Let's turn now in the Bible and let's come back to God's Word together and it's a joy to be able to consider the Book of Judges with you as we're working through the Essentials series on Sunday morning. I really have enjoyed being able to look at these texts, these narrative texts in the Old Testament and sort of go pericope by pericope, section by section through the Book of Judges. And so I pray it's been a blessing to you. It's good to be in books of the Bible this way. And soon, we're nearing halfway through the Book of Judges, I guess we're halfway now. And soon we'll be through with our Essentials series, we'll be back to a book of the Bible on Sunday morning, but it's just a joy to be able to spend time in the Word of God that way. And we have much to learn and the Lord is gracious to us that we get to learn it. You know, just we, this is not a sprint, it's a marathon. So week in and week out, we just, as our brother was praying about the Word a minute ago, we just keep coming back to the Word of God for more and more. And there's just no plumbing the depths of it, you know, it's, it is a bottomless well of God's grace. So we're grateful to him for it. Okay, we're in Judges chapter 10. The title of this sermon this evening is, Despise and Rejected by Men, Despised and Rejected by Men. Our text, Judges chapter 10, verse 17 through Judges chapter 11, verse 11. If you remember the original text, there were no chapter divisions. So we have an unfortunate chapter break here between chapter 10 and 11, but the text flows from chapter 10, verse 17, right into chapter 11, down through verse 11. So that would be the subject of our consideration tonight. So read with me now as we consider Judges chapter 10, verse 17 through chapter 11, verse 11. Hear the Word of God. Then the people of Ammon gathered together and encamped at Gilead, and the children of Israel assembled together and encamped at Mizpa. And the people, the leaders of Gilead said to one another, who is the man who will begin the fight against the people of Ammon? He shall be head over all the inhabitants of Gilead. Now, Jephthah, the Gileadite, was a mighty man of valor, but he was the son of a harlot, and Gilead begot Jephthah.  Then Jephthah fled from his brothers, dwelt in the land of Tav, and worthless men banded together with Jephthah and went out raiding with him. They came to pass after a time that the people of Ammon made war against Israel, and so it was when the people of Ammon made war against Israel that the elders of Gilead went to Jephthah from the land of Tav, and they said to Jephthah, Come and be our commander that we may fight against the people of Ammon. So Jephthah said to the elders of Gilead, Do you not hate me? Did you not hate me and expel me from my father's house? Why have you come to me now when you are in distress? And the elders of Gilead said to Jephthah, That is why we have turned again to you now, that you may go with us and fight against the people of Ammon and be our head over all the inhabitants of Gilead. So Jephthah said to the elders of Gilead, If you take me back home to fight against the people of Ammon and the Lord delivers them to me, shall I be your head? And the elders of Gilead said to Jephthah, The Lord will be a witness between us if we do not do according to your words. Then Jephthah went with the elders of Gilead and the people made him head and commander over them. And Jephthah spoke all his words before the Lord in Mizpah. This is the word of God. Amen. Amen. Let's pray and ask the Lord's blessing on our time together. A father in heaven, we do, Lord, we come to you now asking your blessing on our time together tonight in your word. Apart from you, Lord, there are just words on a page, but you, Lord, by your spirit, by your mighty working through them, they are alive, sharper than any two-edged sword, able to pierce the division of joint and marrow of soul and spirit. And we ask you, Lord, now to drive your word home or through our minds into our hearts and help us, Lord, to take heed to it. We have much to learn from this book and much to apply in these lessons that you present to us and Lord, always so much to apply, so much to consider that we can easily be forgetful. We can easily sort of let it roll in one ear and out the other. Pray, Lord, you protect us from that. Let us not receive the grace of God in vain. Help us now, Lord, by your spirit as we consider your word together and have your way in our hearts for your glory in Jesus' name. Amen. Again, the title of our sermon, despised and rejected by men, Judges chapter 10, verse 17, through Judges chapter 11, verse 11. What has been amazing to me during these months of coronavirus? It's been amazing to me about our news cycle, right? If you consider our news cycle right now over the last couple of months. What's amazing is that every time you come back to the news, they're talking about the same thing, right? Every single time you come back to the news, it's the same story over and over again. You can miss three days, you can miss five days a week, a couple of weeks, and you come back to the news only to realize that you haven't missed anything. You catch a quick snippet of the news between commercial breaks and you're entirely caught up over the past two weeks or however long it's been. Well, someone reading through the book of Judges might be tempted to think the same way about the book of Judges. They might get the same impression, right? What are the Israelites doing today? Well, they're back to their idolatry. They're back under the judgment of God. They repented for a while. They had a little period of peace, but then they're right back to their sin. God has delivered them from judgment now and there's been a stunning deliverance. And after a short commercial break, they're right back to idolatry, right? But as we slow down through the book of Judges, by God's grace, we've been able to do that. We've been able to consider all the lessons that are to be learned here. And there are many lessons that are driven home time and time and time and time again through these chapters. This book is driving home profound lessons, lessons about the nature and character of man, lessons about the nature and attributes and character of God. The progressive, shocking, decline, and destructive power of sin in the heart of man. And it is a destructive force, isn't it? The futility, the hopelessness of the fallen human will, a part of an act of God's grace, the hopeless condition, the fallen human heart.  And in the midst of that, against that black backdrop, we have God's enduring, immutable, faithfulness to his own word. Unshakable, unflappable, unflinching faithfulness, steadfast, covenant, loving kindness, unbending justice, holiness, boundless patience, boundless patience, mercy reaching into the heavens, all these lessons we learn from a simple reading through the text of the book of Judges. But when we last left the Israelites now in chapter 10, they'd been enjoying the patience of God, the mercy of God under two, what are called minor judges because they're given less verbiage in the book of Judges, not because they're lesser judges, but because they're given less information, given less time in the book of Judges. When we last left the Israelites in chapter 10, they were enjoying the patience and mercy of God under Tola and Jair. 45 years between Tola and Jair of combined peace in Israel. It's amazing, consider all the sin of Israel, right? That 45 years of combined peace entirely, entirely, entirely undeserved, undeserved. And the Israelites despite having that 45 years now of combined peace were entirely, entirely ungrateful, such ingratitude toward the Lord who delivered them. In verse 6, we come back to Israel and the children of Israel again did evil in the sight of the Lord. They served the Baals and the Ashtarists, but not only the Baals and the Ashtarists, the gods of Syria, the gods of Sidon, the gods of Moab, the gods of the people of Ammon, the gods of the Philistines, and they forsook the Lord and did not serve him. As we discussed last week in looking at the text, what is essentially happening here is the bride, that's how Israel is described in the Bible, the bride is coming out of her dressing room to play the harlot. And now she is multiplying her acts of harlotry, not just playing the harlot with the Baals, but with the gods of Syria, the gods of Sidon, the gods of Moab, the gods of the people of Ammon, the gods of the Philistines, and virtually anyone who would come by and have her, she is multiplying acts of harlotry with anyone who will pay her any attention. Verse 7, so then, as you would expect once again, the anger of the Lord was hot against Israel, and he sold them into the hand of the Philistines and into the hands of the people of Ammon. And so what then ensues, we've come to expect the Israelites cry out to God for mercy. They're in great need now. They're in great distress. They need the Lord. They need the Lord's grace. They need the Lord's mercy. But listen, God has heard it all before, hasn't he? We've heard it before in our study through the Book of Judges. This is now offensive in God's sight. He's seen their crocodile tears over and over again. The harlot bride runs back to her husband, and as soon as her husband gives her the deliverance, the peace, the prosperity that she wants, then she's right back to whoring after other lovers. That's what she does. And so the Lord says essentially in verse 14, I'm not going to do it anymore. I'm not going to listen to you this time.  Let them deliver you in your time of distress. But it's amazing, isn't it? Amazing that despite her utter wretchedness, despite the abject overt betrayal, God remembers and is faithful to his word. It's staggering, isn't it? I mean absolutely staggering. The patience, the faithfulness, the covenant keeping love of God set upon Israel. Not because she's lovely, not because she deserves it, not because she has in any way deserved, earned, or merited his love or favor, but because God himself, in and of himself, has simply determined to set his love upon her for no other, for no other reason. The reason is entirely within God himself. And now having set his love upon this wayward, stiff-necked and rebellious people, God's people, the Israelites are the apple of his eye and God is simply unchanging. God is simply immutable, faithful to his covenant promises. In our last section of text from Judges chapter 10 ends with these words in verse 16 that communicate that truth where it says that his soul could no longer endure the misery of Israel. Why? Because of God's covenant keeping love, his steadfast faithfulness to his word, because God had determined within himself to set his love upon these people. Well the kind providence of God that would then follow remains a mystery to the Israelites at this point in time. They're not given any indication that God will deliver them. It's a mystery to them that God will not endure their misery any longer. It appears as though it may appear to them that God has determined to abandon his people in their idolatry. He's not going to deliver them this time. Once again though, once again it looks as though agents of God's just and righteous judgment are beginning to gather at the beginning of our text now in chapter 10 verse 17. Look there with me. Then the people of Ammon gathered together and encamped at Gilead and the children of Israel, really with no other choice, right? The children of Israel assembled together and encamped in Mizpah in response. And so the people, verse 18, the leaders of Gilead said to one another, we've got to do something about this. Who is the man who will begin to fight against the people of Ammon? We don't even have anyone to lead us. He shall be head over all the inhabitants of Gilead. So the Ammonites gather, this enemy army, they gather their army to Gilead. Israel forced to respond, gathers in camps in Mizpah. Notice, verse 17 and 18, there's no attempt here to seek the Lord. They don't go back to the Lord. In other words, it calls into question their genuine repentance so to speak in the verses that precede this, doesn't it? There's no attempt made to seek the Lord. They act as though they are entirely on their own. They don't even have a man among them that they can point to to lead them. The Lord has not raised anyone among them. They're basically asking for a volunteer here. Who's going to lead us? They certainly don't hold out much hope that someone would be willing to bail them out because they have to then appeal to pride, appeal to power in order to lure someone in to doing it, don't they? Offering them rule over all the inhabitants of Gilead. Listen, if you'll come and lead us in the fight, if you'll come and lead us in the battle, we'll give you, we'll make you head and commander over us. And what generally happens when people resort to that kind of motivation to get a leader or a commander for themselves? Generally it doesn't work out well. Abimelech is a chief example of that, isn't he? What do you get when someone wants to rule and wants to use power to rule versus using God-given authority to serve? You get somebody who's entirely self-interested, self-involved, self-absorbed, selfish. And so all this represents in verse 17 and 18 is an act of desperation on the people of Israel. This is an act of desperation. The armies have gathered, the people of Ammon have come together, they're encamped in Gilead, and we've got to do something. Things are bad right now for Israel. They have no confidence whatsoever that the Lord is going to deliver them. They have no thought whatsoever that the Lord is going to help them. And so what do they do? They take matters into their own hands, essentially abandoning the faith. This is a faithless act of desperation. And yet at the very same time, if you think about the circumstances, this is exactly, exactly the kind of circumstances that most requires faith in God's people, isn't it? When Saul was faced by a gathering Philistine army and Samuel delayed in coming to you. Remember the story? Samuel delays in coming to Saul, what does Saul do? Saul, faithless. He takes matters into his own hands and he sins against the Lord by offering the burnt offering that only Samuel could offer. Faithlessness. It's an act of desperation. He simply will not wait upon the Lord. Why? Because he simply does not trust the Lord. He's not willing to entrust himself to the God who has time and time again delivered him. He won't do it. He takes matters into his own hands. He offers the burnt offering and he loses the kingdom. Just because you and I may not see the Lord's work in our circumstances does not mean that the Lord is not at work in our circumstances. Just because we don't see it, Saul should have waited. He should have waited on the Lord. He should have put his faith and trust in the Lord before making rash decisions, before making hasty judgments, but Saul acted foolishly and lost the kingdom. What does the Lord say? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice. Sometimes in our lives, you and I will simply have to wait. Many times in our lives, we simply won't know what the Lord is going to do. We don't know. Many times in difficult circumstances, particularly, especially in difficult circumstances, we don't know how it's all going to turn out. We don't know what the Lord is going to do. It's been amazing to me to see that over the years. We would have never thought that it would have turned out this way and yet that's exactly the way that it's turned out. And we see that in the rear view mirror as entirely good. The Lord has worked all things together for our good. We were singing to him this morning. We have no regret in anything the Lord has done. We know that everything he's done has been good to us. And yet in times of difficulty and adversity, what do we do? We doubt. We're faithless. We're impatient. Think of the circumstances under which Esther trusted the Lord. Amazing. Think of the circumstances under which Joseph trusted the Lord, sitting there in prison waiting. The cupbearer forgot me. But if you're in Christ through faith, then God is always for you, never against you. Do you believe it? If you're in Christ through faith, God is always for you, never against you, always and in every case promises to do us good. So don't go running off, sinning your way into circumstances. Now you're going to have to face as a result or as a consequence of your sin against him. Israel isn't thinking that way in verses 17 and 18. They are entirely in self-preservation mode. They're acting like they're entirely canonized. We've seen a process of canonization in Israel. And one has said that the Lord's silence throughout this episode is deafening. The Lord's silence. He sits back and he's allowing this to go on. Does that mean that he's not sovereign? No. Even though the Lord is silent, the Lord is sovereign. Even still, God is at work behind the scenes to show compassion to his people. We see that beginning in chapter 11 verse 1. Chapter 11 verse 1, Jephthah comes on the scenes. Jephthah, although God appears to be silent, is raised up by God. Although it appears that Jephthah is raised up by Gilead. Look at verse 1. Now Jephthah, the Gileadite, was a mighty man of valor. But he was the son of a harlot and Gilead begot Jephthah.  And then Jephthah fled from his brothers, dwelt in the land of Tav, and worthless men banded together with Jephthah and went out raiding with him. So Jephthah, the Gileadite, judge over Israel will occupy our attention now over the next two chapters in the book of Judges. And what begins in verse 1 really is a biographical sketch of Jephthah, given in verses 1 through 3. First in verse 1, Jephthah is described as a Gileadite. Now Gilead was his father, and it's interesting, Gilead is also the location where Jephthah is from. What is that saying? It's the same location here where the enemy army is now gathered. The people of Amon have gathered themselves together at Gilead. So Gilead, likely a family name, it's been passed down from generation to generation. It's the name of the place where they're from, and Jephthah's father, likely leader of the clan. His name is Gilead. Jephthah's father described as a Gileadite. Jephthah himself a Gileadite. Jephthah is also described in verse 1 as a gibore, a mighty man of valor, a warrior. Now who else do we know that was described that way? Just prior, Gideon. Gideon was called by the angel of the Lord, a mighty man of valor. He didn't live up to it at the time that he was called that. The Lord had to work that in him. It appears as though from this text that Jephthah has already earned that title. Jephthah is a mighty man of valor. He's a gibore. Now although Gilead had many sons by his own wife, Jephthah it says here is the son of Gilead by a harlot. That means that dad was immoral and Jephthah's mother immoral. Possibly a Canaanite or a Jewish woman breaking obviously the law of God in Israel by herself becoming a harlot. His other sons, Gilead's other sons, merciless as they were, despised Jephthah. They deemed him illegitimate, not a rightful son. He was a usurper. They treated him as an outcast.  Very likely that was purposeful. They were greedy themselves. Didn't want Jephthah to have any part of their inheritance and so they cast Jephthah out. In verse 3, Jephthah then flees to Tav. Tav is a Hebrew word meaning good and he started running with a crowd that was bad. That's interesting, isn't it? Jephthah flees to the land of goodness and starts running with a crowd of badness. The word is rake in Hebrew. It means empty. They were shallow, unprincipled, morally reprehensible. That's what the word means. These were morally reprehensible men. It's the same word used to describe the type of guys that Abimelech hired to help him kill his 70 brothers. Do you remember? Unprincipled, morally reprehensible men. The whole family grossly immoral. The men that he falls in with in the land of goodness are immoral. They've been canonized. All this implies that Jephthah himself wasn't all that morally upright either. These are morally reprehensible men and Jephthah is their leader and they go out, it says, raiding together. They're like mercenaries for profit. Again, what's fascinating about this biographical sketch of Jephthah is that although God appears to be silent and absent from the action here, we know that the Lord is the one who is orchestrating these events to deliver his flawed people by the hand of this flawed man. And God is going to bring about a great deliverance. It's interesting. Israel is playing the harlot with Canaanite gods and God raises up the son of a harlot to deliver her. And Jephthah ends up in the Hall of Faith. Jephthah ends up in the Hall of Faith. Again, what we see in the Bible time and time and time and time again is it's not the man. It's the God wrought faith in the man that is the testimony of God's greatness and goodness and triumph, the glory of his grace, right? Jephthah ends up in the Hall of Faith. Well, verse four then, it came to pass after a time now that the people of Ammon made war against Israel. And so it was when the people of Ammon made war against Israel that the elders of Gilead went to get Jephthah from the land of Tav. What's going on here, right? Back to Gilead's faithless act of desperation. They are desperate. There wasn't anyone in Gilead to take the job. They offered him head and commander over all the people. No one in Gilead would take the job to be their leader, to be their commander. So what are they forced to resort to? I mean, listen, they are really desperate.  What are we going to do? Let's track down Jephthah. Now we know Jephthah. These elders in Gilead are saying to themselves, he's got a reputation for this kind of thing. He is a mighty man of valor. But think with me for a moment, who were these elders of Gilead? Who were they? They would have been the very sons of Gilead who drove Jephthah out the first time.  Now they're coming to Jephthah in their time of need. Wow, right? Talk about having to eat humble pie here. Verse six, then they said to Jephthah, come be our commander that we may fight against the people of Ammon. Now imagine the scene with me, right? These are the very people that had abandoned him before, they cast him out, they treated him spitefully, they had despised him, rejected him. And now when they're in need, when they need something and rest assured it's only because they're in need, they would never go to Jephthah. If it weren't for this great need, they run, they run to the one they had formerly rejected. They don't love him as their brother, do they? They don't love him, they despise Jephthah. That's obvious, but they need him. But they need him. They need his help. And so they go to him, they're using him, aren't they? And it becomes apparent to Jephthah pretty quick, he knows he's being used. You can figure that out. You know when you're being used. Let me ask you the question. Who else, who else have they treated in exactly the same way? Who else? God. That's right. They've treated God in exactly the same way. This example in the text is a living illustration of exactly what Israel had been doing to the Lord all along. Do you see the connection between the two? We pondered in chapter 10, verses 15 and 16, whether their repentance was real or not. It looked like just more of the same, second verse, same as the first. This is a living parable of where the heart of Israel is with respect to God. And we see now it being acted out in their relationship to Jephthah. They'll turn to the Lord in desperation when they need something. They'll trust him. They'll obey him. They'll seek his face when it looks like they might, may not continue to enjoy the peace and the prosperity that he's given them, that he's been gracious to give them. And then they'll turn right back around and betray him when they've gotten what they've wanted. The Lord has seen it before. The Lord who looks on the heart sees right through it, and it's written here on the pages of scripture so that we see right through it also. Right? He says to them in chapter 10, verse 11. Listen to what the Lord says to them. Chapter 10, verse 11. Did I not deliver you from the Egyptians? Look at what I've done for you. Did I not deliver you from the Amorites, from the people of Ammon, from the Philistines, from the Sidonians, from the Amalekites, from the Maonites? I delivered you and you were ungrateful and faithless. That's essentially what's being said there. Do you see? Go and cry out to the gods you've chosen for yourself. Let them deliver you. Where is the love? Right? Where's the love? Jephthah might say the same thing. Where's the love? You guys have treated me this way and now you come back to me when you're in need. I didn't fall off the turnip truck yesterday. Jephthah essentially responds just like the Lord responds. Look at verse 7, chapter 11, verse 7. Jephthah said to the elders of Gilead, did you not hate me? Did you not expel me from my father's house? Why have you come to me now when you're in distress? Well, it makes sense, doesn't it? This is a response that makes sense. He knows when he's being used. Anyone can see it. How degenerate the wayward heart of this brazen harlot. Jephthah says, you despised me. You rejected me. Now you want to pretend as though none of that actually happened and you're coming to me now for help? And Israel essentially says, yeah, that's the way of it. Verse 8, the elders of Gilead said to Jephthah, that is why we have turned again to you now, that you may go with us and fight against the people of Ammon and be our head over all the inhabitants of Gilead. There's a shamelessness to it, isn't there? Their response and their actions now. Notice in verse 6, the initial offer was for Jephthah to be their kassin, their military leader. It's what the word means. Kassin means a military leader. Here in verse 8, Jephthah pushes back just a little. And so they set up to sweeten the deal. In verse 8, they offer Jephthah to be Rosh, which is head or ruler over them. It's back to the original offer. They might have thought to themselves, we can get away with a little bit less with Jephthah. Let's just offer him to be our military commander.  Well, all this sounds pretty good to Jephthah. Jephthah is motivated here by pride and power, and he's thinking to himself, I'm going to get what's coming to me from all this. No doubt he likes how the tables have now turned. Their motives aren't faithful, but neither really are his. Nevertheless, Jephthah here wants to be really clear about the arrangements. Verse 9, so Jephthah said to the elders of Gilead, listen, I want to make sure we're clear on this. Did I hear you right? If you take me back home. Interesting how he uses that terminology, right? If you take me back home. If you take me back home to fight against the people of Ammon and the Lord delivers them to me, shall I be your head? I want to get this straight. You're going to subject yourself to me, the one you cast out. I don't trust you as far as I can throw you. Let's clarify the terms together. And the elders of Gilead, verse 10 said to Jephthah, the Lord be a witness between us if we do not do according to your words. It's the first time that the elders here have invoked the name of Yahweh. First time that they mention the Lord. And it's because the elders of Gilead are desperate. They're desperate. Jephthah actually mentions the Lord delivering the Ammonites into his hand in verse 9. But all of this at this point really sort of has the feel and the sense of a fake formalism, doesn't it? We see through it. It just seems like nobody really means what they're saying. There are other motives involved. Jephthah has other motives involved. Israel has other motives involved. The Lord is left on the sidelines. No one is concerned whatsoever with going to the Lord or with repentance or with seeking His face. It all has a feel and a sense of fake formalism. Everyone seems to be entirely out for self-interest. And what we're doing here is we're putting a nice religious veneer over the whole affair, a fake religiosity painted over the whole.  And considering their actions, considering their motives, this is little more than using the Lord's name in vain. If the Lord delivers them to me, Jephthah in verse 9, the Lord be a witness between us, the Israelites or the Gileadites in verse 10, verse 11 seems to affirm that. Then Jephthah went with the elders of Gilead, and the people made him head and commander over them. And Jephthah spoke all his words before the Lord in Mizpah. There's no sacred significance whatsoever to Mizpah. Nothing of any sacred significance that we know of was there. It's interesting for this little ceremony of making Jephthah head and commander over them that they didn't go to Shiloh or that they didn't go to Shechem before the Lord in Shiloh or in Shechem. What was in Mizpah? Why would they go to Mizpah? What was there? If you remember, from the beginning of this text, the army was there. The army was in Mizpah. Jephthah was less concerned about the Lord's witness than he was about making sure that the army knew who was in charge. So Jephthah had other motives here for going to Mizpah. The whole affair has the recommended religious shine on it, but the Lord himself is silent. Do you notice the Lord himself sits on the sidelines? He has been spitefully treated in the same way. The Jews would one day, once again, be faced with seeking deliverance through one that they had shamefully despised and rejected. Interesting, isn't it? The Jews would one day be faced with seeking deliverance. They would be offered deliverance only through this one, and it was one whom they despised and rejected. They cast out. They cast them out. They actually accused the Lord Jesus Christ himself of being born of a harlot, didn't they? They said to him in John chapter 8 verse 41, we were not born of fornication, implying that he was. We have one Father God. The Lord Jesus Christ there says, you do the deeds of your Father. Jephthah surrounded himself with worthless men. The Lord Jesus Christ was accused of being a glutton and a wine-biber. What? A friend of tax collectors and sinners. Although Gilead calls him, Jephthah is ultimately God's judge. We'll see that as we work through the text. And as God's judge, Jephthah points to the one who would eventually come and deliver his people from their sins. He would be head over his body, the church. We think about the parallels there between Jephthah and the Lord Jesus Christ and God's people, the time of the judges and God's people, the church now. We are the ones who are born illegitimate, aren't we? We are the ones who are born illegitimate. We are the worthless ones, the rake. We are the morally reprehensible ones. We are the ones who deserve to be despised and rejected. And yet he, the Lord Jesus Christ, is the one who is despised and rejected for us. And he is the one who calls us friends. This should compel in us a love for the Lord Jesus Christ, a love for our God, a gratitude for all that he has done for us wrought within us by his spirit. This should cause us, compel us to cling to him, to lay hold of him for far more than merely what we can get from him. I remember growing up and hearing basic truths associated with the gospel and having no interest whatsoever in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. No appreciation for, no awe and wonder over the excellency of his person, the greatness of who he is. I just wanted to be in heaven.  And so really had no concern with whether Jesus would be there when I got there or not. I just, in it for what I could get from him. And many, sadly to say, it's tragic, many have those very same thoughts.  I want to go to heaven. Looks like this is the way to do it. I'm going to put a religious veneer. I'm going to put a shine, a religious shine on the whole thing. And I'm just going to go along, to get along. It is what I want from him. It's for me, it's what I want. And when the going gets tough, when the heat of the sun comes out and beats upon that little so-called plastic plant, it withers and dies under the heat of persecution, under the heat of worldly cares, under the heat of adversity. When that one is tried in the fire, it comes out tested and proven worthless. We must live for the Lord Jesus Christ as more than simply a spiritual pes dispenser. Some fall out of line and out of fear, they cry out to have their selfish need met to have a guilty conscience placated. When they get to the place where they feel as though they have it, they're right back like the brazen harlot living for themselves. And the tragic pattern repeats itself all over again. Where's the love? Where's the love? Until such a time, when the Lord finally says, no, I will give them over to a debased mind. I will give them over, the Lord says. It's the wrath of God's abandonment.  The Lord is worthy, worthy of our lives, worthy of our worship, worthy of our love, worthy of our devotion, worthy of all that we are and we should in love and in gratitude give it and pray, God, God, please, please change my wretched heart, change my wayward heart. Lord, I am prone to wander. You know it, God, please work in me steadfast faithfulness, steadfast love and devotion to you. And the Lord is the one who does that. Amen.  He's worthy of that. Let us not fall into this pattern of treating him like these Israelites, treated him. The Lord is not silent. He doesn't sit on the sidelines. The Lord is near if you will call upon him in faith. Amen. Amen. Let's pray. Father in heaven, we love you. We look to you, Lord, as the one who has created us, given us life and breath. You sustain us, Lord. You've done so much good to us, for us. And we look to you, Lord, in gratitude and thank you, Lord, for all these many kindnesses, these examples of your immutable goodness, your immeasurable goodness and kindness to us. And we, Lord, turn to you from our sin and repentance and in faith, trusting you, Lord Jesus Christ, for what you have done for us on the cross, the perfect life that you live, fully satisfying the just demands of God's law, taking the sacrifice, the penalty that we deserve, taking that upon yourself, bearing that in our place, Lord, and we just in awe of that grace and mercy, we look to you in faith, trusting you, Lord, in all things. Give us the strength to trust you. Give us the strength to persevere. Give us the strength by your spirit, Lord, to cling steadfastly to you and not to presume in times of difficulty or adversity to take matters into our own hands, like frankly, like these faithless Israelites, not turning to you in dependence upon you, not seeking your will, your face, and protect us from such foolishness, Lord. Protect us from such sin and help us to depend upon you. Preserve us, grow us, mature us in these things we pray in Jesus' name and for his sake. Amen.


Years ago we were begging people to talk about disability in business, now we're leading them. You cannot have an Alucard approach to inclusion. Inclusion is all for everyone and that needs to be reflected in business as well as society.


Hello everyone, apparently I'm the first speaker. And so one thing you notice about this room we're in is it's very dark. We are on chairs and we are indoors in the air conditioning. And that's pretty par for the course for a conference. You go and sit inside in a boring room with gray walls and no natural light. So I'm here to tell you about there's another way and this other way is hillhacks. We call it a conference with a view. We also call it a lot of other things. But every year we go to the sprawling foothills of the Himalayas in the northeast of India. And we go and sit on a hill and we go and hack and we go and make things. And we generally have a good time. So this year at the end of May, at the last two weeks of May, we are going to this paradise on earth. We found a beautiful venue in a village called Bir, which is also known as a paragliding capital of the world. So if you enjoy leaping off mountains attached to an aerofoil, you might find this fun. I know that there's a paragliding course the weekends before hillhacks. But we actually do have a genuine conference there. We have this beautiful structure. You see in the middle photo and you see a satellite dish there. Our internet may or may not come in through there. And we have technical talks on a variety of subjects. We have a bunch of operating system hackers, me. We have people from Chaos Computer Club. We have people from all over the world just descend on the hills, not necessarily paragliding, to come and talk about their fun things. There is never a moment at this conference. So occasionally the weather requires us to disconnect from the internet because power goes away. No power, no internet. At which point we just go and find creative things to do, like turn light bulbs into globes, or we find out that we have a circus artist with us who likes to teach hula hooping. So if you would like to go and learn about hula hooping, you should turn up in the hills and join us there.  So if you have little projects, microcontrollers or whatever, bring them with you and play with them. We also run a school program where we go out to local schools in the villages around our temporary conference installation and we go and teach them about maths and science and general hacking. We try not to use the word hacking because that has cultural connotations which we try not to evoke. But if this sort of thing interests you, if you know the scenery, the weather, never a dull moment, then you should join us in the hills. This year we start the 15th of May and we go until the 31st of May. The actual real conference with a program and submissions and talks and a schedule and all sorts of structure and form is the 18th to the 21st of May and before that we have three days of setting up, just getting comfortable setting up the internet, trying to set up the internet. Then after the main conference we have two weeks roughly of lounging and just hacking and having fun, working on our own projects and enjoying ourselves. If you want to join us, you should definitely go and look at hillhacks.in and see if you find anything that piques your interest. If you would like to give a presentation, you should sign up on our OSM. Unfortunately we cannot pay for your travel to the hills but an economical way to get there is to get an aerofoil and just leap off a taller hill and just descend on our village. If you do that I will personally buy you a beer to welcome you to the conference. So join us. We are particularly looking for people who enjoy teaching. If you are a teacher or you like teaching shorter people of a younger age, you should talk to me and I can tell you everything about our school program and you should come to the hills. Yes, hello. People bring kids. People bring kids, yes. People bring their own kids. They don't just kidnap them and bring them with them. They actually have their own children and bring them with them.  So if you, yeah, take your kids to India. Yes, I'm supposed to wrap up allegedly. Any questions in my last 24 seconds? No? Right, come to the hills.


In the public debate, it is often assumed that the widespread availability of fatty food is responsible for bad eating habits, obesity, and cardiovascular diseases. However, there are larger therogenities in the responses to the availability of fatty food and they remain unexplained even if one accounts for many socioeconomic factors. Τα πράγματα που προσπαθούνται σε αυτή η πράγματα είναι να καταστρέψουμε αν η σκάρση τεμπωρική της καλύτερης στις καλύτερες κατάστασης να παίρνει μια καλύτερη στις καλύτερες ανάγκες. Πρώτας, εμείς φοκορήσουμε σε Ιταλία και εμείς συμμετέραμε αντιμετωπίες που παίρνουν τη χαρά τους δύο μέχρι World War II και που εξηγήσαν την καταστρέψη. Και θέλουμε να δούμε αν αυτές οι αντιμετωπίες, όταν they grow up, have a higher probability of eating meat every day. We also want to understand whether this long-run reaction differs by gender and whether these effects afterwards persist to the next generation. To answer this question, we bring together information at the regional level on the local availability of meat with individual level information on eating habits, body mass index and other health-related outcomes. We obtain regional level data by hand collecting information on the number of livestock using the censuses and the annual statistics of agriculture in 41-42 and in 44-45. We then merge this data with survey data that allow us to observe at the individual level the eating habits and other health-related outcomes. We proxy the availability of meat at the regional level using the decrease in the number of livestock that we observe. This is a good proxy of the local availability of meat for two reasons. First of all, during World War II in Italy, there was rationing. So there was a ration card with which people could acquire basic goods, including meat in established quantities. And these quantities were depending on the availability of the food. This is why many people had to rely on the black market to get more food. But of course, if there was not enough livestock, then also the price in the black market would be very high and people would be able to get meat neither through rationing nor through the black market. So what we do in order to understand whether the scarcity of meat leads to overconsumption of meat later on is to exploit cohort and the regional level variation in a difference-in-difference framework. First, we define the treated cohort as those individuals who passed their childhood during World War II and we compare them to the controlled cohort who are the individuals who passed their childhood after World War II. But of course, there are different individuals living in different regions that were exposed to higher or lower meat scarcity. This method allows us to estimate the causal effect of meat scarcity during childhood on individual living habits later in life. Our key finding is that the temporary scarcity of meat early in life increases the probability of eating meat every day later on. We find also that this effect is particularly strong among females that aged zero to during World War II. We provide suggestive evidence that this gender difference can be explained by preferential treatment of parents toward sons. Going back to our historical data, we find that among children aged two years old during World War II, girls experienced larger losses in weight than boys. This is compatible with a possible story that parents were prioritizing sons over daughters in the allocation of the scarce quantity of meat. How can we explain the findings for children that were so young during World War II? One possibility is that it is a result of a compensatory investment by the parents. So when World War II finished, parents tried to offset the meat scarcity that their daughters experienced during World War II by overcompensating them with meat. Subsequently, these girls developed an increased desire for meat and started to consume it more and more and more. Given that meat is rich in fat, its overconsumption can have negative consequences on individual health. Indeed, we find that among females who passed their childhood during World War II in regions that were more exposed to meat scarcity, their body mass index is higher. They have a higher probability of being overweight and also of suffering from cardiovascular diseases. We provide two sets of evidence in favor of a behavioral mechanism. First of all, all the increase in body mass index that we find is due to increases in weight rather than decreases in height. This means that the behavioral mechanism is at work while a biological that we cannot exclude with more point towards drops in height. Second, we also use information on household level consumption and we see that in households with a treated female member, the share of food expenditure over total is higher. These two evidence together suggest that a behavioral mechanism is at work. We then extend our analysis to the next generation and we study the children of the mothers that were affected by meat scarcity during World War II. What we find is that overconsumption of meat persists also in the next generation. We also develop a theoretical model in order to give intuition to our empirical results. The model shows that the first generation that experience meat scarcity acquires a habit and an increased desire for meat while the second generation that actually experienced meat abundance acquires a taste for meat that reinforces its consumption. Our research makes an important contribution to the literature but also has policy implications. First, while most of the literature that studies the effect of early life experiences focuses on biological mechanisms, we uncover a behavioral mechanism. These mechanisms operate through overconsumption and through overcompensation of parents and we show that it can have adverse consequences on health later in life. In some cases, like in the one we explained in this paper, the behavioral channel may dominate the biological one. This suggests that future research should take into consideration both channels. Our findings suggest that when policymakers want to make interventions or to implement taxes, they need to take into account these behavioral mechanisms and the long run effects. A temporary tax that is designed to actually decrease the consumption of the good may backfire in the future and have the adverse effects if it is not permanent. There are two possible avenues for future research. The first is to apply more widely models of habit formation when studying parental investments. The second is to try to directly measure compensatory investments by parents in order to better understand how people react to adverse shocks. All in all, a temporary shock in early life can have persistent effects on preferences and attitudes of multiple generations. This transmission of attitudes may actually be a channel through which economic variables like consumption or savings significantly correlate among generations.


If you could redo your freshman year over again, what's one or two things that you would change or alter? If I can redo my freshman year, I would take care of things here now in the present rather than save it later because it would just save you a lot of trouble and you're not playing the catch-up game the whole time. And I must rather have a cushion to fall back on rather than like feel behind with my whole college career. Yeah, care now. I'll join ESC and go to all ESC. I think that would have really changed everything. I didn't have any friends with my freshman year. It was really, really sad. What is the ESC friend I had with my groupie who I knew from high school so they didn't even count? What is the ESC? ESC is the Ethnic Student Center and that's where I met everyone. I knew. It's my sophomore year. Latino Student Union, that's where I met Jeff. Salsa, South Asian Student Association, HOA. It's really awesome. We abroad and somewhere you wouldn't normally go. Not Europe. Somewhere more interesting. Somewhere totally different from where you come from. And do math because it's important and it takes a long time to get through all of that.  It helps you get used to yourself. I think I would join more clubs if I could change something because it really gives you a friend group to just start a basis off of. And even if they don't become close friends, you at least have networking and some connections throughout campus which I think is extremely important. Don't get wrapped up in dorm life. Read your textbook and actually do your homework if it's not required. I think one of the main things that I would change is getting to know my advisor earlier than later and sort of figuring out what you want to do earlier than later so you don't waste too much time not knowing. And definitely in the beginning pre-red classes paying more attention because getting a good grade in that determines how far you are going to go. So a lot of times when you're a freshman, your peers and older people will tell you that you don't need to worry about what your major is right now but actually that ends up putting you behind because you end up taking classes that maybe you didn't need and like your GRs might not overlap with the pre-rex that you could have them overlap with. So I would say spend like the beginning part as soon as you come to school trying to figure out what you're actually going to major in so you're not here for longer than you actually need to be. Get out and join more clubs and meet more people because it's really sad if all you do is homework all the time.


How's everybody doing? Awesome. Cool. We're going to talk about optimizing WordPress for SEO. Who's doing their own, basically managing their own website and content in their own WordPress site? Cool.  OK. Who doesn't know what SEO is? All right. Everybody knows. Everybody has a general idea. Good. So WordPress, out of the box, is really good for SEO. It's very clean. If you remember the default themes over the years that you install and run, and you can actually have a website up and running pretty quickly, it's one of the wonderful things about WordPress. And it's like why WordPress is powering about a quarter of all the websites on the web. However, we love to tinker. We love to play with our websites, make it look pretty, make it look unique, which, yeah, that's what we are. We're all unique and we want to make our websites look unique. But sometimes when we get unique, we start tinkering and start throwing things on our website that really slow it down, or don't have a lot of text showing, or we just do things that make it even more difficult for search engines to find the content on our website. But if we tweak it, then we have big happy face, right? Then we really make it an SEO-friendly platform and website. But first, this is assuming three things about your website. We can do all kinds of tweaks to the website, but really, you need to have unique and compelling content on the website as it is. And when I say unique, I mean content that is yours, that belongs to you, not content that you've sourced from other places. Also, having backlinks pointing to your site, Google looks at backlinks as an authoritative vote, if you will, to let Google know that, hey, this content is getting linked too often. There must be a reason for that. So having good quality backlinks from reputable sources is important. Also, that you're not currently under a spam penalty, that you haven't done some SEO trickery or hired a black cat SEO to do your SEO, and that you're not under a spam penalty, but there are fixes for that. So a little about me. I am a digital marketing consultant. My company is Papai Internet. My name is Bobby Kircher. I wrote my first computer program on an Apple IIe, like when I was eight, I think, and I learned a valuable lesson about text and naming files, and I had an extra space in my file, and I couldn't get it to work because I had an extra space in my file, and that still applies today. There's a difference between having hyphens and spaces and special characters in between your file names. So I started my web design career in development in 1998. I started doing SEO in 2002, and I started my company Papai Internet in 2004. So I speak Spanish, and my mom's Cuban, so I grew up speaking both Spanish and English in my house. I love improv. That's one of my favorite things to do when I'm not behind the computer, and I collect roadmaps and vinyl records, and I'm a super fan of RuPaul's Drag Race. Work! All right. So I love that. So why is SEO important? Why is it important for us to think about SEO and optimize our websites? So SEO helps people find your website. How many times have you looked for your website, and you're like, why am I not showing up? I can't find it. Why am I not there? So designing a website and optimizing it is important for search engines to find it, and then also, as a result, important for people to find it. So today, we're going to cover configuring WordPress. We're going to talk a little bit about SEO plugins and other tools that you can use, and then, if we have time, do some Q&A after. So let's start with configuring WordPress. But if you do one thing to configure your WordPress, and you don't take anything away from my talk today, the one thing you should do, if you haven't done already, is uncheck this box. This box is probably one of the clearest things that you can see in the WordPress admin. This just explicitly says, discourage search engines from indexing this website. And if you have that checked, then you should uncheck that. Number one. So I'm going to get into talking about permalinks and slugs and what's important about that. If you're familiar, this is the permalink settings that you find under within the Settings menu. And this has been updated within the last few WordPress iterations. Here is, back in the day, if you notice, there was the plain setting. Just about every website, or WordPress website, does not use that setting anymore. But there are still some that linger. I'm sorry. No, sorry. Yeah, I apologize. These texts may not be the largest. But if you notice that there is a custom structure, and that's where you can really set your post name and change your blog, URL, and your settings there for permalink settings. And so using post name, which is pretty common, allows you to utilize the slug within your posts and pages. So here's a look at what the slug looks like when you're editing a page. If you notice this page is about Marko Island beaches, the permalink structure shows the slug as beaches. And I have this organized in a way where it is using the page hierarchy for the slug. Some thoughts about slugs, like some rule of thumb kind of things, is to make it easy to read and share. These are going to be the links of your pages and posts. So you want to make sure that it's easy to read and easy to share. You want to utilize keywords that is about the topic of the content, but you don't want to overdo it. If you start keyword stuffing it, it'll look really funny, just visually to your own eyes, but also look really funny to the search engines. Once you set your slug, just try to set it and keep it without changing it. But if you do have to change it, let's say you threw a bunch of keywords into your slug and you want to clean it up a little bit, you can use 301 redirects to point the slug to the new slug. So WordPress is a really good job with categories and tags.  And some people don't understand the difference between the two. I've seen people use tags as categories and categories as tags, so let's dive into the details. So with categories, I like to think of it as a pyramid. It provides an organizational structure for your content. With the categories, it's like when you think of a news site or a library, libraries are organized by types of books, fiction, nonfiction. And then even within fiction and nonfiction, you have biographies or you have novels. Thinking about categories is like thinking about how you organize your own library. And within these little categories, you can turn these into landing pages, so you can optimize even the content on these categories that you're classifying your content as. And within that, you can set your category titles, you can set a page title attribute, you can set your meta descriptions, you can add unique content to those pages and use that as basically a landing page for the content that you have on your site. With tags, you're getting into specific details about the content that you have. Think of like a recipe site that has a category for desserts, right? And the ingredients for that dessert would be like a metaphor for tagging.  What can I make with avocados? You can go through the tag of an avocado and see all the different recipes you can create with avocados. It doesn't necessarily have to be dinner, it could be an appetizer, it could be all kinds of meals that you can create with it. So with tags, it's more honing in on the type of content that you have. And not all sites need it. Your site may not need tags. And if you don't need tags or if you've used tags that are just becoming unwieldy, you can no index those tags so they don't get indexed by the search engines. Cool. So mobile is a big deal. It powers half of all Google searches are now on a mobile device. Who has a cell phone in here? OK. How smart is your cell phone? Is it a flip phone or is it a? And how many of you are actually using your phones to do searches on the web, like to use Google? Awesome. OK. Yeah. So as our devices are getting faster, these pocket computers are becoming more of a go-to for performing searches and doing the things that we want to do on the web. And Google knows that. So this number is probably going to continue to grow. How many of you are using your mobile device more than your home desktop do you feel? OK. So a few of you. Google understands this. Google knows this. And it is now pushing for their mobile first index. They're looking at the mobile version of the site as the default index for the search results of the mobile version of your site. So it's considering the mobile version as your primary version of your site. How many of you are using M dots for your mobile versions? OK, good. That means you all have mobile responsive websites. Do you all know what I mean by M dot? OK. So back in the day before WordPress and for other websites, before themes were coded as responsive, you would put in a plug-in to show a mobile version of that page. Do you remember those? OK. So some websites actually have an M dot for that version or a separate version of the website that would show an M dot domain name dot com or domain dot net. If you have that version of a website, then that website is going to be indexed first before the desktop. So it's important to have a mobile responsive website, a website that performs well within a mobile device. So one of the solutions that WordPress and Google have offered is using AMP, which is Accelerated Mobile Pages. It's an open source initiative. It's available via plug-in through WordPress. And you can go to ampproject.org for more information. Me personally, I don't recommend it for every website. There's a lot of configuration you have to put into place to make sure that your content displays the way you want it to. So work with a developer.  If you notice doing Google searches, especially for news sites, and you notice this lightning bolt that you see there in the news pages, that means that website is serving an AMP page. And they do load quickly. It really isn't for everybody. At least I can say it's for everybody quite yet. Who's done a site speed test on their website? Cool. Dude, you guys are on it, man. You understand this a little more than most. I don't know exactly what you're doing with it. OK. Cool. So it looks red. You're like, what? OK. So there's this three-second rule that most people who land on a website, if it takes longer than three seconds to load, they'll probably bounce. Here's something about this fact. This was done by Akamai a while ago. This was back in 2009 that this was determined. That's almost 10 years ago. Yeah. It's hard to believe, right? This still applies today. And there's still a lot of websites that don't follow this rule. I use a tool called GTmetrics. And here's a result from a website that I've worked on that shows the load times for that site. You can see it's got D and E's for their grading system. But the big number is that 9.7 seconds that you see there for the full load time. That's a really long time.  Waiting 9 seconds for that page to load, I'm probably going to go elsewhere. And Google understands that. And Google wants to have everybody to have a good search experience. So they really look for a fast loading website. So here are some places where you can check for your site speed. GTmetrics is one of my favorites. Webpagetest.org is also a good resource that really breaks it down, down to the different types of content that's loading. Google PageSpeed Insights is also very good. And you can also check within your Chrome settings if you go into your developer or go into Inspect and look at all the different developer tools. There's a lighthouse within Chrome now, where you can do an audit and a speed test. So some of the ways that you can help improve your speed is look at your code. The theme that you use, are you using a theme that was coded well and clean? There's a lot of themes out there. One of the great things about WordPress is that, and it's such a huge adoption, is that there's so many plugins and resources and themes that you can use. But not all of them are made equal. So take a look at your code or work with a developer that can help you look at your code and see how clean it is. Also, if you have plugins installed, are you using them? Are you fully utilizing them? Are you a plugin collector? I may use this later. So I'm just going to keep this on and active and see maybe one point. I'll use it. Don't. If you haven't used it yet and you're not planning on using it right away, disable it. All of those plugins will impact performance and speed on your site. Also, is your theme responsive? Is it rendering really nice on a mobile device and loading quickly? Another reason why this is update, another reason why speed is important is because of Google's speed update. They announced this in January. It's coming July 2018. Thanks, Jessica. Good morning, everybody. How's everybody doing? Awesome. Cool. We're going to talk about optimizing WordPress for SEO. Who's doing their own, basically managing their own website and content and their own WordPress site? Cool.  OK. Who doesn't know what SEO is? Everybody knows. Everybody has a general idea. Good. So WordPress, out of the box, is really good for SEO. It's very clean. If you remember the default themes over the years that you install and run, and you can actually have a website up and running pretty quickly, it's one of the wonderful things about WordPress. And it's why WordPress is powering about a quarter of all the websites on the web. However, we love to tinker. We love to play with our websites, make it look pretty, make it look unique, which, yeah, that's what we are. We're all unique and we want to make our websites look unique. But sometimes when we get unique, we start tinkering and start throwing things on our website that really slow it down, or don't have a lot of text showing, or we just do things that make it even more difficult for search engines to find the content on our website. But if we tweak it, then we have big happen face, right? Then we really make it an SEO-friendly platform and website. But first, this is assuming three things about your website. We can do all kinds of tweaks to the website. But really, you need to have unique and compelling content on the website as it is. And when I say unique, I mean content that is yours that belongs to you, not content that you've sourced from other places. Also, having backlinks pointing to your site, Google looks at backlinks as an authoritative vote, if you will, to let Google know that, hey, this content is getting linked too often. There must be a reason for that. So having good quality backlinks from reputable sources is important.  But there are fixes for that. So a little about me. I am a digital marketing consultant. My company is Popeye Internet. My name is Bobby Kurcher. I wrote my first computer program on an Apple IIe, like when I was eight, I think. And I learned a valuable lesson about text and naming files. And I had an extra space in my file, and I couldn't get to work because I had an extra space in my file. And that still applies today. There's a difference between having hyphens and spaces and special characters in between your file names. So I started my web design career in development in 1998. I started doing SEO in 2002. And I started my company, Popeye Internet, in 2004. So I speak Spanish. My mom's Cuban, so I grew up speaking both Spanish and English in my house. I love improv. That's one of my favorite things to do when I'm not behind the computer. And I collect roadmaps and vinyl records. And I'm a super fan of RuPaul's Drag Race. Work! All right. So I love that. So why is SEO important? Why is it important for us to think about SEO and optimize our websites? So SEO helps people find your website. How many times have you looked for your website and you're like, why am I not showing up? I can't find it. Why am I not there? So designing a website and optimizing it is important for search engines to find it and then also, as a result, important for people to find it. So today, we're going to cover configuring WordPress. We're going to talk a little bit about SEO plugins and other tools that you can use. And then if we have time, do some Q&A after. So let's start with configuring WordPress. But if you do one thing to configure your WordPress, and you don't take anything away from my talk today, the one thing you should do, if you haven't done already, is uncheck this box. This box is probably one of the clearest things that you can see in the WordPress admin. This just explicitly says, discourage search engines from indexing this website. And if you have that checked, then you should uncheck that. So number one. So I'm going to get into talking about permalinks and slugs and what's important about that. If you're familiar, this is the permalink settings that you find under within the Settings menu. And this has been updated within the last few WordPress iterations. Back in the day, if you notice, there was the plain setting. Just about every website, or WordPress website, does not use that setting anymore. But there are still some that linger. I'm sorry. Do I make it bigger? No, sorry. Yeah. So I apologize. These texts may not be the largest. But if you notice that there is a custom structure, and that's where you can really set your post name and change your blog, URL, and your settings there for permalink settings. And so using post name, which is pretty common, allows you to utilize the slug within your posts and pages. So here's a look at what the slug looks like when you're editing a page. If you notice, this page is about Marko Island beaches. The permalink structure shows the slug as beaches. And I have this organized in a way where it is using the page hierarchy for the slug. Some thoughts about slugs, like some rule of thumb kind of things, is to make it easy to read and share. These are going to be the links of your pages and posts. So you want to make sure that it's easy to read and easy to share. You want to utilize keywords that is about the topic of the content, but you don't want to overdo it. If you start keyword stuffing it, it'll look really funny, just visually to your own eyes, but also look really funny to the search engines. Once you set your slug, just try to set it and keep it without changing it. But if you do have to change it, let's say you threw a bunch of keywords into your slug and you want to clean it up a little bit, you can use 301 redirects to point the slug to the new slug. So WordPress is a really good job with categories and tags.  And some people don't understand the difference between the two. I've seen people use tags as categories and categories as tags, so let's dive into the details. So with categories, I like to think of it as a pyramid. It provides an organizational structure for your content. With the categories, it's like when you think of a news site or a library, libraries are organized by types of books, fiction, nonfiction. And then even within fiction and nonfiction, you have biographies or you have novels. Thinking about categories is like thinking about how you organize your own library. And within these little categories, you can turn these into landing pages. So you can optimize even the content on these categories that you're classifying your content as. And within that, you can set your category titles, you can set a page title attribute, you can set your meta descriptions, you can add unique content to those pages and use that as basically a landing page for the content that you have on your site. With tags, you're getting into specific details about the content that you have. Think of like a recipe site that has a category for desserts, right? And the ingredients for that dessert would be like a metaphor for tagging.  What can I make with avocados? You can go through the tag of an avocado and see all the different recipes you can create with avocados. It doesn't necessarily have to be dinner. It could be an appetizer. It could be all kinds of meals that you can create with it. So with tags, you want to, it's more honing in on the type of content that you have. And not all sites need it. Your site may not need tags. And if you don't need tags or if you've used tags that are just becoming unwieldy, you can no index those tags so they don't get indexed by the search engines. Cool. So mobile, mobile is a big deal. It powers, half of all Google searches are now on a mobile device. Who has a cell phone in here? OK, how smart is your cell phone? Is it a flip phone or is it a? And how many of you are actually using your phones to do searches on the web, like to use Google? Awesome. OK, yeah. So as our devices are getting faster, these pocket computers are becoming more of a go-to for performing searches and doing the things that we want to do on the web. And Google knows that. And this number is probably going to continue to grow. How many of you are using your mobile device more than your home desktop, do you feel? OK, yeah, so a few of you. Google understands this. Google knows this. And it is now pushing for their mobile-first index. They're looking at the mobile version of the site as the default index for the search results of the mobile version of your site. So it's considering the mobile version as your primary version of your site. How many of you are using mDots for your mobile versions? OK, good. That means you all have mobile-responsive websites. Do you all know what I mean by mDot? OK, so back in the day before themes for WordPress and for other websites, before themes were coded as responsive, you would put in a plug-in to show a mobile version of that page. Do you remember those? OK, so some websites actually have an mDot for that version, or a separate version of the website that would show an m.domainame.com or domain.net. So now if you have that version of a website, then that website is going to be indexed first before the desktop. So it's important to have a mobile-responsive website and a website that performs well within a mobile device. So one of the solutions that WordPress and Google have offered is using AMP, which is Accelerated Mobile Pages. It's an open-source initiative. It's available via plug-in through WordPress. And you can go to ampproject.org for more information. Me personally, I don't recommend it for every website. There's a lot of configuration you have to put into place to make sure that your content displays the way you want it to. So work with a developer.  If you notice doing Google searches, especially for news sites, and you notice this lightning bolt that you see there in the news pages, that means that website is serving an AMP page. And they do load quickly. It really isn't for everybody. At least I can say it's for everybody quite yet. Site speed. Who's done a site speed test on their website? Cool. Dude, you guys are on it, man. You understand this a little more than most. OK. Cool. So it looks red. You're like, what? OK. So there's this three-second rule that most people who land on a website, if it takes longer than three seconds to load, they'll probably bounce. Here's something about this fact. This was done by Akamai a while ago. This was back in 2009 that this was determined. That's almost 10 years ago. Yeah, it's hard to believe, right? This still applies today. And there's still a lot of websites that don't follow this rule. I use a tool called GTmetrics. And here's a result from a website that I've worked on that shows the load times for that site. You can see it's got D and E's for their grading system. But the big number is that 9.7 seconds that you see there for the full load time. That's a really long time.  Waiting 9 seconds for that page to load, I'm probably going to go elsewhere. And Google understands that. And Google wants to have everybody to have a good search experience. So they really look for a fast-loading website. So here are some places where you can check for your site speed. GTmetrics is one of my favorites. Webpagetest.org is also a good resource that really breaks it down down to the different types of content that's loading. Google PageSpeed Insights is also very good. And you can also check within your Chrome settings if you go into your developer or go into Inspect and look at all the different developer tools. There's a lighthouse within Chrome now where you can do an audit and a speed test. So some of the ways that you can help improve your speed is look at your code. The theme that you use, are you using a theme that was coded well and clean? There's a lot of themes out there. One of the great things about WordPress is that, and it's such a huge adoption, is that there's so many plugins and resources and themes that you can use. But not all of them are made equal. So take a look at your code or work with a developer that can help you look at your code and see how clean it is. Also, if you have plugins installed, are you using them? Are you fully utilizing them? Or are you a plugin collector? I may use this later, so I'm just going to keep this on and active and see maybe one point. I'll use it. Don't. If you haven't used it yet and you're not planning on using it right away, disable it. All of those plugins will impact performance and speed on your site. Also, is your theme responsive? Is it rendering really nice on a mobile device and loading quickly? Another reason why speed is important is because of Google's speed update. They announced this in January. It's coming July 2018. Thanks, Jessica. Good morning, everybody. How's everybody doing? Awesome. Cool. We're going to talk about optimizing WordPress for SEO. Who's doing their own basically managing their own website and content in their own WordPress site? Cool.  OK. Who doesn't know what SEO is? All right. Everybody knows. Everybody has a general idea. Good. So WordPress, out of the box, is really good for SEO. It's very clean. If you remember the default themes over the years that you install and run, and you can actually have a website up and running pretty quickly, it's one of the wonderful things about WordPress. And it's like why WordPress is powering about a quarter of all the websites on the web. However, we love to tinker. We love to play with our websites, make it look pretty, make it look unique, which, yeah, that's what we are. We're all unique and we want to make our websites look unique. But sometimes when we get unique, we start tinkering and start throwing things on our website that really slow it down, or don't have a lot of text showing, or we just do things that make it even more difficult for search engines to find the content on our website. But if we tweak it, then we have big happy face, right? Then we really make it an SEO-friendly platform and website. But first, this is assuming three things about your website. We can do all kinds of tweaks to the website, but really, you need to have unique and compelling content on the website as it is. And when I say unique, I mean content that is yours, that belongs to you, not content that you've sourced from other places. Also, having backlinks pointing to your site, Google looks at backlinks as an authoritative vote, if you will, to let Google know that, hey, this content is getting linked too often. There must be a reason for that. So having good quality backlinks from reputable sources is important. Also, that you're not currently under a spam penalty, that you haven't done some SEO trickery or hired a Black Hat SEO to do your SEO and that you're not under a spam penalty, but there are fixes for that. So a little about me. I am a digital marketing consultant. My company is Papai Internet. My name is Bobby Kircher. I wrote my first computer program on an Apple IIe, like when I was eight, I think. And I learned a valuable lesson about text and naming files. And I had an extra space in my file, and I couldn't get it to work because I had an extra space in my file. And that still applies today. There's a difference between having hyphens and spaces and special characters in between your file names. So I started my web design career development in 1998. I started doing SEO in 2002. And I started my company Papai Internet in 2004. So I speak Spanish. My mom's Cuban. So I grew up speaking both Spanish and English in my house. I love improv. That's one of my favorite things to do when I'm not behind the computer. And I collect roadmaps and vinyl records. And I'm a super fan of RuPaul's Drag Race. Work! All right. So I love that. So why is SEO important? Why is it important for us to think about SEO and optimize our websites? So SEO helps people find your website. How many times have you looked for your website and you're like, why am I not showing up? I can't find it. Why am I not there? So designing a website and optimizing it is important for search engines to find it. And then also, as a result, important for people to find it. So today, we're going to cover configuring WordPress. We're going to talk a little bit about SEO plugins and other tools that you can use. And then, if we have time, do some Q&A after. So let's start with configuring WordPress. But if you do one thing to configure your WordPress, and you don't take anything away from my talk today, the one thing you should do, if you haven't done already, is uncheck this box. This box is probably one of the clearest things that you can see in the WordPress admin. It just explicitly says, discourage search engines from indexing this website. And if you have that checked, then you should uncheck that. So let's go back to the first thing that we're going to talk about. So let's go back to the first thing that we're going to talk about is permalinks and slugs, and what's important about that. If you're familiar, this is the permalink settings that you find under within the settings menu. And this has been updated within the last few WordPress iterations. Back in the day, if you notice, the plain setting, just about every website, or WordPress website, does not use that setting anymore. But there are still some that linger. I'm sorry. No, sorry. So if, yeah, I apologize. These texts may not be the best, the largest. But if you notice that there is a custom structure, and that's where you can really set your post name and change your blog URL and your settings there for permalink settings. And so using post name, which is pretty common, allows you to utilize the slug within your posts and pages. So here's a look at what the slug looks like when you're editing a page. If you notice, this page is about Marko Island beaches. The permalink structure shows the slug as beaches. And I have this organized in a way where it is using the page hierarchy for the slug. Some thoughts about slugs, like some rule of thumb kind of things, is to make it easy to read and share. These are going to be the links of your pages and posts. So you want to make sure that it's easy to read and easy to share. You want to utilize keywords that is about the topic of the content, but you don't want to overdo it. If you start keyword stuffing it, it'll look really funny, just visually to your own eyes, but also look really funny to the search engines. Once you set your slug, just try to set it and keep it without changing it.  So WordPress is a really good job with categories and tags.  And some people don't understand the difference between the two. I've seen people use tags as categories and categories as tags, so let's dive into the details. So with categories, I like to think of it as a pyramid. It provides an organizational structure for your content. With the categories, it's like when you think of like a news site or a library, libraries are organized by types of books, fiction, nonfiction. And then even within fiction and nonfiction, you have like biographies, or you have novels. Thinking about categories is like thinking about how you organize your own library. And within these little categories, you can turn these into landing pages. So you can optimize even the content on these categories that you're classifying your content as. And within that, you can set your page, your category titles, you can set a page title attribute, you can set your meta descriptions, you can add unique content to those pages and use that as basically a landing page for the content that you have on your site. With tags, you're getting into specific details about the content that you have. Think of like a recipe site that has a category for desserts. And the ingredients for that dessert would be like a metaphor for tagging.  What can I make with avocados? You can go through the tag of an avocado and see all the different recipes you can create with avocados. It doesn't necessarily have to be dinner. It could be an appetizer. It could be all kinds of meals that you could create with it. So with tags, you want to just, it's more honing in on the type of content that you have. And not all sites need it. Your site may not need tags. And if you don't need tags or if you use tags that are just becoming unwieldy, you can no index those tags so they don't get indexed by the search engines. Cool. So mobile is a big deal. It powers half of all Google searches are now on a mobile device. Who has a cell phone in here? OK. How smart is your cell phone? Is it a flip phone or is it a, right? And how many of you are actually using your phones to do searches on the web, like to use Google? Awesome. OK. Yeah. So as our devices are getting faster, these pocket computers, right, are becoming more of a go-to for performing searches and doing the things that we want to do on the web. And Google knows that. So, and this number is probably going to continue to grow, how many of you are using your mobile device more than your home desktop do you feel? OK. Yeah, so a few of you. Google understands this. Google knows this. And it is now pushing for their mobile first index. They're looking at the mobile version of the site as the default index for the search results of the mobile version of your site. So it's considering the mobile version as your primary version of your site. How many of you are using mDots for your mobile versions? OK, good. That means you all have mobile responsive websites. Do you all know what I mean by mDot? OK, so if you maybe, so back in the day before themes for WordPress and for other websites, before themes were coded as responsive, you would put in a plug-in to show the mobile version of that page. Do you remember those? OK, so some websites actually have an mDot for that version or a separate version of the website that would show an m dot domain name dot com or domain dot net. So now if you have that version of a website, then that website is going to be indexed first before the desktop. So it's important to have a mobile responsive website that performs well within a mobile device. So one of the solutions that WordPress and Google have offered is using AMP, which is Accelerated Mobile Pages. It's an open source initiative. It's available via plug-in through WordPress. And you can go to ampproject.org for more information. It is not, I don't recommend, me personally, I don't recommend it for every website. There's a lot of configuration you have to put into place to make sure that your content displays the way you want it to. So work with a developer.  If you notice doing Google searches, especially for new sites, and you notice this lightning bolt that you see there in the news pages, that means that website is serving an AMP page. And they do load quickly. It really isn't for everybody. At least I can't say it's for everybody quite yet. Site speed. Who's done a site speed test on their website? Cool. Dude, you guys are on it, man. You understand this a little more than most. I don't know exactly what you're doing with it. OK. Cool. So it looks red. You're like, what? OK. So there's this three-second rule that most people who land on a website, if it takes longer than three seconds to load, they'll probably bounce. Here's something about this fact. This was done by Akamai a while ago. This was back in 2009 that this was determined. That's almost 10 years ago. Yeah, it's hard to believe, right? This still applies today. And there's still a lot of websites that don't follow this rule. I use a tool called GTmetrics. And here's a result from a website that I've worked on that shows the load times for that site. You can see it's got D and E's for their grading system. But the big number is that 9.7 seconds that you see there for the full load time. That's a really long time.  Waiting nine seconds for that page to load, I'm probably going to go elsewhere. And Google understands that. And Google wants to have everybody to have a good search experience. So they really look for a fast loading website. So here are some places where you can check for your site speed. GTmetrics is one of my favorites. Webpagetest.org is also a good resource that really breaks it down down to the different types of content that's loading. Google page speed insights is also very good. And you can also check within your Chrome settings if you go into your developer or go into InSpec and look at all the different developer tools. There's a lighthouse within Chrome now where you can do an audit and a speed test. So some of the ways that you can help improve your speed is look at your code. The theme that you use, are you using a theme that was coded well and clean? There's a lot of themes out there. One of the great things about WordPress is that, and it's such a huge adoption, is that there's so many plugins and resources and themes that you can use, but not all of them are made equal. So take a look at your code or work with a developer that can help you look at your code and see how clean it is. Also, if you have plugins installed, are you using them? Are you fully utilizing them? Are you a plugin collector? I may use this later. So I'm just going to keep this on and active and see maybe one point out. I'll use it. Don't. If you haven't used it yet and you're not planning on using it right away, disable it. All of those plugins will impact performance and speed on your site. Also, is your theme responsive? Is it rendering really nice on a mobile device and loading quickly?