WordCamp Peoria 2016

Content is King – what does that even mean? What does it take to put together pages of information that are well-written, colorful, drive SEO, and actually sell? Where do you even come up with good content? There are millions of websites out there fighting for everyone’s attention and most sites and social media pages are mediocre at best. Strong content is the key to the puzzle and those with the key are king.

With all the players in the digital publishing space, it can be difficult to know where to start. WordPress has positioned itself in the publishing market with a unique set of tools to help publishers with every step of their workflow.

Using some of the same tools that power sites like CNN, Quartz and Time we’ll look at how to build a digital publication from the ground up and tackle challenges such as:

– Managing contributers
– Publishing your content to multiple destinations
– How to use new tools such as Facebook Instant Articles and Google AMP to get more traffic
– Integrating advertising and other monetization methods without hindering the end user experience

And much more! With all the tools available in 2016, this will be a step-by-step walkthrough to get up and running whether you’re a new publication or an existing digital publisher looking to modernize your workflow.

Word-of-mouth advertising – and a good reputation among customers – is still your most valuable marketing and public relations asset in the digital age. The only difference is that now people aren’t talking at cafés or bus stops; they’re tweeting about your company and leaving reviews on the Internet.

That means a positive reputation can take you farther than ever… and that a few bad reviews can sink your sales overnight.

Unfortunately, most business owners and marketers don’t know what it takes to establish and grow a positive online reputation. This presentation is going to show you why you should care what others on the Internet are saying about you, and the best ways to cultivate a positive image.

Apart from design, few things have a larger impact on conversion than page speed. In eCommerce, for example, speed is one of your most important metrics. Mere milliseconds can mean the difference between a sale and an abandoned cart. I’ve spent a good portion of the last three years in pursuit of page speed, exploring caching, virtual machines, hosting platforms, SSL negotiation time, CSS preprocessing, minification, inline styles and WooCommerce optimizations with the goal of sub-one second pageloads. Using real-world examples, I’ll show you the results I’ve been able to achieve and how to replicate them yourself.

Yoast SEO is one of the leading WordPress SEO plugins in the WordPress world. It has so many options. Aside from that, you’re trying to juggle your own SEO knowledge.

With so many options on Yoast SEO, there’s a lot to get confused about.

I’m going to go over some basic SEO tips, specifically best practices for using Yoast SEO.

Hopefully using the plugin will be a lot easier after this session.