Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. With you, the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Hello and welcome.

Back to SEO is not that hard. It's Ed Dawson here, your host, as usual, and today I'm going to be talking about why Cloudflare is so much more than just a CDN, a content delivery network. Now this topic comes to me on the back of a conference that I went to, comes to me on the back of a conference that I went to at the end of August. Last week of August it was Hive MCR, which was a one-day conference in Manchester organized by Whitworth SEO, and, yeah, it was a really nice little conference. It was only sort of a bit more than half a day long. It started at 2 pm in Manchester and it went through till 8 pm when there was a networking party and whatnot. I didn't actually stay for the networking party because that day I was a little bit under the weather and although I booked a hotel in Manchester, um, I just thought, you know, I've not got my drinking head on, I've got a bit of a cold. I'm going to go home and you know, and I don't live that far from Manchester, it only takes me, you know, about an hour and a half with a train and the car to get home from Manchester city centre. So I actually cut the. I cut it short and came home.

But the first talk was by a guy called John O'Alderson and his talk was called going over the edge and it was subtitled as unlock the full potential of your website with cutting edge technical SEO techniques. And his talk was called Going Over the Edge, and it was subtitled as Unlock the Full Potential of your Website with Cutting-Edge Technical SEO Techniques. Discover how Cloudflare and other CDNs can make your site faster, smarter and better than your competitors. And what he was basically showing during his talk it was a 25-minute talk, something like that was basically how you can use the advanced features of cloud flare to do more than just caching and accelerating your website. You can actually use it for things like altering the content on pages, intercepting requests, and you're putting a whole load of programmatic functionality in front of your website and the key thing was this was all without having to actually touch your original website.

Now I've always recommended people to use Cloudflare on their websites, although I've never actually been a customer before. Now. The reason I've not used it is because I actually use, until now, a technology called CloudFront, which is very similar to CloudFlare, but it is part of the Amazon Web Services suite of hosting tools. Now, we've used Amazon Web Services since gosh I've tried to remember now, probably 2010 time and, yeah, all our infrastructure is on Amazon Web Services and it just made sense for us to use CloudFront. But if you're not using Amazon Web Services for all the rest of your infrastructure, your hosting infrastructure then CloudFront probably isn't the best solution to use or the most sort of intuitive solution to use, because if you're not used to the AWS sort of interface and managing all that, it can be a bit tricky just to try and use CloudFront for the purposes of a CDN. So I've always recommended Cloudflare to people who are, you know, using, say, wordpress and that kind of thing or other hosting services, and it's much more user intuitive, I think, and easy for people to set up and use. It's much more user intuitive, I think, and easy for people to set up and use.

Now I was really blown away with the example that Jono shared in his talk and the kind of things you could do with Cloudflare and it kind of inspired me to go and have a look at it. And in terms of why I was inspired to look at it, it's because you know, you might have noticed, I've been doing a few rank and rent episodes recently and that's because I'm investigating the whole rank and rent model and I've got some ideas of things that I could try out and I could do. I'm interested in how to scale it. Now the issue I've got is I don't want necessarily to run, you know, 100 individual, say, wordpress installs, but basically the same kind of site that's targeting the same service, but in different cities, say, for example. So I always use the plumber example when I'm talking about it, not that I'm going to use plumbers, it's not what I'm going to target when I do it but um, so I might have a plumbers in Manchester website, a plumbers in Derby website, plumbers in a whole number of places. Now these sites are going to be quite similar in many respects.

But rather than having multiple copies of the site, I've been trying to find a scalable solution where I could have like a base install on wordpress which had the basic templated outline of the site with placeholders in the text for where we would change the text based on the city it was in, so that they would all be individual. You might even change images depending on where they are, but you'd have one WordPress install that would kind of control it all. So I've been looking around for a solution where I can manage to intercept the request coming in and say, right, this is a, this is a request coming in from, say, plumbers in manchestercouk, and it would then make the request to the wordpress site and fill in all those content areas around it being in manchester, so it would use that one template but then just change the content based on it being in Manchester, so that we'd use that one template but then just change the content based on it being in Manchester. Or the other requests might come in for, say, plumbers in Derby, and then we would go to the site and fill in and change the content based on it being in Derby. So, as far as the user was concerned, as far as Google was concerned, they're two different websites, they look different, different content in, but they're all being fed from the same basic site underneath. So I've only got to manage one WordPress install and then we manage the content programmatically through another service, and I thought this is actually something Cloudflare could do, based on the talk that Jono gave. So I've actually played around with this the past few days and what I've done is I created a basic WordPress install and hosted that on AWS with CloudFront in front of it, like I normally would.

But then I've sent requests to two different domains that come through CloudFlare. So those domains sit on CloudFlare and they receive the traffic. When they receive the traffic, we use a thing called a Cloudflare worker, which has got a rule set up. So basically what happens? This little worker will listen for requests coming into these individual domains and it will then say, right, this domain, I've got a request, and it then will rewrite the URLs to pick up their content from the origin, which is the WordPress installer set up on AWS with CloudFront. So they will go and get that page. And then we also set up another worker that when it gets the content from that page will rewrite the domains. It will rewrite all the bits of content within there, put in some test templated bits. So I can say, right, if you see this content, place it with this content and that content store the key value pair, the where to what to change and where is held on a key value pair on cloudflare itself. So I haven't got to write a new setup a database anywhere. I can just use cloud feature of cloud cloudflare, called key values, to hold that information. So as we added new sites, if we're going to add new sites, we could just put the details in that key value store on cloudflare and it would automatically then be able to intercept all those requests and make those changes.

For you and you know, I used ai to help me with this a bit. Um, I just used chat gpt and explained what I wanted to do and said can you build me the code for a worker? Because these workers on cloudflare be in javascript I think they can be in python and maybe something else as well. There's a few options, um, and I just, you know, explained what I wanted to chat gpt and it helped me um, write the code for how to do that um and yeah, I was so incredibly impressed how easy it was to set this up and, like I say, I'm only just scratching the surface at the moment because this is all just new to me now. I appreciate that might be quite a complex um example of how what you might be able to do using cloudflare um to automate things and to make your life easier and to scale things.

There is loads and loads of other things you can do with cloudflare. That I'm. You know I'm I'm going to be missing things here, but, for example, it's really easy to do 301 redirects. So you know I talked about 301 redirects before. You know I've talked about 301 redirects before and you know you can do it on the web server. You can do it in plenty of other places, but it's not necessarily always that easy to do it. I've just discovered, you know, in cloudflare, doing all those redirects. It's dead, dead simple. There's a, you know, a nice graphical user interface. You know a nice web interface. You can do all those things really, really easily. You don't need a developer to do these kind of things. And there's stuff you can do with images to improve your image quality or to get your resolutions right or to make sure that the right resolutions serve for the device people are on. That's just scratching the surface of things you can do with this. They even have a WordPress plugin. So if you're using WordPress and you want to put cloudflare in front of it, there's a plugin that will do a lot of the setup for you, and you know a lot of the intelligent stuff around optimizations it'll do for you. So that looks really cool as well.

Um, yeah, so I just wanted to do this episode really to say to you, know, to demonstrate to you that cloudflare is so much more than just a cdn. If you aren't using cloud flare, then I mean I I can't really see a reason not to. If, unless you've got another cdn and that's all set up for you, like, say, and then in which case, fine, but if you haven't got a cdn set up, if you're not using something like cloud flare, I really would suggest using it. Um, because a it'll speed your site up and that is so important. You know how much I've talked about that before in the past, but it will also give you so many other tools just by itself, and that could become really important to you, um, as you are improving and changing things and improving your seo and you know, just developing, you know and building your site, it can. Yeah, I'm just so impressed with the things it can do that I didn't know just a couple of weeks ago. So I just wanted to share that and say if you haven't explored it, go and explore it. I don't think you'll regret it. Anyway, until next time. I hope you find this useful and until next time I'll see you in the next episode.

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