Why is Google ranking the wrong page?
Your post is optimized, all your bullets in Yoast SEO are green and still, the post you want to rank with does not rank for that keyword. And yet, another page on your website does show up in the results. But that’s not the one you wanted to rank highest with. Why is Google ranking […]
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Should you optimize your content for questions?
Search engines are getting better and better at understanding language. Does that mean they can also understand questions? And what does that mean for the way you should write and optimize your content for questions? We’ll find out in this post! First, we’ll explore how Google understands and uses questions. Then, we’ll go into why […]
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5 ways to boost your Core Web vitals
“If only I could simply wave my wand and have a super fast website!” This has probably crossed your mind as well, right? Optimizing site speed and user experience is a lot of work and gets technical — and complicated — really fast. Most site owners or managers quickly need to talk to their developers […]
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A linguistic approach to creating content that ranks
Search engines are trying to understand language: they want to understand what users are searching for, and they want to be able to provide them with the best results. Before I started working at Yoast, I studied linguistics: the scientific study of language. During my years at Yoast, I’ve noticed that linguistics and SEO have […]
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Learn about the three Core Web Vitals: LCP, FID & CLS
Some time ago, Google caused quite a stir by announcing a new ranking factor for 2021: page experience. User experience has always been a essential part of building the best site out there, but now, it will play an even bigger role in helping you build awesome sites for your customers. All this is powered […]
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Page experience: a new Google ranking factor
A couple of weeks ago, Google announced Web Vitals — a new set of metrics to measure the speed and user experience of websites. Last week, Google announced that these metrics will make its way into a core algorithm update as new ways of judging and ranking sites based on the page experience they offer. […]
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Why and how to use the search results to create intent-based content
Search intent is becoming more and more important. Google is getting better and better at guessing exactly what searchers are looking for when they type in their – sometimes cryptic – search terms. That’s why you need to focus on it as well! What is search intent, again? How do search engines approach user intent? […]
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A brief history of Google’s algorithm updates
These days, the way we do SEO is somewhat different from how things were done ca. 10 years ago. There’s one important reason for that: search engines have been continuously improving their algorithms to give searchers the best possible results. Over the last decade, Google, as the leading search engine, introduced several major updates, and […]
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Does social media influence your SEO?
Handling your social media is a necessary part of any marketing strategy, but it’s also a vital part of any good SEO strategy. The popularity of social media has risen and probably will keep doing so. That means Google and other search engines can’t ignore them, and you probably shouldn’t either. You even see recent […]
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Google BERT: A better understanding of complex queries
By announcing it as the “biggest change of the last five years” and “one that will impact one in ten searches”, Google sure turned some heads with an inconspicuous name: BERT. BERT is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) model that helps Google understand language better in order to serve more relevant results. There are million-and-one […]
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15 questions about ranking factors – Yoast webinar recap
People are always talking about ranking factors. You know, the secret ingredients to Google’s magic algorithmic formula. If you know them and find a way to please these factors, you’re well on your way to that coveted number one spot — or so people seem to think. In general, chasing all these individual ranking factors […]
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Seven reasons why your rankings dropped and how to fix them
When you face a drop in your rankings or traffic, it’s just the tip of an iceberg. Discover the possible causes of a sudden drop in traffic and their fixes.
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Google says it doesn’t use rel=prev/next for pagination
Sometimes you wonder if Google even knows how Google works. Search is getting more complex by the day and there comes a point where it’s anybody’s guess. Yesterday, Google ‘announced’ that its search engine doesn’t use the pagination markup rel=prev/next at all and hasn’t for years. That’s curious because they have been advocating using it […]
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How does Google understand text?
On Yoast.com, we talk a lot about writing and readability. We consider it a very important part of good SEO. Your text needs to satisfy your users’ needs. This, in turn, will help your rankings. However, we rarely talk about how Google and other search engines read and understand texts. In this post, we’ll explore […]
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What were Google’s biggest search algorithm updates of 2018?
A visual representation of Google’s biggest search algorithm updates 2018. This infographic highlights each major update, its date, and its implications.
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How to rank high in Google
“Could you please write a post with a clear path on just what to do to rank high in Google?” “What should I do to make sure I’ll outrank my competition?” “Could you write a clear, step-by-step to-do list on how to rank high in Google?” Although I completely understand these questions, answering them is […]
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An updated look at Alpha-Beta in a world of close variants
Google updated their exact match close variants to include implied words, paraphrase words and same-intent keywords. How does this affect Alpha-Beta?
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Google at 20: Journeys, AI-driven results and visual search
It’s hard to imagine a life without a search engine that knows what it’s doing. I remember the days of AltaVista and co, search engines that just dump random pages on you for every given query. I was so excited to see Google enter the scene and immediately do everything right — the results were […]
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Google’s Medic update, and how to deal with it
In the week of August 1st Google rolled out a “broad core algorithm update.” We know it was that because they said so on Twitter. There was quite a bit of buzz around this update. Some sites “won”, others “lost”, which is logical because, in the end, this is pretty much a zero-sum game. We’ve […]
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Keyword density in Yoast SEO: what you should know
Keyword density is the number of times your focus keyword occurs on a web page, compared to the total text of that page. If you write a post for your blog, you should have thought about what keyword you want to rank that post for. In our Yoast SEO plugin, that keyword is what we call […]
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