Articles Tagged with Web Development

Getting the Most from Yoast – My Cardiff WordPress Talk

Cardiff WordPress Prisma pic
Yesterday I did a talk at Cardiff WordPress, my first speaking gig in close to a year (you can see a list of all my past speaking gigs here).

Held at the fabulous Tramshed Tech (where Cardiff SEO Meet is also held!), I presented in front of 20+ WordPress designers & developers as well as fellow digital marketers.

My talk? Getting the Most from Yoast, giving details and insight into the Yoast SEO plugin, showcasing its features and settings, explaining how and why certain parts of it affect your website’s SEO, and how to make sure you’re setting it up to get the most out of it.

It was a good, attentive group, who were a pleasure to present to. After my talk, there was a general roundtable Q&A session where individuals could field their WordPress problems to the group, which was pretty cool. We also talked about SEO a bit more (something that I ain’t complaining about)!

Here are the slides, which I submitted to Speaker Deck (because they looked terrible when uploaded to SlideShare):

[Image credit – Davey Brown via Twitter (and then run through Prisma)]

The Business Of Web Design Conference 2014 – An SEO’s Perspective

Yesterday I attended The Business Of Web Design 2014 (#tboWD), which was held on my doorstep in Cardiff. Although I am not a web designer, I could see from the conference’s talk topics that a lot of it would relate heavily to SEO freelancing – and I was right.

The question “how much does a website cost?” is so similar to the question “how much does SEO cost?”, when you’ve not even been told the prospect’s industry, their goals (e.g. whether they want to rank for a really tough keyword or a few less competitive keywords) or even the URL of the site. Determining how to price yourself as a consultant – whether it be on a basis of time or the potential value/ROI offered to the client – is applicable across both industries. And getting a client to say “yes” to things can be just as tricky in SEO as it is in web design.

In addition to eight fantastic talks, there was a panel Q&A at the end, and to my terror (but also delight), the wonderful world of SEO was debated. I spent the first few minutes of my recent unified.diff talk tackling the subject of SEO’s terrible reputation – especially in the eyes of the web design/development community – and have previously blogged about how one of the best compliments I’d ever received was from a highly-respected local developer. Fortunately, while there were some stirrings of the typical “SEO is evil” type talk that we’re so used to seeing, I was really surprised and pleased to discover that the debate was handled really well. I’ll go into more detail below.

(Note: for those where it says “[Slides TBA]” for now, I’ll update the post with the slide deck embeds as-and-when they all become available.)

1) How much does a website cost? – Sean Johnson

[Slides TBA]

Sean Johnson photoSean (@seanuk) kicked things off with the question from prospects that often causes the most chagrin: “how much does a website cost?” Why? Because the answer is always: “it depends!”

What’s your industry? What are your goals with the website? Do you need eCommerce functionality? Does it need a blog? This applies to SEO so, so much: What’s your industry? What are your goals? Is the site brand new? Is the site even live yet? Has SEO work been carried out before, and if so, were spammy tactics involved? How can a web designer or SEO quote effectively without knowing that type of info first? The answer is: not very effectively. Not very.

Click to read more!

Choose Your Own Adventure – SEO For Web Developers: My unified.diff Talk

unified.diff 1st slide screenshot
Last week I spoke at unified.diff, a monthly software/web development meet-up that’s made its home at the wonderful FoundersHub. It was a good and busy crowd.

I was sandwiched between interesting and entertaining talks about the Robotic Operating System and JSON Schema. Additional photos can be found here.

And here are the slides…

For my talk, I decided to challenge myself. I took on the Choose Your Own Adventure format – they were a bunch of books where you decided the journey of the character. Do you climb the mountain (go to pg. 33) or dive into the cave (pg. 38)? You chose the cave? Oh no! You were eaten by a bear! Go back to before that happened (pg. 29), and so on. I remember having a Sonic The Hedgehog CYOA book (in fact, I think it was this one).

Click to read more!

The Best Compliment I Ever Received (Was From A Developer)

Complimentary Code GIFI like to think that I’ve received a couple of compliments during my career as an SEO (just one or two in nearly 5 years – not bad huh?!)… There’s probably also been an instance or two of a criticism or an insult, but hey, let’s just concentrate on the positives, yeah? 😉

Out of those compliments, the best one I ever received regarding my SEO skills wasn’t from a manager, a fellow team member, an industry peer or a client. It was from a developer.

Why’s that such a big deal? Because it’s fairly common knowledge that a lot of developers out there hate SEOs. You only need to spend 5 minutes looking at the comments on Hacker News submissions related to SEO to see how much our industry is despised by what seems like the majority of the web/software development community. Here are two examples of threads and a few choice excerpts, because clearly I’m a sadist…

  • “SEO is basically gaming search engines instead of contributing anything of value. It’s not a respectable business.”
  • “SEO is a nasty little cottage industry.”
  • “[SEOs] are polluting the web and degrading the experience for millions of users.”
  • “SEO is more a plague then it is a real profession.”
  • And my personal favourite: “SEO is a cargo cult with no benefits to society.”

Angry computer imageBlood boiling yet? Thought so. A lot of sweeping statements there – and yet if I shouted “web/software developers are {rude|hugely ignorant|whiny crybabies}” in return, I’m sure there’d be hell to pay (besides, it wouldn’t be true anyway)…

But I digress… The purpose of this article isn’t to further deteriorate SEO-developer relations – it’s actually to extend an olive branch.

Click to read more!

Awesome Web & Tech Events in Cardiff – September 2012

Welsh Twitter dragon logo by FoomandoonianThis post is a bit different to the usual type of stuff I’d post on SEOno, but I was having lunch with a friend the other day and while we were talking about some of the upcoming web/tech events in Cardiff, I realised that there were so many going on next month that it was becoming difficult to keep track of them all.

…So I thought I’d list and link to them all in one place:

Cardiff Blogs

Cardiff Blogs logoWeb | Twitter | Facebook
When: Tuesday 4th September

Where: Maldron Hotel, St. Mary Street (map)
How much: Free!
Tickets: Eventbrite
Subject: Blogging
About: Anyone who knows me well knows that I adore Cardiff Blogs. This particular meet-up is all about the Wales Blog Awards (which I’ve been longlisted for, by the way)!

unified.diff

unified.diff logoWeb | Twitter
When: Wednesday 5th September

Where: O’Neill’s, Trinity Street (map)
How much: Free!
Tickets: Via their site (fill out the “+++ you ‘tendin?” bit!)
Subject: Software Development
About: All about software development, with a number of speakers. I’ve not been to one before (I think it’s still fairly new, so I don’t think there’s been that many previously), but I’m going to try and make it along to this one. I’ve heard many good things though!

Cardiff Start

Cardiff Start logoWeb | Twitter | Facebook
When: Tuesday 11th September

Where: IndyCube Central, Castle Arcade (map | link)
How much: Free!
Tickets: Facebook
Subject: Startups
About: Someone asked me to explain what Cardiff Start’s Hackdays were all about the other day. I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m horribly wrong (please do!), but it’s my understanding that its aim is to discuss how to boost the profile of Cardiff’s startups as a community. And that this is Phase 2. Rob Lo Bue sums it up well over on his blog.

cardiffrb

cardiffrb logoWeb | Twitter
When: Thursday 13th September

Where: The Owain Glyndwr, St. John Street (map)
How much: Free!
Tickets: Lanyrd
Subject: Web Development (more specifically Ruby on Rails)
About: If you’re a Ruby developer in South Wales then this is definitely one for you. I believe they’ve been running monthly for about a year now.

Cardiff Internet Marketing

Cardiff Internet Marketing logoWeb | Twitter
When: Monday 17th September

Where: Future Inn, Cardiff Bay (map)
How much: £5 (£4 if booked in advance)
Tickets: Eventbrite
Subject: Digital Marketing
About: There’s been a few of these now, and although I’ve unfortunately not been able to make one just yet, I’ve heard that they’re very good if you want to learn about different areas of online marketing (and that they’re also good for networking)! This one covers online reputation management: more info here.

#cakemixer

#cakemixer logoHashtag (I don’t think they have a dedicated site/Twitter yet)
When: Wednesday 19th September
Where: Vanilla Rooms, Park House Club, Park Place (map)
How much: Free!
Tickets: Eventbrite
Subject: Social Media
About: I believe this is the first one! A “Social Media Mixer” with speakers, social media-inspired cocktails and cake!

Oi! (Online Influence) Conference

Oi! Conference logoWeb | Twitter
When: Thursday 20th September
Where:
The Celtic Manor Resort (map)
How much: £75
Tickets: Eventbrite
Subject: Social Media
About: I have no idea why this wasn’t added to the list sooner, especially seeing as I already knew about it (something I probably shouldn’t admit to, but gosh darn my honesty)! Anyway, cheers for @Nonentity for bringing its omission to my attention. For more info, feel free to check out the hashtag: #OiConf.

Wales Blog Awards

Wales Blog Awards logoWeb | Twitter
When: Thursday 20th September
Where: Richard Burton Theatre, RWCMD (map)
How much: £5 (ticket price includes a glass of wine)
Tickets: Via the RWCMD website
Subject: Blogging
About: The Wales Blog Awards has been running annually since 2010 and features a variety of blogs in a variety of categories – click here for a full list of the shortlist nominees.

CryptoParty Cardiff

CryptoParty logoWeb
When: Saturday 22nd September
Where: O’Neill’s, Trinity Street (map)
How much: Free
Tickets: Eventbrite
Subject: Cryptography
About: Hat tip to @foomandoonian for finding out about this one – please see his blog post for more info.

Have I missed anything? If so, please feel free to drop a comment on this post, use the contact form or simply tweet me! For repeat visitors, if there are any updates then I’ll make a note of what they are below here, so that you know if there’s anything new.

I haven’t decided yet if this is to be a one-off or maybe part of a regular-ish series. I was thinking more the former simply because there’s a lot going on in September (as I said in the intro to this post). However, I guess we’ll see how it goes…!

Also, when I first had the idea for this post, I wanted to write it as a guest blog post on behalf of Computer Recruiter, so I’d still like to accredit them with a mention (and a link)!

[Welsh Twitter dragon image credit: Foomandoonian; event logos courtesy of each event’s Twitter profile]

Updates:

  • 08/09/12 – Added the Wales Blog Awards event.
  • 11/09/12 – Added venue info for cardiffrb.
  • 18/09/12 – Added CryptoParty Cardiff.
  • 20/09/12 – Added Oi! Conference (better late than never eh!)