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2018 General Meetup Notes

WordPress Notes and Links: September 2018

How to Find the Las Vegas WordPress Meetup Group

Website Review

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An SEO Freebie You Could Be Missing

Russell Aaron shared insight into what you could be missing out on in terms of SEO: categories.

  • Just like you can set a meta description/Google snippet for your pages, you can do the same for your categories.
  • Download and use Yoast SEO.
  • Set descriptions/snippets for your various categories. Russell calls it free SEO juice.
  • Rely on Yoast to help guide you.
  • Set a social media image that is used when a sharing your blog category.
  • If your website is built on Genesis Framework, read this article about displaying your categories’ names and descriptions.

Know Your Numbers

Matt Campbell talked to us about the importance of tracking your numbers. Numbers to know:

  • Popular products and popular products by season
  • Cost for web traffic
  • How much your business is making per customer
  • Expense of your website
  • ROI if you’re doing advertising
  • Know your overhead (business licensing, insurance, internet costs, etc.)
  • Use a spreadsheet to track costs
  • But also track where your money is coming from: sources of revenue
    • products
    • services
    • affiliate
    • selling advertising on your blog/website
  • Measure KPIs
    • Clicks
    • Email Subscribers
    • Ad spend
    • Rankings
    • Page speed
    • Bounce rate
    • Returning visitors
  • Use Google Analytics and Google Search Console
  • Affiliate and Ad Programs Matt recommends:
    • Google AdSense
    • Ezoic
    • Amazon Affiliate Marketing
    • MediaVine
    • Zazzle

You can view Matt’s presentation slides here.

Gutenberg

John Hawkins gave us the lowdown on Gutenberg and even gave us a little demo. The standard WordPress editor is 15-year-old technology and so WordPress is replacing it with Gutenberg, a brand new editing experience . It’s available now. Running and hiding isn’t going to help you. If you have a staging site, go ahead and install and use Gutenberg.

Things to note about Gutenberg:

  • You can reorder blocks by dragging and dropping or click the arrow key.
  • You can control and manipulate each block.
  • Right now the reviews are negative, but John has seen progress and improvement with Gutenberg.
  • The one thing he’s concerned with is the way Gutenberg works with Custom Post Types. It doesn’t negatively affect CPTs but that seems to be because classic editor is being used with CPTs. 

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