On the podcast today we have Mina Tamang, who is an SEO expert at Codewing Solutions. Mina advocates for prioritising user needs over traditional SEO tactics that emphasise keyword ranking. She stresses the importance of integrating user-centric content with core SEO principles, technical optimisations, as well the utility of WordPress plugins. The discussion also addresses…
Jetpack has introduced a major update to its Form block in the latest version 11.6 release. Users can now interact with the various form templates as patterns. A new quick start placeholder appears anytime users invoke a new form block. It displays a selection of the most commonly used form types as icons. Clicking on…
After 10 years in the WordPress ecosystem as one of the most popular plugin businesses, Yoast is branching out with a new SEO app for the Shopify market. The app will offer Shopify merchants a set of optimizations for search results and Google Shopping, automatically add structured data, and allows users to optimize for desired…
Last week, the popular Rank Math SEO plugin received a major update that includes a new artificial intelligence system. The Content AI feature is a SaaS product that behaves like a personal writing assistant to boost search rankings. “We built Rank Math’s Content AI feature to revolutionize the content production and optimization process with proprietary…
Bing has launched its first official plugin for WordPress aimed at helping site owners get their content indexed immediately. Instead of waiting for a bingbot to crawl the site, the plugin notifies Bing of any new or updated content automatically using its Submit URL API. “Bing believes that the future for search engines is less about…
Yoast CEO Marieke van de Rakt published a post yesterday, addressing the controversy that dominated the #YoastCon hashtag on Twitter in the days leading up the the event. Several parties from the SEO industry began circulating old tweets, along unsavory videos depicting Joost de Valk partying with promotional models. de Valk issued a public apology…
Yoast SEO 8.2 was released last week with the plugin’s first tools designed specifically for Gutenberg. It includes two new How-To and FAQ structured data content blocks for early adopters of the new editor. Structured data is content that can be marked up with a shared vocabulary, such as the one provided by Schema.org. Content…
WordPress.com is a service that doesn’t allow users to install plugins to add functionality. Because of this, users are at the mercy of WordPress.com and the tools it offers for managing SEO. These tools have expanded with the ability to create custom meta descriptions, custom title formats, and live previews now available to WordPress.com Business Plan…
In this episode of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I are joined by Rebecca Gill, founder of Web-Savvy-Marketing. We discuss a number of topics surrounding SEO including, what’s changed in the past five years, the purpose of SEO plugins, common misconceptions, and the amount of effort involved in obtaining good results. Gill also provides insight…
Semper Fi Web Design, the company behind All in One SEO, a popular WordPress SEO optimization plugin that’s active on more than 1M sites, has released 2.3.7 to patch a persistent XSS security vulnerability. According to the plugin’s changelog, 2.3.7 sanitizes the Bad Bots module referer and user agent. While it doesn’t sound significant on the surface, this…
Jetpack 3.9 has just been released with a new module that makes it easy for users to add sitemaps to their websites. Since sitemaps are important for SEO, many WordPress sites already have a plugin installed to create them. The new module in Jetpack will detect if you’re already using one of the popular sitemap…
The WordPress Theme Review team is encouraging all theme authors to take notice of Google’s upcoming change to its ranking algorithm, which will be put in place at the end of April: Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all…
Finding and linking to previously published content on your site is a daily necessity for bloggers and content managers. Usually, you have to search the frontend of your site or search posts/pages in the admin to track down the content you’re trying to link. Mentionable is a handy tool, created by the folks at XWP,…
John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, announced today that Google will be discontinuing its support for authorship in search results. We’ve gotten lots of useful feedback from all kinds of webmasters and users, and we’ve tweaked, updated, and honed recognition and displaying of authorship information. Unfortunately, we’ve also observed that this information isn’t as…
Schema.org provides a standard way of marking up structured data so that it can be easily found by search engines and properly structured for other forms of data communication, i.e. JSON. Search engines such as Bing, Google, Yahoo! and others make use of this “shared markup vocabulary” to correctly identify the content on web pages.…