2019·09·12 · 44:14
Joost De Valk : WordPress SEO in 2019
A WordCamp Athens talk on what it takes to rank well in 2019. I cover the Yoast SEO mission, why democratizing publishing should also mean democratizing being found, and then work through the practical elements: structure, speed, schema, content. I explain that our “SEO for everyone” commitment means the features you need to rank are always in the free version, and why that decision costs us money but matters for the web. I also address what has changed in SEO since 2017 and what to prioritize given where search is heading.
0:02 so I'm starting by throwing things around that's to make things easy hi I'm Yoast thanks for having me and thanks for being awake after lunch because you all are awake after lunch right a bit yeah a bit more yes would be good here but I think so I'm the founder of Yoast I'm no longer the boss which is a good thing for me and I think everyone else involved too if you want to follow me on Twitter I'm at Yeti Volk and
0:34 that's where I actually respond I no longer have access to the at Yoast Twitter account so I can't respond to either I should have access I just don't but what's more important is that I'm a husband a father and one of my kids is with me so we're enjoying Athens I have to say the last time I was here I was way better at walking up these hills it might have to do with the fact that that
1:09 was 20 years ago but yeah that's enough about me I work for this company called Yoast and we have a mantra our mantra is SEO for everyone and that is quite a big thing for us it means that we want you to be able to compete with everyone else in the search results we want you to make it easy for you to build a website and to be found by search engines and to
1:41 be to easily share your content everywhere and we want to do that regardless of whether you're the local shoe store or Disney now the funny thing is that all the big names that you know that use WordPress use our software so Disney uses us SEO on like 400 sites Microsoft uses Yoast SEO on a ton of sites but you can use it too and when
2:12 you use it you use exactly the same software today are you we want to be an extension of what wordpress is to democratize publishing in our minds to democratize publishing also means to democratize being found on the web to make it possible for everybody to have a website and be found and be shared now what I'm saying next is something that's not really good for
2:45 our sales so feel free to forget it but we don't even really care whether you can afford to buy us SEO premium or not everything that you need to rank in the search engines in our mind is and always will be in Yoast SEO free and yes there will be some upsells and we'll try to sell you on that the premium thing is actually better but what it does is it saves you time this is a very deliberate
3:17 choice on our part and we will probably make a lot more money if we didn't make that choice but we feel very strongly about allowing everyone to compete and with that we've also reached a few people to the number of now 9 million plus people using our software which is incredibly scary because when we release an update every time all of us are
3:48 refreshing those forums and our inboxes to see what we broke I was actually very glad to get a compliment from a lady who's sitting here up front earlier that we did we dealt with our mistakes so so well well we make mistakes but it's also very impossible to build something stable in the WordPress ecosystem because right now we are supporting WordPress 4.9 which doesn't have good to murk we're
4:19 supporting everything after that which does have Gutenberg we're supporting PHP 5.2 up until 7.3 and we have all these other variables and all the time everything breaks and we test a whole lot of different things but I want you to say to you as one of the biggest plug-in builders builders out there it's almost impossible for us to build something stable so please bear with all those other plug-in and theme
4:51 developers because it's very very hard to build something in the WordPress ecosystem and keep it alive so help them and be patient with them so I want to talk to you about SEO and the way that we look at it I've told you what our mantra is our mission and historically we've talked about SEO in two different ways we've talked about technical SEO and content SEO now I'm going to try and do it a bit differently and divide it into what we've been doing internally
5:22 dividing it into three parts which is discovery where is it on your site indexing what is it and then ranking how this helps because these are the three processes that search engines use internally when they talk about these things too so let's first talk about
5:54 discovery fervid in the beginning of SEO we had direct URL submission now most of you are probably too young to remember this but when I started doing SEO you actually had to submit your year or else to search engines this was annoying and you had all these incredibly expensive packages that helps you do this it wasn't really a good way of doing things then some search engines especially Google started following links and and went from link to link to link and they
6:28 used that to discover new stuff after a while these search engines came together and built something called XML sitemaps and now we have at least four plugins in the top ten most use WordPress plugins that do X site maps so everybody seems to recognize like hey that works we are currently working with the search engines to do away with XML sitemaps and go one step further and publish straight into their index when we publish because
6:59 why would they need to grab the content when we can just send it to MIT I'm to be honest we've been working at that quite a bit turns out it's hard it turns out especially the security concerns around it are very hard so we'll keep on working of it but for us discovery is a solved problem no normal user needs to think about that other than to install
7:34 any SEO plugin and it just works then you get to the next stage which is indexing and then you have content metadata all of that fairly trivial and you have to do things like canonicalization so you have to think about hey I have this page here and this page here and they're almost the same but not entirely how do I solve that or even worse I have this product here this product here and this product here and basically they're the same product but
8:07 they have a different color all of these are pretty hard to solve things but we've also solved most of those automatically within WordPress by now now you get to rendering which is slightly more annoying in the current world because in the past rendering for a search engines meant that they saw HTML and CSS and they made a patch out of that and then some developers thought that it would be nice to add a lot of JavaScript to all those pages and search engines had a bit harder time to render
8:39 that as of two weeks ago Google is now using the exact same rendering engine in Google bot that you have in your Google Chrome so there used to be a difference between those two but now they used exact same thing so if you look at a page with Google Chrome exactly that it's what Google sees as well that makes JavaScript a lot easier and I still would not recommend very JavaScript heavy websites but it does seem to have
9:15 solved quite a few issues so with that for a basic WordPress site we've we've also solved indexing and then we go to ranking and ranking is where it becomes really interesting because to rank content you need a couple of things you need quality in your content you need some sort of Authority some sort of other people saying hey this is good
9:50 stuff you need internal links and this is way underestimated still even though this has been the case in SEO in the last 15 years people still underestimate the power of their internal links in their site structure and then I can tell you that you need a couple more things you need more quality and more quality because in the end everything else has been fixed there are no tricks to this
10:23 anymore so in the context of WordPress I dare say that regardless even almost of which SEO plug-in you use your content will be discovered and your content will be indexed by those search engines but the question is will you get it ranked and a lot of stuff has happened in that space in the last couple of years so what is new in 2019 that we did not have
10:56 before or has become more important well one thing is really clear the time of 10 blue links and search results is entirely gone we have rich results everywhere from featured snippets to these are brand new FAQ markup blocks ratings and product highlights and things like that these
11:29 wonderful knowledge graph blocks that basically tell you everything you need to know about a lot of things without ever needing to click onto a website and recipes and all sorts of other specific things I can show you how this works and I've seen the last two today when I was looking at the sessions that I did understand because my Greek is not all that good sorry that your sessions were quite
12:02 technical so I'm gonna not try and skim over this because this is actually good to understand schema.org is something that you if you build websites you really should know now the problem I have with schema.org is that is probably one of the worst websites itself that exists out there because all of it looks like this and the URL for this particular schema piece is schema the
12:34 org slash recipe with a capital R because if you write it with a lowercase R it will give you a 404 and I really oh yeah I can't live with that so I've been moaning and groaning to the teams that maintain this site that they should really fix that but the content itself is very very valuable it gives you a way in this case to mark up a recipe and if you search for lasagna recipe this is the number one
13:06 almost everywhere in the world and it's not number one because this page is so awesome even though it looks quite good and it has everything you need but it's number one because it provides search engines with a ton of metadata that is all scary I hope it and she can see him now scrolling through on the right hand side all the metadata that this page has for this single recipe it has all the reviews it has all the ingredients it
13:39 has literally everything that a recipe can have and that's what makes it rank because if you don't have that metadata ranking with recipes has become impossible the reason they find this so important is because of voice search what they want to be able to do is for you to go into the to the kitchen talk to your
14:10 Google home and say hey Google tell me how to make lasagna and they will just follow this recipe step-by-step and it'll literally say at some point this recipe from blah blah blah you have to do this next step next step at Google IO a couple of weeks ago they announced that they are now able to continue conversations so they are now actually able to go from one step to the next to the next to the next and this is helping
14:43 them prepare for that but it's also helping them understand because when we look at a recipe page we have no clue we see what's there but the search engine has no clue that spider is really a very stupid thing still people overestimate what Google can see on a page but if you give it schema they underestimate what it can do with it as schema gets more
15:16 use it really becomes more of a requirement for ranking in the recipe space it's impossible to rank without schema and I'm here to tell you that for the next six to 12 months this will happen to a lot more types of results and one of the most important reasons for that is all of us it's this simple thing that brief released which really
15:47 wasn't that simple to get released at all called Gutenberg you see suddenly we've gone from a blop of content on a page to an interface where we can have blocks and know what each block is within that page and what it is within the context of that page so here let's see if my fancy pointer works probably doesn't
16:18 know here you see a how-to block from your Ciccio which has steps and everything or an FAQ block actually in this case I see the rich snippet I just showed you for an FAQ block comes from exactly this thing this block if you're using US SEO is already in your WordPress site you just all you have to do is search for an FAQ block and you'll get this thing and it works and you won't have to type any schema and you
16:49 have to still get that fancy who does fancy Rich Snippets because we've done all the work for you this is where Gutenberg really shines if you were in Mauricio's earlier session where he shows you how to make really cool sand blocks with a CF integrating that with schema is actually fairly easy because you know what is what and where it is and how it can relates to each other so suddenly a search engine can come by and
17:20 instead of seeing one blop of content it can actually identify all the different things on that page the funny thing is as we were work working with this and we were building our schema integration we realized a problem because most schema implementations look like this or if you use the Google's structured data testing tool which too
17:54 have for these things like this so you have six blocks of schema on a page and no way to know how this relates to each other so you have a web page a local business a web page header a web page footer an about page a site navigation element what I don't even know what it means the problem is that for a search engine which of these is the most important I was talking to a Pinterest
18:26 engineer a while back in a call we had with Pinterest on improving some of their schema parsing and they were complaining that on WooCommerce sites they saw they often saw four products on a page because there was one main product and then three related products but if they just read the schema there was no way for them to figure out what the most important product on our page was because all of them had the same product schema so we started thinking
19:00 and my dear colleague John o Alderson started researching in how can we tie this together how can we make something where it's logical that this is a webpage that also happens to be an about page actually for a local business because that's what this says but as humans we can see that easily but for a search engine algorithm this is incredibly hard so we started tying these things together and it turned out
19:32 to be simpler yet more complicated than we thought there's a couple of problems some are technical some are just because schema.org is also constantly evolving and not always logical and but we've succeeded in doing this so if you now have your SEO running on a site what it does is it ties all these things together so it becomes instead of only separate block becomes one thing that has everything
20:06 tight and it declares the main content of that page so literally in this case is an article we've declared the article as the main thing of that page and if you go look through it you'll see that it declares that it's an article on a web page within a website written by an author published by an organization everything's there but it's all tied together in one coherent graph now we
20:39 were working with Google on FAQ and how to stuff that they recently released and we showed them this and they were like yeah that solves a few problems now the problem is that they've yet to solve a few problems on their end so one of the things that we ran into is that a site in our system can be either a representative of a person or an organization turns out Google doesn't like persons to be publishers of anything which is really weird if you
21:11 think about it I mean if it's on Yoast a blog that's my personal blog I am really the publisher of that content there's no company there it's just me we're working with them to fix that and we're also pushing some changes in between to make sure that you don't get the errors that we're getting but this is a constantly evolving battle but this solves the problem the Pinterest was having because on a product page now what we what you have is one product and four related
21:43 products so suddenly you know what the most important product on a page is suddenly it becomes very easy for everyone to build a graph the funny thing is there were only two companies so far in the world that had a graph this extensive it was Facebook on the one hand and Google on the other hand and now all you need to do is crawl the web and you have the exact same graph because there's no need to disable this oh yeah all you have to do is you just update your sis you know and all of this works now where it becomes really cool and
22:15 some of you the ones of you that are developers to dig in is to look at our schema documentation because we've documented all of this and we've published a lot of api's and examples on how to add your own stuff so Mauricio is showing an example of three talks and and how you could do how you could basically build a word camp Athens site in about 15 minutes of work you probably can add the event schema to that and then you have all of the event schema
22:46 that you'll ever need for this site and it's done because it's really simple you have all the data already all you have to do is connect the dots so extend it make it better or if you're building in a competing SEO plugin by all means copy it that's what it's open source for now the question I expected to get and we'll probably get somewhere later today anyway it's but isn't SEO all about dat
23:20 these days now I hate stupid acronyms but EA T stands for something that Google calls in its own crawl in its own crawl rate or guidelines the people that manually look at pages the whole day to quality to check their quality it sounds for dis for expertise Authority and trustworthiness of the page and of the author what they're trying to do is establish whether you're actually in whether you actually know your when
23:52 you're writing about it now they've been doing that for an awful long time if you've been around in the SEO world long enough you'll remember results like this with me looking very young and very posh in a suit but this was Roe author in 2011 and then they call it author rank all of this doesn't really change anything we have the same thing now and actually I think we have a better system now in schema where you can say who you
24:24 are by declaring not just your name but also saying I'm the same person as this so if you go into your WordPress profile and you run yo socio there's a lot of new input fields there where you can declare your other social identities and then we'll connect them to each other so we'll say that you are dis and you're the same person as the Twitter account the LinkedIn account etc and then when Google can verify that that goes the other way around - so when it sees a link from your Twitter accounts to your
24:56 personal blog or whatever it that it can validate these connections it'll actually know that you are the same person so works a lot better than rel author' ever did and what I'm guessing is that what Google is doing in part is trying to figure out whether they can actually build an author rank and real and follow you across sites as an author and see how well you write so I'd like to give
25:28 you some practical advice on what you should do in 2019 to get your site ranking and I sometimes wish this was more glorious than it is SEO stands for something that most people don't realize search engine optimization is not really what it means it's seriously effortful optimization in other words it takes a
26:01 load of work and it doesn't really mean it takes a shitload of technical work so you should start using Gutenberg just because it's awesome and because we'll be rolling out more cool stuff for it you should go into that author profile and complete it that's not really hard either I mean it's probably about three minutes work then if you're a developer and you have the open the possibility you should extend our schema but even
26:32 that is not a lot of work but this is where it gets hard you have to write good content have to write more content you have to write better content and you have to keep on doing that I can honestly say that I'm standing right here and y'all y'all are listening to me because I've been blogging since since 2006 about this topic and I've been building on
27:03 that and building on that and building on that and there's no better day to start doing that than now if you haven't already you really really have to write more and have better content and you have to want to be the best result this doesn't come easy SEO good SEO campaigns if you hire a really good SEO consultant still take
27:34 six months to have any effect anyone who tells you that he does SEO and he'll get you somewhere in a week he's either lying or preventing you from having any real success in the future because he's using all sorts of hacks that will definitely get him caught this is a long-term game with incredible benefits because if you look at the results in the last six months Facebook is sending less and less traffic twitter is sending less and less traffic and Google is sending more and
28:07 more and more traffic to websites so stop talking about all that stuff go talk about SEO copywriting and I think there's some speakers talking about that later on and make sure that you have a good SEO plugin so let's do a quick recap discovery solved problem indexing solved problem ranking well that's up to you I think we've solved schema and we'll extend it and we'll do more in it I should definitely extend it for your own
28:39 sites if you can if you can using the developer site I just showed you and then you have to write good content and if this is the mode that you find yourself in if you look at our plugin then I der tell us what we're doing wrong in Greek or write better so SEO and 2019 pretty much rocks because all of the hard work in terms of technical SEO has been done now it's up to you
29:17 thank you hello great speech thank you thank you I would like to ask you a question I saw the last 10 days that the first page results in Google are all how do you say paid for example AB all the above the fold is how do you say it takes a lot of architectural space and what is going to
29:49 happen with the SEO in the future it's a good question and I don't know whether I can completely answer it I think Google is making it really clear that they want to make money from ads the new images in ads if you haven't seen them are while quite egregious um at the same time there are still tons and tons and tons of results without ads or very little ads where it's very easy to get a ton of
30:21 SEO traffic the funny thing I think is that AdWords as a advertising platform is actually quite expensive and if you invest in SEO and have to and can wait it's a lot cheaper in the long run but that's just Google I still have high hopes for a few other search engines and I actually also
30:52 think that with some of the changes that we're making in yo Ciccio and in WordPress in general we're making the barriers to entry for other new search engines lower because it gets easier for them to crawl these sites I think schema is a really way of actually opening up the web a bit more and allowing people to get into that space so I'm hoping we'll actually get some new search engines at some point and have a bit more competition because that would be very healthy for everyone involved we've seen being do
31:23 that a bit and even being pushing a bit already made Google more open and more willing to talk to other people so I think that's very good for everyone if that happens and at the same time it the reality is that it becomes what we call pay-for-play type of world more and more which is annoying so Google Ads are yeah well i'm not-- i'm not a fan but that comes with
32:04 any comments on EMP that is well so a MP is awesome and scary at the same time the way Google launched a MP was pretty shitty they launched it mostly pushing a wordpress plugin that added slash a and P to the under URLs creating new pages with that look bad the latest versions of the MP plug-in have been pretty good if you use their native mode then it basically turn your HTML into fully mph email and they do cool stuff with it what I'm really excited about is them
32:36 opening up a MP and allowing you to use special specific bits from a MP knee or normal pages so they're things like their pop-up code and there's pieces in there a really smart JavaScript and it's becoming more and more of a library and one of the things they've promised us now is that we will be able to load the
33:07 a MP library from our own domain at some point and then it becomes more basically a JavaScript library just like reactor or other things and well I think that's a good thing it's already also changed some browsers in their behavior so Chrome's new how do you call that chrome has a new way of loading images that are not in your few poor that the hell lazy loading things so they have an attribute on images that you can set and then they will only load
33:38 those things when they come into the viewport and they do that by default for things like iframes I think that's actually a great improvement to the web so it has very good size its it also has had some stupid sites I think they're aware of where they've gone wrong and and I hope hi thank you for being here and talk to us my name is guy Rasmussen they would like
34:09 I would like to ask what about your opinion about content strategy is the video content that is better text photo or a combination thing so having a good content strategy is very important thinking about okay what am I gonna write how am I gonna show this content to people is very important I honestly think that if something is really
34:42 important to you you'll probably have both video and text and images so you do it all the the sad part here is that if you look at video from Google's perspective what they try to do and what they're getting better and better at especially in English I honestly don't know how this works in Greek but it works in English now there they're also captioning of things is ridiculously good so they you can upload this
35:14 presentation to go to YouTube and within 10 minutes you can download basically everything I've said as text because they don't treat it that any differently they need to text to be able to search through so I would do both if if you have the resources video doesn't have to be expensive people oftentimes over do that in how expensive they do it I would I would seriously consider like playing with it and also looking at your audience so what what does your audience
35:47 do where are they how do what type of content do they engage with and does that work for you so content strategy cannot be completely set for it from actually knowing your audience first and knowing the audience that you want to interact with thank you very much my pleasure hello I don't see where are you oh there you are congratulations for for the presentation and thank you for for the contribution to with the Yoast SEO blogging it's a very useful
36:20 like Dean so you talked about Google ads and how how you think that we should try more to produce good conned and rather that rather than advertising it per se and I would like to to to hear some of your thoughts about this new alternative that the brave browser brought with a BT cryptocurrency which is you don't have any access to ads but depending on your
36:51 own you're browsing you're getting Kryptos depending on which sites you you visit more do you think that this is going to be a viable model for privacy related vert eyes encoder it's just a trend that's going to blow up and I'm happy with anyone trying anything in that space and the current advertising model is quite broken some of you may know that I've done quite a lot of work for the Guardian in the past and the
37:23 Guardian recently announced that they are now breakeven on a model of selling advertising on their site and getting donations for their site without having a paywall that's something that really excites me because that allows that means that we have a large journalistic organization that is able to make it work without without putting up a walls or doing things that actually break user experience I don't know what the solution is going to be here I do know
37:55 that we'll have a lot of court cases in the next 12 to 24 months on GDP are about two months ago the Irish Privacy Commissioner was testifying before US Congress and she told the US Congress that they were currently working on 17 large corporations that they were preparing court cases against now if you know I Island is the main headquarters for Google for Facebook for all these companies so they need to be if court cases against them in Europe are going
38:26 to happen they're going to happen there and while we're already seeing some first ones and I'm you know I'm very I'm hoping that the TDP are will actually help force these people into some more ethical advertising I'm also hoping that at some point will actually catch the really bad guys because I think Google and Facebook are relatively okay because we all know that we interact with them and there's a lot of these people in between all these retargeting companies
38:58 that all of us interact with and none of us know about so I'm hoping we'll get those kilts sooner rather than later all of that is to keep the open web alive which is what work presses I mean WordPress is the open web everything that we do is is ok it's web pages that everyone can access in in the largest part and well I'm I just hope that we'll come up with good solutions and I and in some cases that might mean that might
39:30 also mean that there are no good solutions I hope there are a bit more hello here the lights are horrible yes I see you yep thank you for the great presentation and being here in Greece my pleasure hope you enjoy the weather well so far so good it was raining when we were on the Acropolis yesterday so
40:01 that's a sign we brought our Dutch weather with us I'm sorry one clarification first is using schema is the page sending more data only during the indexing also the client the schema date is always there so if you don't have caching get caching but to be honest that has always been the case the funny thing is that I think we're not adding any data there wasn't already
40:34 there so in terms of overhead there's probably not too much because there is always going to be a request within that page that loads that data because you already probably the author of that page on that page Homer and other stuff but WordPress when it runs us SEO and a couple of other plugins I would really recommend having full page caching through a plugin or your host or whatever use I love how you
41:24 mesmerising that's not a word I've heard before here hi I'd like to hear I'd like know your opinion about all the new web page builders that come out like element or Divi builder so I really really really like Elementor and that's not
41:59 I think that the web page builder space is going to be very interesting I I look forward to how they will integrate with Gutenberg once we get face to Gutenberg done phase 2 of Gutenberg is meant to have all the widgets be blocks too so that you can basically added everything as a block which i think is a huge step ahead and I'm really looking forward to how how they will involve evolve as that happens and how they will integrate with
42:33 that I've not seen all of them and all of their reactions well I've seen Elementor and I've been really impressed with how they've had they've evolved alongside Gutenberg instead of fighting it I'm hoping that we'll get Gutenberg to be like the stable API that we need so that webpage builders can work on top of that and you can switch out webpage builders because for the last few years web page builders basically you weren't
43:04 using WordPress you or using WordPress with something else and you couldn't really switch to another thing without rebuilding your entire site and I hope that's something that we can get away from and that we can get a bit more of a common ground there I mean it's pretty easy to switch your SEO plugin it's pretty hard to switch your web page builder I don't think that's in the long run a good concept for the WordPress ecosystem so I'm hoping that Gutenberg is gonna be that common ground and that build then build awesome stuff on top of that I will say though elementor's
43:35 growth has been inspiring that they've gone from not existing to having more than a million users and I think 14 months I've never seen anyone do that in the WordPress space and I've been around for a long time so that's been really inspiring and I'll just keep watching
44:06 thank you [Applause]