Transition words and SEO
If you’ve been using the readability analysis of Yoast SEO, you’ve probably noticed our check on the use of transition words. You might have been wondering: What are transition words exactly? Why did we include that check in our analysis? Or, to what extent are those words important for SEO? Here, I’ll explain everything about the relationship between […]
How to get local reviews and ratings
If you’re a well-known local business owner, one of your online goals should be getting more local reviews from your (satisfied) customers. These reviews or ratings help Google in determining the value of your company for their users. If you have a nice amount of four-star and five-star ratings, Google considers you a more valuable result on their search […]
What is cornerstone content?
Cornerstone content pieces are those articles on your website you’re most proud of. They reflect your business, communicate your mission and are extremely well written. These are the articles you would like to rank high in the search engines. Cornerstone articles are usually explainers; these articles combine insights from different blog posts. Here, I’ll explain all […]
Ask Yoast case study: SEO of a mom blog
SEO can be a rather complicated and abstract thing. What exactly do we mean by increasing keyword density? How do you start with improving the structure of a site? That’s why I’m going to write a series of Ask Yoast case studies. In these case studies, I’ll take a look at a specific site (the owner […]
Ask Yoast: Too many links in navigation menu?
Doing your internal linking well has quite a few SEO benefits. Connecting related posts with each other lets Google know that you’ve created content on various aspects of a certain topic. This can make you a stronger candidate to rank for that topic. But, can internal links also be detrimental to your site? Is it possible to create too many internal links, […]
Analyzing your audience: a how-to
To write appealing text for your audience, you need to know them. Who are those people that read your stories? Who are the people that search for the terms you want to be found for? Where do they come from? How old are they? What are they interested in? And how will you be able […]
Contact page examples: What makes a great contact page?
In this post, we’ll go over a number of contact page examples, so you’ll be able to review your own contact page and improve it. For a lot of companies, that contact page is the main reason they have a website in the first place. For others, the contact page filters or manages all incoming […]
SEO basics: How to optimize a blog post?
Content writing should be a key element of every SEO strategy. How do you make sure your blog posts have the highest chance to rank well in Google? What are the successive steps you’ll need to take? In this post, I’ll take you back to the very basics of SEO. How do you optimize a blog post? […]
Ask Yoast: noindex posts that need an update?
If you own a blog for a long time, it could be that some of your old blog posts need to be updated or optimized. Every once in a while, you should go through your archive to check that. When you go through your archive pages, you might see posts with low quality content that you […]
Does readability rank?
Two weeks ago Google’s Gary Illyes tweeted that you should read your text out loud. If it doesn’t read nicely or sounds strange, it probably won’t rank either. Of course, a discussion followed. Some SEOs are reluctant to believe him, because in some cases keyword stuffing still seems to pay off. For relatively small languages […]
Local ranking factors that help your local business’ SEO
If you have a local business, selling products or services, you have to think about the local ranking of your website. Local optimization will help you surface for related search queries in your area. As Google shows local results first in a lot of cases, you need to make sure Google understands where you are […]
Ask Yoast: do off-topic comments hurt SEO?
If you own a blog, you have to deal with the opinions, questions, and feedback from your blog’s visitors. Mostly you receive comments related to your post, but sometimes you might receive off-topic comments. How do you respond properly? And, more importantly, do off-topic comments on your blog post hurt your SEO? In this Ask Yoast we’ll […]
Ask Yoast: duplicate content issues on my shop?
If you own an eCommerce site, you might wonder how to optimize your category pages and your product pages. Could you have the same content on your category page and your product pages? If you have the same content on multiple pages of your website, would Google know what to rank first? Or would it cause duplicate […]
SEO copywriting and writing for sales
Writing is hard. Writing for the search engines is even harder. What about writing for the search engines and writing for sales simultaneously? Is that even doable? Because, in the end, we want to write copy that’ll rank in the search engines AND convince people to either buy your stuff, contact you, subscribe to your […]
Ask Yoast: stop words in your focus keyword?
If you want people to easily find your website, you should start by picking the right focus keywords (the keyword or keyphrase you’d like to rank for). Sometimes it can be hard to decide which keywords to optimize for. Do you have to focus on a head or a long tail keyword? Do you have […]
Is my website over-optimized?
Optimizing sites for search engines is something we do every day. Of course, we practice what we preach! But, now and then, we encounter websites that have gone a little bit overboard in their optimization strategies. What is the difference between SEO and over-optimization? And, how do you recognize an over-optimized website? In this post, […]
My post ranks, but I don’t get any traffic
You did everything you were supposed to do. You wrote an awesome blog post, and the post actually ranks high in the search engines. Perhaps you even made it rank in a number one position. And you’re quite proud of your performance. Your deception is huge when your number 1 post doesn’t attract any traffic to […]
Meta description for search & social
Meta description elements have many uses and can be constructed in several ways. First and foremost, a good meta description entices the user to click. It does that both by the fact that it contains enticing, well readable text and the keyword or keyphrase, as that becomes bold in the search results. Our view on that […]
Tips for your local SEO content strategy
If you own a local business, you want to dominate the local search results of your niche. But how do you write content that’ll pop up in those local search results? On what aspects should you focus? In this post, I’ll give tips you can use in order to set up your very own local […]
How to prepare for voice search
Voice search is picking up steam. You can now use your voice to search the web, play music, navigate home, order sushi or get the latest football results. Not a day goes by without news stories about search assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana or Google’s – uh – nameless service. It seems […]