Joost writes about their SEO journey, what they got right and unintended consequences of trying to make SEO easier.

Slim SEO is a free lightweight plugin that helps you optimize your site and content for SEO with minimal configuration. The team just released version 4 which allows you to use dynamic tags in your meta titles and descriptions. Here is a video that looks at the features.

For new users – This is a good overview of WordPress permalinks, their options, and use.

A look at the Slim SEO Schema builder, which is a premium extension for Slim SEO. There is a video link near the top of the article.

Alex Denning of Ellipsis, an SEO strategy firm, shared their analysis of the Google document leak. They fed sections of the documentation to GPT-4o to get its summary and analysis. Some of the things I got from reading the article are:

• The leaked docs closely align with information that came out in the court case.
• Google assumes anything put into writing will get out.
• Google answered questions about ranking that were technically truthful, but were misleading.
• That content is very important, but that “Click is King.”

Hardcore SEO – There were recently some Google document leaks about its indexing and ranking systems. As some have suspected, Google representatives have mislead the public related to ranking factors. This article takes a pretty deep look into the leaded information and is not for the light of heart. Nevertheless, it is interesting and revealing.

Despite the marketing hype that Google wants to help you find information on the net, Roger Montti reports that the direction is to fill the first screen of search with AI Overviews and ads. It looks like Google is intending to use our Search Engine Optimized content in its AI search summary to offer more value to advertisers.

WordPress 6.5 added support for AVIF, but it looks like using that image format may not currently be good for SEO.

Here’s an interesting idea from Joost, to change to having an allow list for site crawlers and blocking all others.