Today, there’s a constant demand for more efficient and effective SEO practices. Keeping this in mind, we’re constantly updating and refining the features of Yoast SEO. One of our key milestones was the release of Yoast SEO 21.0, where we revealed a pioneering generative AI to redefine SEO optimization. In our next release, Yoast SEO 21.1, we’re improving upon that work.
AI in Yoast SEO
In Yoast SEO 21.0, we introduced a generative AI tool that simplified the generation of SEO-optimized titles and meta descriptions. No longer a tedious manual effort, this tool gives you the power to create engaging titles and descriptions at the click of a button. This innovative application of generative AI eliminates the complexity of SEO optimization, freeing up valuable time to produce top-quality content.
Here’s the awesome video we made to remind you!
Building upon this foundation, we’re excited to present Yoast SEO 21.1, continuing our journey into optimizing your SEO with AI. We’re making the first behind-the-scenes improvements to improve the performance and results of the generative AI feature. This makes your content more appealing, while also upholding its SEO-friendly character. Remember that the AI generator functionality only works when the SEO analysis is turned on. If you don’t have it activated, we’ll show a message alerting you about this.
Let generative AI in Yoast SEO help you make great titles and meta descriptions
Making the most of Yoast SEO Premium
If you’re still on the fence about including AI in your SEO strategy, we recommend trying out Yoast SEO Premium. This grants access to our robust AI feature and equips you with other advanced tools to enhance your site’s SEO performance. More so, these tools are specifically designed to streamline your workflow and amplify your productivity.
Fixes and enhancements
As usual with our new releases, Yoast SEO 21.1 brings a series of fixes and enhancements to boost performance. We’re always at work to keep Yoast SEO a practical and reliable tool that supports your needs.
We value your trust in Yoast SEO, and our goal is always to deliver tools that simplify your SEO routine. So, we would like to encourage you to upgrade to Yoast SEO Premium to unlock the full potential of your site’s SEO capabilities with AI and our advanced features.
Update to Yoast SEO 21.1
Yoast SEO 21.0 was a great success, and we can’t wait to show you what’s next. As we continue to improve your SEO experience, we invite your feedback to help us refine our services further. Comment on this post, use the WordPress forums, or contact us via our socials — it’s all good. Guided by your input, we can ensure Yoast SEO remains high-quality, effective, and user-friendly. Be smarter with SEO in Yoast SEO 21.1!
Having great product pages is important for your sales. After all, it’s where people decide to click that buy button. Besides optimizing your product pages for user experience, you also want to make sure these pages work for your SEO. You might think this is obvious. That’s why we’ll show you a few less obvious elements of product page SEO in this post. And we’ll explain why it’s so important to take these things into account. Let’s go!
1. The basics of product page SEO
First things first: a product page on an online store is a page too. This means that all the SEO things that matter for your content pages, matter for your product pages as well. Of course, there’s a lot more to product page SEO. But for now, this will be your basic optimization. Tip: If you offer not-so-exciting products on your site, you may want to read our post on SEO for boring products.
Let’s start with the basics.
1. A great title
Try to focus on the product name. And include the manufacturer name, if applicable. In addition, if your product is a small part of a larger machine (screw, tube) for example, you should include the SKU as well. People might search for that specifically.
2. A proper and unique product description
While it might be tempting to use the same description as the product’s manufacturer, you really shouldn’t. That description might be found on hundreds of websites, which means it’s duplicate contentand a sign of low quality for your website (to Google). Remember, you want to prevent duplicate content at all times!
Now, you might think: “But all my other content (content pages, category pages, blog) is unique!” However, if the content on hundreds of product pages isn’t unique, then the majority of your website’s content still won’t be up to par. So make time to create unique content! And if you need help, the Yoast WooCommerce SEO plugin comes with a product-specific content and SEO analysis that helps you produce great product descriptions.
3. An inviting meta description
A product page usually contains a lot of general information, like the product’s dimensions or your company’s terms of service. To avoid Google using that unrelated text in a meta description, you want to add a meta description to your product pages. It’s arguably even more important than adding one to your content pages!
Next, try to come up with unique meta descriptions. This can be difficult sometimes. You might come up with a sort of template, where you only change the product name per product. That’s okay to start with. But ideally, all your meta descriptions should be unique.
4. Pick a great and easy-to-remember URL
We recommend that you use the product name in the URL. However, make sure that the URL is still readable for site visitors! Keep it short and simple.
5. Add high-quality and well-optimized images with proper ALT text
Include the product name in at least the main product image. This will help you do better in visual search. Also, don’t forget video — if applicable.
6. Focus on your product page UX
Last but not least: UX, or user experience. This is an important step, because it’s all about making your product pages as user-friendly as possible. Plus, it’s an important part of holistic SEO. There are many parts to UX, which is why we wrote a post with product page UX examples. Give it a read!
2. Add structured data for your products and get rich results
Structured data is an essential part of a modern SEO strategy. You simply can’t do without structured data for your product pages anymore, because they help your product page stand out. For example, there is a specific Product schema that helps you get highlighted search results, so-called rich results. These are great for your site’s visibility, and they can also increase your click-through rate! And if you mark up customers’ reviews with Review structured data, they will show up in the search results. Seeing those beautiful stars underneath a product page will convince people they should check out your site!
Another reason to add it is to manage expectations from customers. Your visitors will know your price up front and that the product is still in stock. How’s that for user experience!
Search engines will understand your page better
Structured data is also important for your product page SEO because the major search engines came up with this markup, not the W3C consortium. Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex agreed upon this markup, so they could identify product pages and all the product elements and characteristics more easily. Why? So they could a) understand these pages a lot better and b) show you rich snippets like this:
That’s a lot of info in the search results, right?
The Product schema tells the search engine more about the product. It could include characteristics like product description, manufacturer, brand, name, dimensions, and color, but also the SKU we mentioned earlier. The Offer schema includes more information on price and availability, like currency and stock. It can even include something called priceValidUntil to let search engines know that the price offer is for a limited time only.
Many options to add structured data for product page SEO
Schema.org has a lot of options, but only a limited set of properties are supported by search engines. For instance, look at Google’s page on product page structured data to see what search engines expect in your code and what they can do with it.
This is why you want to add Schema.org data for product page SEO: It’s easier to recognize for Google, and it makes sure to include important extras in Google already. If you have a WooCommerce shop, our WooCommerce SEO plugin takes care of a lot of this stuff behind the scenes.
A preview of how your product might look in Google thanks to structured data
3. Add real reviews
Reviews are important. In fact, 95% of consumers say that they check reviews before buying anything online. Although not everyone trusts online reviews, a lot of people do, so they can be very helpful.
88% of American consumers find online reviews at least somewhat helpful
If you are a local company, online reviews are even more important. Most reviews tend to be extremely positive, but it might just be the negative reviews that give a better sense of what is going on with a company or product. In addition, getting awesome testimonials is another way of showing your business means business.
Leading Dutch online store Coolblue gives consumers a lot of options to make relevant and useful reviews of the products they buy
Try to get your customers to leave reviews, then show the reviews on your product page. Do you get a negative review? Contact the writer, find out what’s wrong and try to mitigate the situation. Maybe they can turn their negative review into a positive one. Plus: You’ve gained new insights into your work.
If you’re not sure how to get those ratings and reviews, check out our blog post: how to get ratings and reviews for your business. And don’t forget to mark up your reviews and ratings with Review and Rating schema so search engines can pick them up and show rich results on the search results pages.
4. Make your product page lightning fast
People don’t like to wait. Especially in today’s mobile-focused world, every second counts. Even more so if you spend a lot of time and energy trying to get that potential customer to your product page in the first place. People expect a fast page, and Google does too. Of course, there’s a lot you can do to improve your site speed. To get you started, here’s a post about how to improve your Core Web Vital scores.
5. User test your product page
Looking at numbers in Google Analytics, Search Console or other analytical tools can give you insight into how people find and interact with your page. These insights can help you improve the performance of a page even more. But there’s another way to ensure that your product page is as awesome as it can be: user testing.
How user testing can help you
Testers can find loads of issues for you: terrible use of images (including non-functioning galleries), bad handling of out-of-stock products, or inaccurate shipping information and return information, which can lead to trust issues. Now, you might be thinking: Surely, my website doesn’t have those issues! But you’d be surprised.
In their 2021 Product Page UX research project, the Baymard Institute found that “the average site has 24 structural UX issues on its product pages, and only 18% of the 60 top-grossing US and European ecommerce sites have a “good†or “acceptable†product page UX performance. The vast majority of benchmarked sites — 82% — have a “poor†or “mediocre†performance. And no sites have a “state of the art†product page UX performance.†You can read this fascinating study on their Product Page UX site.
The Baymard report has loads of insights into the most common errors seen on product pages
While you compare your product pages to external user research, don’t forget to do your own user testing! Doing proper research will give you eye-opening results that you probably wouldn’t have found yourself.
Bonus: Build trust and show people your authenticity
Getting a stranger to buy something on your site involves a lot of trust. Someone needs to know you are authentic before handing you their hard-earned money, right? Google puts a lot of emphasis on the element of trust — It’s all over their famous Search Quality Raters Guidelines. The search engine tries to evaluate trust and expertise by looking at online reviews, the accolade a site or its authors receive, and much more.
This is why it’s so important that your About us and Customer service pages are in order. Make sure people can easily find your contact information, information about returns and shipping, payment, privacy, et cetera. This will build that trust for your customers. So, don’t forget!
Conclusion: Be serious about your product page SEO
If you’re serious about optimizing your product page, you shouldn’t focus on regular SEO and user experience alone. You’ll have to dig deeper into other aspects of your product pages. For instance, you could add the Product and Offer Schema, so Google can easily index all the details about your product and show these as rich results in the search results. In addition, you should make your product pages fast, add user reviews, and try to enhance your website’s trustworthiness. And don’t forget to test everything you do!
Need a helping hand? Be sure to check out our ecommerce SEO training course. Learn what ecommerce SEO entails, how to optimize your site and boost your online presence. Want to get your products ranking in the shopping search results? We’ll tell you how. Start your free trial lesson today! Full access to Yoast SEO academy is included in Yoast SEO Premium.
Check out our overview of product page must-haves
To help you stay on top of your product pages, we created a PDF that you can use to optimize your product pages. Most of what’s discussed in this blog post can be found in the PDF, plus more tips! Just click on the image to go to the PDF and download it.
People often ask us: What makes a good website? Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy, one-size-fits-all answer. As with many things SEO, the answer is: it depends. What kind of site do you have, and what do you want to achieve? Who do you want to target? There are, however, a few best practices that help you get underway. In this post, we’ll list 7 elements that can help every site become a good site and a better search result.
The number one thing you should keep in mind is something that we advocate a lot at Yoast: holistic SEO. Essentially, holistic SEO helps you strive to be the best result. This comes down to optimizing every part of your site on all levels; from satisfying user intent with your content to offering a stellar user experience. If you combine all these things in a solid SEO strategy, implement the enhancements, and keep an eye on the results, then you’re on the right track!
7 elements of a good website
Many things we deem important for a good website are hard to quantify. There’s a lot of talk about quality in SEO, for instance. Even Google has been saying for years that you should focus on the quality of your site and content. After every algorithmic update that Google implements, the answer for those who lost rankings is the same: it might not be your fault. Other sites might seem to be a better fit for this specific query. Nonetheless, you should work on the overall quality of your content.
People flock to the Search Quality Raters Guidelines for input on how to improve their quality. Now, you shouldn’t take everything that Google says as gospel, but in this case, they are right. You should improve your content — always! Make sure to look at user intent and the behavior of your potential customers. Periodically redo your keyword research. And check your niche. What’s happening in your part of the market? By continually evaluating your SEO strategy, you’ll get a grip on the changing market and find new opportunities.
1. Your website satisfies user intent and has a clear goal
Why should anyone come to your site and do business with you? It’s not because you think you have an awesome product — that just doesn’t fly anymore. “Build it and they will come?†Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. You need to have a clear mission and goal for your website.
What does your audience need?
If you want to succeed, you need to know your audience. You have to uncover everything about them. You can probably find out what your audience says they want, but is that the same as what they really need? Does your product or service offer a possible solution to a problem, or does it make your customer’s life genuinely better? Are you selling a drill or a hole in the wall?
Focus on your site’s search intent
Your story has to be right. It has to align with what people want and need. This means you should nail your site’s search intent. Uncover all the different ways of how people can end up on your pages, then tailor these to answer their questions. Map out your user journey from A to Z and place your content in strategic spots. Also keep a close eye on the way you formulate your answers. More often than not, a conversational style will turn out to be what you are looking for.
2. Your website has technical prowess
A good website is easily crawlable, and shows search engines what they can and can’t index. Good sites don’t have a huge amount of errors. A good website loads super fast, from anywhere in the world. Make sure you do everything you can to get your pages to load as fast as possible.
Technical SEO is incredibly important, but you can get ahead of the curve by getting the basics right. Thoroughly think about which CMS you’re going for and how you’re going to run it. We may be a bit biased, but WordPress has given us everything we need. It’s solid, flexible and has a huge following. WordPress is pretty SEO-friendly, but with a bit of help from Yoast SEO, you can get your WordPress SEO going in no time. Also make sure to pick a reputable hosting company; one that’s flexible and helpful.
3. Your website is trustworthy, safe and secure
Both search engines and users are looking for signals that signify trust. Things like regular downtime might be an indication of sloppy maintenance. A missing green lock icon can mean you don’t take security seriously. But why is this important?
Best result
Search engines like Google want to give searchers the best possible result. Increasingly, if a search engine doubts the claims you make, or if you use sketchy ‘experts’ to validate your content, search engines will not show your content. Instead, they’ll pick a result that has proven to be a good and trustworthy result. That’s why you need to work on your trustworthiness on all levels, both technical as well as in content.
Safe for visitors
In addition, your site should be a safe haven for visitors. You need to have your security in order. A hacked site isn’t getting you anywhere! And a hacked site is easier to prevent than it is to fix. Use up-to-date software, have your SSL in order, create strong passwords and use tools such as Cloudflare to protect your site from DDoS attacks.
4. Your website has a great design and stellar UX
Does your website need to be beautiful? Let’s be honest, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You won’t please everyone with your design. You should, however, create a website design that fulfills the goals you set. For example, your message should come across loud and clear. The design should also be on-brand and well-thought-out. But more importantly, your site should be clear and easy to use for everyone. Accessibility is not something you should scrimp on.
You also need to consider user experience. Which is not only how something looks, but also how it feels. It’s about giving users an enjoyable experience; something they will remember. This means it’s not good UX to let users wait long for your pages to load, or have them become frustrated because they can’t read the text on your site thanks to your color scheme or because they can’t hit the buttons on your mobile site. Ask yourself: how can I turn any possible frustration on my website into happiness?
And happy users might just have higher buyer intent, so get those CTAs in order!
5. Your site has awesome, user-centered content
Be user-centered, not company-centered. Good content helps your users accomplish their goals. But you want to offer this content at the right moment, while keeping your business goals firmly in sight. To do so, you need to know your user inside out, as I mentioned earlier. Understand your audience, understand their behavior, and focus your content on that. The content you offer should be clear and easy to understand by using language your users know well. Try to bring something unique to the table. Do the research and present original reporting.
6. Your site is mobile-friendly (or rather, designed mobile-first)
For the last couple of years, mobile traffic has kept growing and growing. If your site is not mobile-friendly by now, you should really get to it. And don’t forget to work on your mobile SEO. However, if your site has been mobile-friendly for a while, it’s time to start looking at building your next site mobile-first.
It’s not a new concept, but most sites are still being developed desktop-first. After designing the desktop view, the designer crams it down to mobile size, often losing its authenticity and freshness along the way. Adopting a mobile-first mindset helps you focus on the tasks users should be able to perform on your mobile site. It helps to clean up the clutter and, more often than not, lets you come up with a minimal and fully focused design. Less is more, remember?
7. Your site can ‘talk’ directly to search engines
For years, search engines tried to read content on pages to determine what that page is about. They need that content to be able to match the search query with the indexed pages that give the best answers to this query. Turns out that truly understanding what something on a page is or means is harder than it seems, especially for machines. Search engines need a little guidance to discover the true meaning of elements on a page. Enter, structured data in Schema format.
The power of Schema
Schema is kind of like a translator for search engines. It describes elements on a page, so search engines can now say with certainty that a review is a review and a recipe is a recipe. In return, because Google is so certain about your content, marking up these elements can lead to rich results in the search results pages. This includes carousels, nutritional information for recipes, star ratings, FAQ dropdowns, swipeable How-To boxes on mobile and much more. Structured data is one of the areas search engines spend a lot of resources on these days, so make sure to get on board.
We noticed this, and built a complete and fully extendable Schema framework inside Yoast SEO. This structured data implementation builds a complete graph for your site, so search engines not only know what everything means but also how everything is connected to the bigger picture. In addition, Yoast SEO comes with a few structured data blocks and we’re working on adding more in the future.
So what makes a good website?
There’s a lot that goes into building a good website. It’s more than simply buying a domain, getting some random host, installing WordPress and picking a theme that looks cool. When you leave it at that, you’re setting yourself up for failure. You need to plan to get things right. You need a strategy — which is probably the most important element of a good website.
These are some of the most important elements you should focus on while developing or improving your site. Of course, this isn’t an exhaustive list, so I’d like to ask you: What is your number one focal point for building a good website?
In part, attracting visitors from the search results pages comes down to crafting irresistible titles and meta descriptions to entice users to click. However, it’s a challenging task to create these elements for every page manually. This is where the disruptive power of generative AI comes into play, revolutionizing your SEO strategy by automating the process and generating top-notch titles and meta descriptions. But, don’t blindly follow the suggestions without critical assessment. In this post, we’ll dive into the practical side of generating flawless titles and meta descriptions using generative AI for SEO.
Mastering AI titles and meta descriptions for SEO
Titles and meta descriptions serve as your web page’s ambassadors in search engine results, making their role critical to your online presence. As users perform searches, these snippets are often their first encounter with your content, influencing their decision to click and explore further. Hence, creating captivating titles and meta descriptions is essential for capturing attention, showcasing relevance, and enticing users to choose your website. Generative AI can help write good ones. Generative AI and SEO can go hand in hand if you do it well.
Enhancing click-through rates (CTR) and UX
Titles and meta descriptions that effectively communicate the value of your content play a pivotal role in improving click-through rates. Compelling titles and descriptions are relevant to the users’ search query, which leads to a high chance of getting them to click on your link.
A higher CTR signals to search engines that your content is valuable, potentially leading to more traffic. Moreover, conveying the essence of your content accurately helps users find precisely what they’re seeking, leading to increased engagement, prolonged time spent on your website, and, ultimately, SEO success.
Unveiling the (un)predictability of Google’s rewriting game
While you invest time and effort into crafting optimized titles and meta descriptions, it’s crucial to note that Google often rewrites them on the SERPs. Therefore, there’s no guarantee that your carefully written titles and meta descriptions will always appear as intended.
Google often thinks it knows how to present your site best. It tends to rewrite stuff to provide users with the most relevant and informative snippets that align with their search intent. Thus, it may rephrase or modify a title or meta description if it believes its version better matches the user’s query or accurately represents the page’s content.
Although Google’s rewriting will occur, optimizing your titles and meta descriptions remains beneficial. Generating well-structured, keyword-rich content increases the likelihood that Google will utilize your provided title and meta description.
Remember to monitor how Google treats your titles and meta descriptions in the search results and make necessary adjustments. Keep optimizing your content and stay up-to-date with changes in Google’s algorithms so your site will remain superbly represented in the SERPs.
Use the AI in Yoast SEO Premium to generate titles
Hot off the presses! Yoast SEO now empowers you to generate titles and meta descriptions using AI. Imagine not having to ponder and labor over crafting the perfect meta descriptions and titles. Our advanced AI does it for you! It’s designed to understand your content and create precise, engaging titles and descriptions that boost your SEO performance.
The AI feature of Yoast SEO helps you find awesome titles and meta descriptions quickly
This feature is not just about saving your time and effort; it’s about improving the quality of your SEO, enhancing your visibility, and driving more traffic to your site. It’s where technology meets creativity, resulting in an unparalleled SEO experience. Give it a try today!
A helpful AI tool in Yoast SEO Premium
Experience the benefits of generative AI and make your work simpler today!
For SEO, generative AI presents a powerful tool for automating the creation of captivating and optimized titles. We can streamline our workflows and generate irresistible, tailor-made titles for our target audience using state-of-the-art generative AI models like GPT-based models.
How to evaluate AI-generated titles
Getting models to spit out titles is not hard, but what comes next might be even more important. When evaluating AI-generated titles, you should check for relevance, keywords, length, uniqueness, and branding, to ensure they are effective and appropriate for your content:
Clarity and relevance: The title should accurately convey the subject and main focus of the content. It should indicate what the page or article is about so that users can understand its relevance before clicking on it.
Keyword optimization: Incorporate relevant keywords that align with the content and help search engines understand the topic. However, ensure the title remains natural and readable, avoiding keyword stuffing or over-optimization.
Length and readability: Keep the title within a reasonable length so it can be fully displayed in search engine results. The title must be easy to read, with proper grammar and punctuation, so users can quickly grasp its meaning.
Engaging and unique: Titles that stand out and generate interest are more likely to attract clicks. Use AI-generated titles that evoke curiosity, offer a benefit, or create a sense of urgency. Always try to make your titles unique and different from your competitors.
Brand consistency: Check if the AI-generated title aligns with your brand voice and messaging guidelines. Ensure it accurately represents your brand’s personality and values while maintaining consistency across your content.
Remember, there’s still no substitute for human experience, so please take the time to manually improve the work of the generative AI tool of your choice.
Unleashing AI-generated meta descriptions
Titles are not the only heroes in the SEO battlefield — meta descriptions also play a vital role. These concise summaries entice users to click on your link and explore your website. By harnessing the power of generative AI, you can optimize your meta descriptions to be engaging, informative, and perfectly aligned with users’ search intent.
Checking the AI-generated meta description
Here are a few key aspects to consider when evaluating AI-generated meta descriptions. In general, look for relevance, length, clickability, and if it has the correct tone of voice.
For relevance, ensure that the generated meta description accurately reflects the content of the corresponding web page. Verify that the description captures the main topic or purpose of the page and includes relevant keywords or phrases that users might search for.
Looking at length and readability, you should check the length of the generated meta description. Ensure it falls within the desired character limit (around 150-160 characters). Check the readability and clarity of the text so it flows smoothly and is easy to understand for users. See if the message comes across in this short piece of text.
Clickability is a vital aspect. Consider whether the generated meta description is enticing and likely to attract user clicks. Does it address the user’s search intent, highlight the unique value proposition of the page, or create a sense of curiosity or urgency? Aim for attractive descriptions and encourage users to click through to your website.
Another essential aspect is tone and brand voice. Review the tone and style of the generated meta description to ensure it aligns with your brand voice and messaging guidelines. Does it accurately represent the personality and values of your brand? Make any necessary adjustments to maintain consistency.
We’ll dive deeper into these aspects in the following sections of this article.
Checking generated content: A mix of AI and human expertise
Once you have your AI-generated titles and meta descriptions, evaluating and refining them becomes crucial in ensuring their quality, relevance, and alignment with your objectives. Manual review and refinement, infused with human expertise, are vital in perfecting the generated content before implementation.
Reviewing for quality and coherence
Initiate your evaluation process by scrutinizing the generated titles and meta descriptions for quality and coherence. Assess their language fluency, grammatical correctness, and overall readability. Identify and rectify any inconsistencies or errors hindering the content’s clarity and impact. By making necessary edits, you enhance the overall quality and cohesiveness of the generated content.
Assessing relevance to content and context
While reviewing the generated output, evaluate its alignment with its content. Consider the specific web page and its context to ensure the generated content accurately portrays the page’s main topic, theme, or purpose and adjust where necessary.
Infusing brand voice and messaging
Like any other content, aligning the generated titles and meta descriptions with your brand’s voice, messaging, and tone is critical. Assess how the generated content reflects your brand’s personality and resonates with your target audience. Make necessary edits to infuse your brand’s unique identity into the content while preserving clarity and readability.
Optimize keyphrase integration
Examine how effectively the generated titles and meta descriptions incorporate target keyphrases. Keyphrases play a crucial role in optimizing your content for search engine rankings. Evaluate whether the generated content naturally integrates the desired keywords and their variations.
Analyzing user engagement metrics
In addition to manual review, analysis of user engagement metrics is vital in assessing the effectiveness of the generated titles and meta descriptions. Monitor key performance indicators like impressions, click-through rates, bounce rates, and time spent on the page to gauge their impact. Compare the AI-generated content’s performance against alternative variations to determine the best-performing options.
Incorporating human input and expertise
While generative AI plays a significant role in generating titles and meta descriptions, it’s imperative to acknowledge the indispensable value of human expertise. Generative AI models are trained on data but lack intuition and a thorough understanding of contextual nuances. You can inject your creative insights, industry-specific knowledge, and brand context into the content by implementing manual review and refinement.
Balancing SEO optimization and user value
Leveraging generative AI for generating titles and meta descriptions requires achieving the elusive balance between search engine optimization and delivering value to users. This harmony ensures your content features prominently in search results while providing an engaging and meaningful experience for your audience.
Grasping user intent
To strike the right balance, understand the intent behind user searches. Analyze the keywords and search queries relevant to your content, and consider the motivations and expectations of users when they land on your web page.
Providing clear and concise information
When crafting titles and meta descriptions, ensure they convey precisely what users can expect from your page. Clearly outline your content’s main topic, purpose, or value proposition. Use concise and compelling language to capture users’ attention and encourage them to click through.
Showcasing unique selling points (USPs)
Titles and meta descriptions are excellent opportunities to showcase the unique selling points of your content. What sets your page or product apart from the competition? Does it offer a unique perspective, in-depth analysis, or exclusive insights? By incorporating these selling points into the generated content, you entice users and demonstrate the value they stand to gain by engaging with your page.
Engaging and connecting with users
Titles and meta descriptions are gateways to user engagement. Use compelling language, emotional triggers, and storytelling elements that resonate with your target audience. Emphasize the benefits, solutions, or outcomes users can achieve by interacting with your content. Stir curiosity or evoke a sense of urgency that compels users to click through and explore further.
Prioritizing readability and usability
While SEO optimization is essential, prioritize the readability and usability of your titles and meta descriptions. Use language that is clear and concise, making information easily understandable. Structure the content in a scannable format, incorporating proper punctuation and well-defined sections. Ensure the generated output doesn’t compromise readability or coherence by focusing solely on optimization.
Redefining SEO with AI and human ingenuity
Generative AI presents an extraordinary opportunity to simplify and optimize the creation of stunning titles and meta descriptions for SEO success. By leveraging the power of AI, you can save time, amplify click-through rates, and elevate user engagement. Yoast SEO Premium has a helpful AI tool that lets you generate titles and meta descriptions with the click of a button.
It’s crucial, however, to remember that AI should enhance human expertise, not replace it entirely. By combining the creativity of human content creators with the assistance of generative AI, you can create titles and meta descriptions that are optimized, captivating, and valuable to users.
Say goodbye to the manual labor of creating SEO-optimized titles and meta descriptions! We’re excited to introduce an AI-powered breakthrough in Yoast SEO 21.0 that transforms how you optimize your content. We’ve harnessed the power of generative AI to bring you effortless title and meta description generation at the click of a button. Dive into our newest release and experience the benefits of seamless SEO optimization, giving you more time to craft quality content and less time worrying about SEO details.
Simplified SEO
We’ve designed this update of Yoast SEO to eliminate the hassle of your SEO optimization efforts. We all know that creating SEO-friendly titles and descriptions can be complex, often consuming a lot of your time and requiring an understanding of SEO best practices. Not anymore. Unlock the potential of AI with the newest release of Yoast SEO Premium. You can now generate titles and meta descriptions with just a click!
Now available as beta in Yoast SEO Premium
The new AI feature is now available as a beta in Yoast SEO Premium. As we fine-tune the API, you might see system messages in this beta phase. These are not huge issues, and it’s certainly not your fault. Simply try again if you see a message pop up! Think of it as getting a sneak peek behind the scenes, like witnessing a chef in a restaurant kitchen perfecting your dish. It’s all part of the process as we refine and optimize the product. You can activate the AI feature in the Yoast SEO settings.
We’re constantly working to improve our AI features, which is where we need your input. We value your feedback and ideas to ensure our products serve you better each time. We understand how quickly the world moves, particularly in areas like LLMs and generative AI. So, we are ready to make numerous tweaks and changes to keep pace and maintain high quality. Together, let’s explore this exciting new chapter!
Powered by generative AI
The new feature in Yoast SEO 21.0 uses advanced generative AI to create engaging, creative, SEO-optimized titles and meta descriptions. Relying on large language models, machine learning algorithms and fed with vast amounts of data, our AI understands your content to provide you with optimal suggestions.
Generating SEO titles and meta descriptions is now easy as pie with Yoast SEO Premium
Why use AI for SEO
SEO involves techniques and strategies to rank your site higher in search results. One of them is to have good, catchy titles and relevant meta descriptions that appeal both to readers and search engines.
But the challenges are real. Manually crafting these pieces of content can be tedious, and time-consuming and may require an advanced understanding of SEO. This is where our new feature steps in.
Here’s how the AI in Yoast SEO Premium benefits you
Saves time: You can focus more on creating quality content when you automate the generation of titles and meta descriptions.
Enhances creativity: It helps stimulate creative and engaging titles and descriptions, ensuring they grab the reader’s attention in search results.
Improved CTR: Leveraging AI for your SEO efforts can revolutionize your content optimization strategy and helps the number of people clicking through to your site.
Integrated workflow: By integrating different tasks — in this case, content creation and SEO optimization — into a seamless workflow, you save time, reduce complexity, and increase productivity. It also ensures that all your work is aligned toward one goal, increasing the effectiveness of your efforts.
Let us walk you through the functionality to show how this new feature will help you do SEO.
How does it work?
The AI feature in Yoast SEO 21.0 works for all your content. Here’s how:
Get started: Activate the AI feature in the Yoast SEO settings. Locate the ‘Use AI’ button. You’ll find this in the Google Preview in the Yoast SEO Premium sidebar or by scrolling down your post. Once your content is ready, click this button, and our AI feature will appear.
One-time consent: We’ve powered the AI features in Yoast SEO with external services. We need your consent to allow you to use them. Remember that we’ll transfer your data once you consent to use the AI feature.
AI at work: Ask it to generate titles or meta descriptions. Our advanced algorithms analyze your content after you click the button. The AI then uses this to generate a list of engaging and SEO-friendly titles or meta descriptions that align with your content.
View suggestions: You’ll see five unique suggestions for the title and meta description. Check them to see which ones suit your content the best. They are in the context of a Google SERP result. You can immediately see how it might look in the search results.
Choose or refresh: Find a title or meta description you love? Wonderful! Select it and click the ‘Apply AI title/meta description’ button next to the selection, and it will automatically populate the appropriate fields. Not entirely satisfied with the first round of suggestions? No problem! Click the ‘Generate more’ button, and five fresh suggestions for titles and meta descriptions will appear.
Finalize: The generated titles and meta descriptions are not set in stone. Tweak them to your liking.
Remember, there’s no need for any configuration. It also doesn’t cost you anything extra, like AI credits or an extra subscription — it’s all included in Yoast SEO Premium.
Keep Google in mind
Even as you use our AI feature to create SEO meta tags, it’s worth remembering that Google often rewrites titles and meta descriptions. This process is based on their algorithms’ understanding of your content and what they consider will be most helpful to users.
What does this mean? Google’s systems serve the user the best content according to their search query, which means it will occasionally adjust your titles and meta descriptions. This fact underlines the importance of your on-page content aligning with your meta tags.
Something else to keep in mind
While our generative AI is a powerful tool designed to deliver high-quality, SEO-friendly titles and meta descriptions, we want to remind you that it doesn’t replace the human touch. The technology provides incredible choices by learning from your data, but it might only partially grasp the unique context, branding, or tone of voice your content requires.
The suggestions generated by our AI feature provide a solid foundation for your SEO data, saving you time and effort. However, it’s still important to review these suggestions to ensure they align with your brand’s voice and your content’s context and are factually correct. We have a blog post explaining how to evaluate the generated titles and meta descriptions.
The power of generative AI in SEO is immense, offering time-saving benefits and efficiency; still, the technology should complement human intelligence, not replace it. We ensured that Yoast SEO 21.0 allows and encourages you to review, refine, and tailor the AI’s output.
Stay involved in the process, use this tool to enhance your workflow, and remember — the magic truly happens when human creativity and advanced AI work together!
Get Yoast SEO 21.0 now
We can’t wait for you to dive in and use this helpful feature in Yoast SEO Premium. We firmly believe it has the potential to improve your SEO work and make it more efficient. It helps free up that valuable time to do what you do best — create fantastic content.
The update is free if you use the Premium version of our SEO plugin. If you’re not a Premium subscriber, upgrade today to enjoy this and many more advanced features to help your SEO.
We’re excited about this new chapter in simplifying and optimizing your SEO work. As always, we are open to feedback and suggestions about Yoast SEO, and we’re looking forward to hearing about your experiences with this new feature.
Get ready to harness the power of AI for your SEO efforts!
SEO has always been vital in making your website visible and getting organic traffic. Content creation is at the heart of SEO success. Yet, creating relevant, high-quality content can be a difficult task. Enter generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), a technology that mimics human-like creativity. Today, generative AI is on everyone’s lips and is poised to change the SEO landscape. This article delves into the fusion of generative AI and SEO, examining how it can revolutionize content creation and enhance user experiences.
Generative AI is artificial intelligence focused on generating original and creative content. It uses advanced algorithms, vast amounts of data, and machine-learning techniques to generate output to emulate human creativity. Understanding what happens in generative AI can provide valuable insights into its application in various industries, including content creation for SEO purposes.
Deep learning and neural networks
At the heart of generative AI lies deep learning, a subfield of machine learning that uses neural networks to learn and produce complex patterns. Neural networks consist of layers of artificial neurons that process and analyze data, altering their internal parameters to optimize performance over time. This architecture enables the network to make new output based on the patterns it has learned from training data.
OpenAI started an AI hype with the release of ChatGPT
You’ve heard about large language models (LLMs)
Large language models, such as ChatGPT, are advanced AI models trained on vast amounts of text data to understand and generate human-like text. These models use refined techniques like transformers to capture the relationships between words and making contextually relevant responses. Read this in-depth explanation by Stephen Wolfram if you want to know exactly what happens inside ChatGPT.
Large language models like ChatGPT have many applications, including natural language understanding, text generation, translation, and content creation. They can write coherent and contextually appropriate text reacting to given prompts, making them useful for chatbots, virtual assistants, automated content creation, and other interactive language-based tasks. They’re even great developers!
Training a large language model exposes it to diverse and vast text datasets, including books, articles, sites, and other sources. The model learns the statistical patterns, grammar rules, and contextual associations from this training data to generate text that reads like a person could have written.
These large language models can capture complex language structures, understand context, and produce coherent and meaningful text. However, they also come with challenges, such as potential biases in training data, susceptibility to generating incorrect or misleading information, and the need for ongoing supervision to ensure quality and ethical usage.
Balancing creativity and realism
A key challenge in generative AI is to balance creativity and realism. While making unique and inspiring content is crucial, it should align with audience needs and adhere to best practices. Achieving this balance involves fine-tuning the model and including rules guiding the output.
Now that you understand the basics of generative AI let’s dive deeper into the applications of generative AI.
Applications of generative AI
Generative AI has entered numerous industries, changing organizations’ operations and creating innovations. Across various domains, generative AI applications enable you to automate tasks, generate creative outputs, and simplify operations.
Art and creative works
Generative AI has significantly affected the world of art and creative expression. Artists can use AI to generate unique artworks, explore new styles, and push the limits of creativity. From algorithmic paintings to computer-generated music compositions, generative AI offers endless options for artists to experiment with and produce stunning pieces.
Virtual assistants and chatbots
Chatbots have been around for a while, but generative AI has become vital to creating next-level virtual assistants and chatbots. By training AI models to understand and generate human-like responses, virtual assistants and chatbots can engage in meaningful conversations with users and provide personalized support. Through AI, these intelligent systems can generate natural language responses that are contextually relevant and enhance user satisfaction.
Content generation and curation
It’s the understatement of the year to say that generative AI has altered the content creation landscape. With the ability to learn patterns from vast amounts of data, AI models can create written content for specific topics or industries. This technology is beneficial for creating product descriptions, blog posts, and social media posts at scale, helping you to maintain your online presence and meet content demands.
Video and image generation
We’ve all seen the results of generative AI for images and videos. The technology has opened up new options for video and image generation. AI models can make images or videos based on text input parameters, making them useful in advertising, gaming, and virtual reality. This power allows anyone, skill or no skill, to create beautiful content in every style imaginable.
Midjourney lets you generate beautiful images from text prompts
Recommendation systems
Generative AI powers recommendation systems that suggest products, movies, music, or content for individual preferences. Understanding user preferences and generating recommendations for their tastes can enhance user engagement, improve customer satisfaction, and increase conversion rates. AI algorithms enable recommendation systems to constantly learn and adapt to users’ changing interests, giving good recommendations.
The role of generative AI in SEO
Generative AI has emerged as a game-changer in SEO, offering new ways to improve websites, user experience, and content creation. Using generative AI, you can optimize your SEO strategies and stay ahead of your competitors.
Content generation and optimization
We’ve touched on this before, but generative AI is vital in content generation. It allows you to produce large-scale, relevant, and engaging content. It can help overcome the challenge of consistently creating content by generating unique blog posts, articles, and product descriptions that align with SEO best practices.
Keyword research and targeting
AI offers valuable support in keyword research and targeting. With its ability to analyze vast amounts of data, AI algorithms can identify relevant and trending topics and uncover long-tail keyword opportunities. Using AI for keyword research, you can optimize your content, improve relevance, and enhance search engine visibility.
Design and user experience
AI can help with site design and UX optimizations. We’ve seen various AI-powered site builders appear in the last year. AI algorithms can recommend designs and suggest interfaces, layouts, and visual element improvements.
A/B testing and optimization
AI can automate A/B testing methods so that you can evaluate and optimize versions of your sites. By making multiple variations of landing pages or content, the AI can analyze user behavior and statistically determine the most effective options, which could lead to improved conversion rates.
Generating SEO-friendly content
Making SEO-friendly content is one of the most impactful applications of generative AI in SEO. Generative AI lets you simplify your content creation process, ensuring the generated content aligns with SEO best practices.
Craft your content with care
Crafting exceptional content with the help of generative AI while keeping SEO in mind requires a careful balance between creativity and optimization. Using AI models, you can make content that helps you include suitable keywords, optimize meta tags, and employ a reader-friendly tone and structure.
However, it is crucial to go beyond mere optimization and ensure the content remains engaging, informative, and tailored to the target audience. This is where human expertise and intervention come in, adding a personal touch, unique insights, and crafting authentic storytelling.
AI content tools like Jasper are getting better by the day
Tailoring content to target keywords
Generative AI can help write content for specific keywords. This enables you to create content that is not only engaging but also optimized for specific target keywords.
Maintaining content relevance and freshness
Search engines favor fresh and relevant content; generative AI can help you address this need. AI can also help you keep your evergreen content fresh and relevant by suggesting improvements.
Working SEO into content
You can get generative AI to include SEO-friendly elements in its content. This can consist of optimizing meta tags, headers, and subheadings with relevant keywords, ensuring proper usage of internal and external links, and structuring the content for easy readability. By automating this, AI saves time and effort for content creators while improving the content for better results.
Balancing creativity and optimization
While generating SEO-friendly content, it is crucial to maintain a balance between creativity and optimization. Generative AI algorithms can ensure the generated content is optimized for search engines and retains a creative and engaging tone. This prevents the content from sounding robotic or keyword-stuffed, providing a positive experience while sticking to SEO best practices.
Enhancing UX with generative AI
In SEO, user experience plays a crucial role in deciding the success of a website. With the advancements in generative AI, you can now use these technologies to enhance user experiences in several ways.
Personalized content recommendations
Generative AI models can analyze user behavior, preferences, and historical data to generate personalized content recommendations. The AI can suggest relevant articles, products, or services by understanding user patterns and interests, increasing engagement and satisfaction. This personalized approach also improves the chances of conversion and customer retention.
Interactive virtual assistants and chatbots
Chatbots are all the rage. Generative AI helped the development of interactive virtual assistants and chatbots that provide valuable support to users. With natural language processing abilities, these AI models can understand and respond to user queries, providing instant assistance and fixing common issues. This leads to a better user experience and less work for customer support teams.
Dynamic content generation
Generative AI models can dynamically make real-time content based on user inputs, making the user experience more immersive and interactive. For example, online stores can use AI-powered systems to generate personalized product descriptions or virtual showrooms based on user preferences or browsing history. By tailoring content this way, you can create a more engaging and user-centric experience.
Sentiment analysis and emotional responses
AI can discover sentiment. Generative AI models can analyze user sentiment and emotional cues from text or voice inputs. This information can be used to tailor responses to better match users’ emotional states and needs. By understanding user sentiment, websites and applications can adjust their tone, recommendations, or support accordingly, creating a more empathetic and engaging user experience.
Generative AI and keyword research
Keyword research is critical in SEO, as it helps you identify and target the most relevant and valuable keywords for your content. Leveraging the power of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) allows you to streamline and enhance your keyword research process for improved SEO performance.
Analyzing big data for keyword insights
AI models excel at analyzing vast amounts of data, making them invaluable for keyword research. You can gain insights into keyword trends, search volumes, and user intent by training AI algorithms on large search queries, website content, and user behavior datasets. These insights help organizations understand the preferences and requirements of their target audience, enabling them to create relevant and engaging content that aligns with user expectations.
Uncovering long-tail keywords
One of the advantages of generative AI in keyword research is its ability to uncover long-tail keyword options. Long-tail keywords are longer, more specific search phrases with lower competition but higher conversion potential. Generative AI algorithms can analyze user search queries and identify patterns, allowing you to uncover long-tail keywords that align with your niche and target audience. By optimizing your content for these specific keywords, you can attract highly targeted organic traffic to increase conversion.
Improving keyword relevance and optimization
Keyword relevance and optimization are crucial elements of successful SEO strategies. Generative AI can help you create content that not only contains relevant keywords but also meets the conditions of search engines.
AI models can examine top-ranking content and identify patterns contributing to higher rankings. Incorporating these insights into the generation process allows you to improve content for targeted keywords while keeping a natural and engaging tone.
Enhancing local SEO with AI-generated keywords
Local businesses can also benefit from AI by finding more keywords for local SEO. These keywords can help local companies to optimize their content for optimal visibility in local search results. This enables them to attract local customers and drive foot traffic to their physical locations.
Addressing language and cultural variances
Generative AI is handy in handling language and cultural variances in keyword research. It can consider nuances in language, regional dialects, and cultural preferences to generate keywords that resonate with specific target audiences. By using AI, you can expand your reach and tailor your content to diverse linguistic and cultural groups.
AI-generated SEO titles and meta descriptions
In SEO, creating compelling titles and meta descriptions is vital to attract users and increase click-through rates. Traditionally, human writers have been responsible for writing these elements. However, with the rise of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), you can now use AI-generated SEO titles and meta descriptions to optimize your content for search engines.
Challenges and ethical considerations
As AI becomes integrated into SEO strategies, it is vital to recognize and address its use’s challenges and ethical considerations. While generative AI offers remarkable capabilities and benefits, it raises concerns about transparency, biases, and human supervision.
Lack of transparency
One significant challenge in using generative AI for SEO lies in transparency. Generative AI models often operate as black boxes, meaning the decision-making process behind their outputs can be difficult to understand. This lack of transparency raises concerns, as you may be unable to explain how and why specific choices were made based on AI recommendations.
Biases and unintended consequences
Generative AI models learn from large datasets that reflect the biases and preferences of the data they were trained on. Consequently, these models can perpetuate existing biases or introduce unintended consequences when making content or recommending SEO. Biases can appear in various ways, such as gender biases in image selection, favoring specific demographics over others, or reinforcing stereotypes in content creation.
Evaluating the outcome AI models generate is critical to make them clear of bias and unintended results. The Yoast SEO inclusive language analysis can help you find and correct these in the text.
Human supervision and decision making
While generative AI can automate and streamline many aspects of SEO, it should not replace human supervision and decision-making. Human oversight remains crucial to ensure ethical practices, maintain control, and make informed decisions. Relying solely on AI-driven optimizations may lead to unintended consequences, as AI models may not fully understand the business goals, cultural contexts, or nuances specific to a particular industry.
Human supervision concerns critically checking the AI models’ outputs, recommendations, and decisions. It entails validating AI-generated variations, evaluating the impact on user experience, and aligning the optimizations with the business objectives and ethical considerations. Human involvement helps maintain accountability, ensures that AI remains a tool rather than an independent decision-maker, and allows for intuitive adjustments that AI may not capture effectively.
Future directions in generative AI and SEO
As AI advances and changes various industries, including content creation and SEO, several exciting future directions emerge.
Integration of generative AI and user feedback
User feedback helps understand user preferences, improve content responses, and enhance user experiences. Future directions in AI involve incorporating user feedback loops within AI models. The AI can learn and adapt to growing user expectations by including user responses and making content more relevant, engaging, and user-centric.
Real-time content generation
Real-time content generation is an exciting direction with immense potential for creating dynamic and contextually aware content. By leveraging real-time data streams, AI models can make content using current events, trends, and user interactions.
Personalized content recommendations
Generative AI can significantly tailor personalized content to individual preferences and interests. This direction uses AI models to analyze user behavior, consumption patterns, and historical data to provide personalized content suggestions.
Improved content planning and strategy
AI can revolutionize content planning and strategy by giving data-driven insights and suggestions. Future directions in generative AI involve developing AI models that can analyze market trends, competitor strategies, and user preferences to assist in content planning.
Conclusion
The intersection of generative AI and SEO represents a significant content creation and optimization milestone. Generative AI lets anyone produce high-quality, engaging content at scale — which is also one of the most important flaws. It revolutionizes the content creation landscape by automating tasks, enhancing user experiences, and simplifying operations.
Generative AI presents numerous chances for content creators, marketers, and firms to excel online. However, handling ethical considerations and bias mitigation is crucial when implementing AI in content creation. Striking a balance between automation and human creativity is critical to creating content that engages, informs, and delights users while sticking to SEO best practices.
As generative AI evolves, integrating it into your SEO work could help you to thrive online. Using the power of GenAI, you can optimize your SEO strategies, improve visibility, drive traffic, and offer users excellent experiences.
Generative AI is a powerful tool but cannot replace human creativity and expertise. People must collaborate with AI to shape and refine the content, ensuring it meets audience expectations and aligns with brand values. Together, you can continue to create meaningful, relevant, and SEO-optimized content that captivates audiences and drives success.
Meet our latest update, Yoast SEO 20.12. It’s loaded with improvements designed to enhance your SEO efforts and simplify your journey toward better rankings. We owe the growth and evolution of Yoast SEO to your constant support and invaluable feedback. This update will benefit your website optimization efforts as we improve our products.
More improvements in Yoast SEO 20.12
The heart of this Yoast SEO 20.12 lies in fixes and improvements. Our dedicated team has worked hard to fix issues, refine our plugin, and optimize functionalities to ensure a smoother, more efficient user experience.
Reliability is a cornerstone of effective SEO, so we’ve strengthened the stability of our plugin to give you consistent, peak performance. Also, we’ve ironed out issues to ensure your SEO strategy remains intact and your site’s performance soars.
Helping you do SEO
Quality readability analysis ensures your content is available and understandable to your audience. Adhering to recommended reading levels, using clear language, and structuring your content effectively can improve user engagement and lower bounce rates. Remember, Google and other search engines also focus on the user experience when ranking websites, which means good readability is critical for SEO.
Our well-executed SEO analysis helps you to improve your rankings and increase your visibility to organic traffic. By catering to relevant keywords and building high-quality backlinks, you can attract a larger, more targeted audience to your website.
Updating WooCommerce SEO
We’ve also updated our WooCommerce SEO plugin. We’ve made it easier to use, more stable, and with an enhanced user experience. Our team has worked hard to streamline the plugin, incorporating more intuitive controls and cleaner processes to make your SEO optimization as easy as 1-2-3. Moreover, we’ve improved the plugin’s stability, eliminating bugs and ensuring a smooth run for your SEO needs. The user experience is now seamless, with faster response and comfortable navigation, making your tasks more efficient and hassle-free.
Update now to Yoast SEO 20.12
Yoast SEO 20.12 is available to download for all. We appreciate your support and remain committed to continually improving our products to cater to your SEO needs. This update aims to make Yoast SEO not just a tool for your website but the ultimate companion in your online success journey. Try out our latest release and experience the difference.
Building trust and establishing authority has become paramount for most online publishers. As Google strives to deliver the most reliable and high-quality content to users — especially in the age of generative AI, they have emphasized a concept known as E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. E-E-A-T serves as a critical framework to evaluate the credibility and reliability of websites and their content. Improving your E-E-A-T can solidify your position as a trusted authority in your field. Yoast SEO Premium now has a tool to help you work on that.
Yoast SEO Premium helps improve E-E-A-T
Google looks at your site from all angles to help determine its expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. There are so many options for you to point Google to the right places so it can quickly find what it needs to verify all that. For instance, your publishing principles pages provide excellent insights for Google. In today’s release of Yoast SEO Premium, we’ll enhance these pages via structured data.
Publishing principles are guidelines that govern the creation and dissemination of content. They encompass accuracy, integrity, relevance, transparency, engagement, privacy, accessibility, continuous improvement, and legal compliance. Following these principles ensures high-quality, trustworthy content that resonates with users.
Adhering to publishing principles establishes credibility and expertise, improves user satisfaction, and positively impacts SEO by enhancing E-E-A-T.
There’s structured data for that: publishingPrinciples
Yoast SEO Premium has new options to help Google find those all-important pages. We also make sure to add the publishingPrinciples schema to it so it’s instantly recognizable as such for search engines.
Head to the Site basics settings in Yoast SEO and scroll down to the Site policies section. Here, you can find different options for publishing principles, like:
General publishing principles
Funding information
Corrections policy
Ethics policy
Diversity policy
And more…
Select the appropriate pages from the fields, and you are ready. If you don’t have policies, this might be a good time to start writing those!
Adding publishing principles with Yoast SEO Premium
Update now to Yoast SEO 20.11
In Yoast SEO 20.11, we’ve added a new notification that reminds you to optimize recently added content types. You’ll not only see a notification on your dashboard, but we’ve also added a label to the content types to make them easily recognizable as new.
In Yoast SEO Premium, we’ve added a new option to add your publishing principles to your site. Select them from the options, and we’ll add the proper schema. This makes it easier for Google to find and recognize your essential principles, which helps your E-E-A-T!
In SEO, there are on-page factors and off-page factors. On-page SEO factors are aspects of your website that you can optimize for better search rankings. It’s about improving things like your technical set-up, your content, and how user-friendly your site is. In this post, we’ll explain all about on-page SEO and how it differs from off-page SEO, and we’ll talk about some on-page optimizations that can help you to rank better.
On-page and off-page SEO: what’s the difference?
Every SEO strategy is focused on ranking as high as possible in the search engines. To do this, we all try to design and develop a website that Google’s algorithm — and people! — will love. That’s basically what SEO is about. The factors in Google’s algorithm can be divided into two categories that will determine the ranking of your website: on-page factors and off-page factors.
On-page SEO factors all have to do with elements on your website. For instance, things you work on to improve your E-E-A-T also fall in this category. Some of the most important on-page SEO factors are:
Your site set-up and technical features, site speed in particular
The quality of your content and use of keywords
How do you use additional media, such as images and videos
Your site structure and internal linking
Structured data and search appearance
Your URL structure
User experience
Meanwhile, off-page SEO looks at what happens away from your website. Some off-page SEO factors include:
Relevant links from other websites leading to your site
Social media activity
Business and map listings
External marketing activities
Pro tip: Find out more about on-page SEO with our front-end SEO inspector! You can use the front-end inspector tool in Yoast SEO Premium to explore the SEO data, metadata and schema output for pages on your site. It’s a great way to get to grips with your on-page SEO.
Importance of on-page SEO
On-page SEO consists of all the elements of SEO that you have control over. If you own a website, you can control the technical issues and the quality of your content. We believe you should be able to tackle all of these factors as they’re in your own hands. Remember: if you create an excellent website, it will start ranking.
Focusing on on-page SEO will also increase the chance that your off-page SEO strategy will be successful. Link building with a crappy site is very tough. Nobody wants to link to poorly written articles or sites that don’t work correctly.
How to optimize on-page SEO factors
1. Make sure search engines can crawl and index your site
If you’re unfamiliar with crawlability and indexing, here’s a quick explanation of what it is and what it has to do with Google. To show your page in the search results, Google must first know about that page. It has to be indexed by Google, meaning that this page has been stored in their index. And for that to be possible, you must ensure you’re not blocking Google from indexing your post or your whole site. So check if you’re not unintentionally doing that (we still see this happening!), and ensure your site is indexed.
Although this isn’t technically a ranking factor, getting your site into the search results requires it, so we thought it should be included here.
2. Invest time in creating quality content based on solid keyword research
Why do you think people visit your site? Most likely because it contains the information they’re looking for. Therefore it’s essential to write excellent content that corresponds with their needs. Search engines like Google also read your text. Which site ranks highest for a specific search term is primarily based on a website’s content. That’s why your content should be informative, easy to read, and focused on the right keywords that your audience uses.
Aside from creating quality content, you must remove or remedy low-quality pages. So-called thin content can harm your SEO. Take time to find these pages and do something with them occasionally to keep your content in good shape.
A significant on-page ranking factor is site speed. Users don’t want to wait for pages to load, so Google tends to rank fast-loading sites higher. If you’re unsure how fast (or slow) your site is, check out your Core Web Vital scores using the report in Google Search Console. This helpful tool will point out areas where your site speed can be improved so you know what to work on.
If you’re tech-savvy, you can probably handle this on your own. If you’re unsure where to start, our Technical SEO training can help you.
4. Get your site structure and internal linking right
A good site structure helps Google (and users) understand your site and navigate your content. And when it comes to making that site structure, internal linking is the way to do it. Firstly, you must channel many internal links to your most important content. We call those pages cornerstone content. Secondly, you should tidy up pages that aren’t getting many (if any) internal links. Those pages are what we refer to as orphaned content. It would be best if you decided whether to improve those pages and add more internal links pointing to them or remove them altogether.
Yoast SEO Premium has two SEO workouts to help you improve your site structure and internal linking. Using the workouts can help you to make big improvements quickly, so give them a go!
5. Optimize your use of images and videos
You’ll want to include images on your site to make it attractive, and maybe some videos too. Doing that wrong can harm your SEO, but doing it correctly comes with some SEO benefits.
High-quality images are usually large files that can slow your site down, and that’s a problem. Using smaller image files and giving them descriptive names, captions, and alt tags will favor your SEO. Plus, there are additional benefits. For one, you’ll make your site more accessible, so it’s helpful for a wider audience. And for another thing, you’ll have a chance of your images ranking in the Google Image search results. Read more about these topics in our posts about image SEO and alt tags.
Adding videos to your site is a bit more complicated than images. And ranking your videos on Google (or YouTube) comes with its own set of challenges. We’ve got a great series of posts all about video SEO, if you’d like to learn more about optimizing in this area. There’s also a dedicated Yoast Video SEO plugin, if you’re serious about getting your videos ranking.
6. Create a persuasive search appearance
How your site looks in the search results is vital for SEO. While the search results aren’t part of your site, the things you do to optimize your search appearance are. Therefore, we consider SEO titles, meta descriptions, and structured data part of on-page SEO.
Optimize your SEO title and meta description, and then add structured data for results that stand out
Optimizing the text for your search snippets is fairly straightforward. Adding structured data can be trickier. Good to know: Yoast SEO can help with all these tasks. With checks and previews to help you, getting your SEO titles and meta descriptions right couldn’t be easier. And when it comes to structured data, Yoast does all the hard work for you — all you need to do is select the content type and fill in the blanks.
7. Make your URLs SEO-friendly
A well-crafted URL structure helps your on-page SEO — it’s like giving your web pages a good road map. Think of it as a friendly address that guides search engines and invites users to explore your content. Creating SEO-friendly URLs makes it easier for humans and search engines to understand what your page is all about. Opt for concise and descriptive URLs that include relevant keywords, as they provide a clear signpost. A clean and organized URL structure enhances navigation, making it easier for everyone to understand your website. Don’t forget to keep it short and readable.
8. Design an excellent user experience
The last thing we want to mention is user experience. Simply put, users need to understand your website easily. They should be able to find what they want in a heartbeat. They should know where to click and how to navigate through your site. And your site should be fast! A beautifully designed website is nice, but you should make it your top priority to create a user-friendly website first.
If you want to learn more about combining SEO and UX to get more people to your site, we’d advise you to look at our other articles on user experience. Or check out our all-around SEO training course.
To conclude
We’ve talked about the most important on-page SEO factors. First, ensure that your website works correctly and that your technical SEO is up to par. Secondly, create content that is user-centered and focused on the right keywords. Thirdly, work on the usability and speed of your site to help users and search engines around your website.
As these factors are all a part of your site, you can work on them to ensure your on-page SEO is top-notch! That being said, do remember to also work on your off-page SEO. Although you may not have total control over these factors, you can still put some effort into creating that exposure on other sites too!
We are excited to present Yoast SEO 20.10, a release dedicated to fine-tuning your website and delivering an even smoother experience for all our fantastic users. This update focuses on fixing bugs and implementing minor enhancements to ensure your SEO journey is flawless. We’ve added a support section that gives you quick access to helpful content, while Premium subscribers can contact our dedicated support team.
A brand-new support section
At Yoast, we deeply value our users and understand the importance of reliable, responsive support. With Yoast SEO 20.10, we’ve made it easier for you to access the help you need, empowering you to optimize your website and achieve outstanding results confidently.
The latest release of Yoast SEO offers a new support page. Here, you’ll find options to get answers to all your burning questions quickly. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced pro, you’ll find a wealth of resources on our site to guide you through the intricacies of SEO optimization.
If you subscribe to Yoast SEO Premium, you’ll find an option to contact our support team instantly. Unlock unlimited 24/7 premium support and take your SEO to new heights by signing up for Yoast SEO Premium now!
Yoast SEO 20.10 introduces a new support section
Fixes and enhancements
In Yoast SEO 20.10, we’ve squashed numerous bugs that might have been causing a few hiccups along the way. Building stable foundations is crucial for your success, and we’re committed to providing you with a top-notch, bug-free experience. Of course, we’ve also added some interesting enhancements to our product.
For instance, we’ve expanded the list of HTML elements excluded from the content analysis to ensure these don’t influence the scores. In addition, we’ve introduced more robust HTML processing for the competing links, keyphrase in introduction, image keyphrase, and images assessments. Lastly, you can find a new option in the crawl optimization settings. This new one lets you block AdsBot crawling when enabled.
You can now block Google AdsBot from crawling — if you don’t use Google Ads, that is
Update now to Yoast SEO 20.10
Upgrade to Yoast SEO 20.10 today and experience the updated stability and fine-tuned enhancements. We appreciate your feedback, and we’re confident that this release will bring you peace of mind and increased optimization capabilities. Let’s take your SEO goals to new heights together as we continue to refine and perfect Yoast SEO.
