Considering how many I follow, I'll be starting today with just SEO podcasts, and will get back soon with a similar post for tech and web development podcasts.
What's the problem with SEO?
We all hear that SEO is constantly changing, that we need to adjust to all these changes, always. But in fact, many things also stay exactly the same. New things appear everyday, and very often they just don't matter that much, if at all.
What's true is that figuring out where to best put our efforts to improve our website rankings requires a lot of - constant - learning. I have found 3 ways to do that compatible with how I work and live:
following blogs - through RSS feeds
following people on Twitter
listening to podcasts
Blogs and Twitter are also a topic for another day, but let's see why I found podcasts so useful.
Podcasts are an easy and efficient way to improve your Joomla SEO
Podcasts have really upped my game in recent years because:
they are easy to consume: no need to look at a screen, you can listen on many different occasions, you just need your phone basically.
there are many high-quality podcasts to learn from, including SEO podcasts
the right podcasts distill in 20 to 40mn actual SEO actionable items, or deeper, more general topics
What are my top SEO podcasts to listen to?
While none are Joomla-specific - except one! - the podcasts listed here explore topics that most Joomla website developers and owners should benefit from. Yes, you'll hear the WordPress name quite often but please don't be detracted, SEO is SEO.
What's that you may ask? it only means that after 3 years of pandemic, and 2 purely online editions, Joomlers from around the USA - and elsewhere - will physically travel to Austin, Texas to attend in person.
BUT some talks will also be given remotely AND you'll be able to attend online as well.
Please go
Not sure there will be that many in-person Joomla events this year, so if you can, take this chance to travel to Austin and meet fellow Joomlers.
You can sign-up on this page, and the cost of attending in-person or online is the same. But in-person attendees get swag and free food, so that counts!
We've been busy over the last couple of months adding several new features to 4SEO to make it both easier to use and extend its Search Engines Optimization capabilities to help you get more traffic.
4SEO version 4.5 is out today and there's the full changelog for it of course, but I wanted to get through the main improvements quickly in this post, with a focus on how these new or improved features can help you.
So here we go:
Customize page title and meta description on many pages with a metadata rule
One major addition to 4SEO 4.5.0 is to give you the ability to use patterns to customize automatically page title, meta description, robots tag or canonical with a new SEO rule type: metadata.
Being a 4SEO rule, all the actions below can be executed either on your whole site but also only on one or more pages. All the usual options are there to decide where to set these metadata:
on one or more pages as defined by their address
on some components
on some categories
depending on the value of a Joomla custom field
after, before or between dates
Meta data for search engines
In the simplest form, you can now easily add something at the end of the page title of any page:
This is the day. After a long, much longer than I hoped, 4SEF beta testing period, we're officially releasing today 4SEF, our latest SEF URLs for Joomla 3 and 4 extension. 4SEF has been available as beta for several months and in fact is running in production already on many sites which have transitioned from sh404SEF to 4SEF. But due to how SEF URLs are such a basic building block of any website, it took some time to have enough real world testers for me to feel confident all the bases are covered and we can remove that "beta" tag.
But that's not all: a few months back, looking at the fact not that many people were fans of reading our blog, I decided to experiment in combining it with a podcast. It did not take long for me to be sold on the concept, and so we came up with 4Podcast, meaning today is an exceptional double-release day!
4Podcast lets you very simply run a fully featured podcast with only standard Joomla categories, articles and a dedicated custom field. It's released today at the same time as 4SEF and we'll have a launch discount period, please read on for all details.
We just had a support question regarding how to evaluate and use 4SEO real Core Web Vitals (CWV) measurement, and after replying to it, I thought this might be a good topic to talk about, again. The question was similar to:
4SEO reports a bad Core Web Vitals score for many pages but common online speed test tools give me a perfect score. What's going on here?
There's still a bit of confusion on how Core Web Vitals are used by Google, how important they are (hint: not that much) and how to use the numbers provided.
What are Core Web Vitals?
A quick reminder first: Core Web Vitals is Google's method for evaluating websites performance. These measurements are used when Google ranks pages in search results, which is why they get a lot of attention.
Google has used speed to rank pages for a long time, but in 2021 they started using Core Web Vitals, a more realistic method, better at evaluating what real users experience when visiting a website.
