Jono Alderson on Why He Hates JavaScript Only Sites and Loves Technical SEO & AI

Speaker A Welcome to Within WordPress, the podcast about people in and outside of the whole world of WordPress, which we, you know, there's 43% thousand of us, however you want to call it. With me today is Jono. Welcome, Jono.

Speaker B Hi. Thanks for having me. What a treat. This is fun.

Speaker A Well, thanks for being here. We had some audio issues, so we're on. We're recording on Zoom, unfortunately. So I do apologize for those listening and thinking this is not the quality we're used to. I was trying really hard. Jono, you and I go back quite a while. We've been colleagues, even people who have no clue what you are, which is wild. There's people there, including me.

Speaker B I have no idea.

Speaker A Oh, okay. Good, good, good. Well, let me have your best version of Jonah Alderson. Hi, welcome.

Speaker B Who are you? Hi. Nice. Yeah, I honestly wish I knew. Yeah, I guess WordPress nerd is probably a big chunk of that, but more broadly. Yeah. Let's do a recap. So I started out as a starting out, not being able to speak on podcasts. Look where that got me. Now. I started out as a bedroom web developer, as I'm sure many, many people in this space did. Yeah, exactly Right. What feels like 100 years ago and I knew nothing about anything. And what I found quite quickly is I got very frustrated with the tooling we were using. And it was a homegrown CMS and we were building websites for small local businesses and butchers and bakers, etc. And it was all clunky and cumbersome and slow and frustrating. Without realizing, I fell into the world of technical SEO because I got a bit obsessed about what does good look like and what does perfect look like, and what order should I put these HTML tags in? What's the difference between an alt attribute and a title attribute? And what is best practice around all of this? Of course, at that point in time, there isn't really a playbook. The Internet is still evolving. These are the geocities era. Everyone's working out and winging it, and it's just a lot of opinion. I fell from that into the world of WordPress.

Speaker A Are we sure it's falling down?

Speaker B Climbed into the world of WordPress.

Speaker A Yeah.

Speaker B I discovered WordPress and my life got a lot better and a lot easier. And I was still building small websites for little local agencies and little local businesses, but it was faster and it was sleeker and I kind of that obsession with what does good look like? Groom. And I think I came to the conclusion fairly early on that over however many decades we're going to see this Internet thing play out for I'm sure it's still just a fad. But if we're all, all trying to make good things and in aggregate make the web better and improve all the things that like we improve society, we improve humanity, we improve access to information, we democratise publishing, all these things are good then WordPress was probably the best bet for the tool of choice for us all to be aligning on. And that's really stuck with me. So then I bounced around about I've worked in digital marketing agencies, I've learned about politics and people and projects and pitching and business and all sorts of other areas. Bounced around in the world of SEO across tool vendors and consultancies. And then we met and I spent five years working at Yoast which was super interesting. Some real roller coaster moments. Ended up started out running essentially R and D, so working out what should we be building that is that people will need in two, three years from now, what does the roadmap of SEO look like at ecosystem level and make sure that we're aligned with that. Then by the time I left was running product and SEO and the roadmap and all the other bits and pieces and throughout all of that essentially realized that I'm fundamentally unemployable. So I'm now a freelance consultant doing consultancy type stuff much of the same flavor. So it's a mix of when I can WordPress centric work where people come to me and say hey John, we've got a site that is 6 out of 10 on technical SEO or performance or structured data or accessibility or whatever else. And I help hustle their teams and people and say install this plugin, change this config, tweak this thing much in the same way you do and help them get to good. And then the other half of the stuff I'm doing is kind of big enterprise businesses, so the big global brands who often aren't on WordPress and as such much of what I end up doing is pining about the three year roadmap that we end up putting together to get them to the point where they have something that looks like what WordPress did 15 years ago. And I can't name names but I'm literally doing that at the moment for some of the biggest brands in the world. I'm going to spent yesterday, I think two hours scoping a requirements document for how should categories work now to look at when WordPress got categories and it turns out it's 2004. So these incredibly huge organizations I'm babysitting and hand holding them through, how do we get to where WordPress was in order that they. Et cetera. Not Apple, but not a million miles from that directionally. Okay, so yeah, it's interesting. Yeah. So I'm WordPress 2 and 3. Cut me and I bleed WordPress. But I only really kind of encountered the community side when I started working at Yoast. So I'm still a relatively new face in the space despite having caused some kerfuffle. And I still feel a little bit like a bit of an outsider because my background is agency, world and capitalism and commerce and still half the work I do isn't WordPress. But it's really where my heart is. Yeah, I'm a WordPress dev 2 and 3.

Speaker A Yeah, yeah. I think that's a good bottom line. A lot of people would qualify as a WordPress dev or a WordPress builder or whatever you want to call yourself. But yeah, we all come from different backgrounds. I mean, I see some similarity in the stuff that I've done before I started working on the web. I built stuff for the web before, but not in WordPress because it just wasn't there. This is 1999. Am I saying this correct? Yeah.

Speaker B Yes.

Speaker A I am old.

Speaker B Yep, yep. I think I, I learned HTML in maybe 1998. As like a 13 year old teenager over a weekend, I'm like, this is the moment I can do nested tables within tables within tables and splice my JPEGs into corners. And that was just a light bulb moment.

Speaker A Well, yeah, that was 96 for me. Like literally when I, when I got online, my first curiosity was not what can I find online, but how can I build this as well?

Speaker B Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly that. Yep. Yeah. As somebody who's very, very uncreative in the real world, like these hands are not good at writing or drawing or sculpting pottery, but unleash me in front of nested tables in css. Yeah, just a whole honey world.

Speaker A I'll get back to that because you included writing in there. And I have something.

Speaker B Yeah. With a pen. Like I physically can't hold a pen anymore. Like I have evolved out that skill set.

Speaker A I think there's a whole generation behind us that really is never used. Depending on elementary. Anyway.

Speaker B Yeah, I've got to sign documents occasionally, but that's it.

Speaker A Yeah, yeah. Mortgages and other crap.

Speaker B Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A What was I, what was I going to say? Oh, yeah. So you mentioned technical SEO. I know what it is. Some People will know what it is, but there's a lot of people who have no clue what it actually means. We generally know what SEO means. It means the optimizations you do on your site that may or may not improve SEO, but that have the goal to improve SEO. What specifically is technical SEO?

Speaker B Oh, I like that. Right. So yeah, the surface area that most, the surface level that most people will be familiar with with SEO is you search for something in Google and, or Bing, ChatGPT, whatever, and it's going to make a bunch of decisions internally about what is the best result that I should serve for that. The very first step that happens way before that is search engines and these systems go out and they explore the web through crawlers, bots, agents, systems, et cetera, and they hoover up all the URLs, all the documents, all the websites, and they try and analyze and assess and evaluate them and the processes involved in that are affected by everything about a website. So the type of server it's on, where it's hosted, how the CMS is configured, every line of HTML, how your images are loaded, the order of your css, the rules you have on which particular parts and URL structures that search engines can and can't enter, your yoast SEO configuration and a thousand other things like literally every aspect of how your website works and functions, both behind the scenes and in front of it, can have an impact on how easy is it for search engines to discover and find this, to be able to download and parse and understand it, to be able to evaluate it and comprehend it and blah blah, blah, all of those things. So a whole lot of it is things like determining, okay, we don't want search engines to be able to find and access our invoices, custom post type on WordPress, because for obvious reasons, we don't want that indexed by search engines. We want this thing to be fast, we want this thing to be blocked, we want this thing to be clearer. Oh, look, the developer has implemented a 12 megabyte carousel in client side JavaScript. It looks very pretty, but search engines and AI systems in particular, they're not going to be incentivized to download that. They're going to struggle to understand it. If they do. How do we take that and maintain the business goal of a pretty nice functional carousel that engages and converts people and implements it in a way that systems can understand? A lot of this is very, very aligned with the world of performance optimization and accessibility optimization, usability optimization. These are all facets of the same thing. Essentially, it's how do we make this inherently good? And a whole bunch of technical SEO is just web standards.

Speaker A Yeah, yeah. That's probably the most easy one to relate to. Technical SEO is web standards. So the closer you are to web standards, the closer you are obviously with, with a whole bunch of configuring in the cms, in the plugins, the SEO plugins and all that combined. But that's where the money is. As you were explaining, I was thinking basically, you're the master of robots.

Speaker B I will get that on a T shirt. I like that.

Speaker A Txt.

Speaker B Yeah. Nice. Yeah. When the Android revolution comes and the robot uprising happens, I was good to you.

Speaker A I was good to you.

Speaker B Well, I'll point them at my text file and see if that helps. Yeah.

Speaker A Are you, are you. I mean, just to make sure that you're covering all angles, are you saying thank you when you ask AI for something and it does?

Speaker B Yeah. But I think quite cleverly, because as these systems start to have more memory, not just because they won't execute me immediately, but because I think it's quite helpful to provide a feedback loop where you validate that the answer was useful and correct and effective. So I think actually as a behavior that makes a ton of sense, yeah.

Speaker A I lean into it hard because like there's short prompts where it's just whatever the prompt is. But in general, when I'm asking bigger things, I have a structured prompt. And the last section is the same is where I say, this is the type of feedback that I want you to give while you're conjuring up the information I've just requested. So if in that conjuring you think there's something you need to ask additionally, this, this and that, do that before you start on the assumption of this is probably what he wants. You know, it's like a two paragraph thing I paste at the bottom of every single thing that I think.

Speaker B So you drove it back and forth. It's ambiguous.

Speaker A Exactly. And the end result is that I have a perfect loop, just like you said, of not just it doing what it thinks I want, but, you know, oftentimes it's just me answering six, seven additional questions like do you mean this or are we potentially also considering this? Oh, that's a great question. Or that's a great distinction. And sometimes it comes with directions and angles that I. Oh, yeah, right, yeah, definitely. I need to think about this one. I didn't consider this one. But yeah, playing with AI, a lot of fun, great stuff to learn there from that. When you just Explained technical SEO and AI. We already touched it, but AI is.

Speaker B One of sorry, sorry, sorry to happen.

Speaker A No, it's inevitable. I think for the last year, every single conversation I've had on the podcast has touched AI, because it is taking over our lives. There is no escaping from it anymore. And yet we are still Maybe just the 1% that actually uses it, but it's just going to be omnipresent, if not already. But my question was, when you look at all these things from the stuff that you do, right, so let's call it the Optimizing for Web Standards, technical SEO, whatever. How much of an aid is AI for you in this process? Because you know how to do this without AI. But now you have AI. What has changed? What is.

Speaker B Yeah, so it doesn't change a bunch of my technical processes, which so. So throw me a website. And I'm typically going to do a few things. I'm going to open Chrome Dev Tools and go and look at what is this page loading? And is any of that a 12 meg gif? Because that's probably problematic. And what's going on? How does this work? What are the HTTP headers? And I'll view the page's source and I'll look for, okay, this particular standard is missing, or this thing is redundant, or this thing is in the wrong order. And I will poke around and try and experience the site in the same way that Google does. And I'll look at this, this link's broken. This thing doesn't make sense. This is contradictory. Um, those kinds of processes doesn't really involve a ton of AI, though increasingly Chrome's developer tools has some handy, I.

Speaker A Was going to say, like, how does.

Speaker B This work, what's this error, et cetera.