Speaker Spotlight: CT Moore!

WordCamp Montreal is two weeks away! We’re excited to bring you a new speaker spotlight series this year!

I’m happy to present our first spotlight, CT Moore!

A recovering agency hack, CT Moore (@gypsybandito) is a strategist, blogger, and speaker who specializes in SEO and social content strategy.

CT will be giving a talk titled SEO for WordPress.

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What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

I don’t know if it was in the last 365 days per se, but being able to install plugins & themes through the backend user interface was a huge win for me. I hardly ever use my FTP client anymore.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

I love the WordPress community. By learning my way around WordPress, I’ve learned CSS and a bit of PHP, and none of that would’ve been possible if the community hadn’t been there to share their knowledge and lend a hand when I needed it. So it’s always been important to me to either give back to the community, or pass the buck forward by sharing my own experience with others.

What is your talk going to be about?

My talk is going to be about SEO. I know that WordPress is relatively SEO-friendly right out of the box, but there is so much more bloggers can do to help their content rank better, and that’s what I do for a living (SEO), so that’s what I want to share with the community.

What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?

I want them to walk away with an actionable to-do list. I want them to learn from me and say “Oh, that’s what I can be doing better with my blog,” and then go do it. I want them to walk away with something they can use immediately and see the benefits of in the near future.

Who in the WordPress community inspires you? Who do you follow?

Brendan Sera-Shriar (@digibomb) has always inspired me for both his knowledge of WordPress as a platform, as well as his passion for community involvement. Andrea Rennick (@andrea_r) has also been an inspiration. I mean, she an actually WordPress community moderator, and despite her accomplishments, she still takes the time to help out those who know so much less than her. That, and I met her at Wordcamp a couple years ago, and she’s always been willing to help me troubleshoot problems here and there.

What new feature would you like to see in the future?

I’d like to see more advance SEO options integrated into the core framework. There are a few really great plugins out there, but WordPress out of the box lacks some things (like redirects and custom meta info) that I think any basic user can benefit from.