My first job in search engine optimisation was in 1997. So much has changed - SEO is more nuanced than ever before, with every character, every comma having an effect.
In addition to writing about SEO and speaking at various conferences, I enjoy actioning it myself too. There's nothing quite like sending a client a graph showing their organic traffic skyrocketing - without them having to increase their monthly spend.
For my Mastodon instance, I create a new little logo today.
Along with a matching banner. It’s actually silly how pleased I am with them.
I finally set up a Mastodon instance; https://toot.kiwi
I love Mastodon, and can’t wait to see what becomes of my server. (After I open it up to the public of course).
I bought the domain back when saying something on Mastodon was called ‘tooting’ – those days are long gone but I still like it.
Find me here; Mastodon
The Spinoff are doing a special week dedicated to screens. It’s like Shark week but more digital. 🙂
They took me up on my offer to write an article about digital safety for kids. How much screen time is too much, how much it too little – etc.
In a previous life I worked in education and was involved in hours of discussion around digital safety for young people, different approaches, etc.
It’s great to be able to continue some of those conversations in this very different, Covid-19 era.
It can be hard to talk about, but we have to acknowledge that our children can be at risk when they’re spending time in digital spaces we’re not familiar with. Just as parents talk with their offspring and help them navigate difficult situations in the playground, we need to do the same with digital communication.
Peter Mahoney in the Spinoff
The pandemic really has changed everything with screen time. Kids expect (and need to) socialise – which leaves them doing that online in games we don’t play, interacting with people we don’t know.
Video calling has become totally the norm for hours at a time.
Just three years ago in 2019 a major survey in NZ found kids used screens around two hours a day. Current (last month’s) data puts that figure at just over five! And that’s not five total, that’s on top of what’s needed for schoolwork.
It’s a dangerous playground out there – but at the same time it’s best to teach kids how to navigate it all in the safest way we can provide.
Definitely don’t throw them to the digital wolves or keep them ‘locked in the house’.
Just like we help teach our children what to look out for in the physical world, how to interact in the physical world, and how to play their part in keeping them safe in it too – we can and should do the same thing in the digital world.
Just like a builder’s house is never finished, so too do SEO people end up overlooking their own sites. I really must do better!
I work out of a really affordable (actually cheap) shared studio workspace in Te Aro, Wellington. Just off Cuba Street.
We’ve just made a one-page website to try to fill a current vacancy! Have a look, and come and join us.
It happens. Your WordPress installation stops behaving as it should and just returns a white screen.
It can affect the whole site or just the Dashboard and login pages.
It’s not terrible to troubleshoot though, just try the following (in this order):
The white screen of death is definitely worrying when it crops up – but it’s not hard to resolve.
There are a few features in WordPress we take for granted, like easily being able to insert a ‘Read More’ break in our posts.
But in the new WordPress 5 editor (which was called Gutenberg during its development) finding that isn’t as easy as it should be.
Like all elements in the new editor you need to add it as a block – but you will not find it by searching for a block called read more.
Bizarrely, it’s just called more.
When it actually inserts into the editor it is named read more, which suggests to me this is a an oversight that will hopefully be fixed soon!
I’ve been doing search engine optimisation for 21 years now.
That means my SEO experience is old enough to legally drink through the USA, although it’s been able to drink in the UK and NZ for quite some time.
Cheers!
I just finished up a presentation at the Wellington WordPress Meetup all about WordPress speed, image optimisation, and its ultimate effect on SEO.
The slides from the talk can be viewed here.
I also referred to a settings file to import into WP Rocket which will work well with most WordPress sites – you can grab that here.
(I also made my own silly GIF for it! “SEO is a many headed hydra.”)
In my last post I mentioned the importance of forcing HTTPS if you’re using it on your website. (Which you absolutely should be.)
You don’t want visitors seeing the non-secure version of the site anyway, but from an SEO perspective Google doesn’t love it when they can see both either – they’ll interpret it as two different sites with the exact same content.
As long as your site is running on an Apache server (and most do) then you can edit the .htaccess file – this is the hidden file at the top level of your website that has specific instructions for how the server should load things.
To force HTTPS, just stick this at the top of it:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]And that’s it.
Or if you’re running a WordPress website you just want to stick this in that same file somewhere:
# Rewrite HTTP to HTTPS
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1 [R,L]And just one more quick tip to make it even easier to force HTTPS on a WordPress site; as long as you use the normal permalink structure (domain/postname) then just replace the WordPress code in the .htaccess file with this:
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
# Rewrite HTTP to HTTPS
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1 [R,L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPressThat will take care of the permalinks and forcing HTTPS.