yes okay so the popular vote seems to be saying yoast seo time to buy a landslide i'm surprised by that i thought they were more equal t...
okay so the popular vote seems to be saying
yoast seo time to buy a landslide i'm surprised by that i thought they were more
equal the bloggers used both plugins about the same
all right so we have a challenge for today yeah
so we see the popular opinion but the whole goal of today is like let's find out what google actually needs
in terms of seo information from a plug-in what they're actually doing because we're preparing the next release of acabato
and previous purchasers are going to get the upgrade for free
but we want to make sure this thing is a seo monster it's just taking care of everything
as best as it can be done exactly and the reality is that there are existing plugins
um for wordpress sites that people have been using for years and the two that we showed in our poll obviously yoast which won by a landslide and then all in one seo
and there are others out there as well and they're doing a whole bunch of things but
that's the question we need to answer today is what are they doing that actually matters
what things are necessary and what things would we really want in an seo plug-in
and are they doing it okay so let's split up i'll go
get a list of everything you actually need your seo plugin to do and you want to check out the features that these are doing
absolutely
[Music]
on the whiteboard in here i've drawn for you the things that we
really need and we really need in seo so let's say google
goes to your blog post on our stand-up desks better for posture
right google goes here and it has the title already it has the body and any pictures you have right but google needs a little bit
more information there's the meta title so the meta title is where you want to change what shows up on the search result as the title of the page from what's already in wordpress as your page title
then there's the meta description that's the little paragraph text
on under your serp
under your result in the search showing a little description of what it's about next is a site map a site map is just showing
it's just a huge page that no human would ever need to go to
but it's just showing all of the pages on your website and how they're organized so google can find everything you have next is no index sometimes there are pages that i don't want to go
in google's uh into google's index it's a page that i want to be there you know about a little event that i'm doing but i don't want google to crawl this for years to come
and so i'm just going to know index i don't really care if it shows up in in search
so it's helpful to have this no index this is what you actually need this is what you need um on your on your page
but then there are some nice to have features that a lot of these plugins will have
like your google analytics code you can integrate it easily by hand but it's handy if your plugin will handle that for you so it's just automatically put in same as connection to google search console
link settings are handy so that i can no index or mark a link as our new the new tag
which is sponsored if it's an affiliate link it's handy to have those things so need to have handy to have that's really what we need from our plug-in but is it really
let's go through these things one at a time this is kind of our
our what most people would say now your meta title wordpress already has the title to the page done for you when you write the title up there it's already creating your meta title the only time you would need a plugin for this is if you wanted to have it different than what's displaying on the page
i can't think of a time i would ever need that next
meta description we have written thousands
of blog posts where we just didn't bother to fill it fill in the meta description because
in a huge percentage of cases google is going to pick their own meta description of what
part of the article they think was the best
summary of it anyway and they'll not even obey what you said as the meta description
and so it's nice to have it's a best practice but again
thousands of blog posts brought millions of page views where we didn't even fill it in
and we did just fine so do we really need that
now let's go to sitemap we have had many many sites that we never bothered to make a sitemap
because if you have your menu structure normal so that just every page you could navigate to from the home page they're gonna find all the pages just fine by following your links we've never had a problem with that
so a site map can be very handy if you had a massive site
an e-commerce site with ten thousand pages and a complicated link structure but on most wordpress sites this will make no difference whatsoever to your seo now no indexing pages it's really
just kind of saves your crawl budget google sets a certain budget for your site
of how much how many resources they're going to put to crawling it and how often they want to come to your site and and you're saving yourself a little bit of unnecessary them checking on a page that they don't need to check on here
is it really going to make you rank better not really
it's just it's just handy to have it's a best practice
so do we really need a plug-in to do any of the most necessary things actually not and this stuff we've already talked about
these are just nice features to have but again these aren't actually going to impact your seo at all
you can put in analytics a million different ways
same as connect to search console you don't need a plugin for that link settings you can just do by hand go into the html
editor for that post and you're there so you can see from this that people think an seo plugin is some kind of silver
bullet it's going to do this seo juju to your website and the truth is the most necessary things you need to rank on google
you need no plugin for which is why we just built several websites with no seo plugin and built them up to a lot of traffic and sold them
and they did just fine
okay so these seo plugins are doing a whole yoast of things for you sorry pardon the pun i just had to do that um i went through and made a list of
all of the features that are being done here on on the computer and between yoast and all-in-one i mean there are dozens and dozens of different features
things like um de-indexing category pages
these are all things that seem like good practice for seo
but the reality is according to kinsta 37
of the web is on wordpress you don't think that google
understands what a category page is and how to handle that in search we've never had an issue with category pages ranking high in search and having that
hurt our seo it's just not a thing and so there are numerous just numerous features and settings in both yoast seo and all-in-one seo
that if you don't know what you're doing you can actually actively hurt your website and in fact
they're promoting behaviors that are actually going to actively hurt your website let me show you this this is crazy so here's an article we wrote this article years ago a few years ago
it has attracted over 360 000 organic page views people who just come to the website right
but look at the yoast seo analysis score you know how to get a high seo analysis score
you keyword stuff that's what you do in fact let me show you another example jim wrote this one yesterday this was fun this is a complete
garbage blog post right um look at the title
bad plugins are what this post is about you know why he titled it that way because the target keyword was bad plugins and he actually wrote the title this post is about
bad plugins and yoast seo said no no the keyword needs to be first in the title
it's ridiculous are you kidding me like that's gonna make the difference like google google's not gonna know that it's about bad plugins because it's not the first word in the title are you kidding me
but the seo analysis shows green it's perfectly happy and the readability score is equally easy to gain you just have relatively short sentences don't repeat the same
starting word of a sentence too many times in a paragraph
and you get a good readability score which actually has nothing to do with good readability
these are tests that are first of all antiquated and second of all can be really harmful we've had several members of our membership program in income school who
have spent hours trying to get green scores on yoast seo to the point that we told them
take the plugin off your website entirely
it's doing you more harm than good because you're wasting time and now you're actively keyword stuffing now
there are some things that we would like a plug-in to do there are some actual technical seo things that in 2020 can really benefit you yoast and all-in-one are not doing any of those things
but um a newer seo plug-in out there called rank math
seems to have um some some good schema features
um they're addressing that the the seo needs that we have now in 2020 so i'm optimistic about that plug-in but without
some thorough testing i can't make a solid recommendation yet they are doing some of this um
seo analysis juju stuff that i'm not real confident in
um and because of that i do think that most people most of you who are bloggers on a wordpress site
are probably better off using none of these seo plugins than choosing between one or the other
so you've seen what those plugins do for you
and now let's look at some things that we want
to happen in our technical seo that aren't happening
now ricky's going to slowly slink in and pretend he wasn't the camera person who needed to be there for the transition okay so when we made acabato um we were taking a holistic look at seo what
actually is necessary and some of these things
are cool and needed so post type schema if you're making a news
website you're dead in the water without schema you need it
right now and so that's going to enable google to have some special information about the blog post the organization that published it the time it was published that kind of thing so that it can work in google news and same thing with recipes if you're making recipes in 2020 without recipe schema it's a problem and so these plugins that are handling your seo are doing the things that we don't need them to do and missing some very critical things
for some publishers right so another example author's
authorship schema right in 2020 we talk about how important it is to establish expertise authoritativeness and trustworthiness
and without authorship schema like what authorship schema is doing is it's allowing us to
provide information about individuals the creators the writers
the publishers on a website and provide that information to google so that they can tie it all together and that even like across multiple websites you can say hey i'm the same ricky kessler that showed up on that podcast and so being able to do that helps to establish that eat
and then you've seen you've seen cool um like in the serps especially you know in google
in the sidebar when it pulls up you know you do a search for an author and it pulls in a bunch of cool biographical information all of that's information that's been provided by schema and it just adds that level of kind of professionalism and trustworthiness
um so you and i you and i are making another youtube channel called margin it's all about personal finance called margin by income school
and right if we haven't started a website for it yet just the youtube channel
but when we start that website it would be very important to tell google hey that jim harmer who wrote that blog post is also the guy who has a lot of followers
talking about uh business on income school that would be a very important deal exactly
the only way to do that is with authorship schema on my author page on margin i'd want to use the same as tag and say this is the same jim harmer as this
and i can provide links to an article on cnbc
and all these different things that people have talked about jim harmer right okay so authorship schema very important in the age of eat organizational schema is really the same thing but about the website as as a business or whatever you can say if it's an individual or a business page you can have your company logo there when the company was founded your address
contact information you can do all kinds of things with the organizational schema not that big of a deal i wouldn't say but i definitely want
it right well yeah when somebody does a search for
income school right right now google's automatically pulling up the website and then they're automatically putting in some of the other key pages about us pages stuff like that we could do a lot more right if we can have it pull in our logo
and like this is when the company was founded and it just again adds that level of detail
that sets a little bit of
authoritativeness a little bit of trustworthiness
for that organization it's pretty cool okay this last one needs
like this is a big
deal so wordpress's default behavior and really everything i've ever seen the default behavior
is you write an article at the very bottom it shows your byline and if you click on the name jim harmer it takes you to
my archive page of all the other blog posts i've written
this does very little or nothing in terms of eat
expertise authoritativeness and trustworthiness to convince google that like hey this is a trustworthy author but what if and so instead i create an about jim harmer page
but google now has to try to connect the dots between this author page and which author they are and maybe
it happens maybe it doesn't happen um but if instead that byline went to my about page instead now i have the about page with all my links and credentials and all that kind of stuff in there
and maybe some of the blog posts i've written all in one spot
that's beautiful for eat and right there is my authorship schema right on that page
that's gold that's what we need in 2020 for authorship
no one does this um so that's one thing that we added in our theme aka bottle and this isn't like a self-serving thing we actually identified some things in acabado we really want to improve in the next version so we're by no means there but there are some things like that that
no one seems to be doing that i would consider to be a big deal so like if i were if we were
had our own like if we were ranked math right this is a feature that wouldn't be hard to add
anybody with any theme can just turn off the author byline
and then the plugin could have an author byline that links over to a special about page
like build that into your plugin let's have a more holistic approach to what actually matters for seo but instead
what these guys are generally doing is they're ticking the boxes that everyone has said for the last 20 years are important to tick whereas today google
and wordpress together are smart enough that they do all of this for us right and as we look at the feature set of
yoast and all-in-one and we're just picking on those two because they're the biggest right
it's every wordpress plugin ever for seo um there are things it's not snake oil like you read through
each feature and it's like okay i can see why with the use case for that but just in a practical case from building lots and lots of websites to millions of page views we look at those things they're like this
isn't it this isn't what moves the needle this stuff actually does and it's missing
i'd like to just add one little disclaimer if you were like target.com massive e-commerce loads and loads and loads of pages like yes i would probably want to use more of the technical features
not just the ones here but the many other features that are available for seo and they're not using plugins either
they're doing all of them but they they are real things that you could need in texas
it's not that those things don't have a place
it's just that we need to not get hung up as bloggers
as content creators as internet marketers with little technical seo things
that don't move any needles that's the point because frankly
if you had no seo plug-in on most wordpress sites
and you had a normal a normal menu that's critical so you can navigate to every page
you would do perfectly fine um this kind of stuff would be handy if you were in a ymyl space
