need help now this recipe ranks number one for lasagna recipe and if you look at what a search engine sees when it sees this page you throw it into Google's structured data testing tool I hope I'll get the video to play now and you see that the recipe has been marked
14:36 up with schema.org to a ridiculous extent the schema.org markup on this page is incredible it's also technically actually pretty hard to do all of that no normal user will ever be able to code schema like that and make it as simple or accessible as that the reason it's doing this is because all these search engines are preparing for voice search
15:09 they want to be able to read out that but as we've seen in the recipe industry as schema gets more use it becomes more of a requirement for ranking it is impossible right now to rank recipes without having schema that's simply because there's so much sites already to
15:43 have implemented recipe schema so in 2019 we will see more types of search results require schema and maybe you're thinking why is that well let me tell you a story a year and a half ago we stood here on stage Omar and I on this same stage demoing Gutenberg the new
16:18 block editor for WordPress it looked like that year and a half ago which when I looked at the pictures it baffled me because it doesn't really look all that different now even though we've taken so much time to polish it a year and a half ago we were not really content with where Gutenberg was at that time but we got to work and we started as helping build Gutenberg and we started building
16:52 Yoshio for it right now it's probably the best version of yo Ciccio we've ever built is when you use the block editor it's faster it's more stable and it looks a hell of a lot cooler so we have our sidebar which is turns out to be actually very useful as you can look at your readability stuff while you're typing I find that very fascinating and our highlights in sentences have become way better and way more stable because
17:23 we actually got to build an API into Gutenberg that allows us to do this instead of hacking it onto the justing WordPress editor you'll also see here that we recognize combinations of words and work and we recognize plurals we didn't use to do this but we did we do as of this year and I'm very proud of what we have that looks now by building all of that we made gutenberg plug-in
17:55 ready but now it's time to go one step further you see Gutenberg really opens up a Play Store Gutenberg has this concept called blocks and blocks have huge potential they have the dream of combining two things that is easy content management and seamless schema.org markup without you having to
18:30 think about doing that markup now our thinking about this of course progresses as we work with it so we have a how-to blocking sseo already but we're currently working on a second iteration what's different here is that all these things that you see this thing on top you'll of course not see in the front end but we tell you which block of which parts of a block are required and then you can shovel everything around you so you can move your time needed to the
19:01 bottom if you want to you can do stuff with that you can change the label on time needed you can do everything you want I built this literally in under one minute yesterday and this parses if you check the output of this it parses immediately as a valid schema so you can say I want to make a how to you open up a how to blocking Gutenberg you start
19:32 typing and all of this just works you don't have to think about schema because thinking about schema is very scary the way I like to think of it and does you who've seen it in the videos of our office might know that I'm a bit of a Lego nut um we are building the Lego blocks that help us build the bigger blocks so that we can very easily combine them into different types of
20:09 schema if we've looked at this before this is the recipe again you can see that it contains a lot of different properties if you start really looking at a dough there's only a couple of different types of data in there the input fields for those are the same basically they have a different name and a free schema but that's not something a user should be worried about that's something that we should worry about so
20:41 we've got DS and maybe a few more and by making DS in our blocks as they're called in the block editor and combining them in useful ways we can make basically every schema block that you want this is the wall at Google Zurich and I'm afraid to say I've cut it wrongly because funnily enough if you up the top there there's a Yandex logo that somebody Legos on to the Google ball
21:12 which I found hilarious Yandex if you don't know it is the big Russian search engine but with these blocks we can build a lot more than just how to blocks so we're planning to build in 2019 job postings recipes events organization and local business person or offer of
21:44 profile reviews etc etc all of those as we think they are requirements for ranking will have a versioning yo so Co free so by the end of this year if we get our way this will look different why will it look different well because if we flood the web with sites that do schema easily
22:17 then search engines will start to prefer schema for those specific types of rankings and because of our sheer size this goes for jobs I think very quickly because that has already begun in many ways Google has been pushing job postings for a while so for millions of sites schema will really become effortless
22:51 I honestly also think that this is why other CMS's will have to adopt a similar method it's really not feasible to expect users to understand schema we should really abstract away from that just make it easy for people to put out schema so I want to welcome you to what we call a world of blocks so let me
23:24 recap this year and I hope a lot of this will actually be the first half of this year we're going to change discovery by doing live indexing with Bing and Google straight from your site we're going to change ranking and indexing by adding schema to many many more sites and the funny thing is that what will be
23:55 important now in ranking is that the quality of your content is no longer just the quality of your writing but it's also have you filled out your schema correctly so you can expect us to help you in doing that as well have you added all these things a recipe without calories ranks harder than a recipe with calories a recipe that doesn't specify its ingredients well enough has a hard time ranking these things start to matter it starts to matter that you really have
24:28 all of these things correct in your content so the quality of your content becomes a much more holistic thing but if I combine all of this I can honestly when I was looking at this I was like how am I gonna end this and I can only say that for me 2019 will be a very cool
25:12 thank you thank you thank you for a wonderful talk so we have some time yes we have some time for questions where is that thing yeah I want to throw yeah can i fro at least once so does anyone have a question and we'll throw gently promise Wow great catch good morning good morning Yost will there be a ski
25:44 well we'll give feedback on it honestly the UX if these things is some of the hardest UX work we've ever done so we're looking at how to give that feedback in a way that that it it's there where you need it and I see a couple of rate of things we will probably do there I'll probably highlight it as you're editing and probably also if you're missing required things at some point we'll start highlighting it to you when you want to publish in WordPress in the
26:16 block editor you now have an extra step when you publish where we can add stuff so we can tell you like hey you should be adding this or you should be adding that or you haven't said a massive description yet we could add like hey you've added this schema but you're missing that required block that sort of feedback is yeah if in all honesty you access the hardest problem in all of this even though the technical problems are hurt the UX problems are infinitely harder so thank you thank you
26:48 anyone else okay yes you have to troll all the way back all the way there yeah if you see if I can reach otherwise throw it on please yes almost nice thank you for this nice presentation the schema does it only work when you use Gutenberg or yes so these blocks are Gutenberg only yeah I realize there's a lot of people who don't really like Gutenberg yet and also realize that there's a lot of UX work to be done on
27:19 Gutenberg to make it better we we just recently yeah we we only recently switched ourselves so the problem is that we can't maintain that for two editors because the block interface simply doesn't exist in classic editor so it's very hard for us to do it there so yes this will only work in in the block editor and in Gutenberg and I hope other CMS's will adopt similar systems we're already seeing a very large action from the
27:51 Drupal community to to use Gutenberg and Drupal as well there's been a lot of negativity towards through good to work in the beginning and I honestly would urge everyone who's not looked at it for a while to look at it again and try it I like it but I can also totally see that it has its problems somewhere will you still support the classic yeah we will support the classic editor with all the features we have we're actually thinking about moving some of the interface changes that we've done for Gutenberg over to the classic editor as well so
28:23 having a sidebar for us SEO and the classic editor because the you access that is some a lot nicer as you're typing so yes we will support the classic out of here for at least two more years and I think a couple more depending on what core decides to do okay thank you not a question yes a front yes
28:55 oh it's constantly saving every single settlement you're going to make a change and then it's already saved and you're not sure exactly where you stand so I think that's the biggest problem why I wanted to go back to the classic I yeah I see a heroine next to you going yes we know that era is one of our architects working on all of this stuff there's issues I know and the part of it is also
29:27 there's issues with plugins that collide with Gutenberg in ways that make it very hard for people to figure out that there's issues so we I'm not saying it's perfect yet I do think it's the future so we're in we're in this weird limbo state that we have to get through to get well the schema we already put out in yes SEO will will remain to work but all those new blocks we'll only built built
29:58 for Gutenberg not a question do I still have time yes we have to to rosin bein behind you and and you won't have to throw very far yes it's wearing no scholar it's a beautiful color so you mentioned the leaning the blocks to to work with the scheme Oh does that play well with with visual composer if you were to use that builder it's interesting to see where the official
30:29 composer and other builders will go in the next six to twelve months because a lot of these things are changing in the WordPress world as a whole we work quite closely with visual composer we actually have a slack chat so we use slack for internal communications we have a slack channel with external parties that integrate with us SEO visual composers in there so we talked to them but I honestly can't really tell you what their plans are for this right now all of this is built on the Gutenberg API so if we change
31:01 basically if they tie into the Gutenberg API all our stuff will work in the in that and I hope all the block editors in the world will do that you know in a way the blocks open up the possibility for all these site builders to work on a singular API have their different interfaces but work on the same API and so that plugins like ours can work with all of them that's the future that's not
31:33 really the present yet anyone else thank you yes all the way you can throw it back at us if you want to not at me I'm hi everyone good morning so did I get it correctly if we are gonna be able to publish directly to Google and Bing does this matter that we don't need the fetch and render feature anymore by our Google search console what will basically do that for you it's
32:05 what we do is pretty much as you hit publish we do a similar action to that it ties into two similar api's and for Google you'll need a Google search console accounts probably for Bing you won't even need a Bing Webmaster Tools account we'll just send it straight into Bing do you want to ask a question or you're just stretching a question yes that's a final one I guess yeah throw - yes Wow
32:39 hello good morning good morning what type of schema will be the yours be using schema.org or it's a schema.org in Jason we'll put it out on the page in json-ld markup and we're actually working on combining all the schema on the page into one big json-ld block John Oh who's here has been working a lot on
33:10 that it's yeah it is for us it's the preferred way because it means that we can separate the schema from the look of the page so that if someone it means that you can't really break things with your theme or in any other way we can just put it in search engines can just read it thank you thank you thank you Frank oh nice - y'all Iraq you [Applause] you