Jake Aull is an expert in SEO for WordPress sites. So much so, in fact, that he’s written a book about the subject.

In this episode of Site Unseen, I sit down with Jake and talk about all the puzzling WordPress SEO issues which developers and SEOs typically ask themselves when they first step into the back end of a WordPress build. Some of the issues we cover include:

• When to use Tags, when to use Categories and what to do about their Archive pages?
• How does one deal with pagination indexation for multi-page Archives on WordPress?
• When building out a custom WordPress theme, which SEO tools are the ‘must haves’ and which are optional?

I hope you enjoy my chat with Jake Aull. WordPress does make the automation of many basic technical SEO tasks easier, but still leaves developers with a lot of confusion and questions. This episode seeks to clear some of those up.

Episode Transcript

David Hitt: 00:18 Hello, and welcome to another episode of the podcast known as Site Unseen. Site Unseen is a podcast which is digital marketing in nature and relates to the intersections that a lot of small agencies sort of find themselves at, intersections between design, development, SEO, and other digital marketing tactics that modern clients in 2018 require us to provide them with.

David Hitt: 00:46 Today we’re happy to welcome a newcomer to our show, Jake Aull. Jake is the founder of a digital marketing studio in Georgia known as Zen Fires, and Jake’s written a book, two books as a matter of fact, but we’re principally going to be talking about the concepts he describes in his book which is called WordPress SEO Success. Jake, hi and welcome to Site Unseen.

Jake Aull: 01:17 Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me.

David Hitt: 01:20 It’s our pleasure, it’s our pleasure. I look forward to this discussion because we develop mostly custom WordPress themes. WordPress is essentially the only CMS on which we ever build sites, and because we’re digital marketers we’re concerned about using best practice, SEO practices on those sites, and you’re an expert on all that stuff. So you’re going to get the opportunity to do some mansplaining about WordPress SEO.

Jake Aull: 01:52 If that’s what you want to call it.

David Hitt: 01:56 Jake, I did a little bit of background research on you and it looks like you have been in the industry a while. I noticed that your original training was in design. So how did you go from there to here? How did you go from sort of more front end graphic design kind of stuff to digital marketing.

Jake Aull: 02:17 Certainly. Well yeah. So as you said my background was in graphic design. I started doing more and more web design and UI type of design, and just gained more of a interest in marketing, specifically digital marketing, to a company that I went back to school while working full-time, I went to Georgia State University on the side to get a master’s of science in marketing, but really there wasn’t much that you could study in terms of classes in digital on the university traditional business college side at that time, but I did independent studies and special programs to really focus on digital and focus on the intersection of social media and search engine marketing. So at the same time that.

David Hitt: 03:17 And what year was that?

Jake Aull: 03:19 That was at Georgia State University [crosstalk 00:03:21].

David Hitt: 03:21 No, but what year was that?

Jake Aull: 03:23 That was during the time between 2007 and 2009.

David Hitt: 03:28 Okay, so that was almost, that was prescient in a way because I think of the role of social media as being more integrally linked to content marketing campaigns as being something sort of insight that we only later evolved a few years after 2008. So you were sort of ahead of the curve for sure.

Jake Aull: 03:50 Yeah, and there was certainly a lot of material at that time to still talk about the emergence of search engine, of SEO, and social media, even though yeah, as you kind of indicate, the real kind of knowledge span that we all began being hit with saying, hey social media is very helpful, very advantageous to SEO and vice versa. A lot of that became more public knowledge, more visibly apparent a couple years later, but there was still plenty of writing at that time on kind of those philosophies. So you just had to dig deeper for it.

David Hitt: 04:35 Yeah, my recollection of that era was are the sort of professions that encompass digital marketing as whole were very siloed. So I was talking about this with my last guest, I feel like in 2009 I was reading books about social media, or I was reading books about technical SEO, or I was reading sort of more strategic books that talked about that factor, or excuse me, principles like conversation marketing. But really all of those things ended up getting tied into the discipline of content marketing later on, but in that era things were very sort of segmented I feel.

Jake Aull: 05:16 Yeah, I think the thread, the common thread that exists today, or can exist today depending in your philosophy, and that was still there back then was if you want good content, good digital content, then you need to be doing some homework regarding keyword research. And yeah, certainly I think a lot of content strategy, content marketers would still say that yeah, there’s a real value to keyword research and hashtag research.

David Hitt: 05:52 Sure.

Jake Aull: 05:54 Way back then they weren’t doing hashtag research so much but, because Twitter was the only channel doing hashtags but.

David Hitt: 06:01 Hashtags, right.

Jake Aull: 06:03 But keyword research was valuable for social media marketers. If they wanted to know what the words people were actually using in their own digital questions and digital writings.

David Hitt: 06:20 Right, right. So fast forward a few years. You wrote a book a couple years back called WordPress SEO and.

Jake Aull: 06:30 Success.

David Hitt: 06:31 WordPress SEO Success, I’m sorry, yes. Sorry, I was reading that and not speaking it on my notes here. I Apologize for that. So what circumstances drove you to write a book and that book in particular?

Jake Aull: 06:48 Because I had been at the university level, I began writing this background, I began writing the course that I teach which I social media marketing, but also because of my practice has a whole lot of SEO in it in what I teach, in the content and in the strategy, and the philosophy. I began writing that course in 2010, which is when I was asked to do that by Georgia State University. So 2011 I started teaching the course itself, and that was also when a book offer from the academic side came to me for social media marketing regarding the editing and writing the instructor’s manual, the guidelines for professors. So I, and that was through Pearson Publishers.

Jake Aull: 07:43 So I already had that background. Fast-forward years later to I wanted to write another book, I wanted to write a real book on SEO, and I managed to formulate a pitch to Pearson once again, but on the market, on the consumer side of their publications, their publishing, to look at based on my keyword research, see how many people were searching for books about WordPress, how many people were searching for books on SEO, how many people were searching on books for those topics combined, and they were trying to build up their consumer marketing publications at that time. So they looked at that research and they looked at my pitch, my outline for the book, and really liked it so they hired me to write it there.

David Hitt: 08:42 So keyword research helped you pitch a book basically.

Jake Aull: 08:45 Yeah, absolutely

David Hitt: 08:47 One more novel application for keyword research.

Jake Aull: 08:50 Yeah. Yeah, it actually works folks, keyword research has real value.

David Hitt: 09:00 So you wrote the book a couple years ago. We’re now in 2018 and I express obviously my personal and professional interest in WordPress SEO. So I thought we would take sort of a few minutes and do sort of both pic picture and small picture looks at WordPress SEO in 2018 using the foundations from your book and maybe talking about a couple of things that might have changed in the last couple of years. Hopefully the result of this is twofold to lay a blueprint for people who are maybe just diving into either WordPress theme development, or SEO, or SEO for WordPress themes, and also there are a couple of sort of long standing points of confusion that I’ve … I confess, I had or continue to have about some of the sort of more granular aspects of doing SEO in a WordPress site, and I wanted to talk about a couple of those if that’s, if you’re good with that.

Jake Aull: 10:05 Absolutely.

David Hitt: 10:06 So let’s lay the groundwork for correctly SEOing a WordPress install. Suppose I am either developing a new WordPress site if I’m a developer, or suppose I’m a digital marketer who is starting with some sort of bare-bones theme in WordPress. Step me through an initial checklist of things I should do to make that WordPress SEO site, excuse me, make that WordPress site SEO friendly.

Jake Aull: 10:43 Sure. This could be, depending on how big the site is and what the scope of your contract is, this could be a long list or a short list. There’s all kinds of very specific detailed modern SEO things that you could get into such as Rich Snippets using plug-ins like WP Rich Snippets for schema markup and AMP, if you wanted to get into AMP strategies, if you wanted an AMP plug-in [crosstalk 00:11:14].

David Hitt: 11:14 Well tell our readers about AMP. Let’s just talk of AMP briefly.

Jake Aull: 11:19 Sure. So AMP stands for.

David Hitt: 11:21 What is AMP and why should we care?

Jake Aull: 11:24 Accelerated mobile pages, and it basically means Google seeing streamlined pages of your website for mobile usage, for mobile, the mobile web, for mobile search results. There’s a whole lot of good, there’s a whole lot of good standard user strategy and SEO strategy, mobile web strategies that just go into making a good mobile responsive site that you can apply that also fit AMP, but at the end of the day usually when we’re talking about accelerated mobile pages, we’re talking about a website that has been enabled to create additional pages that are AMP friendly that have like an AMP, a hidden AMP address in the URL so that Google recognizes them specifically as AMP pages. The benefit of that is Google says that it will serve AMP pages higher up in mobile search results and will [crosstalk 00:12:46].

David Hitt: 12:46 Right, and correct me if I’m wrong but sort of another big picture concept behind AMP pages are that they are in essence certified to be more efficient in terms of load times, right?

Jake Aull: 12:59 Yeah.

David Hitt: 12:59 Is that correct? So in other words, if my site has been rewritten and is AMP compliant, it will load fast enough, sort of passes the threshold that Google requires for page speed on mobile devices. Is that [inaudible 00:13:14]?

Jake Aull: 13:14 Correct.

David Hitt: 13:15 Right.

Jake Aull: 13:15 Exactly.

David Hitt: 13:16 Right. Okay, so AMP plug-ins, Rich Snippets plug-ins. We may as well define Rich Snippets as well. Go ahead, take a shot.

Jake Aull: 13:28 Sure. So Rich Snippets are kind of the result of your schematic markup, your schema markup. It basically, Rich Snippets means the different types of visual results that you can see in Google Search results when you search for content. So the organic content results, we’re still talking organic, not paid.

David Hitt: 14:01 Right.

Jake Aull: 14:01 But when you see reviews in a regular website organic SEO result, not talking Google My Business, but you’re seeing a review on a page, or you’re seeing kind of an author blog content result, or you’re seeing address specific content information, contact information results. Any of these more elaborate larger organic results in Google, in the regular search engine results page, those are as a result of schematic markup, or Google finding and reading schematic markup. So we call these results Rich Snippets and they’re just a good strategy in today’s strategy of the web. People still place emphasis on rank in results, but the truth of the matter is if you see a result with stars, or with video, or with contact info, you’re going to react to that more quickly than you are to the results around it which are strictly text based.

David Hitt: 15:15 Right. I tell our clients when we talk about Rich Snippets that it’s a way to sort of cheat the ranking game in the sense that, like a lot of people aren’t realistically going to get pages to rank in the number one position. So Rich Snippets call out otherwise perhaps a little bit less conspicuous listings, and get your, draw your eye to them, even though they might be a little bit further down the page.

Jake Aull: 15:44 Right.

David Hitt: 15:46 Okay, so those are a couple of kind of nice to have but often times not essential. So what are the essential things I need to concern myself about when I’m setting up a site in WordPress to be SEO friendly?

Jake Aull: 16:04 Certainly. So a lot of times today we’re seeing themes that include a lot of SEO in the themes. A lot of SEO fields, a lot of SEO capabilities. I still personally ignore those, and sometimes you have to turn those off in order not to conflict with your principal SEO plug-ins being All In One SEO, or Yoast WordPress SEO. Those are still kind of the standards.

David Hitt: 16:42 Yes.

Jake Aull: 16:43 And they’re great, your base SEO plug-ins that you should always be using for any kind of SEO. One of the other, not both.

David Hitt: 16:53 Right.

Jake Aull: 16:55 So you want to get those installed definitely. It’s definitely one of the first plug-ins you want to install on your website. There’s also you want to think about, do you need a redirects plug-in? Probably. A plug-in like Simple 301 Redirects so that you can, when you discover your errors, your page not found errors, and other errors such as what Google Search console will show to you, then you want to be able to redirect them to actual tangible pages within your site, and a plug-in like Simple 301 Redirects does that really well.

David Hitt: 17:33 Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jake Aull: 17:35 So there’s those plug-ins, and you really have to keep conscious because you can keep adding, like with anything, you can keep adding more, and more, and more SEO plug-ins that are supposed to theoretically make your SEO better, but at the same time you get website bloat and way too many plug-ins installed, and plug-ins that can conflict with each other.

David Hitt: 17:58 Right.

Jake Aull: 17:58 So with everything there’s a balance, right? Another big question is when you’re talking about your base SEO is Google Analytics. How do you want to incorporate your Google Analytics ID? Do you want to utilize a for it to be fully trackable, are you going to use a plug-in like Google Analytics plug-in or are you just going to install the code in the header of the theme?

David Hitt: 18:23 Right.

Jake Aull: 18:23 If you just install it on the header of your page, if you just install it in the header of your page, great, but what happens when the theme updates?

David Hitt: 18:38 Sure.

Jake Aull: 18:38 Does it erase the Google Analytics code out of the headers?

David Hitt: 18:43 How about Google Tag Manager?

Jake Aull: 18:46 Yeah, I mean Google Tag Manager, or the Google Analytics plug-in, being able to use your Google Analytics code properly, you need to be able to incorporate the code somewhere in the website, it’s just a question of are you going to go the extra mile to utilize an additional plug-in for that, or like All In One SEO I think will allow you to drop your Google Analytics code into the plug-in. I can’t remember if that’s the premium version of All In One SEO or the free version, but then there’s, if you really wanted to use Yoast, then you’ve got to make that argument. Which plug-in do you want to use and how many plug-ins are you adding on to your website, and how hard is it going to be to maintain?

David Hitt: 19:42 So do you have a recipe that you fall back on in terms of your core plug-in list?

Jake Aull: 19:51 We tend to just go ahead and install the-

David Hitt: 19:53 I’ll give you a hypothetical scenario. Suppose we’re talking about a business-to-business profession services firms, say for instance a law firm, who is committed to marketing on the web, meaning that there might be some sort of level of content marketing going on. So business-to-business content marketing on a WordPress site, let’s just assume that theoretical client persona.

Jake Aull: 20:18 Right. Well, avoiding the easy, the desire for an easy joke about lawyers, I’ll skip that right now. Just say that we still like to actually manually install the Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager code into the header or the home page, making sure it populates across the site, and just when we’re maintaining, if we’re maintaining a website regularly, then of course we’re making sure that the code stays there. We do, we do these days we’re using Yoast, so we make sure Yoast is installed along with Simple 301 Redirects plug-in, so both those plug-ins are installed. We do install WP Rich Snippets plug-in, and for ongoing content marketing, and we don’t, the WP Rich Snippets, if it’s a one time setup we’re not going to install that.

David Hitt: 21:28 Right.

Jake Aull: 21:28 If it’s just a small business one time website setup, but if we’re maintaining the website and if they’re going to be doing regular content marketing, like regular blogging, regular articles, then certainly we’ll install the WP Rich Snippets and set up certain posts under the category of Rich Snippets for article. So what I didn’t explain earlier is Rich Snippets has all these different kind of categories, not to be confused with WordPress categories, but these different items topics for different types of Rich Snippets, and one of the is very good for blogs, for articles, and it allows a wider result there in Google Results for your blog posts.

David Hitt: 22:19 Right.

Jake Aull: 22:19 So we’ll install that. AMP we reserve, we try to as much as possible, if we have control over the website to streamline and reduce your size of images. Early on during the build if we’re working with a developer we’ll say, “Look, this image size needs to be as small as possible for results for mobile friendliness.” Because we don’t want bloat, you know?

David Hitt: 22:57 Sure.

Jake Aull: 22:57 So sometimes we’ll install AMP, sometimes we won’t if we feel like the size is going to be small enough, it’s been streamlined enough, and it’s mobile responsive enough, but those are the major plug-ins that we install.

David Hitt: 23:15 Right, okay. Good. Well that’s progress then. I’m going to try to offer this list up in our transcript to the podcast. So I think our listeners would find that really useful. I know that the process, anybody that’s put together a custom WordPress theme or is trying to modify and install plug-ins for an off the shelf theme has encountered the whole sort of decision making process for plug-in choice. I know it can be completely confusing and exasperating to try and find just the right plug-in and a plug-in that you can trust. So lists like this I think are really useful and I thank you for that.

Jake Aull: 23:59 Sure.

David Hitt: 24:00 So now we’re going to spend a few minutes now talking about some deeper SEO issues related to WordPress and the way WordPress is structured as a content management platform, and things that I think a lot of non SEO certainly, but even some SEOs are very foggy about, specifically issues related to blog archive pagination and taxonomy archives. So we’re going to start with pagination. And I’m just going to define the problem for people that are newbs on this point. So basically in a WordPress site or any content managed site that has a blog engine on it, the minute you get past about six or seven posts that you’ve written, your site will start paginating a blog post. So in other words, if I go to my company blog, I’m going to see, unless I just started writing, multiple pages worth of blog posts. So that, that page that a lot of people just call a blog page is actually known as an archive page, a blog archive page in WordPress nomenclature. In the pasts SEOs have had concerns and there’s been some debate about what you do with all of the pages beyond page one in a blog archive.

David Hitt: 25:37 So in other words, typically the way a lot of CMSs work, the meta tags, the descriptions and the title tags for subsequent pages beyond page one will be similar or duplicate, and this begs the question, how do you, do you deindex pages beyond one, or what do you do about meta tags? So I wanted you to talk about a best practice approach to dealing with these concerns.

Jake Aull: 26:10 Sure, and my answer to that, the way we approach it is, is a strategy that’s the same also for categories and tags. So to try to help clarify and yet not confuse even more, because I know that was a point of, you had questions about that too. So your categories and tags similarly, your blog has both categories and tags.

David Hitt: 26:43 Right.

Jake Aull: 26:46 For organizing that information for those, any of those taxonomies. Just as you can have URLs that say, that are page two, page three of your archives for your blog, your blog posts also have category URLs and tag URLs.

David Hitt: 27:09 Right.

Jake Aull: 27:09 That if you have a blog post on example.com/blog/category/junkfood and you have, that same post can also have a URL that’s example.com/blog/tags/M&Ms and that same blog post can also show up in archives if it’s old enough and have a page URL, and that same blog post can also show up in its original URL, which would be example.com/blog/myfavoritejunkfood.

David Hitt: 27:47 Right.

Jake Aull: 27:53 So I think I’ve just listed all four different URLs for that one blog post.

David Hitt: 27:58 Right.

Jake Aull: 27:59 And that’s the dilemma, because what happens is with multiple URLs for the same blog post, even in this day and age, Google still thinks of it as duplicate content, it has forever. So what I mean by that is because it’s four different URLs, even if it were just two different URLs, Google would still say, “Hey, you’ve got these two different pages here.” Or two different posts depending on what you want to call them, with the same exact content, therefore that’s a user friendly issue, it’s a example of bad SEO, and it’s a point of confusion for Google, and theoretically Google reduces your rankings for that page, or post I should say, because of, for that very reason.

David Hitt: 28:49 Right.

Jake Aull: 28:52 So the strategy is one URL. So how do you get there? Well in the default settings of Yoast, or All In One SEO, or whatever SEO plug-in you’re using, you want to click on noindex for categories, noindex for tags, and noindex for your archive pages, but you want to retain your original URL for your blog posts, being that when I listed off example.com/blog/myfavoritejunkfood.

David Hitt: 29:31 Right.

Jake Aull: 29:37 So that’s kind of a quick summary of the strategy, and you want to look for those settings, your taxonomy, what the plug-ins call your taxonomy settings, to noindex or to not, for Google to not index, not see the multiple URLs. You just want it to see the original URL of that post, not the category/tag/archive page two, all those additional URLs which can apply to that same post.

David Hitt: 30:19 So just clear one more thing up for me. How does this, or does it not, I mean, can you explain the relationship between your noindex process and using the rel canonical tag on the original post? I mean, is there a relationship here or?

Jake Aull: 30:36 The rel canonical is redirecting your one URL to another.

David Hitt: 30:50 Right.

Jake Aull: 30:52 I think is a way to explain that.

David Hitt: 30:55 Right.

Jake Aull: 30:56 And the noindex just flat out tells Google to ignore a certain.

David Hitt: 31:06 As far as you’re concerned this URL does not exist.

Jake Aull: 31:09 Right.

David Hitt: 31:09 Right, right. Okay, well that’s a finer point of WordPress SEO that I appreciate you’re clarifying. While we’re on the topic, talk about the differences between categories and tags in WordPress. Why they exist as separate entities and how optimally you’re supposed to treat or use one versus the other?

Jake Aull: 31:42 Right. So categories and tags go back, I assume if I remember correctly back to the beginnings of WordPress, and they kind of helped distinguish what a blog is, and you can certainly redirect me if I ramble here. But the categories and tags are what defined blog posts, they’re what make web 2.0.

David Hitt: 32:16 Right.

Jake Aull: 32:19 Relevant, and your traditional web pages are a little bit more static, but categories and tags allow the user to find additional information on the same categories or tags just as they do with hashtags for example in social media today. When you as a writer, and let me back up and say just because I gave those warnings about categories and tags, it doesn’t mean not to use them.

David Hitt: 32:51 Sure, sure, yes.

Jake Aull: 32:52 You can still use them.

David Hitt: 32:54 Right.

Jake Aull: 32:55 And they can be very user friendly if you have a very active blog with a lot of content in different topics. So either your categories or your tags can be used for different content topics so that your reader might be reading about my favorite junk food on your blog post this week. I don’t know why I picked that topic, I’m not [crosstalk 00:33:18].

David Hitt: 33:17 Are you hungry, Jake?

Jake Aull: 33:19 Well, I guess I haven’t eaten breakfast yet, so I guess that’s why. But you might be a blogger that blogs about all different topics about your personal life. Well, if they’re particularly interested in the topic on junk food, then you can set that up with categories and tags relevant to junk food, and your reader can click on those categories or tags to read your other blog posts of that topic. So that’s the real value of categories and tags, but it doesn’t help Google. It can also help within your insight.

David Hitt: 33:59 But why categories and tags? Why do we have both?

Jake Aull: 34:04 Okay, so. Why categories and tags?

David Hitt: 34:05 Yeah.

Jake Aull: 34:06 You don’t have to use them both. I’ve seen blogs that only use one or the other, but to get really technical here, the difference is that categories are hierarchal information. You can have categories and subcategories.

David Hitt: 34:20 Right.

Jake Aull: 34:21 You can have limited category, you can have maybe 10 categories, so you don’t want a ton of categories on your blog. So let’s say you have 10 to 20 categories but you have multiple subcategories underneath those categories.

David Hitt: 34:34 Okay, that answers the question I think. I mean I.

Jake Aull: 34:37 [inaudible 00:34:37].

David Hitt: 34:37 I’ve been doing this for years and I’ve never, I mean, obviously we’ve all got a list of 25 Google Searches we are trying to get to at some point. That question has been on my list for a while, it’s just never filtered to the top.

Jake Aull: 34:56 Awesome.

David Hitt: 34:56 So I appreciate that clarification. So we’re sort of going to wrap things up with a look to the future. It seems as though in the last couple of years when I read articles about on-page or technical SEO factors that for years have been considered very, very important, like meta tags, title tags, description tags, H1 tags, all things that historically have been considered ranking factors and influencers. It seems as though search algorithms are evolving in such a way that those sort of factors aren’t quite as important as they used to be. I know that the tools that we rely on in WordPress like Yoast sort of place and emphasis on those sort of more traditional technical SEO tools. I was wondering what changes would you like to see built into the interfaces or what changes are you seeing built into the interfaces for either core WordPress or WordPress plug-ins that sort of anticipate the direction that search is headed in rather than where search has been?

Jake Aull: 36:18 Right. Yeah, that’s a great question, and I’ve certainly read about plug-ins that are supposed to help mine keyword research data, even help mine like a voice search type keyword phrases as opposed to traditional desktop search.

David Hitt: 36:48 Right.

Jake Aull: 36:50 Keyword phrases. All that’s great. We’ve experimented more with the, on like the Rich Snippets side and plug-ins, different plug-ins for that and experimented more with the AMP type plug-ins. Like I said, the problem is when you’re talking about plug-ins, then you quickly get into escalation in website bloat. So that would be the big thing is what I would say is … To some extent, you got to be conservative, you know?

David Hitt: 37:27 Right.

Jake Aull: 37:27 I’m not saying don’t experiment, but maybe just experiment with your own site because there’s just too much damage that you can do to your client websites if you’re just throwing in this plug-in, that plug-in, and the other plug-in.

David Hitt: 37:42 Sure.

Jake Aull: 37:44 I like to place a lot of emphasis on spy tools in research. There’s a lot you can do with spy tools and research. We do our keyword research outside of WordPress, right?

David Hitt: 37:55 Sure.

Jake Aull: 37:56 I know there’s plug-ins that are supposed to help you within WordPress to look at what keywords are valuable and look at other keyword research in addition to the keywords that you’re using, but we use spy tools and we use Search Console to do our keyword research, and that gives a lot of, like is a lot of input. There’s all kinds of spy tools out there, and there’s spy tools that are devoted to voice search type keyword phrases.

David Hitt: 38:27 Right.

Jake Aull: 38:27 So we try to do that side outside of the website itself and do it out front and do it as part of the strategy. Granted, if you’re maintaining the site monthly and you’re doing their SEO, you want to see what Search Console is telling you, are major keywords that are bringing people to the site and you want to be cognizant of new keyword research too. But I don’t want to screw up my client websites basically.

David Hitt: 38:57 Sure, sure. So caution combined with an eye towards progress and where things are going is sort of the general prescription that you’re offering I guess.

Jake Aull: 39:11 Yeah.

David Hitt: 39:11 Right. Great, great. Well, is there anything else you wanted to talk about or mention before we sort of close things up?

Jake Aull: 39:20 Hi mom.

David Hitt: 39:23 Will she be listening?

Jake Aull: 39:25 No, she won’t.

David Hitt: 39:27 We can put her on our Mailchimp mailing list if you want. We’ll ping her when the episode is live. Jake, I wanted to thank you so much for taking a few moments out of your undoubtedly busy schedule to talk to us. It’s always nice to get somebody whose knowledge is really deep in a specific area, and obviously you have very deep knowledge in WordPress SEO. And again, just to sort of round things up, my guest is Jake Aull. He is the founder of Zen Fires Digital Marketing and is a, what’s your title at Georgia State, by the way?

Jake Aull: 40:07 At Georgia State I’m a part-time instructor of social media marketing.

David Hitt: 40:11 Part-time instructor of social media marketing, and he’s written a couple of books, and one area of expertise of his is WordPress SEO, and that book is called WordPress SEO Success, I got it right this time, and we thank Jake so much for being our guest this afternoon. Thanks Jake.

Jake Aull: 40:31 Thank you.

David Hitt: 40:32 All right.

Jake Aull: 40:32 Absolutely, appreciated it.

David Hitt: 40:33 Right, thanks.