Keeping your site safe, speedy and searchable
Today, my AI SEO Snippet co-host, Tony Cosentino, has full rein of the episode to share his tips and advice about WordPress SEO, and a bit of AI mixed in.
If you haven’t heard already, Tony is an expert on the Recipe for SEO Success Course, in the DMC membership, and is of course, my beloved.
So stay tuned to learn all about WordPress SEO.
Tune in to learn:
- Why internal links are important
- How to check and manage your internal links
- How schema works
- Helpful schema tools for WordPress sites
- Why speed matters to Google and your customers
- Ways you can optimise your site to speed it up
- How to keep your website secure
- Why you should review your plugins regularly
- How to integrate Google and track as much data as possible
- How to get ahead of the curve of LLMs and AI instead of chasing it
- Tony’s favourite tools for WordPress
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Connect with Tony Cosentino:
Useful resources:
Internal links:
Schema:
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Security:
Backups:
Google Integration:
About Tony Cosentino
He’s spoken at many WordPress conferences in Australia and taught countless people how to build and maintain their sites.
His current focus is on long-term client site maintenance, WordPress website audits, SEO audits and maximising AI search visibility.
Transcript
Kate Toon: Hello, my name’s Kate Toon and I’m the head chef for the Recipe for SEO Success, an Online Teaching Hub for all things related to Search Engine Optimization and Digital Marketing. Today, my AI SEO snippet co-host, Tony Cosentino, has full rein of the episode. I’m scared, but he’s here to share his tips and advice about WordPress SEO, and a bit of AI mixed in.
If you haven’t heard already, Tony is an expert on the Recipe for SEO Success course. He’s also in the DMC membership and of course, is my beloved. Stay tuned to hear all about WordPress SEO.
Tony Cosentino: Hi, I am Tony Cosentino, known around the places as the WP Guy. I have been building WordPress websites for businesses since 2009. I have attended and spoken at WordPress conferences in Australia and New Zealand in that time, but these days my main focus is on website audits, which I call website health checks.
I also like providing consistent ongoing support and advice for businesses that have WordPress websites. And I like to throw in some advanced SEO fine-tuning and damage control. I kind of love going in and working out the SEO aspects of a website that need to be sorted out as well. And finally about me.
I have fully embraced the AI revolution that is upon us. I have found that using AI tools has really expanded my capabilities of what I can provide to my clients. I use it to analyse logs to work out to find errors and issues much faster than I could if I was looking at them line by line, go in blind.
I use it to understand new clients’ themes, WordPress themes or weird plugins, or custom plugins. It can look at the code and tell me how it works. I love, I use it to make custom plugins. If I want a very specific thing done, I can get AI to help me build a custom plugin to do just that, and also making general tools to run my business.
It’s just been fantastic for me. Okay, that’s enough about me. Now, let me tell you what I want to cover today. I want to talk about internal links, schema, speed, security backups, Google integration, and of course, AI. Alright, internal links, internal links are important. If you don’t link to your own content, why would Google pay any attention to that content?
My baseline is to have three internal links to every piece of content on a website, and if it’s an important service or product, even more than three, three is just the baseline for anything. Now the links themselves need to describe the product or service that you’re linking to and not just use words like, click here or read more.
Now the tools to work out what, what you’re going to fix range from a plugin like Link Whisper, which will assess all of your internal links, make suggestions, add, it’ll actually add the internal links. If you want a more manual approach, you can use a tool like Screaming Frog to look at all of the links on the website, tell you exactly how many links each page or piece of content has, and then you can manually go and edit the content to add the links to the pages that are have less than three.
Or you could make a custom tool I made. I use AI to make a custom tool that does that. It checks how many links there are to each piece of content. It also suggests which pages you could link from and to.
Okay. Let’s move on to schema. This is important because it is computer code based that speaks the bots language. When I say bots, I mean Google bots and other bots that come and look at your website. Is usually served at the top of the page, so it’s read first and it gives these bots very useful information before it has to read your content and try and work out what your website webpage is about. The Yoast SEO plugin is very good at putting all of the basic schema in place, like the page information, the product information, the business information.
When I need to add extra schema over and above that, I tend to use extra tools to insert that extra schema into the page on a specific page. A free plugin to do that is called Header Footer Code Manager which lets you target specific pages. I prefer to use WPCodeBox, which is a paid plugin and is very powerful. Once you’ve done anything like that, any custom schema, you need to validate it.
It’s important to make sure that it’s working and it hasn’t broken anything. And the tool I use for that is called Schema Validator. It’s a free website at validator.schema.org.
Speed. Speed is very important for a number of reasons. The first one is your customers. If your customers get to your website and your website is slow and sluggish, they’ll get frustrated and go elsewhere and look for a website that they can get what they need fast.
The other reason is Google cares how fast your website is also, ’cause it wants to send people to websites from search results that are not gonna get annoyed. So it’s, it’s really important for on all fronts to make your website as fast as you possibly can. The website I use to test website speed is called GT Metrixs as in it ends in TRIX.com, GT metrics.
It’s excellent for finding performance issues. It’ll tell you all the largest large files that are being used it, which could be images or videos or other things that you may not realize are slowing down the webpage. Once you’ve worked at things that need to be fixed. The tool that I use on a WordPress site is WP Rocket. I find it very effective at improving the speed and what goes well with WP Rocket is a tool that they also own called Imagify. Imagify optimizes the images, as in it reduces the file size, not the image size. You’ve gotta get that correct as well. What I mean by that is if you are gonna upload an image that’s 3000 pixels wide, but it’s only gonna display it at a thousand pixels wide, then adjust the size of that image before you upload it.
Now, what Imagify does is even if the image dimensions are correct, the file size can still be bloated and too big and Imagify does two things. It will make the file itself smaller and it will convert that image to a web P format, which is very efficient for speed as well.
Some other tips regarding optimizing a website is when you’re looking at settings, lazy loading of images is a common setting. You have to test that on a case-by-case basis because what it does is, is it waits until you get to that particular part of the screen before it loads the image, and sometimes that can break your logo not loading quick enough or other things. So use that carefully.
And finally, fonts is something that you’ve gotta be very careful of on our website for speed, if you’re using Google fonts, each time that font loads on the page, it goes to Google and gets the current information for that font library.
And if you’ve got five different fonts to make your site look dazzling, it’s going to really slow it down. So I suggest sticking with two fonts, one font for the headings and one font for the body content, maximum.
Security. Now here’s an area that gets done incorrectly all the time. I, in the last 12 months, I’ve had to deal with a number of websites where people have come to me with, what’s going, why am my rankings tanking? Why am I not getting in the search results as often? Like I’m talking, falling off a cliff kind of numbers. And in these cases, the hackers have won, worked out how to get access to adding code to the website. And then they have added code that redirected just the Google bots to a casino website, so all the visitors would see a normal website, the owner would see a normal website, but Google would see a casino website. So any search terms that were on that client’s website were being destroyed because everything that Google was reading was talking about casinos and poker machines and stuff like that. Also, in one case, I found code that was added to the website that was copying every password that was entered by users into that to log into that website and sending it to a Gmail account. So you can imagine the security implications of that, particularly if you reuse the same password on different things. It was crazy.
So what do you do? The first thing you do is add a is add a WordPress security plugin, which makes it much harder for these sites to make changes to the website and also will block multiple attempts to do nasty things. Two tools that will do that are Solid Security, which has a free and a paid version, and that’s my tool of choice, the paid version. Also Wordfence is useful for doing this kind of thing. If you’ve got that, then leave it, that’s still good security.
And then I would say plugin reviews every quarter. So go and check that all of your plugins are up to date and, well, you should be updating them more regularly than that, but they need to be up to date. But also, if there’s any old plugins that you’re not using or that haven’t been updated for a long time, I would seriously think about removing them because that’s what the hackers love.
They love an old plugin being there that has not been updated for a long time. And the security. Someone’s worked out a way of getting into via that plugin to add more malicious code to the website. So that’s my tips for that area.
Backups. Now, if you have been hacked, backups are a fantastic way to recover an issue like that. If you have a backup that was made before the hackers got into your website, you can revert to that backup and then update plugins, delete plugins and change the things that they could have used to access the website and go back to trading and running your website as normal as soon as possible.
It’s also good if you happen to do something that crazy and break the website or something else happens. I think that the Updraft Plus plugin, the free version, is fantastic for this task.
Okay, let’s talk about Google integration. And when I talk about Google integration, I’m talking about Google Search Console and Google Analytics. Google Search Console is a fantastic tool that will tell you which pages Google has indexed, which pages it’s not indexing, which pages have issues. Which pages are getting impressions in Google search results, which pages are getting clicks in Google search results. It’s a wonderful tool. It also tells you kind of some of the internal, the links that are coming to your website, things like that.
Google Analytics is also good for heavy data processing, you know, if there’s a lot of traffic data that you need to look at and work at conversions and all kinds of technical stuff. So you should have it on there so that if you do get a professional that can deconstruct all that for you then you can use the data’s being collected and can be used.
But I also love installing a plugin called Independent Analytics to the website. It doesn’t need any Google accounts. You just install it and it starts tracking the data, and you can see the data in the WordPress admin error, and it’s all the stuff that you care about. Most people care about the number of visitors. Where it came from, which pages they landed on, that sort of thing.
It’s really easy to look at and understand. Yeah, I really love having on there as well for the client’s perspective. To connect Google Analytics and Google Search Console, I tend to use a simple plugin called Tracking Code Manager that lets you just add the tracking code that they might require to verify that your website’s connected. Simple as that.
Now, one of my favourite areas, the AI aspect of all of this. The AI engines, tools, whatever you wanna call ’em. ChatGPT, however you describe them, are giving webpages as results for questions people are asking, whatever the question is, best headphones, or something. They’re still gonna give you webpage links, but understand this, the language models still are using the search results to work out which pages to suggest. So the search is not dead. Search results are still used, and you know, currently ChatGPT uses Bing actual search results to work out which things to talk to you about. And Google Gemini uses the Google search results, the original Google search results.
So just understand that the ChatGPTs of the world are still using search results. Now to give those large language models information that they can use quickly, someone has made a standard called LLMS.txt as a file that you can put in some basic information about the website that the large language models can use to quickly understand the site.
Now, this is not necessarily being used heavily yet, but it’s coming. It’s a standard. It’s being built into SEO tools as we speak. So the sooner you get it going, the better. Now, my favourite SEO plugin being the Yoast plugin, has this setting built in, but it is not turned on by default, so you have to turn it on. I suggest you do that as soon as you can. Now, once it’s turned on, it has an automatic mode where it will go and find pages that it thinks are important and put those in a summary of those into this file and then every week it will refresh that file. But you can manually set it to manual page selection, and then you can select the about page, the contact page, the terms page, the privacy page, the shop page, and then add other important content pages that you want it to know about so you can really control the narrative on that.
Now once you’ve made these changes, you can go to your website address slash LLMS.txt to see what the content looks like, and if you have any major changes on your website, then update those, if you’ve done the manual settings, update it so that you get, the current information on it.
So the things I’ve talked about today are internal links, make sure you link at least three pieces of content to each other. Schema, make sure you have schema running with a SEO plugin just for the basics. Speed, make sure your website’s performing well, loads quickly. Security, make sure that security’s in place to keep the hackers at bay. Backups, have them so you can roll back in case you do have an issue. Google integration so that you make sure you have all the Google tools connected so you can get as much data as possible. And AI, make sure you’ve got the LLMs.TXT file turned on on your website so that you can be ahead of the curve instead of chasing it.
Thanks for listening. If you need me to help you out with a website audit or ongoing support for your WordPress site or some advanced SEO work, you can find all of the information about those services at theWPguy.com au.
Kate Toon: So that’s the end of this week’s show. If you have questions about WordPress and SEO, head to my I LOVE SEO group on Facebook. You can also check out my AI SEO workshop at the recipe for seo success.com, where Tony and I will teach you how to get found by chatGTP and other LLMs, and how to appear in the AI summaries on Google.
We still have a few sessions coming up, but they are selling fast, so make sure to book ASAP. And if you like the show, please don’t forget to leave a five star rating and review on iTunes, stitch, or Spotify, or wherever you heard the podcast. Your review will help others find the show and learn more about the lovely world of search engine optimization, and you’ll get a little shout out. So until next time, happy SEOing.
