Recap OnPage.org / Ryte.com Expert Event 20.06.2017 in Düsseldorf

The team at OnPage.org / Ryte.com invited everyone interested in SEO to the Kerkhoff Lounge in Düsseldorf for their Expert Event. Since I had never attended an OnPage.org/Ryte.com event before, I was curious whether I would end up at a purely promotional event or whether I would really take something away from it …. (to say it upfront: yes, the event was definitely worth it).

First Talk: Joost de Valk

After admission and the welcome early in the morning, the program began with the first keynote by Joost de Valk, the founder of Yaost.com and developer/inventor of the famous WordPress plugin Yoast SEO (now also available for other CMSs).

His talk was titled “SEO for 6.5 7 million websites; learnings from building Yoast SEO”

In the talk he first spoke about the beginnings of his company and, of course, about his famous plugin. An interesting point in the presentation was that, through more than 7 million installations on websites using his plugin, he has a certain influence on Google's development. He also explained how he and his team handle this responsibility.

Want an example? Imagine his plugin enabled star ratings (rich snippets) in Google's search results for his users, so that overnight 7 million websites (!) would have the ability to activate them without much trouble. Suddenly, in many search results, an extreme number of websites with star ratings would appear. Google would very likely feel compelled to remove these ratings from its search results again …. “We would kill the feature …” were the words of the speaker, and with them he illustrated the impressive power he actually holds with this plugin.

I took the chance after his talk to briefly speak with him. Personally, I find the keyword density calculation in his plugin rather suboptimal, and I asked him why at least WDF-IDF couldn't be found in the plugin. His answer: a WDF-IDF calculation has not been integrated so far, because it would require higher server performance and data might have to be outsourced from the website in order to calculate WDF-IDF. I can understand the point very well, but I find it a shame that, due to the large number of users, the plugin's hands are somewhat tied.

Daily Work with OnPage.org

After that, Daniel Scheffbuch from OnPage.org presented how users can work with their tool, so that, for example, 404 errors or Duplicate Content can be found and how the XML sitemap can be checked.

Create New Content or Revise Existing Content?

After that, Marcus Tandler & Alexander Breitenbach were actually supposed to continue with another talk, which, however, had to be postponed due to a faulty WiFi connection, and so the SEO veteran Martin Witte started with his talk.

In his talk he presented the pros and cons of “creating completely new content” versus “revising existing content.”

Revising existing content is anything but easy, and is often not faster than creating completely new content.

Old content also ranks significantly better than new content. It always takes time for new content to rank well, even on large websites with a high level of trust from Google.

Anyone who wants to optimize their existing content quickly and profitably should not start with the pages that don't rank at all and have no organic visitors. If you want to optimize, you should look at which URLs already have good rankings on page 2 (e.g., with Sistrix). Such pages often only need a few more optimizations to reach the first page. Here, revising the content is definitely worthwhile.

Zoom Deep Dive

After the delicious lunch, it was Alexander Breitenbach from OnPage.org's turn with his talk about their SEO tool. In his session he presented the functions of the “Zoom” module for error analysis in more detail.

He examined their own website “www.onpage.org” with the Zoom module. According to the analysis, a wiki article on the website links to an untrustworthy page. If you visited the linked page normally by entering the URL in the browser, a normal website was displayed in the browser. However, if you visited the URL via the search results, the visitor was redirected to a shop for potency pills (cloaking). A really nasty hack that was detected by the tool. A truly interesting case and, at the same time, frightening to see what tricks hackers use.

OnPage.org Expert Test

Then the time had come. Every participant had the chance to take part in the OnPage.org Expert Test. Of course, that is a clever marketing measure by the company, but I have to say that you really had to earn the certificate.

The questions were multiple-choice tasks and, in places, a bit tricky. With some thought, I then filled out the entire test and passed it with 34 out of 38 possible points. Joy!

SiteClinc

In their SiteClinc, Marcus Tandler and Alexander Breitenbach from OnPage.org examined an online shop for office supplies that had previously been submitted by a participant. Marcus and Alexander took the website thoroughly apart and found numerous optimization opportunities. To protect the operators, I don't want to name the site.

What I was able to take away from this session:

The operators have a calculator on their site with which their target audience can calculate certain fees (e.g., court costs). Marcus brought up the idea of tracking this target audience with a retargeting pixel as soon as they land on the site's fee calculator, and repeatedly serving this group targeted ads for the shop. You probably can't get cheaper advertising and traffic than that. Definitely a very brilliant tip!

Finally….

Toward the end there was also a feedback and outlook round as well as the awarding of the best test results.

Because of the heat, I was already a bit worn out afterward, but I still took the chance to network a little after the event and was thus able to get to know Marcus Tandler and his team personally. Definitely very relaxed and great people!

The event was clearly much more than just a purely promotional event. The two speakers had organized great talks, but the SiteClinc was also very interesting. The test was not a mere show, but was appropriately challenging.

I can definitely recommend the event.

-Fabian