back to the cloudways web growth Summit uh I’m Brent Weaver director of ugurus and our agency coaching division here at cloudways in digital ocean we have another amazing activity coming up but first just want to give a shout out to uh my co-host Shelley Fagan hosting Alex and Gert on that amazing session on navigating AI amidst the search landscape um tons of value in that session it’s been fun to watch chat over the last little bit um seeing the diverse audience we have here I think I saw somebody who’s based in Australia staying up till two o’clock in the morning somebody else first uh cloudways event but been a customer for almost a decade so amazing to be here with you all and I’m excited to introduce our next speaker and activity we’ve got Carolyn Shelby with us here today she’s the principal SEO at yoast she’s going to be running a live website SEO audit session we had some folks that submitted uh their websites to do a live SEO audit which is always a little bit of a of a bold move right having your website and having your search strategy kind of torn down publicly but I know Carolyn is gonna be a great Steward of your site and give some amazing feedback quick little background on Carolyn after leading SEO at Tribune publishing and ESPN Carolyn now serves as a principal SEO at yast enhancing their plugins and add-ons if you’re a web Pro right now you haven’t used yo or don’t rely on on a regular basis I’m not sure where you’ve been these last few years she also co-hosts the SEO update by Yos podcast if you haven’t uh subscribed to that if you’re in SEO if you’re in web and you haven’t yet heard her on her podcast definitely go check that out subscribe on all the major podcast channels and she also um is actively sharing all the latest on SEO news and strategies on Amazing sessions like this so Carolyn Welcome to our program so great to have you and let’s get this party started all right well let’s uh let me get my screen shared so I we were given way more than we can get through today so I took the first four um and I went through them I don’t know if the people who submitted are in the audience today so Kim if you’re here um giving you your advice is going to be quick uh and easy because your site is blocking robots every page of your site has a meta tag that says no index no follow so you will not perform well in the organic search inkings because you cannot be indexed the first thing I would recommend is removing that the so what I did though was I told my crawler to ignore the no index no follow directive and crawl it anyway and some of the things that I found on your site that I thought you might want to work on a little bit the payload on your site is gigantic and I suspect it’s because you have really really large images you can upload smaller file siiz images not necessarily dimensionally smaller but the file size can be smaller and that will make it faster to load and it will make it easier for your users to see you um just tangent real quick Google is crawling everything with the mobile crawler so everything has to load quickly and look good on a mobile device in order to be indexed well so with your file sizes you can resave them out of whatever it is you’re taking them in so if you have um you probably had professional photos done if you had professional photos done don’t send them immediately up to your website you’re going to want to resave those with a lower resolution to make the file size smaller or you can compress them there’s a couple different ways to do that but you want to try to get the file size not necessarily the dimensions but that file size much much smaller so that you’re not forcing your your users to load so much data onto their phone um couple of the other things that I noticed you I don’t know that there is a specific keyword phrase that you’re targeting so I’m not sure about the things that you’re going to be ranking 194 once you get the no index taken off you’re going to want to do a little bit of research to figure out what kinds of phrases people who want to use your services would be searching for to find you and then make sure you include those phrases in your headings in your text you want to repeat those phrases at least on the homepage so that your homepage is going to pull up for other than your first name or other than the name of your domain if that makes sense um I don’t see if she’s here in the chat yeah I don’t see but the big takeaways here you want to have uh you want to do some keyword research and make sure that you’re weaving in those keyword phrases into your into your text naturally you got to take that no index no follow off your site because it’s not going to uh that that’s really going to hamstring kind of everything that you do and you want to make make sure that your payload the uh the file sizes are smaller um I did see you’re using WordPress uh the I’m I’m not Shilling for Yos this is a this is a free plugin you can use the yast plugin it’ll take care of quite a bit of the basic technical SEO things that you’re going to want to have fixed there is a there are professional you know Pro add-on premium things that you can get but if you just want to stick with the free one perfectly okay I think it will help you out with a lot it’ll also warn you when you do things like accidentally block the robots so I hope this was helpful and I wish you all the best of luck with your website all right so the next website I have is brainy Backpackers so brainy Backpackers I ran a crawl and I didn’t find anything terribly there’s nothing terribly technically wrong with your site um I mean there’s nothing terribly wrong with it period you’ve got your redirect set up correctly it looks like you’ve you’ve got a you got a 93 on your audit score which is an a you got a 97 on your SEO score which is an A so all of these things very very good also using Wordpress I saw that love love the WordPress the things that I would make sure that you focus on are internal linking so in the in the body copy of your blog posts in the body copy everywhere on your on your on your page you want to make sure that you’re looking for opportunities to cross link to other pages in your site especially if you have a page that is ranking very well so let’s say you have a blog post that does gang busters that blog post is going to be attracting links and it’s going to be it’s going to be an authority magnet really and what you want to do is you want to internally link to other pages on your site to kind of share that Authority around to pages on your site that maybe aren’t necessarily getting as much Authority you want to spread the love there are there’s other I’m sure you all are remember the Google leak that happened last month right one of the things that I noticed when I was looking at the variables that they’re keeping track of is the number of internal links that you have going out for your copy as well as the external links that you have going out from your copy and I have a theory about that my theory is that if I wanted to determine if someone was selling guest posts and therefore doing something wrong that I might want to you know devalue them for I would look at the number of internal links that are in the body copy not not the navigation the body copy compared to the external links because I think for the most part guest posts are only going to link out to that other site they’re not going to have those internal self-referential links and that might be a dead giveaway that you’re running guest posts not that you are running guest post but I’m just saying this is something I would keep in mind because I have a hunch can you think about it how do you calculate that how do you figure out someone selling guest posts if they if they’re trying to keep it you know quiet right I think that’s one of the giveway boys and I think that’s the reason that they’re tracking it so do make sure if for no other reason than to make sure that you look like everything’s on the up and up that you’re doing that self-referential linking because it’s going to be good for your rankings it’s going to be good for the keywords and your targeting and it’s just generally a best practice other than that um you know things looked pretty good so I would say congratulations on that um best of luck and let me know if you have any other questions all right I’m getting a tickle in my throat let us move on DM hey carine I had a I had a quick question not to interrupt you on on both those last sites I’m just noting the home the home title tag up there in your browser it both said they both say home yeah um I don’t know if that was a is that a nitpick thing is that old SEO of just like really focusing on that homepage title tag it’s not old SEO and it definitely will make a difference at at least on on this first one it’s not going to make any difference until she gets those no index tags taken off right yeah sounds like we need a little bit of SEO overhaul on that one but yeah ass that they get that done the best practice really is to have something more like name of the site some kind of separator and then your tagline or name of the site doesn’t necessarily have to be a separator if you can make it into a sentence something that explains exp what it is you’re targeting what people can find you for uh DMT did a good job here it’s uh see I don’t know if I can read this it’s DMT film it’s not going to it says what they do uh and then the next one that I did also has a good um a good a good title tag which is like Counseling in Melbourne Clinic online Bayside psychotherapy excellent the DMT is DMT film explainers pipe it series Recaps pipe comic books pipe ampers and more so they’re almost going after and maybe you could comment on that like they’re going after maybe three kind of keyword phrases within their homepage title tag yeah and and the pipe and more probably that was probably a goof it’s probably somehow um automated and they’re they’re just concatenating things I would I would maybe skip the extra pipe before the Anor and I’m not even sure would include and more and more is one it’s like learn more click here it’s sort of um empty calories you know and I and I don’t know that we need that um it it’s wasting characters it’s wasting it’s it’s filler and like premium real estate every letter counts Make It Count yeah you know a long time ago we were told that the value each character has is related to how many character you have total so if you had 100 characters the value of each one of those characters would be one so if you wanted to make each one of those characters each one of those words have more meaning you would decrease and use only the words that were necessary and that way the total which we assume to be 100 is being divided by fewer fewer Parts which means each part is worth more but we’re not 100% sure that that’s accurate but it’s still good rule of thumb we don’t want to waste characters we don’t want filler words we want to avoid using meaningless phrases just to have them there so yeah and I I would I would maybe clean up the title tags but that seemed um I don’t know too basic maybe maybe I need to remember to be a be a little bit more basic I guess Carolyn what’s what’s the the the less basic stuff well so on this one I did uh I did AOSS on this one as well and this one also has their seos pretty dialed in the the things that I noticed again were there’s not a lot of internal cross referential linking so this one actually has more than a couple of the others but the first season this is great for the user because it it does tell them that they’re going back to the first season of this show this is not great for the search engines though because this doesn’t tell us what show it’s the first season of not it’s not horrible though they did the same thing for season two but there really aren’t a lot of there aren’t a lot of other opportunities here that are being taken advantage of for internal linking and there are a lot of ads thing that I know I do worry about that a little bit because too many ads can be bad you know they they can slow the site down and they can make people less likely to stick around because you know I get to the the fourth or fifth ad and I’m like do I really want to read this that bad I don’t think so so I would I would make sure that every ad that you’re using every ad unit you’re using is getting actually clicked on if you start getting to the point where you’ve got ad units that are almost universally not seeing any clicks why don’t we consider getting rid of those because they’re they’re slow in the down they’re making the users mad nobody likes ads it’s just that that’s a fact of life um we’ve already got this one ad down here that’s kind of blocking things I apologize for the targeting I I like jewelry um I would do link back up to that topic oh I think sharing went byebye I think we’re back um looks like Carin your internet just dropped ever so slightly so I think we’re back I don’t know if it was Those ads that were making it a little bit funky but um let me think it could be yeah we might need to get your screen share back for our audience I think our team refresh the stream to see if we could get you all right cool looks like we’re good back to good so okay so um I think those diamond rings were too much for the internet it just broke let’s get to a website with less ads you hear the whole could you hear me the whole time um it dropped out just for a little bit there I think after we talked about you know the ads and stuff like that so if you had another point after the ads I think we can I do see a lot of opportunities though for for internal links that aren’t being taken advantage of you could be linking back up to the title of this TV show which is another self which is a topic page you should be linking back up to your topic Pages link back up to your category pages in the body copy it’s very important that you have these links in the body copy it’ll move things around it’ll help Google understand the order and and and the other thing I noticed that would be unique to what I assume is a new site the XML new sitemap exists it’s not linked to from the sitemap index so I would make sure that that gets included in your sitemap index in the new sitemap and then also in the RSS speeds there’s a lot of characters I don’t know if you can see that that are turning into their asky equivalence this isn’t necessarily bad for Google however if you’re lying on syndication I know that asky characters sometimes break Google News crawler and they’ll break syndication so you might want to consider making an effort to not use characters that are going to turn into an asy equivalent I worked at a new site that had a lot of syndication happening and the the weird characters would routinely break the syndication and some companies when they’re syndicating your content and it breaks they’ll stop going back and asking so it’ll break and you won’t know that they’re not syndicating you for a week except you’ll have notice that there’s a huge drop off in in referral traffic so I would I would definitely take a look at that um they’re also in your RSS feed which does exist so if you didn’t mean to have an RSS feed it’s still there uh and if you want it to be useful I would make sure that you make sure those headlines aren’t generating the head well the headlines and really anything you don’t want those wonky those wonky characters sitting in there the other thing I noticed was that I’m not sure I like the metad description on the homepage the homepage metad description kind of buries the explain films and television series a little bit too far down the line if that’s what you’re targeting I would move that to the front and find a way to phrase the sentence so that you’re leading with the words that you’re trying to be found for we want to try to frontload all the important words in our headings in our titles in our descriptions in our excerpts frontloading the important words is really the way to go it indicates that they’re important it indicates that that’s your focus and it ensures that they’re not accidentally going to get clipped off um the other thing I noticed on your homepage specifically you have no H1 at all you have no H2S you have lots of h3s so I think on your homepage what I would do is s so in WordPress you can do a thing where in the template it says if this is the homepage then display this header if this is not the homepage display a different header and for the homepage header you’re going to want to put your the name of your site in that H1 and you’re going to want to make sure that you’re including good headings good headings are very important um I did not happen to pull up the interior pages but I’m going to assume it’s the same there do make sure you have H1s just because you don’t have an A a true headline on a page which is what you have on a blog post but you do need to have them on your topic aggregation pages on your category aggregation Pages the archive pages and on the homepage because especially in the homepage good Lord the H1 should have the pH the phrase in the keywords that you’re targeting that’s you know want to talk basic SEO that’s that’s some basic SEO right there let’s see um I am burning through these a little bit quicker than I thought I would be you’re okay Caroline and actually I was gonna I was going to pull an audience question uh for you um it is specifically about yoast so I think people heard you’re a principal at yoast let’s ask her about yast um but quick question here from one of our uh one of our viewers here uh Yaya will yast be used in the future for custom coded websites and not just as a WordPress plugin any words of wisdom there for our amazing guest so I don’t know I don’t know how much I’m supposed to say we we won’t tell anybody Carolyn don’t worry it’s it’s it’s our secret here please don’t tell anyone but um we as much we we love the WordPress community and we are very dedicated to the WordPress Community but I I do know that there are so many other platforms that would like to take advantage of the services that yoast offers that we are I don’t know how far they are in the plans and I don’t want to I I I couldn’t make any promises about when it’s going to come but I do know that there is a desire to make it more of a less platform dependent system so that we can start allowing people who are on different content Management systems or maybe custom content Management Systems to take advantage of what we offer I know people are taking the open source and they’re making modifications to it to work with their unique situations but internally I know that we are also working on something that will accommodate other platforms too but I have no idea where they are in that process and I and I could not Hazard a guesses to when to expect that thank you Carolyn we can jumped here to uh Bayside Psychotherapy our next site for review so Bayside had a um they’ve got a good a good title which is great the they do have H1s and H2S on their pages but they’ve got too many H2S and my concern about the H1 here is is it time to work on you that’s not um I don’t think that’s a specific as we would like I think we what we need to be working on here is perhaps [Music] um Bayside Psychotherapy colon we’re here to psychotherapies you something like that um is some something that uses the keywords that you’re trying to be found for I assume the keywords you’re trying to be found for would be Counseling in Melbourne or Counseling Clinic in Melbourne so you’d want to repeat that in the H1 especially on the homepage the problem with is it time to work on you is that it’s just a little bit too vague and I don’t think customers if you think about when I when I go to Google and I say I need a psychotherapist I’m not going to say I think it’s time to work on me you know it is just that’s not a thing someone’s going to say they might say that but they’re not going to say it in the context of trying to locate a service provider so think about how they’re going to phrase the way they search for that service provider and incorporate that language into your headings that’s going to help you rank for those terms and then people will find you um on that one like um if if I’m like a a copywriter or I’m designing this and thinking about like an attention grabbing headline which maybe isn’t always going to be in alignment with what Google wants to see for a descriptive headline that tells people exactly what we’re doing here I can see what they’re trying to do here the from a visual standpoint is it time to work on you is it okay if that was like your H3 and the smaller text below that the Melbourne counseling hypnotherapy Psychotherapy and psychology was technically the H1 but from a design perspective you kind of flip it is is it okay for somebody to do that absolutely so what I would do is what is what is not advised it’s it can be done but it’s it’s not best practice is to have an H1 below an H3 I wouldn’t do that you could put the H1 which would prob be mbird Consulting hypnotherapy Psychotherapy and psychology above is it time to work on you with the with the CSS you can make it look exactly like it looks now and flip them just make the H1 style look small make the H3 style look big so visually to a human they’re going to see is it time to work on you first and it’s going to accomplish the same the same goal but to the robot the robot is going to see oh this is an H1 this is the most important thing on the page and it’s going to read Melbourne counseling hypnotherapy Psychotherapy and psychology first then it’s going to see is it time to work on you and they’re going to see that that’s an H3 they’re goingon to say okay this isn’t as important as what I just saw because what I just saw is the topic of the site and that’s what we want to make sure is the H1 I could just see like on a zoom somewhere there’s a designer and a Content person and an SEO and they’re all AR arguing about this and I think I’m hearing Caroline that you can have your cake and eat it too structure the HTML Melbourne counseling first that’s our H1 CSS we can flip it from a design perspective we can make that hierarchy look a little bit better which is I think it it does take a little bit of custom CSS coding but it absolutely can be done we’ve done this at I’ve done this at Disney I’ve done this at you know the LA Times the Chicago Tran you can do it it’s really easy to do you should not be using HTML elements as design Design Elements that’s not what they’re for the HTML elements are there to convey meaning and structure they’re not there to Delight the eye you want to use CSS to Delight the eye that’s fine you can do whatever you want with the CSS but try not to get Loosey Goosey with how you assign your headings just because you want it to appear a certain way to the human eye speaking of I had a little bit of concern with some of these subheadings because again I think they’re a little vague and I think we could tighten that up a little bit I understand what you need help with is is pretty standard to ask but you want to really kind of put something Psychotherapy is in there um trying to think of a good way to phrase it I can’t think of one off the top of my head that’s also short but um so what we do that that’s another one super super vague online and face Toof face what online and online and face Toof face therapy sessions therapy sessions colon online and face to face therapy sessions in person or virtual you can sit you you have to call them what they are because the the robots and even as a person I’m looking at that picture I don’t know the the the girl in the first image what do you need help with she could have just been arrested for all I know she could need a lawyer not a shrink like there’s you cannot rely on the robots especially or people to deduce what it is that’s going on in the image or deduce the context of a statement based on what’s in an image so you just make sure that you’re not being ambiguous make sure that you’re not being vague very specifically say what it is that your offering so that no one’s confused about anything the search engines they get confused about your message if you’re not super clear I know copywriters in particular um it’s less so now but I’ve encountered them in the in the past they were trained not to repeat things too often and they say oh well I don’t have to say the name of the product because there’s a picture of the product right there the search engines are getting good at recognizing what’s in pictures but they’re not that good yet and you still have to have in the text what it is that you’re selling what it is that you’re talking about what it is that you’re promoting say the words that you want to rank for do not leave that to chance if you leave it to chance there’s a high probability that they’re going to not fully understand exactly what it is you’re trying to say so I would definitely Spruce that up a little bit it reminds me of like the I know you’re from publishing Carolyn but like the you know when people bury the lead like you start further down the paragraph and you start to see like the real attention grabbing stuff and when I click on that conditions page there’s actually a lot of really rich content on that page and I feel like you could you could probably come up with a much better phrase to represent like top mental health conditions or some something like that that people might be searching for that’s better representative there conditions we treat you know jump out there and get their attention uh otherwise the technical structure of the site’s not bad I don’t I couldn’t find anything immediately wrong with redirects or things like that all of these sites that we’ve looked at so far today could benefit from more more backlinks more more socializing more you brand building but I’d say that’s probably true for the vast majority of sites out there you can’t have too many backlinks I I mean I suppose you could have too many bad backlinks but realistically you want to get out there you want to make sure that you’re sharing your information um you know are you on the forums don’t Forum spam absolutely do not Forum spam I am telling you that now do not Forum spam however if you are involved in the forums and you can meaningfully participate in a conversation and happen to mention reference an article that you wrote reference a post on your site those kinds of things especially on Reddit lately those are going to be good because that’s going to get inhaled right into Google and that’s going to a help with your rankings and Beads it could attract some links and some traffic um so all of these places could definitely benefit from that this page is a little long but yeah like I said there’s nothing horrifically wrong with it um i’ were I just tighten i’ tighten up the targeting make sure that there’s some keyword research done and get those get those headings and the title tags tightened up the homepage title tag is good just let’s just tighten everything else up now so those were the ones that I had picked out I had that we were done at 11:45 my time so I wanted to make sure I was done in time are we doing a Q&A yeah we are right at time uh so if there are there are questions happy to probably grab maybe one of those possibly two I know Diane uh van Eaton from the chat asked a little earlier when we’re talking about those titles uh would it be terrible to have an image that had the text is it time to work on you before the H1 so basically moving that text into an image I’m not sure if you have a strong opinion on that or if your recommendation would just be to put the HTML correctly and then correct it within CSS if it’s easier to do the image you can do the image yeah absolutely where like a comment like is it time to work on you maybe it’s adding value to the user but it’s not necessarily adding value to Google right it’s for sure adding value to the user and you can even put in the alt attribute for that image is it time to work on you and the alt image will have less importance than the H1 because it’s an alt and it’s not wrapped in a header tag so I mean if if you’re unable to edit the CSS which some people some people don’t know how you know that they don’t they don’t have a designer on staff or their designer is not a coder you know it I can I can absolutely see situations where it would be far more difficult to accomplish the CSS fix for that than to just pop it into an image and put the image where they want it so I think that would be perfectly okay another question came from mm uh and this is regarding images is it better to use webp or avif in your opinion I I feel like avif is not universally recognized and I’m trying to I’m trying to double check in my head if it was avif or webp um I think eventually they’ll both be okay but I think for right now maybe webp is the way to go awesome well uh Carolyn this has been amazing um thank you for taking the time to review some of our amazing cloudways customer submitted websites for a little bit of an SEO tear down whether your website was reviewed or not today hopefully you all got a ton of value I know I personally did just thinking about things that we might need to do with our uh business units website and all that kind of stuff so top of mind for me right now is like title tags uh making sure that we have those in links which I know are a pain to do very monotonous to do those very very well but um I think we all here can there are plugins that’ll do those for you what’s that there’s plugins that’ll do those for you i’ I’ve heard of one um oh no it’s not even ours there’s a different plugin that’ll do it okay okay in terms of like identifying opportunities and and autom that stuff no it literally does it for you oh very cool very cool well anything to make our lives easier as web Builders um there’s always endless work to be done so uh we def appreciate those um suggestions and the reviews today Caroline I was happy to do it so um you guys can find me on the socials if you have any other questions and real quick while we have you um how has been your experience at the web growth Summit uh so far this year oh it’s it’s always a lot of fun and I find the information always useful and valuable you know sometimes you forget to think about things and this is a good reminder and there’s nuggets that you didn’t think about before at all that you discover so I think it’s been it’s been a real good good experience so far very cool well Carolyn thank you again for being here best of luck and amazing work at all you do at yoast amazing company amazing plug-in uh and platform and uh I know personally we use it a ton so um definitely keep up the good work thank you and next up at our web growth Summit we’ve got another session for you called Beyond search leveraging new avenues for traffic we’re going to be doing a bit of a panel discussion uh with vaselina vin vinova as well as Jerry Broadway they’ll be joining us here both digital marketing strategists and experts so we’ll be back here in about 10 minutes for our next session so stay tuned as to more great content coming you to you from this web growth Summit 2024 and we will see you back here in just 10 minutes talk soon for