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. You might […]
My bullets are green, but my post doesn’t rank?!
The Yoast SEO plugin helps you to easily optimize the text of your post. This could definitely result in higher rankings. But unfortunately, green bullets do not magically put you on top of the search results. In this post, I’ll discuss a number of possible reasons why a post doesn’t rank, even though the text has […]
Yoast internal linking: the making of
A few weeks ago, we added Yoast internal linking to Yoast SEO Premium for English. We released the same feature for German earlier this week. In this post, I’ll explain how the earlier released Insights laid the groundwork for this feature, how we compose the list of linking suggestions, and why Yoast internal linking is currently only available for a limited […]
SEO fact or fiction?
SEO has a somewhat questionable reputation. Why is that? At Yoast, we advise you to make an awesome website. Our SEO advice always comes down to: make sure to outrank the competition by being the best result. We actually collaborate with Google in the development of our plugin. So, why does SEO have a questionable reputation? […]
The sense and nonsense of XML sitemaps
Fact: if your website is set up the right way, you shouldn’t need an XML sitemap at all. You shouldn’t need to think about your category’s XML sitemaps or about including images in your post’s XML sitemap. But why do we keep talking about them like it’s the most important thing ever for SEO? It’s an almost daily […]
How to start your keyword research: a case study
If you start a new site, either a blog or an online shop, you won’t rank immediately. So, what’s the first step you need to take to boost your rankings? In our view, you should always start with keyword research. Take some time to think about the words you want to be found for: which words […]
Ask Yoast: importance of keyword strategy
Optimizing your site or page for words that people don’t use doesn’t make any sense. That’s why you have to do proper keyword research. You’ll have to get inside the heads of your audience and find out what words they use while searching. There should always be a keyword strategy behind the keywords you pick. Keyword […]
Know your customer
Once in a while, every company needs to take a closer look at the state of its marketing. Are you still sending the right message to your customer? Do you still target the same customers? And, in what way did these customers change? In this article, we’ll address a number of things every website owner needs […]
SEO basics: What is content marketing?
Content marketing consists of all marketing activities that focus on creating and sharing information. It should be part of every SEO strategy, but it’s also crucial for branding. The idea of content marketing is that sharing valuable information is a great way to attract an audience and to build a brand. Blogging is one of the most well-known ways of […]
Ask Yoast: change URLs when relaunching website?
Relaunching a website can be an overwhelming project. You need a new design and perhaps new functionalities. What should you do with your existing content? And what about new content? The more changes you want, the more challenging it gets. In this process you might face the question if you should change or keep your URLs. […]
Why you should NOT write clickbait headlines
You’d like your post to rank and your headlines to be clicked on. That’s how you generate traffic from the organic search results. After your headlines have generated those clicks, you’d want your customers to stay on our site and read your posts (and eventually decide to buy your stuff). That’s why writing clickbait headlines are not […]
Why you should use Yoast internal linking
Yesterday we released our new internal linking tool in Yoast SEO Premium. The internal linking tool will help you to link to related content. It will find related posts for you, and it will become much easier to link from your post to these related articles. Using our tool systematically will help you improve the structure […]
Site structure training: now available!
You want your site to appear high in the search engines. You want extra traffic and more customers and/or sales. And what you want most, is to outrank the competition. In order to do so, you can apply all kinds of SEO tactics. Structuring your site in such a way that Google can easily understand what’s […]
Why is site structure important?
Structuring your site is a crucial element of SEO. If you want to generate more traffic to your website, you should create a structure for your site that makes sense to Google and your site’s visitors. In this post, I’ll explain why site structure is such an important aspect of SEO. Structure shows importance to Google […]
Ask Yoast: how to rank globally
Ranking in your own country is one thing, ranking around the globe is quite another thing though. It poses other challenges. Let’s say you’re organizing trips for tourists who visit your country, how to reach those tourists? In this Ask Yoast, I’ll explain what’s essential for your global SEO strategy. We received the following question from […]
We’ve created the fastest related posts ever
When we say “related posts for WordPress“, we say “bad performance”. Without using an external service like ElasticSearch, it’s practically impossible to have related posts work fast in WordPress. That’s why we’ve always stayed away from including any related posts plugin on our site. It’s also the reason we haven’t tried to come up with a solution ourselves before. In the […]
Site structure: the ultimate guide
Your site needs a certain structure. Otherwise, it’ll just be a collection of pages and blog posts. Your users need the structure to navigate through your site, to click from one page to the other. And Google uses the structure of your site in order to determine what content is important and what content is […]
Ask Yoast: how many (internal) links on a page?
Links are valuable for search engines. Therefore, it’s important to understand how Google and other search engines use links. They use the number of links pointing to a webpage to determine how important that page is. Not only external links could help in the ranking of a page in Google, but the internal links could help […]
SEO basics: What is SEO?
SEO is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization. It’s the practice of optimizing websites to make them reach a high position in Google’s – or another search engine’s – search results. SEO focuses on rankings in the organic (non-paid) search results. In this post, I’ll answer the question “What is SEO?” and I’ll explain how […]
Interview with Maile Ohye (Google)
According to Maile Ohye of Google, “SEO is evolving into what Loren George McKechnie described as ‘search experience optimization’. It’s less about top ranking, and more about optimizing the searcher’s journey. It’s the intersection of content, UX, and as always, staying smart about search engines.” We had the chance to ask Maile a couple of questions, […]