What to watch out for on Self Hosted Wordpress Websites - #seopodcast 192

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. I am Charles Lewis, your internet marketing specialist. How is everyone doing today? I hope you're doing great. I'm doing great. I'm happy to be back in Houston. I was actually in Illinois for the whole week, working on a big project, actually a pretty cool project, and I have to say that I really appreciate a full eight hours of sleep. I believe you. Ooh, man. I heard that I was working 12s. Yeah. To get started, I was picked up at 4 o'clock in the morning to go to the airport. That day we worked until 8. Wow. And then that just continued. So remember, we are your friendly local neighborhood top position snatchers, where our mantra is. Don't be a deuce. If you can, tweet now. Pick up a device. Or if you're at your computer listening to this podcast, go ahead and tweet. And they should tweet. Hashtag SEO Podcast. This is number 192. So make sure you tag us in it, at eWebStyle. That way we can link up and be social and do all of that. So hook up with it. Hook up. Remember, there is, you don't have to. I have to remember because sometimes I forget. There is a tip from our previous podcast. That podcast was 191. This is podcast 192. The tip is use offline marketing to help with your local search strategy. Yeah, definitely. Take advantage of things you can do offline to help with an online local search. For example, offline newspapers that maybe have events that have a website that will link back to you. Or different community events and things like that. Fundraisers. Things that you can have at your location that people can come to where they can check in and do things like that. That will enhance your local search strategy. So take advantage of that. Yep. So remember, it would be much nicer if that was still on that screen. Remember, use

offline marketing to help with your local search strategy. There are two things that you could do for us if you decide that you've listened to this podcast, you like it. Audio quality is getting better. Content is something you can use. Actually, content helps you get your site on the first page of Google. One of those two things is you could, it's only three steps to do it. Three steps. Get onto iTunes. Make an account. Write a review. That simple. By the way, if you need to find our podcast on iTunes, literally just type inside iTunes Marketplace or iTunes Store. In iTunes Store, search SEO, period. When you see the podcast listing, boom, you will see us. So you could do that. That's one way. If you do write a review on iTunes, go ahead and send us an email, podcast at edagewithstar.com. And tell us in that email that you just submitted a review and tell us that it was five stars and give us some information about your URL or whatever. And, that's a lot of hands. And we will give you a punch in the face. If you're a new listener, trust me, that's a good thing. The other thing that you could do for us, you could write a G Plus review. Currently, G Plus Local has a really long URL, so we've simplified it for you. The way to get to our G Plus Local page is you go to e-webstyle.com slash G Plus and slash G Plus. Wait, wait, wait a minute. Wait a minute. You know what? This is like, we've been doing that for five weeks, two months. Podcast 190, 180, I think. Yeah, a long time. And we still don't have any G Plus Local reviews, so I think we need to change it up a little bit. Okay. All right? So how can they find our G Plus Local page? e-webstyle.com slash G Plus. Pretty simple. e-webstyle.com slash Google Plus. Any variation of the term, whether it's the letter G and the symbol

plus, or Google spelled out and plus spelled out, or Google spelled out and the symbol plus, or G and plus spelled out. However you want to do it. They all go to our Google Plus page, so go there and leave us a review. Tell us what you think. And, one more and, when you leave a G Plus Local review for us, go ahead and send us an e-mail, let us know, and we will give you a putoof, a punch in the face. And one thing I'd like to mention, we do have a referral program. If you are a web designer or are in the internet marketing space and have a client that you don't want to do SEO for, or you just don't want to handle it yourself and you want to send them to a reputable company where you know they will get good service, where you know they will get good results, and you can actually make some cash, we have a referral program. Just go to the bottom of our website. Our website is e-webstyle.com. There's no slash to get to our website, is there? Right there at the bottom, you can see a link. And they're like, okay, okay, well, wait, wait, wait, wait, silence, perfect. So, go ahead and, at the bottom, you'll see our referral program, download that, and you can see how you can get renumerated for a referral. Maybe we should do .com slash referral. Yeah, oh, you know what I mean. Yeah, that's probably a good idea. All right, so, you notice no tear tattoo? Yeah, I saw that. It was one, because I was just too tired, and two, because we actually got a review. This one is from Brian McGovern. It says, can you hear me now? It is five stars, and it says, seriously, go to Radio Shack and upgrade, maybe even two tin cans and a paper cup. Wow. I gave you five stars, because I ain't a douche. But, gentlemen, for the love of all that is good, learn how to

record audio that doesn't sound like Thomas Edison's phonographic cylinders. Wow. Wow. Well, first off, punch in your face for, you know, I've got to say this. For appreciating our content enough to give us five stars, even though the quality wasn't great. Yeah. One of the things that drives me crazy, because we've, actually, we addressed once, we had somebody write in our review that they had submitted for a website analysis, and in our review, they put, they suck because they didn't answer my website analysis request. Well, we just got busy, we hadn't gotten back to them yet, and we're like, well, that's not really the venue to express that. What you really should do is send us an email, I don't know, or call, because our number is readily available on our webpage, which is one of the SIBO things that we recommend for all of our clients. So, I'm really, thank you very much, Brian McGovern, punch in the face, for giving us an honest review. Brian, when you hear this, tweet me, man, at eWebStyle. Let me know, with SEO Podcast, which number you're listening to when you wrote that review. I'm curious to know if it was before 182 or after 182. Maybe you can upgrade your title to, they got it now. Now you got it. All right, a little bit of news. I thought this was cool. Google builds push notification into Chrome browser, right? So, you've got the browser. The browser is now, in order to have updated content, say you're just sitting, say eWebStyle was a public company, and on our homepage, we had our latest stock price. So, if we had our latest stock price, it would need to be constantly updated in order for you to have the latest stock price. The way you have to do it with a browser now, because of the static interface that it is, is you really need to have the browser requesting that stock price every 10 seconds or whatever. Now, because of push notifications, it will just hold the

number that it has until the new stock price is pushed to you. To your browser. It's thus saving resources, because the server isn't getting hit all the, dinged all the time for, you know, actually requested, information requests. For those who don't know, that push technology is the same sort of technology that's used in, like, apps and other mobile devices, where they want to give you information versus you going and request information. Yeah. It's one of the things that made REM and the BlackBerry such a phenomenal product. Back in the day. Still a good product. No iTunes on Windows 8. I just thought this was worth a little discussion, because new Windows 8, which Microsoft apparently has come out and said, we know it's bad. Oops. We're going to come out with something else. I forget what it's called. It's not a number. The problem with that is the last time they had not a number, it was Windows Me, and everyone's trying to forget Windows Me, so hopefully it doesn't go to that path. Currently, iTunes. Yeah, all the ones with no number, Me, Vista, they all suck. Yeah. It's like, hey, we need to put out a crappy OS. Let's give it a name instead of a number. That way, it's code for don't work too hard on this one. Yeah. It's code for wait for the next release. Talented programmers go on the numbers. The interns code the names. This is Windows 8. This is Windows 8. Yeah. Apparently, somebody didn't get that memo. So, you can't get iTunes, and iTunes is invaluable to, well, it is valuable. You can actually determine the value to Apple in terms of generating revenue from content sales. So, of course, music sales, book sales, TV shows, everything happens through iTunes. So, the question is, is why wouldn't you put iTunes on Windows 8? Because Windows 8, good or not, and we've determined it's not, is going to have a lot of users, and those users are, if they were to have iTunes. Probably used iTunes. If

they had iTunes, they could actually purchase product. Especially if you had iTunes on 7, and then you upgrade, yeah. Ouch. Right? Like, ouch. I think it will work in, like, Windows 8 has Windows 8 mode and desktop mode or something, so it works in desktop mode, but it doesn't work like iTunes on the iPad, because that was designed for actually touchscreen, whereas Windows 8 desktop mode was not designed for touchscreen. So, why not make the touchscreen version? Because they've sold, this is what they said, their income, they made $2.4 billion on content sales. Hold on, who made? Apple. Okay. Apple, and they sold 237 million units. Let's just say they, I don't know. Units, iPads? Units, iPads, iPhones, Mac workstations, everything. So, they make a lot more money off of the hardware. So, this is an opportunity in a reasonably good way, because if somebody really needs iTunes. Yeah, to increase the attractiveness of the iPad. The demand, is the word I was looking for. The demand. Yeah, they're creating their own demand, since they have the product. Yep. Makes sense. Yep. Very cool. Well, that's how they've all, you know, that was always my biggest thing in regards to iOS and Android, was the fact that at the end of the day, Apple is on its own device. And so, at some point, they have a bigger share, a bigger percentage of revenue, because it's not on a Samsung device, on HTC or whatever. It's on an Apple device. And so, that kind of, you know, helps keep some of the money in-house. Yep. Samsung Zoom phone is rumored to be out there. So, it's actually going to have some number of zoom, not digital zoom. By the way, never use digital zoom, because you can always zoom later. Better to just capture all the information than zoom later, because all it's doing is limiting the pixels that it's using, instead of actually zooming optically. But the Samsung Zoom camera, Zoom phone, is going to have a zoom lens on it. Kind of cool

idea, right? That's pretty attractive. Yeah. Because the phone is such a big part. I mean, the camera is such a big part of your phone these days. It's very cool. And I thought this was worth mentioning. Google Drive. So, I mentioned you've got, you're using Google Drive. You're sharing it with your company, right? And you open up Google Drive, and there's no files listed. That sucks. Panic mode. Yeah. They were still there, and Google fixed the problem. There was a period of time where the list didn't show up. Panic mode. Yeah. I had that the other day, except it wasn't because they weren't there. It was because I was logged into the wrong account. I wasn't logged into mine. I was logged into a different client. And I clicked Drive, trying to see some of my files, and it was blank. No, matter of fact, it was like, set up, drive. And I was, what? It is set up. I was like, you know. Yeah. It took for me to, you know, look at the upper right corner, realize it's not my email. Somebody else's email. Somebody else's drive. Yeah. All right. So, that is the potatoes of our podcast. Time to get to the meat. Take it over, Chuck. All right. So, this is a great article here. My guy from Search Engine Journal, Sabote and Manic posted it. Self-hosted WordPress websites, a few do's and don'ts. Oh, that's. Yeah. Yeah, we've been. Yeah. Did we mention in the last podcast, WordPress getting brute force? I think we may have. We probably did. But I thought it was pretty cool because it fits us, right? We hope we build in WordPress. That's our platform of choice. And we host them all. And so, and we do SEO. All right. So, when I saw a title about self-hosted WordPress sites and SEO, it was worth bringing to you guys. And for two reasons. One, just because I'm pretty confident in the information that's here. I did review it. But also, we do this. And so,

I'm pretty sure there will be some things that we may do better or disagree with. And so, let's get right into it. Number one, SEO functionality. He says, the first do is to use a plugin to handle your website's SEO. I totally agree with this. If you, you know, if this is, let's say, a default WordPress install, and you are using, adding your content and images and things like that, using the basic install version, then you don't really have that much control over your titles and metas and things like that. It's best to use a plugin. My preference at this point, I've narrowed it down to one. I was using, if you'd asked me this probably six months ago, I would have told you three. All-in-one SEO, SEO Ultimate, and Yoast, WordPress SEO by Yoast. And so, I stopped using all-in-one, just kind of lacked some features. SEO Ultimate is really cool, power-packed, feature-packed. Only problem with that one is the features and the tools seem to be kind of spread out all over the place. So, Yoast, by far, is probably the best one, in my opinion. It has all of the features of Ultimate and All-in-One. But, more importantly, it has everything right where you can see it, right where you can change it. And they automated a lot of things like authorship and things like that, which we'll talk about later. So, do. Get you a plugin to handle your SEO. And the reason you should is just don't. Don't. Let me interject there, because on our Facebook page, somebody asked if we had, you know, give a good list of the WordPress plugins that we use, boom, you just got it. Yeah. Yoast, WordPress SEO by Yoast is a good one. SEO Ultimate is a good one. And those are SEO plugins. Share and Follow, good social plugin. We use, it just, man, depends on what you're really using, your site for, determine which plugins you need. The default ones, Ask-A-Mit, like a must-have, right? Yeah. So, the don't, in regards

to that plugin, is don't let a everything but the kitchen sink kind of WordPress theme handle your SEO. There are some themes that will tell you, you know, we can manage your descriptions and titles and things like that within the theme. You don't want to do that. And he doesn't really list why, but the reason you don't want to do that is because, let's say you decide to change themes, right? Or you decide to move your host or you decide to, I don't know, upgrade WordPress to the latest version and, therefore, some of the features in that theme aren't applicable, right? Or, let's say you do change themes, if you're using an SEO plugin like Yoast, then all of your information, your meta information, all of the things you configured and changed will still be there because they're not part of the theme. If you optimize your site using the kind of built-in stuff that's in your theme, then if you change themes, you lose all of your SEO work. So, yeah, use a plugin for that. So, number two, taxonomies. You may or may not know what that is. That is basically a way to group something, right? And so, you know, if this was, let's see here, if this was produce, we would group, you know, our citrus things in taxonomy. Oranges would be a taxonomy. Grapefruits would be a taxonomy. And over there, there would be different types of oranges, tangerines, neighbor oranges, things like that, right? So, in regards to the web and WordPress, the concept is still the same. It's a way to group things. How do you group things on WordPress? How do you group things? Well, like categories, right? It's a group of similar posts. Or tags are ways you can group posts that have something similar. And so, definitely the do to taxonomies is use the descriptions. So, anytime you're in WordPress and you're like you're creating a category, WordPress gives you an option to describe that category. You can assign it a template, what's going to

be found in that category, the type of post to be available. Fill that information out. Because what usually happens is those category pages can begin to rank. And if they begin to rank, then that description that you put there will be the description you see on the search engine results page. So, take advantage of the taxonomies. Remember, CVO begins at SERP. So, definitely. Now, what you don't want to do in regards to the taxonomies is go crazy, right? You shouldn't have a one post that's in 15 different categories, right? Or one post shouldn't have really more than three different tags. Because if it has more than three, four tags, then it's likely that your content is all over the place and not focused. That's why you have so many tags. So, definitely don't go crazy with that. And don't have one category per post. Yeah, yeah. Just put, yeah. If you have, yeah, don't do that. I mean, unless you're just starting. If you're just starting, then. You've got three posts. Yeah, and they're all about three different topics, then you probably will have. But that means you need to post frequently. Yeah. And get those numbers to change. Number three, and this is important. Permalinks. The first due to permalinks is set up a proper permalink structure. Strucker. Structure. You know, it'll come by default. It'll be like, you know, ewebsstyle.com slash question mark P equals whatever the ID is for that post, right? And that's okay. But it's not sexy. It's not easy to read. It's not search engine friendly. So, turn on your permalinks. Go with the standard post name. And so, now it's ewebsstyle.com slash SEO podcast or ewebsstyle.com slash, you know, pay-per-click Houston. Things like that. So, the don't in regards to permalinks is don't ignore the slugs, right? Because the way permalinks works is whatever your post title is, especially if you're not using an SEO plug-in, then that becomes your page title. And that also becomes your permalink structure. Right. And so, you could very well have ewebsstyle.com

slash don't use permalinks this way, right, as your structure. And that's kind of long. It's still search engine friendly. But when you use the slugs, the slugs allow you to customize that. So, exactly. You may just want to go ewebsstyle.com slash howtouse permalinks. Simple, right to the point. It'll still go to the same page. And that gives you the freedom to really insert your targeted keyphrase as part of the URL using that slug. So, take advantage of the slugs. Do not, or in this case, don't ignore the slugs. Use the slugs. Yeah, so that's that there. Let's see here. Number four, content structure. This is key because I see this a lot dealing with people who are kind of new to WordPress. He puts do know the difference between posts and pages. Yeah. This is extremely important because I'll see some people who will use pages for a blog post, and then they come back and wonder why that post has a problem in somebody's RSS feed. Or people can't subscribe to it right, or they're having a problem sharing it, or whatever it is. It's because it's a page. It's really meant to be static for, like, maybe a frequent asked questions or about us or contact us or even home, frankly. But for your post, pages that you want people to share, pages that you want to show up in some RSS feeder, pages that you'll probably be emailing out with some sort of newsletter later, those should be posts. Those should be posts because that's what posts are meant for. Now, I will say this. Be clear in regards to when you're developing your site and you're putting those pages together, it's a good idea to know what's going to be a post and what's going to be a page prior to you even developing the site. I know internally it works for us better when I can give our developer those kind of notes. These will be pages, this will be a post, this is a category, this is a tag,

that sort of deal. It makes the WordPress flow even better. So know the difference between posts and pages. Now, the don't in regards to constant structure is don't be lazy when adding images to posts. I really like this because image optimization is an integral part in proper SEO. And WordPress made it extremely easy to optimize your images, especially if you upload them with a SEO-friendly file name already. Then after you upload it, you get the section where you can give a title, a caption, a description, alt text. And the lazy in you wants to just upload your picture, leave all that blank, and proceed. But take a few seconds, 10, 15, 20 seconds, and fill in that information. Because the title, well, that's the title of the image. That's going to show when somebody hovers over it. And the caption, if you happen to be using like some sort of shadow box slideshow, then that caption is going to show there. Your frame, that caption will show there. Now, alt text, well, we know what alt text is. I don't have to go there. And the description will show if that image happens to be an attachment, then people click it, and then they'll see the description along with the caption. And all of that is indexable content. So take advantage of how easy WordPress made it to optimize your images. Number five, and this is the last one, SERP snippets. The do, do claim your authorship for your content. That's extremely important. And, you know, in regards to click-throughs and things like that, it's been proven that having your avatar there pulled from your Google Plus profile increases your click-throughs like crazy. Done deal, yeah. So take advantage of authorship, right? The don't. You know what makes me kind of give a little weight to that? Have you seen the Bing commercial where they're like, which one do you like better, Google or Bing? And then they show the results and people invariably in the commercial, because it's a commercial for Bing, choose Bing.

And the reason is because Bing has taken the time to kind of spend a little more layout time on some of the most popular searches on the web. And so they have more images and more maps and more things for people to interact with right there on the search result page. And that's very similar. The reason that you get more attention is because you've got a picture there. Yeah. It's trustworthy. I don't even know this person, but that is his picture. So take it or leave it. The don't in regards to SERP snippets is don't. I like this one. Don't autopilot your post meta descriptions. What does that mean? That means use that plugin we talked about in step one, like say Yoast, and give all of your pages and posts custom meta descriptions. Because if you don't, if you put them on autopilot, then Google is going to either A, generate their own based on what they think your site is about, or B, pull the first 150 characters from on your page and display that as your meta description. And so you don't want that, right? Because we're just saying that that first opportunity to convert someone is at the SERP. And so take advantage of what they see next to your picture when you claim your authorship. So that's it. I like the bonus one on here. And the bonus one was like really a personal jab to me because that just happened with the client. But don't, change your settings, right? You can install WordPress and you can get ready to launch. Go in your general, change your settings, remove the just another WordPress blog. Take that off of there. We had a client the other week, and so I launched it. And then he must have visited the launch site prior to me telling him it was ready. Right. Because he saw it as just another WordPress blog. But then I updated everything, did some on-page SEO, got to change the stuff, sent him a link telling him he could

review the site. And before he responded, he says, I already saw it. Why does it say just another WordPress blog? It doesn't anywhere. Yeah, clear your cache, refresh the page. So, yeah, definitely make sure you change your settings so it doesn't say just another WordPress blog because that's kind of lame. And one piece of advice, there are a lot of brute force attacks going on WordPress websites right now. One of the things, the most simple thing you can do is just change admin to administrator or something else. Change your login creds. Go with the password that's very secure, alphanumeric with symbols and everything. And, yes, change your username from admin to something else because the attack is targeting all credentials using the login admin. And they have, like, thousands of common passwords. And so they're hitting all WordPress sites using admin. And if one of those passwords works, then guess what? You've been hacked. And so, yeah. Yeah, if you have password or password123 for any of your passwords, you need to change that. If you change the, just change the username from admin, that's going to stop a lot. That's going to help a little bit, yeah. And also there is a plug-in that keeps track of IP addresses that are trying to get to your site. You can actually use that. We've actually put that on a couple sites. And, frankly, we've put it up, you know, within hours, gotten notification of IP addresses being locked out of WordPress because they were trying to brute force. And so it locks them out. I think it locks them out for five minutes after three failed attempts and then for 20 minutes. And then 24 hours. And then, you know, permanently you've got to go back into the database and change it if that's your only access. So good reason to add the plug-in and to change that username. Yeah, remember, you know, WordPress right now is 20% of all websites on the Internet are using WordPress. So that's a lot. Yeah. You can understand

why hackers are attacking them. So, yeah, take care of your site. Well, and, yeah, a lot of, frankly, amateurs have installed it and not made those types of changes. And amateurs tend not to be as concerned about passwords as experts such as us. Definitely. All right. Do we have any blanks there? Yeah, we've got a blanks there. We've got a blanks there. Yeah. Yeah. This blanks there goes to Yahoo. So Yahoo. Again? Don't we have that? Let's dig this. Yahoo renewed their deal with Microsoft for search. Okay. So Bing is supplying the results to Yahoo. Yeah, Bing is still applying the search results. But at the same time, they're looking for an out of that agreement. Of the agreement that they just renewed. Yeah. But the only reason they renewed it, even though they wanted an out, was because financially or technically they had to. Yeah, they had no choice. Because they had no choice. And they wish they had an out. Yeah. I'm trying to think of an example that might apply. Like maybe you show up at your mechanic and the engine's in pieces. And you're like, yeah, I finished the job. But it's taking you six months to get this far. So if I could find, if you would allow somebody, if I could bring in a mechanic and you would let them work on it, that would be a better result. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. So fix it so I can drive it to your competitor. You know what I'm saying? That's what we're going to happen. And you just throw the engine into the trunk. I'll push it down the street. Yeah. So come on, Yahoo. Wow. Get it together. Wow. Get it together. All right. You have been listening to the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes. Our title is the SEO podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. We are the most popular because of all you all. We really appreciate you all. You and you over there. Go and check out our Facebook page. Facebook.com slash

eWebStyle. Or our Twitter page, Twitter.com slash eWebStyle. We have a YouTube page, and it's YouTube.com slash eWebStyle. Or just fire off an email to us, podcast at e-WebStyle.com. There is a form on our front page, and actually most of our pages, that is for a free website analysis. So go to e-WebStyle.com slash eWebStyle. Hold on. Slash nothing. Yeah, slash, slash, slash, slash any page. Flash got me. Good one. And fill out that form. We do have a backlog, so be a little bit patient with us. If you're in a bit of a rush, fire off it. Call us. Yeah, call us. Fire off it. We're happy to talk to you. In fact, our first step typically with an analysis is to give a call and find out kind of what perspective you want that analysis from. And really, we just end up doing it over the phone in a lot of cases. So if you just want to chat with us, submit a website analysis, and we'll give you a call. That is the end of podcast number 192. Until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burris. I'm Charles Lewis. Bye-bye for now. Oh, by the way, we're going to miss next week because I'm out for all week. All right. So we'll see you the week after. Bye-bye. Slightly raised up, eyebrow, highbrow. Headed my way. Cool as mountains. Free.