Episode 266: SEO All You Need to Know: Get Yourself and Your Website Found! A 7-Step Beginner’s Guide to Basic Search Engine Optimization

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Show Summary

Rob talks to Author Warren Laine-Naida about his recent book on SEO – “SEO All You Need to Know: Get Yourself and Your Website Found! A 7-Step Beginner’s Guide to Basic Search Engine Optimization”.

Show Highlights:

1. SEO is a long game.
2. SEO matters.
3. Tips to help the SEO on your website.
4. Most web designers forget to tag their images.

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Show Notes

Hey everybody, Rob Cairns here

In today’s podcast I got my good friend Warren Laine-Naida an author to talk about his book.

SEO All You Need to Know

And just for interest’s sake, Warren, friend of the show.

This is his third appearance in the first author to be on the podcast three times.

How are you today, Warren?

Hello Rob, I’m doing very well, thank you and uh, I am clutching my three time author trophy in my hand and I really appreciate that.

Yeah, yeah, it’s great to have you back.

So I thought we jump on and talk about your latest bark.

I told you I would.

I finally got finished reading it, so I think that is a good thing I always do read.

I I said to a friend of mine, Jeff Brown, who’s an educator like you and he teaches like you, and he teaches things like workplace education in Nova Scotia.

You gotta get this book because it’s written from somebody.

Who is used to educating as I know you teach, and I said to Jeff, you’ll resonate with it because Warren is an amazing teacher.

Thank you.

You’re welcome.

And it’s well deserved.

So, CEO and you go on.

The prefix to the book is a seven step guide for beginners, and it’s available on Amazon and Kindle, so you can get it there.

SEO is dead as Co can’t be done.

SEO is only for the big boys, the Amazons.

Of the world, what do you think about?

Oh, that’s a very good question.

You oh, it’s a.

Very good question.

You should have sent me.

This question first.

I think, you know, there are different aspects to this.

You know, there is the CEO, which I think a lot of us chase after.

And and it might be good exercise.

But I I think you know at some level.

Being found in a search engine.

Uhm, that’s.

You know that trophy has already been won by by Google, or if you’re talking about being found and dumb.

On on social media, which is a you know off page was a huge part of SEO.

Again, that award has already been won by the social media platforms.

And then there is the CEO that I think all of us have always been pursuing.

Uhm, in that we try to get people to find our websites for no other reason than because we want to make a sale or have people connect with us.

And I think these two goals, you know, have really sort of merged into one overarching goal and that makes it very difficult.

To to really understand, you know, why we pursue being.

Which is always, I think, and I I bring this up right at the beginning of all of my classes that you know.

Confuses, infuriates and in some respects.

Uh, a lot of my students, they go.

So what do we do?

Yeah, that’s it.

That’s a really good point and it’s so true.

Right.

I think, you know, I was thinking about coming into this conversation today and I had an e-mail from our friends up at Google.

Because those who may or may not know, the old Google My Business page app is decommissioned as of today, so we can’t use.

Yes, yes.

And it’s now called Google Business profiles and got it through Google Maps and I thought we kind of start there because I think.

Google Business profiles is one of the things that many small businesses miss in their SEO strategy, and it’s free and it’s easy to do.

It just takes a little bit of time.

And it matters for search your thoughts.

So what?

Yeah, yeah.

What are your thoughts?

I I agree 100%. Uhm.

Even with the clients that I have, you know, most of them now have Google My Business.

You know, some still don’t.

Usually with a new client, that’s the first thing that people go.

Oh, can I have this?

The idea that it’s free, that it’s, that it’s.

It’s a functional and important part of your of your search strategy seems to go past many people.

Uhm, and I think the reason for this is that we still have this idea.

In order for people to connect with us.

They have to come to our website.

And you know, that’s completely wrong and you know and it it gets more wrong every day.

I mean Google and I mentioned before the search, you know, the the social media platforms, what is so important for them in their algorithms is not that people leave.

What interests social media platforms, and Google very, very specifically is that people spend as much time on their platform, so Google and social media as possible.

And and Google My Business is something there that that we can use that Google likes.

Because it is right there where either the knowledge graph is or if nothing fits your search, a large white rectangular vertical rectangle appears.

That this gives people information about your business, where you’re servicing, what products you’re uh.

Blog posts.

All these sorts of things appear there for free on the right hand side of Google and the more time that people spend looking at this business information and then going no other place other than making a call reading more about the product, this is for Google, a very important.

And beneficial you know, time on page.

They go as far as as giving you for free a website, a Google My Business website which is, you know, consists of all the information you have to build my business.

So I could span five 10-15 minutes with a small business without ever going to their website just simply by using the Google My Business.

Option A Facebook does the same thing with Facebook my, you know, Facebook page, et cetera, et cetera.

So you know, it’s it’s almost like.

There’s the benefit for small businesses to not have their own website.

Because Google and Facebook and other, they’re not interested in having you leave their platform to visit the small business websites and I think this is a lot of the problem that we have with with with SEO, especially with small businesses is that you think, oh, so we want to be found so.

You can go to my website, well, yes, but the platforms offering you these services, there’s no interest as you leave their platform.

And Google My Business is is perfect, like no click service and it sounds bizarre but really honestly.

Search engine optimization means one thing.

It means that people who have never.

Heard of you.

Find you.

So if they can do that with Google My Business or Facebook page or whatever tool you’re using.

You’ve succeeded.

They have found you.

That they spend 20 minutes on your website, that that’s that’s irrelevant, that doesn’t, that’s nothing.

They found you, you’ve won, and now they can call you and buy your product.

And I think that’s an important aspect of SCO that is so missed.

No, I can come up with.

Reasonable, I know.

I would agree with it, I think.

A lot of reasons.

Why that’s missed, but it’s an important reason why that’s missed.

Yeah, so true and I would agree.

I would think one of the reasons you still need a website is because you own it, not for SEO purposes.

There’s a big difference here I I know if I do search.

And you know, as you were talking.

I was kind of looking at my podcast, for example.

And it comes up on my website in search, but it also comes up on Kastos website on my search because gastos is my podcast host.

And frankly, at the end of the day, if somebody finds out about me from the Castro page on my website page, I really don’t care.

They found out about me and that is more important.

It is.

You’re completely right, you know, I mean, if you if if I look at my, I mean, I’ve got a couple of websites if I just look at the English version.

I can be found 200 times.

Uhm, but if you look for my name.

I can be found 104,000 times. So if I didn’t have a website.

I could still be found more than 100,000 times.

Now it’s really good to have the website because I own it.

As you say, it’s a very important point.

I can decide what content is going to appear and what isn’t.

But if I didn’t have a website.

I could still be.

Ergo my SEO strategy is still working.

And there’s a lot of debate, you know, in in this.

Add this key.

But, you know, I would start off by saying yes.

Get the website.

Start with that.

But at some point you might not need to sweat the website.

Let’s dive into SEO plugins.

And for those who don’t know, a plugin is basically what we call a code module.

It’s code that does a specific function.

And the one in the WordPress space that’s well known and has a freemium version is used.

There’s several others.

Uhm, I don’t use Yoast.

I’ll get to what I use in a minute.

And Yoast works on a traffic light system in truck.

And I actually wish they would take that traffic light system out.

Because it is possible.

Togame used so that you have all green traffic lights and not to be getting the right SEO traffic to your website that you want.

Your thoughts?

Oh my. Uhm.

OK, so I I like Joost because they offer a lot of, you know, they’ve got the Academy, they’ve got the tutorials.

I I really like and I can never remember her name.

I really like.

Their CEO, Marika OK.

Maritas, yeah.

Marika yeah, I’ve got a soft spot for Marika.

Uh, now they have the traffic lights now.

I will go back to what Google says.

Google says build your websites for people, not for Google Now if you take that one step further you will say build your websites for people and not for Yoast.

I I always tell my students and for myself as well, like if I look on my website, maybe 10% have green lights.

Most of them have red lights, but I don’t care because I don’t put the content for their for the red lights or the green lights or the yellow lights and no.

So I mean, this is an important thing, I think, if you’re beginning.

To help you understand which direction you should be going.

Now rank math.

UM, has a point system.

Out of 100 now I find this worse than the traffic lights ’cause. If I look at 80, is 80 a green or a yellow?

I’m not really too sure, so I don’t like their point system.

And you know, every every plug, go plug in has this sort of system.

I think it’s useful for beginners to get my idea.

You know, where can I improve?

Uhm, but you know if.

I think if.

So for anyone trying to game the system, whether it be a plug in Google or whatever else if if you’re putting your energy there.

Then you’re putting your energy in the wrong place.

You know if you can, right?

1. You know an article that is 800 words that in Hemingway is grade 6 and for Grammarly comes across as clean.

That is where you should put your energy and if it gets a red light from Yoast or 20 from meta rank math.

Who cares?

You know you’ve you’ve.

You’ve spent your time, you’ve created content, you know you’ve said what needs to be said.

That’s useful and helpful to your audience, and it doesn’t really matter what the plugin says.

I would agree.

But yeah.

I I would, I would wholeheartedly agree with that.

Uhm, one of the things in the book you you talked about was landing pages and thank you and thank you pages.

Oh yeah.

And I want to go there because I think.

Lining pages are some of the most misunderstood things.

So personally, when I design lining pages, I actually strip all the headers off.

I strip all the footers off.

I strip all the logos off, yeah.

And I only have one called action and I can almost guarantee that button is either going.

To be red or blue.

With white on.

Uhm, there’s some discussion on which is better from an appealing standpoint, so I tend to switch to two.

I like orange.

Why does that not surprise me?

I don’t know.

I don’t know.

But the point is, too many people leave landing pages with too many choices.

Yeah, so.

Well, that’s the first thing.

And then when you opt into whatever you’re opting into on the landing page, go to a thank you page and says thank you for opting in.

Folks, please don’t do that.

That is the biggest miss opportunity on your whole website.

Things like.

I really appreciate you opting in.

Your free content will be delivered to you.

And by the way, while you’re waiting, you might want to check out this podcast or this blog post or this product or this.

Use that thank you page as an opportunity to market to the person who just opted in.

How do you feel?

Yes, I mean.

Landing pages are very misunderstood.

Uhm, for me, a landing page is an elevator speech.

You have your pitch, you have your value statement, you know, and there’s no distraction.

Uhm, you know your landing page.

You have to sort of assume that someone is going to spend 20 seconds there.

If they haven’t.

If you haven’t got a conversion.

Then you need to fix this landing page.

And and This is why it’s the only thing that I actually focus on.

I mean, I have, I have seven steps and I have 7 chapters and in Step 2, I actually have a focus and that focus is landing pages ’cause.

I think it’s very, very important now as Bridget Willard, who I have to keep coming back.

To I don’t know.

Obviously I have a thing for Bridget.

I as Bridget, you know, hammered into me.

And I put this on my book landing pages and thank you pages are like peanut butter and Jelly.

She’s right.

Is very, very important and they should be unique.

So if you have six different landing pages, you should have six different thank you pages.

There’s no space for generic as you say.

Thank you very much for doing what you just did.

You know, it’s like, oh, thank you.

What a waste of an opportunity.

So this is important not just for, you know, you’ve got the person they’ve just clicked.

You know, don’t insult them.

In addition to you know, this is really important for your, you know for your back end, for when you set your goals for analytics.

You know, I mean this is this is so important and most people don’t get that.

And I don’t know why.

I think they.

They don’t get it or they’re trying to be too polite.

And I’m sorry, marketing is not about POI, marketing segment about disruption, so.

Yeah, it is unfortunately, but yes.

I think that.

I was gonna go there later, but you’ve already.

Touched on it a little bit.

Uhm, we have some issues with analytics right now, and you can thank your end of the world and GDPR for those issues.

I didn’t vote for it.

I know you had.

Nor did I.

So there you go.

And and we’re seeing it with other stuff too, like Google Fonts and all.

Kinds of stuff.

And I and analytics are getting harder and harder to do because you’ve got.

GDPR cracking down.

You got guys like me running browsers like Brave and Vivaldi.

Good God.

For obvious reasons, yeah.

Because even I get fed up seeing ads in my stream all the time, even though I’m a marketer in a bad market.

I get fed up.

And we’re seeing more and more.

And the question is, should you be looking at a privacy based analytic solution instead of Google?

I know it.

At this point.

Is that a rhetorical question?

Well, I teach a class in matomo which as well as Google Analytics among other things and matomo is what Piwik used to be called.

OK.

Piwik is pushes itself as the data protection friendly analytics.

But my experience with them would lead me to believe that they are far from data protection friendly.

Uhm, I’ve been.

Doing Google Analytics for you know, for clients and for my own websites for over 10 years.

And one of the things that always bothered me in Google Analytics was it is not possible for me to draw a user profile.

I would always have to be guessing.

I cannot in Google Analytics identify specific users and what they’re doing.

I can see this very clearly in matomo.

OK.

Now how then can that be a more user, more data, protective data protection friendly system?

It’s also price prohibitive.

It’s cost prohibitive extremely.

Uhm for what you get?

And Google Analytics is free, but.

Yeah, I don’t know.

I I’m I’m not convinced at all about the entire data protection process or idea.

To begin with, and you know, if we go anywhere where we’re supposed to be going in 2023 or 2024 where we’re getting rid of third party cookies and moving into tokens, then I think it’s a moot point.

Uhm, and just a lot of money spent too.

Yes, to do whatever we’re spending this money on.

I I I agree with you.

To to a big degree, I think the issue is how we’re handling third party tokens and cookies versus the analytics.

Yeah, yeah.

I I would agree with you.

And by the way, it’s worth mentioning the biggest cookie of them all.

Is that visa card or MasterCard or American Express card that you’re carrying in your wallet?

If you’re really concerned about privacy, get ready.

Oh yes, yeah, yeah, it’s it.

Or credit card, I mean.

I mean, I don’t want to anger anyone, but for me it’s the same as recycling.

You know this.

This keeps us busy and suit and solves our conscience so that we can ignore larger problems.

But you know, we are a lot closer to Eco Armageddon.

Then washing out our yogurt containers and we have crossed.

We crossed the line a long time ago to, you know, data protection.

Now we have a cookie plug in and we’re safe.

This is complete and utter nonsense.

It is and and I have to, and I have to tell you, being in North America.

I don’t have the standard cookie acceptance on the bottom of my website ’cause.

Being in Canada, legally I don’t need it and I.

Don’t care if.

Well, well, well.

One moment.

One moment, please.

Oh no.

You do not need it.

As long as you can and and technically.

You would need to be able to prove.

That you have no visitors coming from the EU to your website.

Dropping personalized information, and by that I mean a name and an e-mail together in the same data set.

Yep, Yep, Yep.

If you can do that, then you’re free.

If you can’t, you’re not.

But but honestly, it’s gotten to the point where nobody reads those things anyway.

They don’t.

But ignorance is no defence, I believe.

So so my my argument, my argument has always been you’re on the Internet, so deal with them.

That’s my argument as well.

Yeah, you know, if you’re on the Internet then you accept it.

But I’m sure in a court of law, some smart aleck might.

Yeah. Thank you.

Decide others wise.

So let’s move on to you.

Spend a big time in the book talking about photos and.

We only need to talk about full yeah, you did.

You talked about photos and alt tags on photos.

Oh yes.

From an SCO perspective and I just did an audit for a client who had 5000 photos on his website.

OK.

How many alt tags do you think were filled in in those 5000 photos?

I’ll give you a hint 0.

OK, so 12, I was a.

Little high on, OK.

Yeah, I see where but but.

You get the point.

And it’s like folks, you gotta start to fill in tags and little little secret.

Here you talk about naming your files properly, which I wholeheartedly agree with.

Very important. Oh yes.

Zero if you’ve named your files properly.

Until you get around to doing the alt tags manually.

There are some plugins that will take the file names and put them in.

The old page.

But that’s not the same.

No, I know.

But it’s better.

OK.

I mean, it’s better than nothing.

You are better.

Ah, yes, yes.

But you but you got a warrant to name your photos and not just on.

Frankly, your website, how about on social media?

They’re all asking you to fill in the old tags now.

Yes, for social media it’s really, it’s really useful to have.

A to be having a buddy system.

Now I have a buddy who lives.

I believe he lives in Cologne.

Philip Roth now.

I love Philip.

We’ve had him on our show and every time I post an image on Twitter that does not have an alt tag he will comment.

So he’s been.

Harassing me like this and now I’m always putting alt tags, so I think it’s important to get a buddy system for social media.

Uhm, it’s it’s it’s important.

I mean, for me and I always tell my students, it’s just like, who plays poker?

You know, they all say no.

I said this.

So if you play poker, we.

Have this, you know, saying so you don’t leave money on the.

This is really important for SEO and and images.

Images are you know for when it comes to SEO so important and you know the alt tag is just one of I think like 8 things that you can do with every image you know to you know to win or lose the CEO fight and.

I think it’s important when when it comes to accessibility becomes more and more important, but.

Most people, OK, no, that’s probably going to come out wrong.

Many people.

We have many because of you and I.

At least you and I, we are blessed.

We are very fortunate.

OK, no, we’re both old white men, so we’re not so fortunate.

But aside from the old white male thing, we are fortunate that we do have.

Most of the time control of most of our senses so that if an image does not have an alt tag.

We are not.

Uhm, we are not losers.

But some people do require this, and so, you know, we should keep that in mind.

Uh, that the image is not there, that the screen reader or the website does not display. You know, image name 16793 because that’s meaningless and it’s much more. It’s much better that it says here is an image of Warren.

And raw, talking about you, that’s something useful, but, you know, out of sight, out of mind, and we just don’t think about it enough.

It’s, uh, it’s it’s something, you know that it’s a win for us in SCO, so we should take advantage of it as well as helping other people.

I would, I would.

And the other thing you touched on in the book and you.

Not as stringent as I am with this one, so.

We’ll we’ll talk about.

It was image image size.

Oh yes, let’s.

And you said, and correct me if I’m wrong, that you prefer your images to be less than 250K on your websites.

I go one step further. I want mine to be less than 100 and around 100K120K I go that.

And the point?

In Chat tab is.

Oh really?

I go that far for a long.

And the point in check is if you look at your media sites, your BBC’s Yellur.

Star in Toronto, CNN, CTV, National News in Canada.

Their images are all small if you ever want.

Yes, yes.

And the big reason for this is.

We’re not doing this for print, we’re doing this for the web and it’s one of the biggest things now, my argument?

Is if you are an artist or.

You are a model.

Maybe you want to break those?

Because your reason for posting those images are different.

But for most people, try and keep the images a little smaller and in size because frankly it’s somebody you’re not posting them so somebody can download them and blow them up.

Yes, yes.

No, that’s a good point.

I mean, I guess that’s probably the the teacher in me.

Uhm, you know, because you know after.

Saying you have to do this, this, this, this and this.

I tried to give it a little bit of leeway, but always with the caveat that you can do this.

But then when you run your website through web Dev or page insights or whatever it is, if you see that you are still not in the green light.

Of 90 out of 100.

Then you know what you’re going to have to do.

You know, you’re probably going to have to make your images smaller.

Yeah, so I mean, on mine I am.

I guess, you know.

Fortunate enough in in a few of the websites that I’m able to get into the green with the larger webs with the larger images, but.

Yeah, now you have a very good point.

I guess it depends on the size of the images.

You know if you’ve got the.

If you’ve got the big background images, you know it.

It depends.

It depends on what the function of the image is supposed to be.

Yeah, I would.

Oh yeah.

I wouldn’t.

I would agree, I would agree with it and I would say, I would say.

Just use some common sense. We don’t need, not yeah, 2MB images on a website. Just we just don’t need, yeah.

Yeah, no, that’s something that Bridget and I always talk.

About we have a we.

Have a client together at the moment, you know, and you know she’ll put up an image and I’ll go.

You know as this as I’ve got this picture, as I’ve got this web, the site on my my my mobile the picture is is forming in lines slowly.

This tells me the image is too large.

So and then it.

Be like, oh right, yes, so.

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

I would agree.

And since we’re talking a little bit about sizing, and we know sizing impact speed, I’m gonna jump into a pile of controversy in the WordPress world.

I like to do that once in a while.

Oh, right, yes.

He page speed matters for a seal.

We all know that.

And the argument going on right now, and I think I’ve proved it with a use case last year, about a year ago.

Is page builders.

Add bloat to websites.

Oh yes, sorry.

Yes, I I wrote an article about that.

Yes, I completely agree with you, Rob.

Page builders are balote.

And what I would tell you is, and I’m gonna get people that are gonna send me hate mail the minute I say it and say here I go again.

Gutenberg and Gutenberg.

Don’t add the same bloat as page builders.

To a website.

I completely agree they do not.

So the the use case here is.

If you remember last September, so almost a year ago I started moving my.

Agency website to box.

And as as Brian Gardner will tell you, I’m insane because I moved it on a live site.

And my block, my block stack.

I know.

Oh my God.

Bart Knack is cadence seem Catan spots with a neat little product out there called editor.

Right.

Plus by extended file and I’ll get.

And what I saw when I finally foot the theme in November like this was a four month job.

I increased my pagespeed score by 15 points on the same web host.

I went from 84 to 99 overnight when this was done.

OK.

And I can attribute that.

To like all the images were already.

In check with where they needed to be, but I attribute that to page builder book.

Very true.

And I think this is one of the most compelling reasons why WordPress devs should get their head out of a sand some of them.

And start saying, well, we’ll we’ll use Beaver Builder because we’ve always used before.

I think that’s a really bad response.

I think the response should be we keep using Beaver Builder, but maybe we should be investigating blocks in the background because they’ll make our websites faster in speed matters.

Do you wanna share a little bit around that and what you do?

I’ve built over.

300 websites since I started making websites.

One of those uses a page builder.

And it’s in elementor.

Because the client insisted.

To use elementor.

I’m not happy with it, but they’re paying the bill, the other 300 and some odd.

Do not have page builders.

They don’t need page builders and never will need page builders.

I think that you know and I’ve built, I’ve built websites since the middle 90s.

So long before Dreamweaver, long before WordPress, long before any CMS.

Uhm, large websites for large companies?

Sony Pictures, Paramount banking websites.

All of these websites worked.

Without page builders, without content management systems, they were successful.

The websites that I have now, you know, very very large enterprise ones, might be in Drupal.

Otherwise they’re all in WordPress and dumb.

None of them require page builders.

WordPress is incredibly functional and beautiful.

Out-of-the-box now.

I was very upset when Gutenberg came out.

Because I, you know, I was able to do everything I wanted without these blocks.

Now what are these blocks?

It took me.

It took me probably a year.

To feel comfortable using Gutenberg blocks and and now I can use them.

Uhm, I think they are more.

Done enough.

For most of most of my newer clients, so clients over the last six months, and for the WordPress courses I teach, SEO courses I teach, etc.

And for my own websites now I’m really favoring.

Uhm navit?

As a theme.

And you know if I take websites that are using a page builder or some I don’t know.

Blown up theme and take it out and move into Nava.

I am seeing page speed.

Changes from.

The low 30s to the high 80s, simply by getting out of these systems and putting them into a very simple theme.

Uhm, if you’ve got WordPress and Gutenberg, you have a page builder?

I agree.

You do?

I do not understand the necessity to place a page builder on top of a page builder other than.

You are, you know, trying.

I I really, I can’t think.

I mean, I can think of a lot of reasons, but none of them are politically correct, so I’m not going to go into them.

But I don’t understand why you would do this other than.

And it’s quite fair.

I mean, I’ve been building websites for, you know, almost 30 years.

So you know, I can code, I can do CSS, I can do things and and so I don’t need the page builders.

I understand the argument that you would use these things so that clients can then manage their sites.

After over 300 websites, I have yet to find the client.

That actually does manage their own site, other than perhaps perhaps content.

No client takes your website.

And says thank you, that’s in the page builder.

Now I can develop my site further.

Zero clients.

Then note I know client takes their website and manages the security or anything else on that site, no?

No, no.

So I don’t understand why we use these.

They’re easier and so, but they are so horribly annoying.

When I get this project and the client says I’m trying to do this, I’ve done this and I go oh now I have 3 layers that I have to build through this website.

It’s like, how about we just remove this page builder and we do this in blocks because it’s faster, which means it’s going to be cheaper for you and.

You could maybe if you wanted to manage this yourself, but otherwise you know you’re you’re paying every year for this page builder or whatever plugins you’re using.

It’s cost prohibitive.

I don’t have an agency to support.

I don’t have to rent to pay for my agency and my 16 employees.

So I I fully understand the necessity for some of these, but.

Otherwise, I just have to shake my head and go no, I I don’t understand why you’re using.

This I agree with you.

And if and and you saw my couple weeks ago, I was cleaning up a site where clients part time are actually installed.

I don’t know.

Not one, not 2.

Not three, but four page builders.

On the same website.

Yeah, yeah.

And when it came down to was he was trying to do functionality that he didn’t know how to do with the page builders he was using elementor.

Right.

So he decided.

To install every free page build under the face of the Earth to try and get functionality instead of.

Doing what he should have done and reaching out to the business owner and reaching out to me and say how do we do this?

But it’s, uh, there.

I think, you know, there needs to be someone I I don’t know, not me, but someone or maybe a rethink that says, wait a second, let’s step back.

Now your your page builders, your themes, everything in there.

It has nothing to do with functionality.

Why we have?

And you can’t, you can’t cross these over.

But you know, I agree.

You see this a lot.

And so why have you done this for that?

But that’s a theme, that’s how the.

Website Looks if.

You want functionality that’s a plug in.

Why have you tried to join them?

It’s though I have the same problem with websites that use plugins for things like, you know, MailChimp.

Google Analytics.

Any of these sorts of things that these are standalone systems?

Why are you asking your website?

To perform these functions, you’re slowing down your website.

You’re making this more complicated, you know?

But I don’t know, maybe it’s the new thing of everything in one box or everything under one roof, but it’s not.

It’s not very effective or efficient.

It’s not very efficient and eventually.

You know the machine that is more complicated.

If it breaks, there’s less people can fix it.

And I want my clients to be able to fix these things.

I don’t want to have to step in and go.

Good God I can’t fix this.

Let’s just relaunch your website because it’s going to cost you twice the.

Price to fix it?

Yep, Yep.

So true.

So that’s an impact on speed.

And any other big impact on speed that nobody ever talks about?

Is there web host?

And so important.

I hate.

I hate to tell people your web host is your partner in your game.

A company you buy services from and when you start treating it like a partner in your business, it gets better and.

I would argue that.

Sometimes buying cheap hosting despite everybody saying on saving money.

In the end you’re.

Costing yourself money, so don’t do it.

Go get the right hosting with the right server with the right speed for what you need to achieve.

Yeah, yeah.

I I agree.

That’s kind of one of my qualms.

In that space.

In terms of SCO, we’ve talked about a whole pile of stuff and like, go get the book, go, please go read it as fresh.

Please read it, yeah.

If you throw out, understand it.

It’s a.

It’s as I said, it’s not a heavy read.

What’s your your couple big wins that people should do really quickly?

What they should do really quickly.

Uhm for C Oh well, I think you know.

The first thing is they should see if their website is is is indexed, and if it is, what?

What pages are indexed?

We have this this misconception that crawling and indexing are the same thing, but they’re not.

Google might have crawled your website, but it doesn’t mean that all the pages are actually indexed.

So I think probably the very first important thing is to make sure that you are connected in some way to the Google search console with your sitemap.

Uhm, this will give you incredible amount of information and it will keep you honest regards to your sitemap.

That’s probably the first thing.

That’s very, very important.

I think the second thing is probably dumb not to chase the the current the current big thing.

Because once you’ve chased it, it’s, you know, it’s no longer the current big thing.

I think, again, being honest and finding those things that you know that that you can do better than anyone else so that when people are looking for solutions, they will come to you, I think is also.

Extremely important.

Uhm, and then the third?

I would go.

Back to what we talked about at the beginning.

Was off page SEO

You know if if you are not active.

Outside your website, it’s going to be hard for you to be found.

And that can be everything from social media to Google My Business to putting up a 20 page book on Kindle, you know, writing a post on Medium, just to being, you know, available.

Being visible I think is, you know, extremely important.

Getting your name out there.

I think that’s probably some, you know, those three of the very important things for me.

No, I I would agree with you.

Or and thanks for the amazing chat and for writing the book, go get the book SCO.

All you need to know by Warren.

Amazon Kindle.

Choose your choose your poison.

How you like to read.

Somebody wants to get ahold you.

What’s the best way?

I guess I possibly Twitter or just Google my name.

I’m the only Warren Lane idea in the world, and that’s probably my 4th CEO tip.

Change your last name, get married, take your wife name.

Take your husband name so that you are the only one with that last name in the entire world.

It’s worked for me.

Thanks Warren.

Have an amazing day my friend.

Thank you, rob.

You too.

Bye, bye.

OK.

 

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