the intro song we are live a little bit of intro as we ride up to showtime
we're going to make time stand still
a quarter after midnight and I'm watching the wall
sometimes I feel so untight i just can't sleep at all
every day doing the same old thing we're losing time
the weekend comes we got to have some fun and rewind
these are the days of thunder we're going to make time stand still we
got to feel the hunger hanging over the edge just to taste the
I feel the rope tightening choking up our air
we need to grab some lightning friday's almost here
caught in a web we need to cut this thread we're hanging by
where is it said you have to be half dead to survive
these are the days of thunder we're going to make time stand still we
got to feel the hunger hanging over the edges to taste these
are the days of thunder we're going to make time stand still we
got to feel the hunger hanging over the edge just to taste the real these are
the days of thunder we're going to make time stay
we got to feel the hanging face
there we have it it must be time ladies and gentlemen it is time for WordPress
plugins A to Zed not Z
welcome to another episode of WP Plugins A to Zed interview show where we dive
into the dynamic world of WordPress with Lars Kudall the mastermind behind WP
Security Ninja and SEO Booster Pro in this show we will dive into L's journey
from media production to becoming a leading WordPress developer and SEO consultant we'll explore the critical
intersection of WordPress security SEO and user experience uncovering actionable insights for the WordPress
community wordpress it's the most popular content
management and website solution on the internet and with over 80,000 plugins to
choose from how do you separate the junk from the gems
join us for a weekly unrehearsed conversation about the latest and greatest in WordPress plugins this is
WordPress plugins from A to Zed well good morning good afternoon or good
evening wherever you happen to be hiding out there on the globe today coming to you direct from the brewery overlooking beautiful southern Vancouver Island with
us today is Lars Kudall a WordPress developer with over 25 years of tech experience hailing from Denmark lars
built a diverse career in media production SEO and web development after earning his media economics degree his
early work spans CDROM production 3D animation and CD CGI for film and
television showcasing his versatility in 2008 he founded clever plugins creating
impactful WordPress plugins like WP Security Ninja and SEO Booster Pro which
are celebrated for their robust functionality and ease of use trusted by thousands of websites globally now based
in Miami after stints in Barcelona as an SEO PPC manager Lars runs Lars Corp
offering custom WordPress development and SEO analysis for industries like pharmaceutical real estate and
e-commerce a passionate WordPress community member since 2005 he's contributed numerous free plugins with
his deep PHP and MySQL skills paired with project management and digital marketing experience Lars delivers
tailored solutions that drive success welcome to the show Lars there's your
intro wow thank you John thank you so much wow that's that's an amazing intro who is
this guy he sounds very impressive yeah well that's the whole point here is you got a whole lot going on in here you
know and sort of you know to talk a bit about is like how did you get started in WordPress plug-in development you know
your journey from media production to WordPress how did that what's how did that occur
like well I'm happy to say or unfortunate to say it started with a crisis in 2008 uh up until then I've
been working with a little bit of different kind of platforms wordpress being just one of them i work with Joomla and other kind I forgot the other
ones now drupal but Drupal that's the one wow okay it has been a while i was I
was I was one of those so So you know exactly the problem but then around in 2008 like you mentioned
in the introduction I moved to Barcelona to work for a company there and they went uh well that didn't go so well so
within 3 months they actually uh went bankrupt so I kind of had a decision to make if I want to stick around in
Barcelona and try to make my new life that I I moved there to to start or go
back home to Denmark but I decided to stay in Barcelona but I had to focus on something and I decided to go
exclusively with WordPress and SEO and that was a really good idea because as I'm sure you can talk about also like
having to be a jack of all trades means that I know a little bit of everything but I don't really know much about
anything kind of thing you know yeah been down that road myself a few times
jack of all trades master of none that's what it's called no that's the one I was looking for thank you thank you
so that was kind of what it got me started and then it kind of just worked its way into there and then it's been
well been most of my life for the past I don't know 15 20 years or something like that 2008 is 17 years wow oh yeah you
got a year on me i came into this about 2009 okay that's when that's when I that's
when I discovered WordPress i what happened in what happened well I had a computer store i sold it and I decided
to go back into the internet trade and then came WordPress what made you jump on WordPress back then because you
were probably in the same situation as I was 2008 i was looking for I was looking for something that would help do all the
stuff I had done in the late 90s early 2000s without all the grief and of
course the choices at that time was Jumla Drupal and WordPress and when you compare them side by side there was
WordPress was a no-brainer yeah so with what you've done and how you've moved
forward in in discovering WordPress and working on the SEO
what um drove you into the security functions of it and to create a security
plug-in well that actually came with my consultancy uh because I had a lot of
clients that I was helping with their websites and like back then a lot of things happened with uh with viruses and
uh all kinds of malware became more prevalent and WordPress was a big target and it still is but even then so it kind
of grew where in the initially there wasn't that much security uh problem so to speak like it wasn't a focus much and
then all of a sudden it exploded so I was working with a lot of clients trying to help them both to clean up uh getting
clients in said "Hey can you help me clean up my website and also of course to keep uh customers around to protect
them and maintain them and everything." And then at some point uh I forgot where
I saw it actually but I actually met the owner of Security Ninja at the time and I he said he wanted to sell and I
thought "This is perfect i'm doing so much with this i see some potential in this let me have a talk with him." And
yeah well long story short I I bought it what five six years ago by now okay
I was I was hunting down to see if I'd ever reviewed it i'm pretty sure I reviewed this plugin years and years ago
but I just couldn't find it in my archives for some reason don't don't don't look
don't look don't look oh I always want to look i always want to see what I've done especially if the if it's a plugin
that's been around for a while because it tells me you know what did I do or what did I think about it way back then
because all of my all of my archives all the way back to episode one are on my on my website at johnoverall.com
whereas the WP plugin site only has them since about episode 400 give or take
because that's when we finally built a website for that i like the way you said it only around episode 400 it's like
only Yeah well you know when you've been doing it for a while you've been doing it for a while so um with the uh
security ninja what makes security ninja different and apart from all of the
other security plugins that are out there i tried to make the focus for me had
tried to be well thinking of those customers I started talking about why I bought initially keep it simple because
most of the tools that I used back then and even today if you install some of them I could mention whatever but like
different kind of competitors but if you install those you often need to have a bit of experience already trying to
figure out what does that mean and how does that affect me if I click this button it seemed very um not intuitive
for users to to work and it constantly had to ask me for help and I think that
is the wrong way i see a market here where security is very important for a
lot of people as as you can attest to also but I don't really see many
companies that do it the right way because it seemed like it has you have to have an experience like you and me to
actually use the plug-in and set up the security protections enough so I wanted to make something that's more user
friendly that's been my goal we have an installation wizard when you install it it actually pops up and say "Hey click
here in like three or four steps and it sets up all the default settings that you you would need." Stuff like that i
don't see in some of the other things that are out there they in comparison they have maybe a bigger team to sit and
uh and work on finding new viruses and stuff but whereas you try to focus on
making it user friendly well yeah that's the most important part is to make it as user friendly as possible because the
vast majority of WordPress users are not tech people they are they are your
average user they built the website they may have had somebody build it for them and then it's turned over to them and
they just then they got to manage and maintain and run all the things on their own as you as you mentioned WordPress
still is is still a big target and back in the early days of it it was an even bigger target but it had even more holes
in it how does um the Security Ninja help with uh say preventing when
somebody installs a plugin that has a security flaw in it does it help in those areas well it has a vulnerability
scanner that's that's built in so like many of these vulnerabilities that come out like other people discover a
particular version of a plug-in like you're mentioning our plug-in would actually security ninja would actually come up and say hey this version is
outdated you should either replace it or update to the latest version immediately and we can't always say what's the best
approach because sometimes the developers don't release a new version anytime soon or it takes them a while
yeah yeah well tell us a little bit about your other uh plugin you've got the SEO booster well SEO booster is
actually Oh sorry i Well I just wanted to follow up a little further with that i actually hadn't heard of this so
that's why I'm really curious about it is to see what it does and how it helps people out
well SEO Booster is bit of a a unicorn or a different thing because I'm I'm sad to hear that you haven't heard about it
because I actually launched the first version back in 2008 so that sounds ouch
ouch but I I I think that's more on me actually uh because it's uh you should
have heard about it but that's the thing because SEO booster it sounds like a plugin like Yoast or WordPress SEO or
RankMath and all that and it has nothing to do with that it does SEO the first uh
version that came out of SEO Booster back in 2008 i'm sure you remember back then when you got a visitors from Google
and they came to your website Google would actually pass along the keyword they used to search for your website
yeah I remember those days i miss I I miss those days that was nice my life
was a lot easier i'm sure yours was too oh yeah so it actually started back then as an idea like to tag the get this
information in unless you use analyst so use this information and it also start tagging your content saying oh okay
someone used the word um you know uh yeast to find this page or the blog post
I tag it with the yeast and then use that so it's it wasn't kind of a jack of
all trades again like we discussed earlier like it does a lot of thing now what I did like a year ago and I
actually had this launched on Absumo also because it kind of changed the whole aspect I was talking to a good friend of mine who is a SEO guru that's
what he course himself and I was telling him about this at the end and I said listen what about if I can take all that
information we have in Google search console and then bring it into the website itself and not only that but
actually check if the data is being used so like all these keywords that are coming in from Google and you can go
into Google search console and sign up and use that to find what information I bring it in this plugin bring it into
your website like on SEO booster proto funds page and then it actually analyzes and say hey this keyword you said like
Google search console someone searched on Google for it you don't even use it on your website like it gives you
suggestions saying hey you can improve your content because people are finding you on Google using these terms and
phrases but you're not even actually using it in your content what about adding to it so stuff like that and they
can also help you identify if you're doing keyword cannibalization right because like here you you're looking at
like a fairly small site but you as you know like it doesn't take a long time for a site to grow and all of a sudden
you have two pages about yeast and three about some coffee and one about washing
machines like you want to try to group these things together and have all focus your the traffic that comes in from
Google so keyword cannibalization is where you have different pages on your website that all kind of working on the
same thing and my plug-in actually goes and say hey these pages you should try to merge them or at least change your
focus to be on one particular page that's going to give you more traffic so
so what the plugin does is connects to Google Analytics and or not Google Analytics but Google Search Console
correct and it pulls that data in to help you that's nice and nice so you've
got a you've got in your product listing for it it's got like SEO reports what does that do for helping people well one
of those uh like I was just talking about the SEO report is actually that um what's it called keyword cannibalization
issue where there's multiple pe sorry multiple pages that are competing and
then there are other different kind of reports in here like for instance it shows you um uh CTR opportunities uh
what is that click-through rate many of these uh keywords that come into your page you might have a very long um
phrase and not many people are actually competing for it but this report will help you identify and say hey there's an
opportunity for you here if you try to take this phrase and increase it you can get more traffic and get a better
position for that and then like it like it shows on your in where you just
haven't scroll down missing 404 pages also stuff like that it identifies like
internal redirects on your website if you have a redirect that points somewhere else you shouldn't have that or if you have any missing content for
four that's another thing so we have different kind of reports and we we add different things because we like me and
my colleagues we like to pull in all this data and then try to see how can we utilize this like for instance the the
keyword usage um like I mentioned like I actually scan the entire website the URL
of the page and then look for each of these keywords throughout so like you get very detailed analysis and that
gives you information to oh I can focus on this keyword to increase my traffic
very cool well you made mention in your little pieces that you emailed me there you were interested in the intersection
of security SEO and user experience how did these blend together well that's a
good question because that's what I'm trying to to to figure out exactly how to do it because like one thing we
talked about now in terms of user experience was the security and trying to make it more user friendly right and
that's the same what I'm trying and I spent years on that and now I'm working on this SEO boost of the new version so
to speak trying to make that also increase the user friendliness but I'm I
want to find a way where I can actually merge these thing together because instead of having to have one SEO plugin
and one security I'm starting to see that there are several several things where they actually overlap not just in
the technical aspect but if you as a website owner you actually care about these things if you care about security
you most likely care about the SEO aspect also oh yeah or if you cared about the SEO you most likely care about
the user so there's a lot of things and what I meant in terms of the user experience is also like some of the
competitors we have discussed have much more wide ranging and um like big
toolboxes of SEO or security functionality right but but it doesn't
really matter if if the person who's using is just going to go for the same hammer and the same screwdriver every time you don't need the entire toolbox
but it's nice of you to have it there so trying to find that user that balance between the user interface and the
functionality that's kind of where I'm working at right now and and that's why I find interesting but I haven't found
the clue the solution just yet yeah well it sounds like you're working towards it and uh if you keep trying you'll
actually find it that's that's the idea at least well one of the interesting things is though when you're talking
about it such as an intersection of it is a a secure site can also can often
lead to a faster website and a faster website can also often lead to a better
rankings better rankings so how would you blend or work those together well I guess you kind of already gave a
a good idea right then and there like how to to improve that because like you're saying just by reducing the load
on your server itself by rejecting spammers and scammers you can actually
get even more uh like get get a better speed on your website because it's less
struggling oh absolutely it's one of the things I fight with constantly on my servers is keeping everything running
fast that's a common thing and I'm sure like you're also working with page speeds uh
Google's page speeds tool and website optimization all that i don't use the page speed tool all that much i use GT
metrics GTM metrics and a few other tools page speed is not always known for
giving you true accurate numbers that is true that is true uh I've I just
perceive it in a slightly different way don't get me wrong i use GT metrics and all these but since uh the the end goal
the person we're trying to please or entity we're trying to please is Google so that's kind of always the one that I
focus on as a tool but much of the insight you get from GTMetrics true you
don't get that you need you need that information to to work with to find to find what's happening i'm I try but I'm
one of them people that I get used to certain tools and I don't want to have to keep learning all the changes in the
tools that come along once I get used to a tool as they make changes I adapt to them and someone like Google they don't
just make minor changes along the way it's like one day you log in and the whole interface is different and you're
going "What' they do?" You can't find your way around anymore it's like a improving your customer
experience that's a term that they're constantly improving your customer experience
the the Google might need to start working on that again yeah well the
considering considering where we're at with AI now and that AI is providing more and more searches and more and more
of the search results even in Google we've got a whole new game to play now
true things are changing a little bit in terms of the aspect what's the new term they say not se but gio
what i I haven't heard that what is that oh SEO geo i I'm just uh Google no what
does it say it's like a GPT experience optimization i don't know oh okay yeah
uh yeah chat GTPT g chat GPT seems to be the leader but I don't use chat G chat
GPT i use Grock for all my stuff oh yeah okay okay i think I went on something i
forgot what it's called epicurus where I can split around try different I I don't have a favorite to be honest it's a tool
like it's a good tool but it's just a tool yeah that there that's the problem a lot of people are not realizing it's
just another tool it's not going to replace you anytime soon well I I think it's fair to say without uh insulting
you that both of us have a bit of a like a few years experience in this field so
knowing that some like I'll be honest with you when I like let's go if I go back 15 20 years ago like I would every
new hammer and every new tool that came out I would be checking it out i'll be testing it and it would be amazing and
then like I'm son of a blacksmith my father was a handyman through and through so so I I I learned from him and
but I didn't realize it until I grew older in my own particular field that it doesn't matter it's the the the artist
behind or the handyman behind the hammer itself is just a hammer yep so so the tool but yeah but you still have to keep
up on top of it because like you just mentioned yourself you log in one day into Google then the entire interface
changed if you don't keep up like you will lose out also yeah it it's a it's a
constant battle and that's why I end up settling on a few on a few good tools that are high enough quality so I don't
have to deal with the massive deal with the massive changes all at once and just
deal with them little by little by little and they all they all still get you to the top of the mountain yeah
exactly exactly you just need to persist that that's the big one is persistency
for itself so let's talk a little bit about website security what in your
opinion would be like the top three security measures every website uh WordPress site owner should be
implementing or have implemented for them two of a two factor authentication that
is by far number one i don't think I should mention like having a secure password itself is necessary but having
a separate like having to use your phone to log in is a super important step because if you just have your login and
password people can hack it you lose your password people guess it that's many different things but if you have to
use a code that is automatically updated every I think it's 30 seconds then it's impossible for a hacker to get in that
way so that that would be number one by far um what else can you say like you're
asking me for top three so I want to like identify like the best one
so password manage is one I would say backup i I don't know it doesn't sound
sexy yeah in terms of talking about security yeah or website management but
I don't know i I I lost count how many times it saved my my behind and some of
my customers behind having having that uh that backup available because they they might lose a day or two of work if
they have a regular schedule backup but if they didn't have that they would have lost weeks or months of work yep the
backup and the backup and the backup that's my uh philosophy exactly and you you you keep two and
never keep a backup on the hosting company websites because if they go down then you lose the backup also you need
Dropbox or Fbox always have an offsite copy somewhere and then always have a copy of that and as you mentioned
Dropbox I've been using Dropbox since it was first introduced and that was a beauty for me because I
have multiple computers and what you can do is you upload Dropbox and you can have your multiple computers download
make backups so you can have backups on multiple machines Backups of your backups yeah the backup of the backup backup the reason I do that is because
when I had my computer store I went into my shop one morning to boot up my
machines for the day and it all crashed and it's like okay uh we have a problem
with data so I went well I got last night's backup i went to load last night's backup it was corrupted i had to
go back and because people used to give me grief like why do you back it up why do you keep 30 days worth of backups and
said "Well because just in case." I had to go back seven days to find a backup that wasn't corrupted so I lost seven
days worth of data but I didn't lose four years worth of data that's the calculation yeah and you just
put you just put the numbers right in front for everyone to make their own conclusion seven days or four years what
do you prefer i preferred the seven days and it's like okay well I have paper stuff so I can get the seven days back
in it'll take time but the four years is stuffed in boxes somewhere in a you know
a warehouse so it's like it would have been it would have been a nightmare of inventory and
everything else so it's like that that one there taught me more than anything else that you got to have backups and
the backups and the backups and just keep multiple backups going back because you never know when you might be backing
up corrupted data and you just don't know it until it finally fails exactly and like as you said like even 30 days
might not have been enough like you need to to check it once in a while but I'll be honest I'm not very good at that
checking if the backups are corrupted but I I check mine from time to time every once in a while I'll check to see
if my backups are good and I make better than I I make regular backups of everything
good at least at least at least twice a week my backups are made so yeah so what
else you got there besides backups well another nons sexy thing if you have to
give me a top three uh you asked me for a top three another nons sexy thing is probably auditing and auditing i mean
but literally go in and check what kind of events have happened on the website recently like depend on what kind of
tool you have installed there's an event log like did a new administrator all of a sudden pop up like who who who created
this administrator that I didn't do it my other account like no no no no there's a bug here or there's a
vulnerability notice that popped up I just need to log in and actually check my list and see what's going on
so I would say auditing but auditing is more like actually paying attention i
think is probably more important because you you you mentioned yourself earlier you have even more experience with
people hosting their website and building websites and and stuff so keeping track of it afterwards is not
something people really want to do but that that's the important thing so top three for sure that that would be it and
it none of them are sexy but they're urgent important well the thing is the
the most important things are never sexy they're they'react they they just things that should be done everyone always
likes the sexy though exactly and that's why we tried to make the plugin at least look a little bit sexy like like it has
a nice interface and it's usable and everything but like we we we wanted to
focus on usability as we said and like making this actually work for people
make it easier to to use so and you can see well you you you you put it up for
for us thank you very much the easy install wizard that I mentioned before and we have the firewall protection
security testing vulnerabilities that I mentioned before also so there's a lot of different features that try to
encompass like most important urgent things that you need to keep your website safe but without overwhelming
you and it's sometimes easier said than done so you've built in an events logger into this plugin i did i did um simply
because I wanted to instead of having to have a separate plugin installed I
wanted to have an event log built in so I could see these kind of urgent or h important events and as many things as
many times where I know that it actually helped a customer because they had an issue and they couldn't understand what's going on they went into the event
logging see oh they actually had another administrator that went in and did some plug-in updates and changed some
settings and they had no idea like the other like they got a hold of the other
administrator and chatted with them and it was just oh I was just trying to help out like the other administrator had no idea so but just by having this event
log actually was so easy to figure it out and just oh okay just do this in going forward yeah well it makes it nice
and easy to undo it it's it's I've run into those problems myself whenever I build a client site I'd always stuffed
an event logger in there and that way if something hang came up later it's like
okay who did what when when this event when this problem occurred it wasn't
John yeah well it it actually wasn't me when that happened it was it was the client that
did it and it's like they were blaming me it's like no it's clearly your login here well we'll undo it and we'll fix it
but unfortunately we're going to charge you for this time because you made the mistake not us exactly and now if you
didn't have that you wouldn't have been able to explain or document that you would just have to eat the expense i
would have had to eat the expense which I don't like eating unnecessary expenses i've done that enough times in my in my
career um you also have a firewall protection the firewall protection how
does that compare to say um um what's the can't remember the word fence word
fence word fence yeah word fence well our firewall protection is based on the the what's called that 8G um the the
public um firewall by Jeff Star and then we're taking it and modified it to the
WordPress environment right we add like new protection and different kind of rules once in a while but if we compare
to like word friends that has a team of I actually not sure how big their team is right now they put out it's huge
right they have at least 30 I know I think even more employees I just don't want to guess but they have a lot they have a bigger team of course that are up
to to date with many of these rules and very specific to this but it comes back to what I was talking about before if
you pay attention to your website then this won't won't be a problem like the
word friends protection is mostly because like they they're in in the minute or in the hour in the day they're
super quick to come out but as long as you keep u visiting and make sure your website is okay the firewall the
protection is it doesn't have to be zero day because the chances of your website being
approached by one particular zero day considering how many billions of WordPress websites there are is
infatisely small now you still need to pay attention to it and get it done as soon as possible but the moment that a
new zero day comes out your website is not going to get hacked that's that's that's the difference so
in terms of comparison we I would say that the Word fans team they have a lot quicker and faster turnaround on some of
these rules but our firewall just goes in and takes care and generalize and takes care of all the worst um what do
you call them the worst offenders that come out the worst offenders yeah which is important the worst offenders that come out exactly okay well let's see do
you have any success stories uh where WP security ninja has made a significant diff
i'm sure I could find someone but I have to be honest with you off the top of my head right I didn't I didn't plan or
prepare anything like I had customers who were very happy for saving their butts in one way behinds in one way or
another but uh that they're more like oh thank you for for your assistance but case stories I don't I don't have one
right on top of my head I'm sorry that's quite all right I I have I have questions that you weren't expecting
that's all good that's fine that's fine that's that's the way I that's the way I try to plan these things all right well
let's change let's change base here and let's go into your SEO strategies and
whatnot what would you say would be key SEO strategies that are effective for WordPress sites
content title and speed
was that quick enough that's a lot a lot faster than the other one those are those are those are key strategies well
let's let's take a focus on the content what type of content how should the content be written in this in this new
age of everybody's writing their content with AI well that's the thing they shouldn't
shouldn't do that that's the whole point because today how you stand out is actually not by doing that and looking
at what is your target audience like you will see some of this on this site that
is you know more what do you call marketing speak than than other pages
but me and my my team we're trying to go in and like this like even trying to find better ways to communicate to the
customers in a language they understand they don't need these buzzwords coming up and that's the problem we we have we
see with the content being generated these days it's just um AI trying to stuff in all as many keywords and
phrases and stuff trying to make it sound fantastic try to understand what is the people
that come to your website what are they looking for what are their goals and objectives like are they trying to find
information are they about a particular subject are they trying to Oops there's a bug in my interface oops you didn't
see that never mind supposed to be in three columns you didn't notice that um but what is the
the the person trying to come to your website what is the purpose for them coming to your website and try to
achieve anticipate that goal and then try to fill it for them because they might trying to look for information
like you were talking about security just now they might try to find it but they don't need a 15,000page
document and about the entire history of where security originated from and where security is today that's not the purpose
they're there for they're trying to get a more basic understanding of what is it in in in simple terms and how can I
protect my website simplify it so content needs to be generated towards
the person you want to come and visit your website whereas now is just a game of trying to achieve minimum 3,000 words
there has to be at least three images there has to be two YouTube and there has to be at least 17 links and it has
to be in the No that's not how you get traffic these days now in terms of geo
that's a different story i'm not enough into the chat GPT world in how it affects because things are still being
experimented with these days where I see some SEO channels that SEO people that
come oh you just need to do this and this and then you can get a high ranking in here but I think they're still
playing around with it like I don't think there's a final solution right uh just yet right but but that was in terms
of content and the second one is that that was title and title is because the title tag you see like even now when
you're here on your screen your work like we WordPress plugins A to Z WordPress security made easy so for now
this seems simple enough right but I'm sure you've noticed and I have noticed tons of times customers they don't think
about this no they don't realize the front page is called front page most likely and it doesn't really matter what
you're selling if you're selling chili for instance chili sauce or if you're a hair stylist or your SEO
specialist if you don't do with the title tag there is no way you're going to get any um reasonable amount of
traffic now just putting in your keyword and everything doesn't mean it's like oh this is now Google seizes and you go to
number one that's not how it's supposed to be seen but Google looks at how many people click from their search results
so if they search for chili sauce and they for some reason show up on John Overall's page and it says front page in
the title how many people are going to click that compared to the competitors who says best host source in the world
yeah like that's what you're competing with so it increases your click-through rate on Google and that's going to help
you get higher ranking so just having the title written right and enticing
make me want to click like write me a title that makes me want to click to go on this page that's the whole idea of
copywriting got to have the copyrightiting done but uh that but uh but saying that and then I look at my
own stuff that you're showing on the screen like okay maybe I need to rewrite some stuff here and there but that's the
whole problem we we we often don't look at our we look at our stuff so much and then when we see it in a different area
all of a sudden we realize oh wait a minute because it's it's no longer in the same way we're used to seeing it
it's it's No I already found two things I need to change thank you very much oh you're welcome well we'll give you some work to do as a sideline we're going to
go back real quick to where where you gave us the uh important security items um Ryan from Influence WP he had a 100%
agreement with you for 2FA oh okay that's nice well I agree with
Ryan clever person clever person well he is all right so anyway whoops i lost
track of that all right so just what I was looking at here is on the SEO booster um you know you've got some
functions in here functions some features in here such as the keyword filter and search how does that work to
help somebody out with figuring out their content in their uh site um sorry the keyword which search I'm
sorry what you were talking about in the right here it's the keyword filter and search oh I'm sorry that I was looking
up that I said search keywords insights and I misunderstood what you're talking about okay keyword filter and search the
idea is when you have a website like some of my customers I have old customers that like have a wine shop
yeah and they've had five six years of history gradually getting it they have
so many keywords trying to figure out so trying to determine exactly which is the most beneficial keyword this helps a lot
in terms of the interface itself i wish I had a screenshot I could show you right now because in the interface
itself will you go into and edit a page or post mhm the the plug-in would actually pull in all those keywords that
you that gave you traffic from Google and it would show you like what's your average ranking it would show you how
many times you use the keyword in the content and if there's any opportunities for you to improve your position
so that's one of the features the one that I thought you were talking about the one you highlight right there is actually the the what the most popular
and that's the keyword linker and that's actually a very popular feature because people can go and then enter the the
keyword they want to rank for we we discussed chili sauce before for instance so let's say you had a the term
chili sauce on your website and now you want to link that to a particular page either your your own sales page or some
other information page on your website but going through potentially hundreds of pages on your website nobody wants to
do that and link it nobody has but using this feed nobody has the time and it's like but even though if you know it's
important and it's something that could benefit you and your customers and your Google time like you just said so this
is a simpler feature where you simply can enter this keyword and phrase and then my plug-in will go in and say "Oh
you know what let me try and uh replace this keyword like for instance chili sauce." and it's going to look through
your content and then oh hey John says chili sauce here let me change that into
a link to whatever page you you wanted clever enough to understand shouldn't do it in the page title it shouldn't put a
link in the description or anything else like that only the content where it's needed right but that's a very popular
feature at least wow that that is and and those those features there really
you know with the SEO booster it helps people implement this stuff nice easy
without a lot of headache I take it that was the idea at least
excellent i'm looking forward to trying this plugin out all right um hold my
hands in i will send you of course so let's let's wander on to a couple
other things to you know you know your business has your business
been bootstrapped down down the line is that how you've uh taken yourself uh through it all 100% that was intentional
okay i didn't uh what kind of challenges did you did you face while while during
your growth and managing and scaling oh growth uh is the the the key itself like
how to grow how to do this in a in a proper environment how to make it uh make it work one of the things that I've
uh I've done was for instance I went on Absumo like a year ago mhm and that has been extremely beneficial in terms of
well one thing is growing growing because those 60 days when you're there like that helps you a lot because you
got a lot of short-term income coming in but I also managed to get like hundreds if not thousands of new customers and
they have a lot of different input and feedback so it changed the entire plug-in like the entire direction of how
well at least my plans in my head what I wanted to do so it that changed it and I think that made it an even better
product because after all those um customers they gave me their feedback we had a road map and I started changing I
started to see an increase in my regular subscribers because they were more happy oh we had this new feature that we were
thinking about like it gave so I would say to your question what what helped me
I would actually say Absumo has been quite beneficial and helpful for me in this particular product
okay um I've heard of AppSumo but I've never explored it one of the things I'm
doing right now is I'm in the process of developing a uh a major plug-in which I
hope to have in alpha stage by October of this year hey interesting tell me
more well the it is something to help um clubs and organizations is what it is
it's something that that grew out of a client of mine when I took over a
website that had some custom code that was so amazingly done but unfortunately
their developer died unexpectedly and left them hanging and that's how it came to me
no nobody could figure out how to get into the code and me and my my partner in this plugin we're building we got the
code figured out and we looked at it and said "You know what we can fork this." And so we're we're forking it out
interesting and it's something it's something that for a club and it's something that's not offered to any
other clubs are using this is very unique so we're we're we expect the
alpha stage in October oh I hope I'm sure you're going to share more about it but please Oh yeah little
by little I'm letting out the secrets of it little by little it's one of those things that it's we believe it's an
untapped market so that's the best thing that's the best thing if you can try to find that like I was thinking that
security ninja for instance is an untapped market because it's not user friendly environment so what you're
looking for also that's the right kind of thing exactly well and you and your SEO booster is an untapped market this
is a market that many people need that's why I'm surprised I hadn't heard of it sooner because you know one of the
things we offer at our at our agency is SEO work for clients we do SEO work for
clients and we do Google ad management for clients it's like the Have the conversion bridge plugin have you heard
of that one conversion bridge no okay you'll want to check it out i interviewed um I interviewed um where's
his name here it's um Derek Ashar from Conversion Bridge um at interview
interview 64 and we talk about his plugin conversion bridge and I've been using it ever since he gave me a trial
one i ended up buying a major license and now it's on almost all my clients websites and really the conversion
bridge is something I believe will go handinhand with your SEO booster because what it does is it helps people
connect their pages for better tracking information to go into Google Analytics and whatnot and what you're doing is
you're bringing in information from Google Search Console so with those
being tied together it can bring some amazing stuff to stats and
ConversionBridge was a was a very uh a very low-key plugin too and he's been growing quite rapidly lately so you can
go you go you can get the information it's over at conversionbridge.com I believe so at any rate let me check that
check that out and episode 64 you said i'll check that out too it was It was interview 64 so Oh okay okay thank you
oh nice nice nice so that's somebody you might want to you know talk to he he might have some really great insights
for you but Dererick's a really great guy well nice guys I always want to talk to mhm great network so that's perfect
okay thank you so much no Confession bridge that's a new one for me okay okay yeah well that was a new one for me too
and he keeps improving it so so let's talk about a little bit about future
trends in projects what sort of trends do you see shaping the future of WordPress and plug-in development you
know let's talk about you know if you need to throw in the AI trend that's happening oh uh the
I'll answer in terms of particular to WordPress afterwards but first you mentioned AI and AI have ambivalent
relationship with because I use AI every day it's a wonderful tool and it's super strong but like we were discussing
earlier it's a tool like it doesn't really matter what comes up with i have tried some of those i forgot what the
the term they use but like full full application development systems whatever why I give them like a two-page
description and give it to them and then I came back half an hour later to see my my app being built
and it was horrible like I think AI is incredibly I consider AI it's like a
really well educated but slightly stupid assistant like so they have like best
intention and they re like chativity really wants to do the best and can do but but it will imagine things and
figure things out for you like hallucination I'm sure you heard and many other heard the term anything just
to please you I've had it do that to me once or twice yeah that's not but I would say on the other hand when I'm
sitting and I'm using that I like curs currently I'm using something called cursor an ID IDE that has AI built into
it right and when I give the like sitting there and I give the right command and I can see wow it goes and
find that information that it would have taken me several minutes to go and locate and research and like just oh
it's right there you oh excellent so many benefits in using AI but as I don't
see it as the magical thing that is going to to solve and I'm not afraid of losing my job
if I was a newly freshly blue-eyed educated uh what do you call person with
a new degree in computer science or something I might have an issue with my future not quite sure what to do with it
but I don't think It's a problem for for for most people that AI is going to take the job but everyone is going to have to
adapt in one way or another that's that's that's all I know but um that was
in terms of AI but in terms of WordPress in general I I don't know i don't want to put in
like a the whole situation that came up like last year with automatic and um
what's the the hosting company WP yeah WP Engine thank you um I forgot sorry
but that whole thing has been enough back going on on that but the whole issue the fact that it even happened and
like Matt Mon was able to overtake some of those plugins free listings on the
WordPress repository that itself made me think okay I need to diversify a little bit yeah because of all that like we
started in the beginning of this conversation that I started in 2008 and put my focus onto it and now for the
first time in over 15 years I actually started to think okay I need to diversify and not put all my eggs in in
in WordPress basket and I know I'm not the only one because I'm in a in a
couple of Slack groups and I with other developers WordPress plug-in developers and there is a lot more than just me
talking okay I need to like what else yeah it's it's created some issues in and around things um I would say that
now let's uh look at we're we're starting to reach up against some time here let's talk about your upcoming
project your SEO perception you've put a teaser page up for folks i've actually signed
up for it so I can get more information on it um because it it sort of intrigues
me but I'm wanting to know a little bit more what can you tell us about this
project you know that the that is ready for the public's consumption kind of like me and my teaser of my project
everyone has a pet project they're working on and you can only give so much information at a time that's the thing
but I mean I I could leak about two others ones but let's leak about this one well this is supposed to be SEO
booster and perfect timing because we were just talking about diversifying work away from WordPress so this is my
WordPress plug-in for everyone the idea is that SEO perception is supposed to be a SAS interface that can get you all
this information like SEO booster plugin can get from uh Google search console but instead of having to like only work
exclusively with WordPress this would be a solution that will work across all like Wix Square Page any kind even Juna
or Drupal interesting that's the idea but there are some technical issues and one thing
I can I can well easily talk about already here is like the keyword replacement I just mentioned in my
WordPress plugin like it's super easy to go in and change the keyword term chili sauce to a link that's super easy but
how do you do that if you don't have access to the source code itself i'm trying to build a system that would work
on any website so there are some technical difficulties in trying to like there's solutions where you can set up
with Cloudflare where Cloudflare works as a proxy so the people coming to the website they actually go to Cloudflare
and then I do some stuff in the background and I send them back there's a lot of technical things going on in
the background and I'm trying to to make everything work well not just well I
want it to work perfectly and that is one of the things that I'm working with right now that it's a little bit
difficult but there's so much more information you can get out uh about um SEO perception like all the data it
brings in keyword links is just one of the things that it it it does okay so that was a bit of a a ramp oh I look for
I look forward to seeing this one sneaking out for everyone to check out it'll be very interesting all right well
this is the point here where we get to let you tell everyone where they can find you and uh how they can find out
more about all your stuff and of course all the links for all your stuff will be in the show notes for everyone um and
the show notes will be available over at wpplugins aaz.com within 24 hours of the live broadcast
excellent well you you I think you're already given the information that they need to know i'm a WordPress security
ninja i'm the owner and developer from that and that is my main plug-in uh these days that I'm I'm I'm working on
and as uh as John also perceived right now I set up with the SEO perception that is my future little uh project that
I'm really hoping could uh could bring some interest so please go go right ahead and sign up for that all right
well that's all we've got here folks we're going to let my girl take us on out of here don't run away Lars i'll talk to you after this bit we might have
a minor little bit live after the uh closing credits so let's let the closing
credits roll reminders for the show all the show notes can be found at wp plugins.com
and while you're there subscribe to the newsletter for more useful information delivered directly to your inbox wp
Plugins A Toz is a show that offers honest and unbiased reviews of plugins created by you the developers because
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Plugins A to Z john can be reached directly through the website wppproadz.com
or email him at johnwpro.ca ca amber can also be contacted through
the website at wproz.com or email her directly amber@wpro.ca
thanks for joining us have a great day and we'll see you next week
all right would be the end of that the recorded part all right
briefly i couldn't hear that oh you couldn't hear it no I've just been sitting waiting for you to say something
okay sorry i thought for sure maybe it must be something wrong with the sound but the sound did go out to everyone
else and I did record the sound that's what's important to me oh no i believe I just If I look funny that's why that's
all right no no i I actually flipped the screen off to uh to my uh to my to my
opening image for the uh close okay okay i have a couple of ways of doing things you'd have to watch the YouTube channel
to see all of that so for those of you on the YouTube channel we're going to get one last bonus question here and
what I'm going to be doing is using this as teasers and my more of my interviews to encourage more people to come back to
the YouTube channel so what last question for you what advice would you
give to aspiring WordPress plug-in developers
do your research um what do I mean with do your research
what I mean is that when I first started this uh business like so many years ago
there were less uh rules and and structure around like you had to invent a lot of these things and figure things
out as you went along but now that the WordPress community is so well grown there are a lot of different um ways of
getting information different kind of rules what are you allowed to do in your plugins that uh if you want to be hosted
on the free repository that you can and what you can do in terms of uh premium customers how can you advertise there's
a lot of things that you can uh can research in initially and like you're doing for instance with your product you
found a niche that you think that is is um what's it called underserved
underserved that's the term you're using exactly right and so but you already done the research for that and you have
the experience in terms of how to how a free version would use uh can be hosted on the WordPress repository and so forth
a lot of these things I think it's necessary because I think that some of the plugins that I've seen come out once
in a while they're really good like like good ideas and good but they just structure it and describe it uh
inefficiently and I think that's a that's that's a hindrance something I've done myself and I'm still trying to work
on so do do the research and proper present your idea excellent that's the
excellent advice for everyone yeah um had a thought and that thought is gone
well with that being said I'm going to cut the live stream thanks everyone for showing up we greatly appreciate it you
all have yourselves