2016·02·02 · 53:41
Joost de Valk founder and CEO of Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress - Search Talk Live
I cover my background in SEO and how I came to build Yoast, starting from an IT career and moving into consulting for large brands. I discuss the state of SEO in 2016: what Google is doing, how keyword-based thinking is evolving, and why the plugin’s “SEO for everyone” approach matters. I also talk about what Yoast had reached by then, with around 9 million sites using the plugin, and what that kind of scale means for how we build and release software.
0:05 [Music] yeah welcome to search talk live with search engine optimization and marketing
0:37 experts robertto hver and Caleb mckelvin powered by the Robert Palmer family of companies good afternoon and welcome to another episode of search talk live with me today is Caleb mckelvin my co-host Caleb how's it going doing great man happy to be back for another show and I think we got a really good one in store today for our listeners a lot of good information and an awesome guest yeah yeah um what uh just to give you guys if you're first time listening I want to give you a little bit of information on the show we are search talk live we talk
1:08 about nothing but digital marketing search engine optimization uh social media yeah social media conversion optimization all that good stuff yes uh anything that's happening with Google we talk about that or Bing yep uh and uh yeah Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo yeah we're search talk live uh we are powered by the Robert Palmer family companies you can go to Robert Palmer companies.com check that out we really appreciate them helping us here at
1:39 search talk live and uh all they do for us but yeah let's get this thing started Rob well I want to tell everybody where they can hear us at um you can get the show on iTunes you can download it from your iPhone uh spreer which is another uh where we disseminate all the information from uh you can get us uh where else the website search talk.com talk.com yeah got all the info on there yeah but today I'm really excited we have a guest um probably one of the most
2:10 downloaded plugins in the WordPress hemisphere yes um we have yoast yes Mr Yos Devol yes is that are we pronouncing that right J Dev you're actually pretty good for an American well see I'm American and I'm Southern so that's kind of like a double whammy so it's kind of hard to to pronounce some things but yos deoc how you doing today we appreciate you joining us I'm I'm doing very fine glad to glad to be here yeah it's pretty cool you're in the Netherlands right yes wow we are in in
2:42 this this tiny country with uh well it's it's it's probably as big as the state of New York or something yeah W well what's the temperature there uh it's currently 4 degrees Celsius outside I I don't even know what that is in terms of it's the same when you go past zero pretty much y'all are pretty cold there yeah it's a that's 39.2 Fahrenheit yes so you're cold we got a little better over here nice and sunny Florida so doing good don't even get me
3:16 start so uh yo we kind of want to start out uh our listenership we have from experienced SEO to digital marketing to people that are just getting into the industry to kind of small business owners wanting to learn more uh can we you just give us a little bit about your background uh you know uh how you got started and currently what you're doing okay um so I started out in SEO approximately 10 years ago um coming from a variety of IT
3:49 background so I I walked into an SEO job um became a consultant uh rather quickly uh started blogging about SEO and became a speaker on the international circuit and um from there about five year five and a half years ago now I started my own company uh doing SEO for rather big Brands I was doing at that time companies like km and eBay Etc
4:22 um and so I did that for a while had started developing WordPress plugins as a hobby on the side and the hobby turned into more of a nuessence because is that we I had over a million users and that filled my inbox far too quickly right so uh well basically got told by my wife that I needed to do something about that um and she was right in many ways so started to to look at okay how can we monetize this can we build a company
4:56 around this so the company i' started was in the beginning mostly Consulting and just me uh and then uh from 2012 onwards we started doing premium plugins uh and we've grown tremendously since so uh I started in 2010 hired my first employee in 2012 and there's 37 of us now oh wow uh so yeah it's been uh a bit of growth and we are indeed one of the uh our SEO plugin Yos
5:28 SEO for WordPress is probably in the top three downloaded plugins for WordPress at any given time how many how many would you say downloads has been I you don't care sharing well downloads is a a public number but doesn't really say that much uh because every new download on a site that's already active counts as a new download uh we know that we've got in between 4.5 and 5 million active uh sites wow jeez uh and we know that uh
6:03 according to Bill with.org um of the top 1 million websites out there uh over 8% uses are plugin that's not just WordPress sites that's the top 1 million sites overall wow that's incredible so yeah the impact to that is to be honest even to us still ridiculous yeah absolutely and you look at those numbers and you just go like uh oh ouch yeah right yeah um well I'm goingon to let you do a little bit of a sales pitch here um somebody just getting started because
6:34 we we've spoke with many of our listeners and you know some meetup groups that we have people just getting a WordPress up you know how do they get it started and stuff why would somebody and you know I'll let you put it in your own words why would somebody uh just getting started that doesn't necessarily doesn't know that much about SEO yet why would they need this plugin and how is it going to help their site so what we strive to do is we strive to take all of the technical problems away from you and just fix them for you and so you you install the plugin and we take care of a lot of things automatically um that's honestly
7:06 something we don't talk about much and probably should talk about more ourselves right um and then we give you when you're writing a new post or page we give you a box below that uh the below your input fields we give you a box where you can say okay so what's the word that you would like to rank for with this post and then based on what you put in there we give you Fe back on okay if you want to rank for that term you should do this this this and this
7:37 yeah um those are what has become known as our green bullets um and if you look at our Twitter stream you'll see people go like yeah I got all greens and uh stuff like that which is awesome so we're we're we we're basically trying to gamify you into writing well seed content right gotcha now do do youall see any challenges as far as there's a lot of seos out there that says well don't necessarily focus on keyword specific uh you know focus on you know what's what's the uh individual looking
8:08 for the US you're looking for kind of what's their intent uh and they're kind of saying stay away from you know don't worry about the green bullets don't worry about all this I mean is there something you can say to that because it's still something you might need to focus on but a lot of people are saying you know you can ignore that you can still focus on you know that's not necessarily good SEO your your first and and the first and foremost thing that we tell you all the time if you read our blog posts and and and everything that we put out there in terms of uh content
8:40 is focus on good content good quality well-written stuff right H and and make sure thato is a part of your thinking but don't necessarily change that all that much because you think that that's better for your SEO so we're not going to tell you to get like a 4% keyword density or stuff like that yeah um I I think what he's referencing is because of the green light goes off of exact match phrase uh how many times it shows up you know in in a in a article
9:12 or whatever it may be um that not necessarily focus on that exact match phrase maybe variation of that abely true um the this is the reason why recently when we updated to our latest version We introduced a multiple keyword functionality in our premium plug-in where you can actually do um where you could put in synonyms uh so you could you could optimize for several terms at the same time and we're working hard on making that analysis even better right um the
9:43 problem is that we're doing texal analysis in JavaScript so we have some technical um boundaries huh yeah we have some technical boundaries and we didn't exactly have the this serve the computing power that Google has right um at the same time and this might sound very um weird to a lot of seos um but Ciro density does still work especially if you're non- English sure uh in in in countries like the Netherlands or in
10:17 Germany or in France or Spain Etc having a somewhat higher keyword density does actually uh very often help uh with uh ranking so you you'll need the exact term of course you can r bank for specific terms without having that exact term in your content but you're making it an awful lot harder for yourself yeah sure so um that's why we still ask for that keyword and we still do matching on that specific keyword in headings in in your content in your first
10:49 paragraph but if you're doing more phrase like stuff I'm the first to tell you that that probably doesn't uh always translate into the best uh scores in our in our plugin because we just come and do that from a Computing perspective right gotcha okay well if you don't mind I mean we saw I mean we've been since that recent update you've done a couple months ago the it I love it it's it's made a huge difference yeah I think so uh just it's funny
11:22 there's a couple of people that hate it um the especially the real time bit of it um it's honestly um and and please don't uh think I'm bragging but it's honestly a bit like when Facebook changes timeline yeah yeah right exactly because you're running on like five million websites and you that probably means that there is on average about 10 million different people looking at our interface over the course of a month
11:53 right um can't please everybody right you're right and yeah we've basically given up on pleasing everybody and it just doesn't work like that so we're doing what we think is best um and at the same time with this new update and we're we're working on yet another update as always where we'll try to improve the UI and ux a bit right um but it's yeah it's uh it's hard work getting getting this to work for everybody sure absolutely if you don't
12:26 mind we could run through uh you know the plugin a little bit yeah of course okay so which which bits would you want to go through uh let's just go from the top down um got what general first uh in terms of settings pages so one of the things that I for the the semi longterm our plan is to reduce those more and more because I want more most of those things to I think should either be core functionality of Wordpress yeah or um should not be settings at all but just be right
13:02 yeah so um if you on General you you you'll not find all that many interesting things in terms of specific SEO bits we'll ask for a couple of uh Fields like your company name if if it's a company website or your personal name so we can fill the necessary um Knowledge Graph uh metadata so we'll automatically output uh Json LD script tags with Knowledge Graph oh fields for so like Google can
13:33 automatically fill all those yeah um the problem with a lot of these things is that um explaining exactly what you're going to use it for is actually harder than just asking people to input it right um there's a couple of settings there in terms of security that are interesting if you're uh uh if you have um uh users or your site that you don't necessarily trust with everything yeah um and then there's some some stuff to connect your s to the various Google Web Master tools and being Web Master tools
14:07 and blah sorry Google search console I can't get used to them yeah I still call Web Master tools so what do they what does this disable the advanced part of yours uh so on a post oh okay if you if you check that box yeah which will be a toggle soon um then in in the uh On Any Given post you have an edit uh uh section and there's an advanced tab there that allows you to do stuff like redirects and allows you
14:38 to put no no index post Etc if you check that box everyone below editor is not able to do any of those settings gotcha okay so this is where if you don't trust all your authors to do stuff like that yeah you it's but it's by default they can't do that so you actually this box allows you to allow them to do that while they can do it by the fold right okay all right let's move on to titles and metas yeah so titles and metas is where that the cord magic of this plugin
15:10 happens I think in many ways yeah because it allows you to set up templates for what your titles and meta descriptions on posts will look like um and this it does this for posts and for pages and if you have a an a bigger site and you'll have multiple custom post types or custom taxonomies um it allows you to set up templates for all of these gotcha um so you set a template here and then every post will have a title based on the template that you've set here and
15:41 then you can alter that to be more specific on the individual posts um or overwrite the template entirely gotta um in in many ways that is something that should be in WordPress core mhm I agree and we're slowly working towards that yeah they and the thing I like too on this is you're able to block uh tags and stuff like that because you know with the whole duplicate content issues
16:12 and all that stuff that's that's yeah you're you're able to block uh tags from being indexed you're even able to if you have a one of the things that I find annoying in WordPress is if you have a single author blog um then your author archives will be the exact duplicate of your homepage right uh so you can disable them entirely because it's just stupid to have them right um and the same goes for date based archives for some sites it just doesn't make sense to have
16:43 date-based archives so we allow you to disable those entirely which is not something that core allows and WordPress core by itself allows you to do it just doesn't allow you to disable archives like that they are always there right h you canot link to them sometimes there so um and well there's some specific settings there for having uh
17:16 specific uh metatags on pages um that I honestly don't really think that are all anymore so we stuff like hiding um I'm not looking at the back end right now I'm doing this off the top of my head I think under Advan there stuff like hiding uh specific Fields sure that's stuff that will probably move out of the plug-in because we don't think it's that important anymore the no follow no index and stuff or well no not the no follow no index one not um
17:48 um um oh no sorry we move that to Advanced um there that somewhere else already you'll see that we we play with these quite a bit we we're trying to make it simpler and simpler and simpler to work with this yeah it's it it can be a bit hard for people to do this um so we're hoping that we're getting to the point where the defaults are so good that most people won't even have to get into these settings yeah very good um let's see you got the uh
18:20 taxonomies yeah so you you can do the same thing that you can do for post you can do for taxonomies as of the recent release you can actually also addit individual categories and tags Etc and get a a snippet preview on that and see how they what they will look like in Google Etc and and optimize the Facebook and Twitter looks of those pages when when they're shared um a ton of work went into that to actually help you optimize your category and tag Pages M I think in light of the recent changes actually
18:51 last weekend's changes in Google yeah where you saw a lot of category Pages suddenly pop up right uh that's actually something that you could uh do a lot of work with and then um let's see archives you've got that page it's a duplicate content prevention yeah well there's a lot of that um we're trying to become better at that too one of the the problems we often see in the website reviews that we do for customers they'll have like a tag
19:23 uh well for instance a tag Google analytics and a category Google analytics ah okay uh and that really doesn't benefit you all that much no so we're trying to make it easier to to prevent stuff like that from from um becoming a problem gota and we're actually also trying to make it easier to just get rid of one of the other and and if you have our premium plugin will even let you easily delete it and you'll get a popup to the to redirect it you
19:54 can just redirected to the other one and then uh moving on to social got uh yeah so there's a lot of power in the plugin that has not all that much directly to do with SEO uh it's because we think our SEO and social are so intertwined that you need to do both well to be able to do either one of them good yeah um so uh the most important one there is Facebook um basically you'll want our plugin to take care of all your Facebook open
20:27 graph data because Google uses a lot of that too yeah um and um there's a couple of other ones but the funny thing is they all fall back to Facebook open graph if you don't have them so if Facebook on and you don't do anything for Twitter and Twitter still uses the stuff you use for Facebook um and Google+ is even worse than that uh the settings that you probably see there now will be gone soon because Google seems to be favoring Facebook open graph data more than its own bloody metat tags that funny um
20:58 which is only one more kneel in the coffin of Google Plus uh but um yeah so basically what this allows you to do is connect your site uh to your Facebook uh page or whatever it is that you use uh so you can use Facebook insights y um and it allows you to do a couple of settings around that um but I I think most people should not turn that off
21:30 yeah definitely I like the Twitter cards too I mean those are those are great yeah those work pretty well they I have to admit that I I fought them a lot more interesting a year ago um and now they're also generating them for everyone and they got rid of like half of the types yeah um so the product type and a couple of other ones that were really cool to use are all gone yeah which is a shame but it is what it is it's Twitter yeah uh well if you are just joining us you are tuning in to search
22:03 talk live uh obviously uh hosted by Robert o'haver and Caleb mckelvin um we are powered by the Robert Palmer family of companies Robert Palmer compy companies.com go check it out a lot of cool stuff uh for you there on a wide range of services uh awesome show for you today we do have Mr Yos dealk uh the CEO and founder of the plugin Yos the one of the top plugins uh download voted for WordPress and uh yeah a lot of good
22:35 stuff so uh um well we can move on through the tool here got XML sit Maps um we do um so this is something that I think should be in WordPress core and that we've talked to the WordPress core team extensively about already and that we'll probably at some point get into WordPress core um in a slightly amended version yeah they're gonna have to add a lot to it I mean you know been able to disable maybe posts or pages that you don't want and all that you you still have to have your the question whe
23:07 you want to give people that freedom um if a URL is on your site uh and you don't want it indexed why is it on your site exactly yeah um so there might be a follow I mean no follow I mean follow but no index you might want to know index it and stuff like that and there and and that will Pro probably always be something that plugin should do for you yeah unless you want to know index your entire site at which point you don't need the XML s maps in the first place yeah
23:39 um the the problem is XML sit maps are very hard to maintain from a plug-in uh and would be a lot easier if they were in core um and that as an SEO I no longer think that XML side maps are all that important uh because what we're seeing more and more is that if you're that if you just do your internal link structure right that you don't really need XML sit maps and that they add a lot of work and a lot of code to a
24:12 plugin like ours MH um whereas the and people think that that is the the most important bit of it whereas if I could have you spend two hours on your XML s maps versus spending two hours on optimizing your content uh optimizing your content would get you a ton more benefit than actually doing anything about your XML s Maps got now I have a Dy a question I've been dying to ask you when when you generate site map and you're you have a link back to yoast on there did that give you any issues as
24:45 far as algorithms it's not the link is not in the XML s map it's in the Styles sheet right okay so it it doesn't get indexed uh it's purely promotional right uh but it it it doesn't do anything for Google um and it doesn't well it's it's it's it's a very similar to having a link in the in your style the CSS file right no I was just curious because you know back in the day everybody building plugins were you know throwing links
25:17 back to their site from the plugins and then so that's not allowed um but because it's in the NL sheet okay very cool yeah because I was kind of surprised I I figured when I I uh run Yos through um I would see millions and millions of links but that wasn't the case so they're not uh so basically what you see is you get an XML file that we throw an XSL so that's an cell sheet for XML right top of that which allows us to
25:48 do the the sorting and all that stuff um doesn't actually give us links gotcha um in a way I wish we could um but at the same time um y.com has authority of itself that we don't really need it anymore either yeah yeah it might be a penguin issue too well no it's it I think it would be that many links that Google would just not be able to even do any like penguin related issues towards that it's just it's just too much if 5 million sites link to
26:21 you and they're actual proper sites yeah I mean we the people using our our plugin are some of the sites are incredible I mean wire.com uses it the New Yorker uses it uh Disney uses it on Star wars.com and and on a couple of other sites and you go like oh I would like links from all of those yeah those are authoritative yeah but I'm sure there's a few you wouldn't want links from too there's probably also a few porn sites and other things that I'd rather not have I think i' take them along with all the other ones but no no so it doesn't
26:54 do anything for us other than tell people how they generated that XML s map gotcha and it's great because you can you can take things out of the sitemap that you don't want indexed which is great yeah so but as I said I I honestly it's I think about onethird of our support is related to XML sitemaps M um and we we handle for premium customers I think we we handle about 4 to 5,000 support
27:26 requests a month um and I honestly don't think they're that important yeah so uh it's it's a weird thing where we really can't get rid of it MH because everyone would go like yeah but it's so important and I don't really think it's that important yeah I it's added well bad it's just it it's uh for the amount of code and work that goes into it I'd like
27:57 a lot more benefit and that's that's why we focus on our content analysis more and more because with every update you see Google getting better at all the other stuff mhm so the technical stuff is just technical SEO used to be um something that that could get huge huge huge gains right and if you're on WordPress now the technical SEO bit will get you maybe a five or 10% uplift if you install the plugin and suddenly get like a couple of those things
28:30 MH but then getting the real uplift requires for you to actually do real writing yeah I guess it's labor intensive for you guys right it is but well everything is labor intensive in for us because if you run on 5 million websites then every small problem becomes a b big problem yeah very quickly I'm sure yeah so stuff that we will never find in testing and will suddenly happen on 100 or a thousand sites because those sit
29:02 have uh specific things I that that's I mean that's the the the the other side of being big it's it's awesome to be so big and at the same time it has its issues but we've been able to grow a a nice development team around it so we've got uh 10 developers working for us now and that allows us to do a lot of this work and keep everybody happy let's move let's let's move on to the advanced in there we have
29:33 breadcrumbs and per is something that I actually think is very cool and not enough people use um because the breadcrumbs in our plug-in are uh are very powerful and if you have them uh they even show up in the customizer now you can customize them state to straight in the WordPress customizer and do cool things with them and I think they're uh from an SEO perspective those are actually something to add value sure now does that now if you have a theme already that has breadcrumbs in it does it override or what uh no uh we are
30:04 looking at whether we can do that for more themes we do that for a couple so if you use Genesis then they are overwritten by ours uh and most of the work wo theme stuff too that's because both of them use my original breadcrumbs code got that we can override um um but in most cases you'll have to replace them yourself mhm which is wider on under Advan because they just don't work for a large proportion of people yeah and then the
30:36 the the permal links now that's part of the core in in Google I mean in Google in WordPress um so how does that work with um so we have a couple of settings there that um allow you to clean up your permal links okay um there are pretty scary settings um there's a couple of settings there I uh i' I've wanting wanted to throw out like a couple of times but get so much backlash over that that they're still in
31:08 there U but the clean up your pering setting where it'll automatically strip parameters away from your url which is awesome because WordPress doesn't normally use parameters right well you're talking like the category yeah well so you've got question mark oh yeah yeah yeah X is one stuff like that if you add that to a URL nothing changes in WordPress and this redirect that out immediately um the problem is that there's more and more plugins that actually do add parameters to URLs yeah
31:40 and so when people enable that then suddenly their site stops working and they blame me what if they're running what if they're uh doing session variables and stuff like that well you shouldn't okay but normally WordPress doesn't have any of that so on a clean WordPress install that setting is actually awesome gotta uh it becomes a problem when you run a plugin that does stuff with the URL that it shouldn't uh but because people run a ton of combination of plugins it's
32:14 impossible for us to um to maintain that in a good way so that's why we uh um moved that to Advanced and tell people that they they should only use that if you're really sure that they want to use that but if if you're sure that your URLs are always clean and checking that box is actually something that can help you a lot sure so what if if it's on an existing site and you strip away the category does it redirect those to the the page so if your url is example.com category SEO and you you
32:46 strip away the category then the URL will become example.com SEO okay and but if it's index the other way is if you have posts and you have the category name in the peral link of your posts to at that point you could have your post could be example.com SLO example poost right and then if you remove the SL example postbit you'd go to SLO and that would be the category right but what I'm saying is like if it was indexed with the category in the URL
33:18 does that redirect to that new three yeah that would 301 redirect the problem comes when you when you have that enabled and then disable it ah okay gotta well you can see how this leads to problems yeah it's a good place for it in the advanced side yeah and that's why most of this stuff is hidden because it's the defaults are actually pretty good right um a lot of these functions also predate canonical right um so um I as
33:50 soon as canonical came out a lot of these things didn't make as much sense right and will it does it now change the canonical as well so if you change the url uh yes it changes to canonical because we out we change to canonical everywhere so uh by default WordPress puts a canonical on posts and Pages yeah um and when you enable our plugin it puts a canonical on everything mhm um and when you change the url in some way then we we make we
34:21 fix the canonical yeah okay and down below I I want to ask you about this where it says clean up the head yeah those are those growing going away because I don't think they're that useful anymore okay yeah I was going to ask you about that oh in so in um you have to realize that a lot of this plugin is what's something that I built on my own sure for like six years and now with a team for the last two years so there's there's code in there that's almost 8 years old wow yeah I was
34:52 going to ask you why you would hide at RSS feed and very back in the beginning seos were were very interested in keeping the head section of a site as small as possible sure sure I still want to do that and then I look at Okay so we've got open graph we've got Twitter curs yeah and we've got some other stuff and basically we've just added 44 lines of craft yeah exactly yeah let's check that box [Music]
35:24 room just doesn't make sense anymore yeah yeah I get it so uh so removing those is not a very high priority um so we're we'll move that into a small plugin that people can install if they they still want to do that and then uh get rid of it in the main plugin okay and then the uh see where we at got the tools yeah tools tools buer and stuff like that actually some of the more powerful stuff in the in the plugin there's a bulk editor there that you can use to uh to well to bulk edit uh titles and meta
35:57 descriptions uh off pages and posts uh there is an Import and Export uh setting there where if you use all in one SEO you could switch to our plugin and then go to import and then just import all the uh SEO settings straight from all in one SEO uh and you can also export your SEO settings so you can reuse them on another site uh I actually recently did a post on that on how you can use that if you have a specific set of settings that you want to do in every site you work on you can just uh import specific
36:31 groups of settings yeah um yeah one thing I wish that you had on here uh is the redirect Tool uh there is a if you have premium there is a redirect okay PR so if you have us to see a premium we have a complete redirect manager in there that allows you to do 301s 302s 307s whatever you want ah uh and allows you to import them from HDX files allows you to export them to HDX files uh um it all it also when you change the
37:02 url of a post it will it will tell you to change to uh to add a redirect if you delete a post or page it will tell you to add a redirect if you change a category URL or a tag URL it will tell you to redirect the old one to the new one nice H in fact it will automatically create that redirect and give you a popup telling you to you can remove it if you want to um so we do have that that's in yoso premium I think it's one of the most important functions that we have in yo premium um what is uh just
37:34 for the listeners what is the cost if you want to upgrade to a premium is it a monthly subscription is it time uh sorry did you repeat that it's currently a yearly uh it's a yearly fee of $69 for one site and it goes up if you have multiple sites but it becomes less per site and that's a bargain I think it's a bargain yeah and a ton of people do which is good because that allows us to
38:08 grow so yeah it we were at 89 uh then we did a sale last December where we went to 69 and uh sealed it so tremendously well that we decided to keep it at 69 um because well we can handle it um our support team is so good now that we we can handle all that so you get uh in Yos SEO premium you get a couple of things you get support to our support team you get access to our support team and you get a redirect manager that is very
38:40 solid and you get uh the option to have instead of one Focus keyword you can have up to Five Focus keywords for post or page that's fantastic yeah that's huge functionality there every release basically yeah and then you have the search console integration that's great yeah so we moved that from premium to free okay um because we just think it's too important uh the only thing that you don't have if you uh if you've got the three version if you've got the three version you can see all the errors but
39:13 you can't really fix them yeah if you've got the premium version you can fix them all just by redirecting them out and stuff like that yeah um so I on a side where we go in if we if we do uh side reviews we go in and sometimes we'll just see like okay you've got a couple of hours that seem to happen a lot let's just fix those and then it's like two minutes working you fix the most common issues and yeah very easy okay now we see we have the extensions I I just kind of want to talk a little bit about those as far as I know the video SEO news SEO local SEO can you kind of expand a
39:45 little bit on those features yeah so there's a of course a ton of stuff in SEO that um requires you to do specific Stu uh specific things yeah so um video SEO used to be uh even more powerful back when Google was still showing video Snippets for everyone in the search results but right now basically allows you to show up with posts that contain videos it allows you to show up in the videos search results in Google right
40:16 and local SEO does the same thing for local and news for News so it it gives you news SEO gives you a specific news XML sit map video SEO gives you a video XML sit map and all the m data on the page that you need uh news SEO does all the specific stuff that you need to do for Google news like standout tags uh um well is there any markup to that there yeah so there's markup to that on the page there's a specific XML news site map there's a specific RSS feed for
40:48 Stand Out content and uh featured content and well yeah there's a ton of things and there's a couple of very big news sites actually using those wir uses us and a couple of other said use those extensions to to manage how they show up in Google News okay and that's a yearly subscription as well yeah that's a yearly subscription as well all of those are a 69 we actually have one package in which they're all combined but I don't think many people need them all combined yeah right um and local SEO is actually very cool because it's you can do two things with that one is very obvious
41:19 where if you have like local shop it does the it helps you with the local search optimization but it also allows you to if you have multiple locations it allows you to um create a custom post type for your locations and and and create a map with those locations on there it has a store finder functionality in there and a couple of other very neat things very cool nice so you get your local citation stuff especially with a company with a lot of uh locations that can clean a lot up real quick yeah yeah absolutely yeah
41:50 and it always surprises me when I see people like yes so we' built this site and we had a store locator and it was very expensive I like yeah well you could have had that for 69 bucks right wow so yeah I think we covered everything on the plugin now the um we want to kind of jump back with you you did some posts on the the last update that came out Friday with uh Panda yeah and uh wanted to get your thoughts on that get your thoughts what you thought about actually I I hadit publish on two new posts right before I jumped into this
42:26 call um it's not a panda that much is clear and so well that's what I was thinking too but everybody's you know everybody's saying it's Panda I'm like well Google is not confirmed themselves that it's not banner and it's not penguin um so what they have updated is the uh the rankings for brand terms got so if you search for YouTube uh what what shows up there has changed quite a bit in terms of the used to be news articles there and those seem
42:59 to to be mostly replaced by relatively Timeless stuff Goa uh so for YouTube for instance a couple of news articles would have been replaced by the the YouTube category for Mashable um the funny thing is that I don't that because it changed a whole lot of search results MH a lot of seos out there thought that this was a huge impact but terms like that generally don't drive that much
43:32 traffic to anyone outside of the number one position yeah we rank number four for Google analytics and we get zero traffic wow because if you search for Google analytics where do you want to go right to analytics you want to go to Google analytics it's a purely navigational search m searching for YouTube I mean 99.99% of those people wants to go to YouTube right so the traffic on that is very close to zero if you're not the
44:03 number one yeah so changes in that um have a huge impact in visibility scores in all the big tools but be that's because they don't calculate the visibility score differently for navigational searches so I think we it's basically much to do about nothing yeah uh the impact overall to actual websites traffic will not be that
44:35 big uh the only thing I saw I think is interesting is that they seem to be showing a lot more category type pages into the search results than they used to yeah yeah they uh so you think they're leaning more on the Branded side I the the entire update if you look I've looked at search metrics a lot if you look at the the winners and losers and what what they lost and won for it was almost entirely brand traffic okay and um well most sites don't get their
45:06 business from Brand traffic other than their own brand right and that wouldn't that would have changed so it's not like some people suddenly stopped ranking for your own brand so it's new sites that were impacted by this and they were impacted because they ranked number five six or seven for brand terms mhm and all combined that will have some impact on their traffic but for instance if you look at uh search metrics then um uh the Atlantic uh which I use in my
45:39 article as an example and would have lost 25% of their traffic uh or visibility but I think it's less than 2% of their traffic wow so um it's a a whole lot of changes but mostly some something that most sites will not see as that big of an impact yeah so it's something that seos can talk about for for a whole day with that and but doesn't really impact any real business
46:12 yeah got another question yeah um you know I I and my background is I do a lot of content marketing and Link building and I like with somebody that's you know been in SEO for a long time uh I kind of have this question what do you think people are doing wrong with link building um well just about everything um the problem is that most people start with uh getting links to content that's inferior
46:44 yeah uh so if they'd start with getting Superior content getting links wouldn't be that hard yeah I've honestly never done link building for eos.com uh and never needed it yeah and we rank for some pretty heavily competitive terms um it starts out with having great content great tools Etc and um if your link building doesn't start with that
47:15 then you're doing it wrong and um if if it does start with that then doing Outreach actually can help quite a bit but at that point it really becomes very close to traditional PR yeah um which isn't bad it's just it is what it is yeah yeah and that's pretty much what we preach yeah I mean it's a challenge I always like to say you got to let your content do your link building for you I mean there's some Outreach efforts that go into it and relationship building and stuff like that that can improve your efforts but you know it's it's no longer link building and I used this term before I
47:47 forgot who I got it from it's more link earning where you know your stuff's earning links for you and it's natural and you get those really authoritative links you know it's not quantity it's quality and that's how you're going to earn that uh yeah I I absolutely agree um it's it's earned media in many ways yeah um so um yeah it's link building doesn't have to be hard but it it really becomes hard
48:18 when you're trying to to push stuff that doesn't work so I yeah I agree and U I always tell people like okay if if you're not getting links them is it because people don't know you yeah or is it because they they know you but are not interested in linking to you yeah and there are different problems to solve right right yeah you know there's one thing I wish that you could do you probably couldn't do but uh getting user data back from the use of your your uh
48:49 plugins you know maybe get correlations from you know how people are ranking versus you know that type of stuff but I know you're not a data mining company but that would be interesting data yeah um I wish we could but we're not allowed to buy yeah I know that um for the plugin kind of uh what are some of the most common feedback or requests or issues that you do get from users um you know is there kind of one central theme or you know you kind of see a few uh
49:23 reoccurring uh pretty commonly is there anything like specific um if there was we'd have built it um there's a lot of user feedback uh it usually goes in a lot of directions yeah there's a couple of people that actually because everything's open source we actually get contributions that are sometimes very good uh and we which we'll happily include um uh so but most of the thing things
49:55 that we've heard a lot are things that we've already included or have high up on a road map uh um but um not really specific things I think mostly because users don't really know what's possible yeah um so we have some things on our road map that I think are very cool um which I'd love to come talk about once we release them
50:29 it's just uh people think in what they already know yeah and and we're trying to come up with stuff that will actually change things right so now aside from the SEO plugin what other tools do you have plugin tools for WordPress so we have a Google analytics plugin still um with only like a million and a half users uh um which allows you to well uh
51:01 to to tag your site with thetics tag and then do some optimization around that to add some extra metadata that you otherwise wouldn't have in your antics um we've got a couple more tools that's basically just open sourcing what we use on on y.com so we have plugin specifically for comment handling MH um but to be honest we don't focus on that all that much um one of the things we've been focusing on for the last year or so is is that last release of Uso where everything became JavaScript
51:33 instead of PHP which me that instead of running on the server a lot of it runs in your browser now um the reason for us doing that was that we wanted to get ready to move to other platforms too um so we've uh recently released OS for Drupal MH and um uh we're also looking at doing that for other platforms gotta okay well man I really appreciate you coming to the show yes thank you so much being a guest it's it's it's a pleasure
52:05 and uh great to talk to you yeah we'd love to do it again sometime for sure well I I'd love to be on if we can do it at this time I'm I'm I'm All woken up and and happy so yeah yeah I mean we've got some exciting things happening the show I can't really say anything right now but uh it's going to increase our listenership tremendously um got a lot going on and uh you know having somebody uh with with your stature on the show definitely helps and we really appreciate you taking the time for us yeah my pleasure yeah good luck with the
52:37 show and talk soon yeah thanks again sounds great thanks okay cheers guys see you guys I want to like you thank you for listening to search talk live again thanks for your support yes we are here every Tuesday 3:30 Eastern Standard Time to 4:30 Eastern Standard time you can call in anytime with your questions comments at
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