{"id":3368,"date":"2015-05-31T23:23:36","date_gmt":"2015-05-31T22:23:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.danielebesana.com\/blog\/?p=3368"},"modified":"2015-06-01T09:09:01","modified_gmt":"2015-06-01T08:09:01","slug":"yoastcon-yoast-5th-anniversary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/danielebesana.com\/blog\/biz\/yoastcon-yoast-5th-anniversary","title":{"rendered":"YoastCon – Yoast 5th Anniversary"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"YoastCon\"<\/p>\n

Last week I got chance to participate to YoastCon, the conference organized by Yoast<\/a> to celebrate the 5th anniversary of the company.<\/p>\n

If you know WordPress, you know Yoast. It’s the company behind WordPress SEO<\/a>, the most used<\/strong>\u00a0SEO plugin, and other popular plugins. But not only that: Yoast offers website review<\/strong> service, SEO e-books<\/a>, and will soon start an Academy that I hope will provide a certification – something that in my opinion the industry needs very much.<\/p>\n

The event was held in Nijmegen<\/strong>, Netherlands (where the company is based) and I enjoyed every aspect of it.
\nStarting from the early morning car ride from Amsterdam with the guys from NexusThemes<\/a>\u00a0(their theme collection is impressive!) till the alcohol-fueled\u00a0conversations at the final Dutch\u00a0borrel<\/em>\u00a0with dudes\u00a0like\u00a0Danny van Kooten<\/a> and\u00a0Barry Kooij<\/a> (Woothemes) and that American guy from\u00a0Codeguard<\/a> to whom I gave a million dollar idea. Oh yeah.<\/p>\n

Here is a report with my random notes from the day and my takeaways.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Opening talk by Joost<\/h2>\n

What Joost himself introduced in the opening talk is the concept of holistic SEO<\/strong> based on four pillars:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Design\/Usability: a website must be appealing and clear to use.<\/li>\n
  2. Technical details: such as speed, clean up of pages, maintenance of 404 and broken links, different content options.<\/li>\n
  3. A good story: content must be created thinking ‘why talk about it?’.<\/li>\n
  4. Security: an increasing important aspect of WordPress websites.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

     <\/p>\n

    Rise of the machine – Marcus Tandler<\/h2>\n

    Marcus speech is delivering a clear message:<\/p>\n

    Google is not a search company, is a machine learning company<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

    Every search we do on Google, email we receive on Gmail and action we take with Chrome is training\u00a0Google’s Artificial Intelligence (AI).<\/p>\n

    He advocates the backlinks will soon become irrelevant and while a part of me really hopes so, isn’t something new and there are still plenty of websites ranking because of powerful backlinks out there.<\/p>\n

    I got to know that Matt Cutts, head of Google anti-spam team, is now on-leave and will probably come back with a new role. And Marcus presented a case study where successful ranking of long-term keywords caused his website to be promoted in high-competitive short-term keywords.<\/p>\n

    In the future Google will work on anticipating searched, proposing solutions\u00a0to people depending on the context and location<\/strong>. Example: you’re leaving your office at 9pm, nothing planned in your calendar, so most likely you may want to eat a good pizza in the neighbor.<\/p>\n

    Information searches<\/strong> are more and more answered by Google directly (example: time in Los Angeles) while action searches<\/strong>\u00a0take to the web (buy, learn, travel, fix…).<\/p>\n

    Marcus is founder of Onpage.org<\/a>, a German company specialized in technical SEO.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    The state of WordPress security – Tony Perez<\/h2>\n

    Tony Perez from Sucuri<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0(yeah, he’s the guy in the homepage picture) talked about how vulnerable our WordPress websites are.<\/p>\n

    Having worked for long years in the network security industry I was quite familiar with the concepts, but here are some notes anyway.<\/p>\n

    With popularity<\/strong> came exposure<\/strong>, and with exposure came financial return<\/strong> in attacking WordPress websites.<\/p>\n

    End-user is setup for failure<\/strong> in security out of the box.<\/p>\n

    The auto-update feature is based on the wrong premises: that a user can replace any file<\/strong> (has write permission)\u00a0of the site. A better design would keep things more controlled and separated, but of course there’s a trade-off between simplicity of operations for end users and level of security.<\/p>\n

    Security issues are\u00a0keeping enterprises and corporate away<\/strong> from WordPress.<\/p>\n

    He mentioned in the Q&A session that using SSL (https instead of http) is positive\u00a0for\u00a0SEO<\/strong>… that’s something I really have to investigate about.<\/p>\n

    \r\n
    Update: Tony himself confirmed that in the post comments, pointing\u00a0to this article<\/a>.<\/b><\/center>\r\n<\/div>\n

    I asked what’s the #1 change he recommend to implement on default WordPress installations and he replied with no doubt: 2-factors authentication<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    Growth hacking tips that work on every website – Karl Gilis<\/h2>\n

    Karl Gilis<\/a> from AGconsult<\/a>\u00a0gave what for me was\u00a0the most interesting presentation<\/strong> of the day, probably because I’m fascinated by conversion optimization and the lack of it \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

    A\/B testing is not the panacea:<\/p>\n