Artificial intelligence (AI) is all the rage right now. Some say it’s started a technological revolution, and that AI will change our lives for the better. But generative AI tools are only as good as the data they’re fed. And have we truly considered the implications of a world where people generate content instead of creating it themselves?
What is generative AI?
To put it simply, generative AI creates content. Whether that’s text, images, or audio. But how does it do that? By using deep learning techniques and technologies in a machine-learning framework. This framework is a system that makes predictions based on data that it’s trained on. For example, if you give ChaptGPT a prompt, it’s able to produce content based on your input.
Some well-known examples of generative AI tools are the ChatGPT chatbot, the Midjourney image generator, and the Bard tool from Google.
What this means for how content creators work
Using generative AI tools for work can greatly improve your productivity because they can quickly generate content. They’re also fast and inexpensive. If you own a small business, AI tools can save you tons of money because you may not need to hire a content creator. Plus, since AI tools continue to learn, they’ll also be able to give you better results over time.Â
Why this could cause problems
As is the case with most automated devices out there, generated AI content is not entirely fool-proof. And it also begs the question if it’s ethical to use AI, when these tools are trained on data provided by other people. Sometimes, without their permission. So let’s dive deeper into why AI tools might cause problems.
A cost-effective alternative isn’t necessarily better
One of the big benefits of using AI tools is their efficiency. They’re cheap and quick, meaning you don’t need to hire an entire marketing team. Which is precisely why AI tools might be a problem. They threaten to make certain jobs obsolete. And you have to wonder if it’s reasonable that AI will take over the arts, which one might consider the most human of all jobs.Â
Bad data
Another problem is the data that generative AI tools are trained with. They need large volumes to learn, and some systems, such as ChatGPT, use a lot of the data on the internet to train itself. And that’s undoubtedly what might cause problems. Not all data is ‘good’ data. Most of it is biased because humans are biased. Sexist, racist, or homophobic ideas are littered throughout the content we create, so if an AI tool uses that data, it’ll become a biased tool. The result? Offensive content that can’t be used. Or worse, offensive content that people will accept as truth and therefore post online, strengthening a message that shouldn’t be spread across the globe.
Misuse of AI tools
Furthermore, the data AI tools are using to train themselves could belong to people who didn’t know their content would be used to teach an AI. It has raised numerous questions: When you put something online, is it still yours? And when you’ve generated content that uses other people’s illustrations, is it actually your art piece? Unfortunately, there are no definitive answers to these questions.
You might think that it’s not relevant whether a piece has been drawn by an artist or generated by someone else. But what if the art piece won a big prize? Is that fair compared to the other contestants who actually put in the time and effort? And let’s look at the world of academia. If an academic paper was generated by AI, it might be based on human thought, but it doesn’t actually contain any human input. Is that okay? Do we want the place where people learn to develop their minds become a place where people learn how to craft great prompts, instead of learning how to think for themselves?
It’s not all bad
Luckily, there’s still hope. AI tools might be impressively smart, but they’re still ‘just’ tools. To generate content, they need content that was produced by people. And if we find a way to ethically give AI tools good data, we’re one step closer to creating a powerful tool that can help small businesses grow, so they can actually afford to hire a marketing team.
How to use AI to enhance your writing
Since AI tools are not completely ethical yet, should you refrain from using them all together? No, there’s no denying that AI tools can be a huge help. However, we suggest that you use them as guidelines, inspiration, and a way to boost your productivity on a day you might not feel like writing.Â
Use it as an inspiration to start writing
Do you regularly write content for your website or blog? Then you probably know the feeling of staring at a blank document because you don’t know where to start. AI tools can resolve this issue. You simply prompt an AI tool to write an outline, specifying which topics you want to discuss. Or maybe you need the AI tool to write the first paragraph, just so there’s something on the page. While reading your generated paragraph, chances are ideas will start flowing. You’ll be writing in no-time!
Be critical!
Still, when you use AI tools to generate actual posts or texts, it’s good to be critical. Like we mentioned, AI tools can be biased. And they might be incorrect in their information. You should always read your generated piece, and fact-check any claims the text makes. In addition, you want to ensure the content meets your brand values by paying attention to what language is used, since it might not be inclusive. Luckily, if you use the Yoast SEO plugin, you’ll be able to use the inclusive language feature to double-check your content.Â
Give it a proper rewrite to make it yours
As mentioned before, AI tools can only imitate actual human thoughts and ideas. They generate based on existing ones. And while you might argue that that’s also how humans generate ideas and originality doesn’t exist anyway, you shouldn’t underestimate your personal opinion. It gives a unique flavor to your content. That’s why you should always rewrite (parts of) a generated piece of content.
Conclusion
Generative AI tools can be very useful for small businesses. But, like any technology, it has its drawbacks. It can be biased, or wildly incorrect. That’s why you should use AI as an inspiration to kickstart your creative process, and always read and rewrite your generated content. In our opinion, AI should augment, and not replace humans.Â
On May 1st, Kimberley Cole was appointed as General Manager of Newfold Digital, with a key focus of her role on leading Yoast. Since our former CEO Thijs de Valk stepped down, Yoast has been searching for a new business leader. In Kimberley, we found a fantastic person to take on this role. Kimberley joins us following a long and global career, and we’re super happy to have her on board.
The new General Manager: Kimberley Cole
Kimberley is Australian but considers herself more of a citizen of the world. She is a seasoned global executive with extensive experience in financial services and technology. With over 20 years of experience as a strategic go-to-market leader, she has helped customers across different regions identify solutions to succeed in a constantly disrupted world.
Kimberley has worked with big names such as Reuters and Thomson Reuters in various roles, from product management to sales and marketing. Most recently, she served as Chief Commercial Officer at Lynk, a successful knowledge as a service series B scale-up. In addition to her impressive professional background, Kimberley also founded Risky Women, a community aimed at inspiring and connecting women to be bold, extend themselves, and take risks. She’s incredibly passionate about empowering women from all walks of life.
Kimberley looks forward to guiding Yoast into this new chapter: “I am excited to be on board and about the journey we have ahead. Joost and Marieke built a fantastic company and we will continue to build on their incredible foundation. It is the start of a new chapter for Yoast, and with our talented team, I look forward to innovating and enhancing our products and service to continue as a market leader of SEOâ€.
Will there be any significant changes?
“As I’m new to the WordPress world, I will first be listening to and learning from the amazing Yoast team, our customers, and the community. My main focus will be to understand our customers’ needs, see how we can better serve them, and continue anticipating what will benefit the community, including some of our wonderful partners. It is definitely a new chapter for Yoast, which I will write with the team. Of course, our mission remains ‘SEO for everyone’ at the core but bringing the power of Newfold to provide even more to our customers, partners, and the community.â€
Dear WordPress. Time flies when we’re having fun, don’t you agree? You are turning 20 years old and this feels like the perfect occasion to reflect on our relationship. But to be honest, it’s quite hard to put into words how much you mean to us. You have been a constant source of joy and inspiration in our lives, and you’re always there when we need you. We’re grateful for every moment we’ve shared together, and look forward to many more.
From the moment we met, it was obvious there was something special about you. Your elegant design, user-friendly interface, and endless customization options drew us in and captured our hearts. We were all impressed by how easy it was to create a website with you, even as a complete beginner. You made it possible for people to express themselves, to share their passions and ideas with the world. You inspire us to be our best selves, to constantly strive for excellence. It felt like a perfect match right away!
But as we got to know you better, we realized that there was so much more to you than just your looks. You are endlessly versatile, allowing your users to create anything from a simple blog to a complex e-commerce site. You are always evolving, and constantly improving with every update and upgrade. You are reliable, secure, and trusted by millions of users around the world.
More than that, though, you have become a lifelong friend. You have brought us into a community of like-minded individuals with shared passions and interests. You have given us the tools to build meaningful relationships, reach out to others and make a real difference. You have supported me through thick and thin, always there to lend a helping hand or a listening ear.
WordPress, we love you. We love the way you challenge us to be our best selves, to push beyond limits, and to explore new horizons. We love the way you inspire us to grow, to stay curious and open-minded. We love the way you encourage us to connect with others who share our passions. You’ve introduced me to so many awesome people, and we’re forever grateful for the friendships and collaborations that came out of that.
Thank you for everything you do, WordPress. We cannot and will not imagine a world without you in it. Thank you for being a companion, mentor, and friend. Thank you for every line of code and every update. We solemnly promise to cherish you, honor your legacy, and build on your strengths for as long as we live.
Every two weeks, we bring you a new release of Yoast SEO. Today is no different! In Yoast SEO 20.7, we bring you a round of fixes and enhancements. In this week’s Yoast SEO Premium release, we’ve added a new feature to help you discover your all-important cornerstone content articles in the WordPress post overview.
Yoast SEO Premium: Find your cornerstone content quickly
As you know, cornerstone content is the most critical content on your website. They are typically lengthy, informative pages that cover a topic from all angles. Cornerstone content helps to establish your website’s authority and expertise in your field, and it usually attracts a lot of traffic over time.
However, creating and managing high-quality cornerstone content can be daunting, and that’s where Yoast SEO comes in. Yoast SEO helps you optimize your cornerstone content for search engines, ensuring that it ranks well in the search results and attracts the right traffic. By leveraging Yoast SEO’s guidance and best practices, you can create compelling content that drives traffic and builds authority and reputation.
In Yoast SEO Premium 20.7, we’ve made it easier to find your cornerstone in the post overview of WordPress. An additional column, identified by the pyramid icon, highlights which posts you marked as cornerstones in Yoast SEO. Of course, you can filter the list by clicking on the pyramid icon.
In the screenshot, you’ll also notice the numbers and the icons with arrows pointing in and out of a document. This link counter tracks how many internal links point to a post and how many internal links point away from the post to other articles on your site.
Track the number of internal links going to and from your cornerstone content, plus a new column for easily recognizing them
Zapier integration ends today
In Yoast SEO 20.6, we gave you a heads-up about the upcoming end of the Zapier integration. With today’s release of Yoast SEO 20.7, we are formally ending support for our Zapier integration. This will impact you if you rely on the integration, as existing Zaps using the Yoast SEO integration will stop working for you if you update to version 20.7 or higher.
Yoast SEO academy is an excellent resource if you want to learn how to optimize your site for search engines and to drive more traffic to it. And the best part is that you get free access to all the courses when you sign up for Yoast SEO Premium!
With Yoast SEO academy, you can access a comprehensive library of SEO courses and training materials. These resources cover keyword research, site structure, content creation, and more. You’ll learn the theory and practical application of SEO strategies essential for higher search engine rankings.
In Yoast SEO 20.7, we’ve made accessing and discovering all these excellent educational materials easier. You can find all your SEO courses in the new academy section in one spot. And with access included in Yoast SEO Premium, there’s no reason not to take advantage of this valuable resource!
Yoast SEO 20.7 is out now
Yoast SEO 20.7 is available for download as of now, so go get it! In this release, you can find several fixes and enhancements. In Yoast SEO Premium, we’ve added a new column to the post overview in WordPress to help you find your cornerstone content easily.
Your site needs to have a defined structure because, without it, it’ll just be a random collection of pages and blog posts. Your users need this structure to navigate on your site, to click from one page to another. Google also uses the structure of your site to determine what content is important and what is less relevant. This guide tells you everything you need to know about site structure.
Site structure refers to organizing and arranging a website’s pages and content. It defines the information hierarchy within the site and serves as a roadmap for search engine crawlers. A well-structured site facilitates easy navigation, enhances user experience, and helps search engines like Google understand and effectively index the site’s content. This, in turn, can improve the site’s performance by making it easier for users to find and engage with the content. Ultimately, an optimized site structure helps achieve higher rankings, more traffic, and better conversion rates.
Importance for usability
The structure of your website significantly impacts the experience for your visitors (UX). If visitors can’t find the products and information they’re looking for, they’ll not likely become regular visitors or customers. In other words, you should help them navigate your site. A good site structure will help with this.
Navigating should be easy. You need to categorize and link your posts and products so they are easy to find. New visitors should be able to grasp what you’re writing about or selling instantly.
Importance of your site structure for SEO
A solid site structure vastly improves your chances of ranking in search engines. There are three main reasons for this:
a. It helps Google ‘understand’ your site
The way you structure your site will give Google vital clues about where to find the most valuable content on your site. It helps search engines understand what your site is mainly about or what you’re selling. A decent site structure also enables search engines to find and index content quickly. A good structure should, therefore, lead to a higher ranking in Google.
b. It prevents you from competing with yourself
On your site, you might have blog posts that are quite similar. If, for example, you write a lot about SEO, you could have multiple blog posts about site structure, each covering a different aspect. Consequently, Google won’t be able to tell which of these pages is the most important, so you’ll be competing with your content for high rankings. You should let Google know which page you think is most important. You need a good internal linking and taxonomy structure to do this, so all those pages can work for you instead of against you.
c. It deals with changes on your website
The products you sell in your shop will likely evolve. So does the content you’re writing. You probably add new product lines as old stock sells out. Or you write new articles that make old ones redundant. You don’t want Google to show outdated products or deleted blog posts, so you need to deal with these kinds of changes in the structure of your site.
Are you struggling with setting up your site’s structure? Don’t know the best strategy to link from one post to another? Check out our Site structure training, part of the Yoast SEO academy. Access to Yoast SEO academy is included in the price of Yoast SEO Premium. Before you know it, you’ll be able to improve your rankings by creating the best structure for your site!
How to set up the structure of your site
So, how do you construct a solid site structure? First, we’ll look at an ideal site structure and then explain how to achieve this for your site.
What’s an ideal site structure?
Let’s start by looking at an ideal situation: How should you organize your site if you’re starting from scratch? We think a well-organized website looks like a pyramid with several levels:
Homepage
Categories (or sections)
Subcategories (only for larger sites)
Individual pages and posts
The homepage should be at the top. Then, you have some sections or category pages beneath it. You should be able to file your content under one of these categories. You can divide these sections or categories into subcategories if your site is larger. Beneath your categories or subcategories are your pages and posts.
An ideal site structure looks like a pyramid. On top, you’ll find the homepage and, right below, the main sections or categories, possibly followed by subcategories. On the ground, you’ll find all the individual posts and pages.
Your homepage
On top of the pyramid is the homepage. Your homepage should act as a navigation hub for your visitors. This means, amongst others, that you should link to your most important pages from your homepage. By doing this:
Your visitors are more likely to end up on the pages you want them to end up on;
You show Google that these pages are important.
Further down this article, we’ll help you determine which pages are essential to your business.
Beware not to link too many pages from your homepage, which will cause clutter. And a cluttered homepage doesn’t guide your visitors anywhere. If you want to optimize your homepage further, you can do many other things. Read our article on homepage SEO to find out what.
Navigation
In addition to having a well-structured homepage, it’s also important to create a clear navigation path on your site. Your site-wide navigation consists of two main elements: the menu and the breadcrumbs.
The menu
First, let’s take a look at the menu. The website menu is the most common aid for navigation on your website, and you want to make the best possible use of it. Visitors use your menu to find things on your website. It helps them understand the structure of your website. That’s why the main categories on your site should all have a place in the menu on your homepage.
Furthermore, putting everything in just one menu is not always necessary. If you have a big site with lots of categories, this may clutter your website and makes your main menu a poor reflection of the rest of your site. Where it makes sense, creating a second menu is perfectly fine.
For instance, eBay has one menu at the top of the page – also called the top bar menu – and, in addition to that, a main menu. This top bar menu links to important pages that aren’t categories in the shop, like pages that relate to the visitor’s account on the site. The main menu reflects the most important product categories on eBay.
eBay has multiple ways to start navigating from the homepage
Finally, just like on your homepage, you shouldn’t add too many links to your menu. They will become less valuable for your users and search engines if you do.
Adding breadcrumbs to your pages can make your site’s structure even clearer. Breadcrumbs are clickable links, usually at the top of a page or post. Breadcrumbs reflect the structure of your site. They help visitors determine where they are on your site. They improve your site’s user experience and SEO, as you can read in our guide on breadcrumbs.
You can use one of the many breadcrumb plugins for your WordPress site. You can also use our Yoast SEO plugin, as we’ve implemented a breadcrumb functionality in our plugin as well.
Taxonomies
WordPress uses so-called taxonomies to group content; other CMSs have similar systems. The word ‘taxonomy’ is a fancy term for a group of things — website pages, in this case — that have something in common. This is convenient because people looking for more information on the same topic can find similar articles more easily. You can group content in different ways. The default taxonomies in WordPress are categories and tags.
Categories
You should divide your site’s blog posts or products into several categories. If these categories grow too big, you should divide these categories into subcategories to clear things up again. For example, if you have a clothing store and sell shoes, you can divide this category into subcategories: ‘boots’, ‘heels’, and ‘flats’. These subcategories contain products, in this case, shoes, of that specific type.
Adding this hierarchy and categorizing your pages helps your user and Google make sense of every page you write. Add your main categories to your site’s menu when implementing your category structure.
Your site’s structure will also benefit from adding tags. The difference between a category and a tag mostly concerns structure. Categories are hierarchical: you can have subcategories and even sub-subcategories. Tags, however, don’t have that hierarchy. Tags say: “Hey, this article or product has a certain property that might interest a visitor.” Think of it like this: categories are the table of contents of your website, and tags are the index. A tag for the online clothing store mentioned above could be a brand, for instance, Timberlands.
Try not to create too many tags. You’re not structuring anything if you add a new unique tag to every post or article. Ensure each tag is used at least twice, and your tags group articles that genuinely belong together.
Some WordPress themes display tags with each post, but some don’t. Ensure your tags are available to visitors somewhere, preferably at the bottom of your article or in the sidebar. Google isn’t the only one that likes tags: they are useful for visitors wanting to read more about the same topic.
Site structure is all about grouping and linking the content on your site. Until now, we mostly discussed so-called classifying links: links on your homepage, navigation, and taxonomies. On the other hand, contextual links are internal links within the copy on your pages that refer to other pages within your site. For a link to be contextual, the page you link to should be relevant for someone reading the current page. If you look at the previous paragraph, for instance, we link to a post about tagging, so people can learn more about it if they’re interested.
Your most important pages are often very relevant to mention on several pages across your site, so you’ll link to them most often. Just remember that not only the page you’re linking to is relevant, the context of the link is important as well.
Google uses the context of your links to gather information about the page you’re linking to. It always uses the anchor text (or link text) to understand what the page you’re linking to is about. But the anchor text isn’t the only thing Google looks at. Nowadays, it also considers the content around the link to gather extra information. Google is becoming better at recognizing related words and concepts. Adding links from a meaningful context allows Google to value and rank your pages properly. Yoast SEO Premium makes internal linking a breeze by automatically suggesting relevant content from your site to link to.
Contextual linking for blogs
For blogs, you should write extensively on the topics you want to rank for. You should write some main articles — your cornerstone articles — and write various posts about subtopics of that topic. Then link from these related posts to your cornerstone articles and from the cornerstone articles back to related posts. In this way, you’ll ensure that your most important pages have both the most and most relevant links.
The following metaphor might help you understand this principle:
Imagine you’re looking at a map of a state or country. You’ll probably see many small towns and some bigger cities. All towns and cities will be interconnected somehow. You’ll notice that small towns often have roads leading to the big cities. Those cities are your cornerstones, receiving the most links. The small towns are your posts on more specific topics. Some roads (links) lead to these smaller towns, but not as much as the big cities.
Contextual internal linking works differently on an online store with very few to no pages that are exclusively meant to inform. You don’t explore a specific topic on your product pages: you’re selling a product. Therefore, on product pages, you mostly want to keep people on a page and convince them to buy the product. Consequently, contextual linking is far less prominent in this context. You generally shouldn’t add contextual links to your product descriptions because it could lead to people clicking away from the page.
There are just a couple of meaningful ways of adding contextual links to the product pages for your ecommerce SEO:
link from a product bundle page to the individual products
a ‘related items’ or ‘compare with similar items’ section
a ‘customers also bought’ section
a ‘product bundles’ or ‘frequently bought together’ section.
Landing pages are the pages you want your audience to find when they search for specific keywords you’ve optimized for. For instance, we want people who search for ‘free SEO training’ to end up on the page about our free training called ‘SEO for beginners’. You need to approach the content of your most important landing pages differently than your regular pages.
Here, we’ll discuss two types of landing pages: cornerstone pages and product landing pages. They’re both pages you’d like people to land on from the search engines, but they require quite a different approach. But first, we’ll shortly go into search intent because you have to know what your audience is really looking for.
Search intent
When setting up your site structure, you must consider search intent. It’s about what you think people are looking for when they enter a query into a search engine. What do people want to find? And: what do they expect to find?
Consider different possibilities in search intent, as you might want to cater to different types on your site. Are people just looking for an answer to a question or a definition? Are they comparing products before purchase? Or are they intending to buy something right away? This is often reflected in the type of query they make. You can also use Google’s search results to create great content that fits someone’s needs.
When you have an idea of the search intent, ensuring your landing page fits your audience’s search intent is essential. Pages can answer multiple search intents, but you need a clear view of at least your most important pages.
Cornerstone articles are the most important informational articles on your website. Their focus is to provide the best and most complete information on a particular topic; their main goal is not to sell products.
Because of this focus, we usually think of blogs when discussing cornerstone content. Of course, that doesn’t mean it can only be a blog post. All different kinds of websites have cornerstone articles! Rule of thumb: if an article brings everything you know about a broad topic together, it’s a cornerstone content article.
Product landing pages significantly differ from cornerstone articles. The latter are lengthy, whereas product landing pages shouldn’t be that long. Rather than complete articles, they should be focused. These pages only need to show what your visitors need to know to be convinced. They don’t need to hold all the information.
You want to rank with these pages, meaning they need content. Enough content for Google to understand what the page is about and what keyword it should rank for. Where cornerstone articles could be made up of thousands of words, a couple of hundred could be enough for product landing pages. The main focus of the content should be on your products.
Structuring or restructuring your content doesn’t always have high priority in everything you have to do. Especially when you blog a lot or add other content regularly, it might feel like a chore. Although it isn’t always fun, you must do it, or your website might become messy. To prevent that from happening, you need to fix your site structure and keep an eye on it while adding new content. Site structure should be part of your long-term SEO strategy.
Evaluate your menu
When your business goal or website changes, your menu must also change. Planning things visually will pay off when you start thinking about restructuring your site. Make a flowchart.
Start with your new menu one or two levels deep and see if you can fit in more pages you have created over the years. You’ll find that some pages are still valid but don’t seem relevant to your menu anymore. No problem, just be sure to link to them on related pages and in your sitemaps so that Google and your visitors can still find these pages. The flowchart will also show you any gaps in the site structure.
Creating an overview of your categories, subcategories, and products or posts will also help you to rethink your site’s taxonomy. This could be a simple spreadsheet, but you can use more visual tools like LucidChart or MindNode.
Do your product categories and subcategories provide a logical overview of your product range or your posts and pages? Perhaps you’ve noticed somewhere down the line that one category has been far more successful than others, or you wrote many blog posts on one subject and very few on others.
If one category grows much larger than others, your site’s pyramid could be thrown off balance. Think about splitting this category into different categories. But, if some product lines end up much smaller than others, you might want to merge them. Don’t forget to redirect the ones you delete.
If you have built your HTML sitemap manually, update that sitemap after changing your site structure. In the far more likely event you have an XML sitemap, re-submit it to Google Search Console.
You might be able to update and republish some outdated articles to make them relevant again. If an article is outdated, but no one reads it anyway, you might delete it. This could clean up your site nicely.
What you should know, in that case, is that you should never delete a page or article without thinking. If Google cannot find the page, it serves your user a 404 error page. Both the search engine and your visitor will see this error message saying the page doesn’t exist, and that is a bad experience and, thus, bad for your SEO.
Be smart about this! You need to redirect the URL of the page you’re deleting properly so your user (and Google) lands on a different page that is relevant to them. That could even improve your SEO!
Got some old content to clean up on your site? Sort out hidden pages and dead ends in four easy steps with our orphaned content SEO workout, available in Yoast SEO Premium.
Avoid keyword cannibalization
Your website is about a specific topic, which could be quite broad or rather specific. While adding content, you should be aware of keyword cannibalization. If you optimize your articles for keywords that are all too similar, you’ll be devouring your chances of ranking in Google. If you optimize different articles for similar key terms, you’ll be competing with yourself, making both pages rank lower.
You’ll have some work to do if you suffer from keyword cannibalization. In short, you should research the performance of your content and probably merge and redirect some of it. When merging posts, we recommend creating a new draft by cloning one of the original posts with the free Yoast Duplicate Post plugin. This allows you to work on your merged post without making these changes to a live post. Read the guide by Joost to learn more about keyword cannibalization and how to fix it.
Internal linking with Yoast SEO
Feeling a bit overwhelmed by all this advice? Yoast SEO has some handy tools to make internal linking so much easier.
Yoast SEO’s text link counter visualizes your links so you can optimize them. It shows the internal links in a post and the internal links to a post. This tool can enhance your site structure by improving the links between your related posts. Make sure your cornerstones get the most (relevant) links! You can identify your cornerstones by finding them in the column with the pyramid icon.
Quickly see which posts have internal links pointing to them with the text link counter in Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO Premium helps you with your internal linking as well. Our internal linking suggestions tool will show you which articles are related to the one you’re writing, so you can easily link to them: just by dragging the link into your editor!
The internal linking suggestions even include other content types
Moreover, our tool allows you to indicate which articles you consider cornerstone content on your site. Those articles will be shown at the top of the internal linking suggestions. You’ll never forget to link to them again.
As we have seen, there are several reasons why site structure is important. A good site structure helps both your visitors and Google navigate your site. It makes it easier to implement changes and prevents competing with your content. So use the tips and pointers in this guide to check and improve your site structure. That way, you’ll stay on top and keep your website from growing out of control!
Want to improve your site structure but don’t know where to start? Get Yoast SEO Premium and get loads of helpful tools and guidance, including free access to Yoast SEO Academy, our Site structure training, and our SEO workouts!
The robots.txt file is one of the main ways of telling a search engine where it can and can’t go on your website. All major search engines support its basic functionality, but some respond to additional rules, which can be helpful too. This guide covers all the ways to use robots.txt on your website.
Warning!
Any mistakes you make in your robots.txt can seriously harm your site, so read and understand this article before diving in.
The robots.txt file is one of a number of crawl directives. We have guides on all of them and you’ll find them here.
A robots.txt file is a plain text document located in a website’s root directory, serving as a set of instructions to search engine bots. Also called the Robots Exclusion Protocol, the robots.txt file results from a consensus among early search engine developers. It’s not an official standard set by any standards organization, although all major search engines adhere to it.
Robots.txt specifies which pages or sections should be crawled and indexed and which should be ignored. This file helps website owners control the behavior of search engine crawlers, allowing them to manage access, limit indexing to specific areas, and regulate crawling rate. While it’s a public document, compliance with its directives is voluntary, but it is a powerful tool for guiding search engine bots and influencing the indexing process.
A basic robots.txt file might look something like this:
Search engines typically cache the contents of the robots.txt so that they don’t need to keep downloading it, but will usually refresh it several times a day. That means that changes to instructions are typically reflected fairly quickly.
Search engines discover and index the web by crawling pages. As they crawl, they discover and follow links. This takes them from site A to site B to site C, and so on. But before a search engine visits any page on a domain it hasn’t encountered, it will open that domain’s robots.txt file. That lets them know which URLs on that site they’re allowed to visit (and which ones they’re not).
The robots.txt file should always be at the root of your domain. So if your domain is www.example.com, the crawler should find it at https://www.example.com/robots.txt.
It’s also essential that your robots.txt file is called robots.txt. The name is case-sensitive, so get that right, or it won’t work.
Pros and cons of using robots.txt
Pro: managing crawl budget
It’s generally understood that a search spider arrives at a website with a pre-determined “allowance” for how many pages it will crawl (or how much resource/time it’ll spend, based on a site’s authority/size/reputation, and how efficiently the server responds). SEOs call this the crawl budget.
If you think your website has problems with crawl budget, blocking search engines from ‘wasting’ energy on unimportant parts of your site might mean focusing instead on the sections that matter. Use the crawl cleanup settings in Yoast SEO to help Google crawls what matters.
It can sometimes be beneficial to block the search engines from crawling problematic sections of your site, especially on sites where a lot of SEO clean-up has to be done. Once you’ve tidied things up, you can let them back in.
A note on blocking query parameters
One situation where crawl budget is crucial is when your site uses a lot of query string parameters to filter or sort lists. Let’s say you have ten different query parameters, each with different values that can be used in any combination (like t-shirts in multiple colors and sizes). This leads to many possible valid URLs, all of which might get crawled. Blocking query parameters from being crawled will help ensure the search engine only spiders your site’s main URLs and won’t go into the enormous spider trap you’d otherwise create.
Con: not removing a page from search results
Even though you can use the robots.txt file to tell a crawler where it can’t go on your site, you can’t use it to say to a search engine which URLs not to show in the search results – in other words, blocking it won’t stop it from being indexed. If the search engine finds enough links to that URL, it will include it; it will just not know what’s on that page. So your result will look like this:
Use a meta robotsnoindex tag if you want to reliably block a page from appearing in the search results. That means that to find the noindex tag, the search engine has to be able to access that page, so don’t block it with robots.txt.
Noindex directives
It used to be possible to add ‘noindex’ directives in your robots.txt, to remove URLs from Google’s search results, and to avoid these ‘fragments’ showing up. This is no longer supported (and technically, never was).
Con: not spreading link value
If a search engine can’t crawl a page, it can’t spread the link value across the links on that page. It’s a dead-end when you’ve blocked a page in robots.txt. Any link value which might have flowed to (and through) that page is lost.
Robots.txt syntax
WordPress robots.txt
We have an article on how best to setup your robots.txt for WordPress. Don’t forget you can edit your site’s robots.txt file in the Yoast SEO Tools → File editor section.
A robots.txt file consists of one or more blocks of directives, each starting with a user-agent line. The “user-agent” is the name of the specific spider it addresses. You can have one block for all search engines, using a wildcard for the user-agent, or particular blocks for particular search engines. A search engine spider will always pick the block that best matches its name.
These blocks look like this (don’t be scared, we’ll explain below):
User-agent: * Disallow: /
User-agent: Googlebot Disallow:
User-agent: bingbot Disallow: /not-for-bing/
Directives like Allow and Disallow should not be case-sensitive, so it’s up to you to write them in lowercase or capitalize them. The values are case-sensitive, so /photo/ is not the same as /Photo/. We like capitalizing directives because it makes the file easier (for humans) to read.
The user-agent directive
The first bit of every block of directives is the user-agent, which identifies a specific spider. The user-agent field matches with that specific spider’s (usually longer) user-agent, so, for instance, the most common spider from Google has the following user-agent:
If you want to tell this crawler what to do, a relatively simple User-agent: Googlebot line will do the trick.
Most search engines have multiple spiders. They will use a specific spider for their normal index, ad programs, images, videos, etc.
Search engines always choose the most specific block of directives they can find. Say you have three sets of directives: one for *, one for Googlebot and one for Googlebot-News. If a bot comes by whose user-agent is Googlebot-Video, it will follow the Googlebot restrictions. A bot with the user-agent Googlebot-News would use more specific Googlebot-News directives.
The most common user agents for search engine spiders
Here’s a list of the user-agents you can use in your robots.txt file to match the most commonly used search engines:
Search engine
Field
User-agent
Baidu
General
baiduspider
Baidu
Images
baiduspider-image
Baidu
Mobile
baiduspider-mobile
Baidu
News
baiduspider-news
Baidu
Video
baiduspider-video
Bing
General
bingbot
Bing
General
msnbot
Bing
Images & Video
msnbot-media
Bing
Ads
adidxbot
Google
General
Googlebot
Google
Images
Googlebot-Image
Google
Mobile
Googlebot-Mobile
Google
News
Googlebot-News
Google
Video
Googlebot-Video
Google
Ecommerce
Storebot-Google
Google
AdSense
Mediapartners-Google
Google
AdWords
AdsBot-Google
Yahoo!
General
slurp
Yandex
General
yandex
The disallow directive
The second line in any block of directives is the Disallow line. You can have one or more of these lines, specifying which parts of the site the specified spider can’t access. An empty Disallow line means you’re not disallowing anything so that a spider can access all sections of your site.
The example below would block all search engines that “listen” to robots.txt from crawling your site.
User-agent: * Disallow: /
The example below would allow all search engines to crawl your site by dropping a single character.
User-agent: * Disallow:
The example below would block Google from crawling the Photo directory on your site – and everything in it.
User-agent: googlebot Disallow: /Photo
This means all the subdirectories of the /Photo directory would also not be spidered. It would not block Google from crawling the /photo directory, as these lines are case-sensitive.
This would also block Google from accessing URLs containing /Photo, such as /Photography/.
How to use wildcards/regular expressions
“Officially,” the robots.txt standard doesn’t support regular expressions or wildcards; however, all major search engines understand it. This means you can use lines like this to block groups of files:
In the example above, * is expanded to whatever filename it matches. Note that the rest of the line is still case-sensitive, so the second line above will not block a file called /copyrighted-images/example.JPG from being crawled.
Some search engines, like Google, allow for more complicated regular expressions but be aware that other search engines might not understand this logic. The most useful feature this adds is the $, which indicates the end of a URL. In the following example, you can see what this does:
Disallow: /*.php$
This means /index.php can’t be indexed, but /index.php?p=1could be. Of course, this is only useful in very specific circumstances and pretty dangerous: it’s easy to unblock things you didn’t want to.
Non-standard robots.txt crawl directives
In addition to the commonly used Disallow and User-agent directives, there are a few other crawl directives available for robots.txt files. However, it’s important to note that not all search engine crawlers support these directives, so it’s essential to understand their limitations and considerations before implementing them.
The allow directive
While not in the original “specification,” there was talk of an allow directive very early. Most search engines seem to understand it, and it allows for simple and very readable directives like this:
The only other way of achieving the same result without an allow directive, would have been to specifically disallow every single file in the wp-admin folder.
The crawl-delay directive
Crawl-delay is an unofficial addition to the standard, and few search engines adhere to it. At least Google and Yandex don’t use it, with Bing being unclear. In theory, as crawlers can be pretty crawl-hungry, you could try the crawl-delay direction to slow them down.
A line like the one below would instruct those search engines to change how frequently they’ll request pages on your site.
crawl-delay: 10
Do take care when using the crawl-delay directive. By setting a crawl delay of ten seconds, you only allow these search engines to access 8,640 pages a day. This might seem plenty for a small site, but it isn’t much for large sites. On the other hand, if you get next to no traffic from these search engines, it might be a good way to save some bandwidth.
The sitemap directive for XML Sitemaps
Using the sitemap directive, you can tell search engines – Bing, Yandex, and Google – where to find your XML sitemap. You can, of course, submit your XML sitemaps to each search engine using their webmaster tools. We strongly recommend you do so because webmaster tools will give you a ton of information about your site. If you don’t want to do that, adding a sitemap line to your robots.txt is a quick alternative. Yoast SEO automatically adds a link to your sitemap if you let it generate a robots.txt file. On an existing robots.txt file, you can add the rule by hand via the file editor in the Tools section.
Sitemap: https://www.example.com/my-sitemap.xml
Don’t block CSS and JS files in robots.txt
Since 2015, Google Search Console has warned site owners not to block CSS and JS files. We’ve told you the same thing for ages: don’t block CSS and JS files in your robots.txt. Let us explain why you shouldn’t block these specific files from Googlebot.
By blocking CSS and JavaScript files, you’re preventing Google from checking if your website works correctly. If you block CSS and JavaScript files in yourrobots.txt file, Google can’t render your website as intended. Now, Google can’t understand your website, which might result in lower rankings. Moreover, even tools like Ahrefs render web pages and execute JavaScript. So, don’t block JavaScript if you want your favorite SEO tools to work.
This aligns perfectly with the general assumption that Google has become more “human.” Google wants to see your website like a human visitor would, so it can distinguish the main elements from the extras. Google wants to know if JavaScript enhances the user experience or ruins it.
Test and fix in Google Search Console
Google helps you find and fix issues with your robots.txt, for instance, in the Page Indexing section in Google Search Console. Select the Blocked by robots.txt option:
Check Search Console to see which URLs are blocked by your robots.txt
Unblocking blocked resources comes down to changing your robots.txt file. You need to set that file up so that it doesn’t disallow Google to access your site’s CSS and JavaScript files anymore. If you’re on WordPress and use Yoast SEO, you can do this directly with our Yoast SEO plugin.
Validate your robots.txt
Various tools can help you validate your robots.txt, but we always prefer to go to the source when validating crawl directives. Google has a robots.txt testing tool in its Google Search Console (under the ‘Old version’ menu), and we’d highly recommend using that:
Testing a robots.txt file in Google Search Console
Be sure to test your changes thoroughly before you put them live! You wouldn’t be the first to accidentally use robots.txt to block your entire site and slip into search engine oblivion!
Behind the scenes of a robots.txt parser
In 2019, Google announced they were making their robots.txt parser open source. If you want to get into the nuts and bolts, you can see how their code works (and even use it yourself or propose modifications).
Do you want to outrank your competition? Then basic knowledge of technical SEO is a must. Of course, you also need to create great and relevant content for your site. Luckily, the Yoast SEO plugin takes care of (almost) everything on your WordPress site. Still, it’s good to understand one of the most important concepts of technical SEO: crawlability.
What is the crawler again?
A search engine like Google consists of three things: a crawler, an index, and an algorithm. A crawler follows the links on the web. It does this 24/7! Once a crawler comes to a website, it saves the HTML version in a gigantic database called the index. This index is updated every time the crawler comes around your website, and finds a new or revised version of it. Depending on how important Google deems your site and the number of changes you make on your website, the crawler comes around more or less often.
Fun fact: A crawler is also called a robot, a bot, or a spider! And Google’s crawler is sometimes referred to as Googlebot.
Crawlability has to do with the possibilities Google has to crawl your website. Luckily, you can block crawlers on your site. If your website or a page on your website is blocked, you’re saying to Google’s crawler: “Do not come here.” As a result, your site or the respective page won’t turn up in the search results. At least, in most cases.
So how do you block crawlers? There are a few things that could prevent Google from crawling (or indexing) your website:
If your robots.txt file blocks the crawler, Google will not come to your website or specific web page.
Before crawling your website, the crawler will take a look at the HTTP header of your page. This HTTP header contains a status code. If this status code says that a page doesn’t exist, Google won’t crawl your website. Want to know more? We’ll explain all about this HTTP header tip in the module of our Technical SEO training!
If the robots meta tag on a specific page blocks the search engine from indexing that page, Google will crawl that page, but won’t add it to its index.
How crawlers impact the environment
Yes, you read that right. Crawlers have a substantial impact on the environment. Here’s how: Crawlers can come to your site multiple times a day. Why? They want to discover new content, or check if there are any new updates. And every time they visit our site, they will crawleverything that looks like a URL to them. This means a URL is often crawled multiple times per day.
This is unnecessary, because you’re unlikely to make multiple changes on a URL on any given day. Not to mention, almost every CMS output URLs that don’t make sense that crawlers can safely skip. But instead of skipping these URLs, crawlers will crawl them, again and again, every time they come across one. All this unnecessary crawling takes up tons of energy resources which is harmful for our planet.
Improve your site’s crawlability with Yoast SEO Premium
To ensure you’re not wasting energy, it’s important to stay on top of your site’s crawlability settings. Luckily, you don’t have to do all the work yourself. Using tools such as Yoast SEO Premium will make it easier for you!
So how does it work? We have a crawl settings feature that removes unnecessary URLs, feeds, and assets from your website. This will make crawlers crawl your website more efficiently. Don’t worry, you’re still in control! Because the feature also allows you to decide per type of asset whether you want to actually remove the URL or not. If you want to know more, we’ll explain all about the crawl settings here.
Want to learn more about crawlability?
Although crawlability is a basic part of technical SEO (it has to do with all the things that enable Google to index your site), it’s already pretty advanced stuff for most people. Still, it’s important that you understand what crawlability is. You might be blocking – perhaps even without knowing! – crawlers from your site, which means you’ll never rank high in Google. So, if you’re serious about SEO, crawlability should matter to you.
An easy way to learn is by doing our technical SEO trainings. These SEO courses will teach you how to detect technical SEO issues and solve them (with our Yoast SEO plugin). We also have a training dedicated to crawlability and indexability! Good to know for Premium users: Yoast SEO Academy is already included at no extra cost in your Premium subscription!
Content SEO is a key part of any SEO strategy. Without content, it’s impossible for your site to rank in search engines. It’s, therefore, crucial to write and structure quality content! This ultimate guide covers the most important areas of content SEO. Read on if you want to learn how to create content that ranks.
Have you heard about Google’s helpful content update? From now on, the quality of your content could have an even bigger impact on your rankings.
We know that creating high-quality content isn’t easy. But our Premium SEO analysis can help! It’s just as smart as Google, helping you create rich and helpful content in a natural way and improving your rankings!
Content SEO refers to creating content that helps your web pages to rank high in the search engines. It includes everything, from writing to structuring the content on your website. There are three major elements you need to consider that will make your website rank well: keyword strategy, site structure and copywriting.
Why is content SEO important in the first place? Because search engines like Google read your website, so the words you use determine whether or not your site will rank in their results pages. Of course, your website should be well-designed, with a great user interface, and all the technical stuff that makes your site rank in Google should also be covered. But without quality content your site doesn’t stand a chance in the search engines.
1. Keyword research
What is keyword research?
Keyword research is basically the steps you take to create an extensive list of keywords you would like to rank for. Every content SEO strategy should begin with keyword research, because you have to know what your audience is searching for if you want to generate traffic. Keyword research helps you to discover the terms you should be aiming to rank for.
Keyword research has four steps:
Write down the mission of your business;
Make a list of all the keywords you want to be found for;
Look at search intent;
Create landing pages for these keywords.
If you do your keyword research right, you should have a clear overview of the terms people use and the terms for which you want the pages on your site to be found. This overview will serve as a guide for writing content on your website.
Why is keyword research so important for SEO content?
Proper keyword research will make clear which search terms your audience uses. This is crucial. At Yoast, we regularly encounter clients who use particular words when talking about their products, while their customers use entirely different words. Writing and optimizing SEO content for words that people don’t use doesn’t make any sense. Doing proper keyword research makes sure that you are using the same words as your target audience, therefore making the effort of optimizing your website worthwhile.
Terms we use in keyword research
Keywords and keyphrases
We tend to use the word ‘keyword‘ all the time. However, it doesn’t have to be just one word. After all, ‘WordPress SEO’ is a keyword, as is ‘Google Analytics plugin.’ So you can have keywords containing multiple words!
Long-tail keywords
The longer (and more specific) a search term is, the easier it will be to rank for that term. Keywords that are more specific (and usually longer) are usually referred to as long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are more specific and focus more on a niche.
How many keywords?
It is very hard to give an exact number of keywords you should focus on. You just need to have a lot – as many as you can come up with. More than 1,000 keywords is probably too many though!
Even if you’re a reasonably small business, you’ll probably end up with a couple of hundred keywords. But you don’t have to create pages for all of these immediately. The great thing about having a Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress is that you can gradually add content. Think about what keywords you would like to rank for right away, and which ones aren’t immediately important. Determine what your priorities are and plan the creation of your content.
Head or tail?
Classifying your keywords is essential. Some keywords are very common and competitive (head), while others are long-tail. Decide which are your most critical, high-level keywords – the ones that generate sufficient traffic for your website and best fit your business. You’ll probably only have a few of these general keywords for your business, the rest will be more down the tail. In the next section, we’ll give more in-depth information on long-tail keywords (and the importance of these keywords).
Tip: Make sure your homepage and the pages one level beneath that are optimized for the most common keywords! Content that’s focused on long-tail keywords (and therefore more niche) should be on the tail end of your site.
Keyword intent and search intent
As you’re doing keyword research, it really pays off to think about the search intent of users. Are they looking for information, or do they want to buy something? What is their goal when they enter your keyword as a search term? This goal is otherwise known as keyword intent. For some keywords, it’s pretty clear, like [buy leather sofa], or [how to train your puppy]. But it’s not always that simple.
Four types of intent
There are four types of intent:
Navigational intent: People want to visit a specific website, but rather than entering the URL, they’re entering a term into a search engine.
Informational intent: People are trying to find an answer to a particular question or information on a specific topic.
Commercial intent: People want to buy something in the near future and are doing research before making a purchase.
Transactional intent: People are looking to buy something after doing their commercial intent searches.
Search engines are always trying to answer the exact needs people have, and they’re getting better at it too. So, put simply, if 95% of the people searching for [change car tire] have informational intent, and you’re optimizing for transactional intent to sell tires, you’re probably not going to rank.
Check the SERPs
You can get a wealth of information from the results pages when you’re doing keyword research. If you want to find out what the intent is of people using your keywords, simply google those keywords and take a good look at the search results. Then, try to create content that answers the specific need that you distill from the results for each keyword. Tip: Read more about how to use the search results to create content for the right intent here.
There are multiple free and premium tools available to help you with your keyword research. Yoast SEO comes with a Semrush integration that gives suggestions for related keyphrases, including search volume trends. Of course, this is not a full keyword research tool. But it can help you gain valuable insights, and find high-performing keywords! For other tools, please check out our article about keyword research tools.
Adapting your keyword strategy
Your keyword strategy shouldn’t be static. It should change and evolve alongside your company and website. It should evolve and grow with you. If it doesn’t, you’re doing it wrong.
Stay on top of the changes in your company, and adapt your strategy simultaneously. If your online shop starts selling new products, extend your list with more keywords. If you’re aiming for new markets, it’s vital that your keywords are aimed at these new markets as well.
There are several keyword strategies to adopt. One of them is to try and rank for long-tail keywords first, then aim at more general keywords. But you could also start by focusing on general keywords before aiming for more long-tail ones. You can zoom in and pursue more niche activities, broaden your approach, adding more content on different things, or you can do both simultaneously.
2. Site structure
The second important aspect of content SEO is the structure of your site. First, I’ll explain why site structure is critical, then I’ll show you what an ideal site structure looks like. I will also give you tips on how to (quickly) improve your site structure without completely disrupting the core of your website.
Why is site structure important for content SEO?
There are two main reasons why site structure is an important ranking factor and therefore imperative for building SEO content:
a. A good structure helps Google ‘understand’ your site
The way your site is structured gives Google significant clues about where to find the most important content. Your site’s structure determines whether a search engine understands what your site is about, and how easily it will find and index content relevant to your site’s purpose and intent. A good site structure will, therefore, lead to a higher ranking in Google.
By creating such a structure, you can use existing content that has attracted links from others to help your other pages rank too. Your site’s structure will help spread some of that link juice to the other pages on your site. On a commercial site, this means you can use high-quality content you’ve written to boost the search engine rankings of your sales pages too.
b. A good structure makes sure you aren’t competing with your own SEO content
You will probably have multiple articles about similar topics on your site. At Yoast, for example, we write about SEO. If we wrote eight articles about SEO, Google wouldn’t know which one is the most important. That’s why we used our site structure to clarify this. If we hadn’t, we’d be competing with our own articles for Google’s top spot. So if you solve problems like this by using a sound internal linking structure, the result will be higher rankings overall.
The ideal site structure
Ideally, you should structure your site like a pyramid. At the top is your homepage. On your homepage, you link to some other pages (such as category pages). These pages, in turn, link to even more pages.
In an effective content SEO strategy, your keyword strategy and the way you structure your site work together. In a proper keyword strategy, you’ll have thought about common, competitive keywords as well as long-tail (and niche) search terms. You should make a similar dichotomy in your site structure. Pages that focus on common search terms should appear high in your pyramid, while pages that are optimized for long-tail keywords should appear in a lower part of your structure. And don’t forget to let the long-tail pages at the bottom link to the pages higher in the pyramid!
If you’re serious about content SEO, you’ll most likely already have a live website. So it may be a bit late to set up your site’s structure in an ideal pyramid-like way. Don’t despair – there are still plenty of things you can do to improve your site’s structure and your SEO content.
Decide upon cornerstone content
You should focus your efforts on cornerstone articles. These are the articles that you’re most proud of, and that fit the mission of your website best. You want to rank for these articles the most. Fun fact: This ultimate guide is one of our cornerstones!
If you haven’t decided which of your articles are the most important yet, start thinking about that now. Make these articles the best ones on your site. Give them extra TLC and update them regularly.
Once you’ve decided upon your precious cornerstones, make sure you link from all your ‘tail’ articles to those cornerstones. That way, Google will know which articles to rank highest. You can read all about this in our article about incorporating cornerstones into your site structure. Good to know: Yoast SEO Premium has an advanced internal linking tool that automatically suggests relevant articles to link from.
Pro tip: You can use our cornerstone content SEO workout in Yoast SEO Premium to check on all your cornerstone content pages, see how many internal links they’re getting, and quickly add more if necessary.
Use tags (but not too many)
Your site will also benefit from adding tags. Tags and taxonomies will give your site more structure – at least, Google will understand it better. They group your articles about similar topics. Don’t overdo it, though. Some people have more tags than articles. Using too many tags will lead to a confusing and poorly-structured site.
Avoid duplicate content
The same SEO content can turn up at multiple places on your site. As a reader, you don’t mind: you still get the content you came for. But a search engine has to choose something to show in the search results, as it doesn’t want to show the same content twice. And what about other sites that want to link to your product? Chances are that some of them will link to the first URL, while others will link to the second.
However, if you make sure that all these duplicate posts link to the same URL, your chances of ranking top 10 for the relevant keyword would be much higher. In other words: Canonicalization is the solution to duplicate content. You can configure the canonical URL in the advanced tab of Yoast SEO.
Remove old SEO content
Should you keep old content? That depends. You have three options: update, redirect, or merge. If the content on a page is outdated, remove it! But what about the valuable links to that page? After all, you want to make sure that you still benefit from these links, even though the page doesn’t exist anymore. That’s where the second option comes in: redirect.
Redirecting pages is easy if you have our Yoast SEO Premium plugin, which can help you take care of redirects. Preferably, you redirect the old URL (301) to the new and updated page or product. You can also redirect to a related page if there is no replacement. For example, the category page of the specific product, or, as a very last resort, your homepage. This way, the (outdated) page won’t interfere with your site structure anymore.
Deal with orphaned content
The term ‘orphaned content’ refers to articles that don’t have any links from your other articles or posts. Because of that, these articles are hard to find, both by Google and by your users. What’s more, Google will consider this type of content to be less important! So if an article is important to you, you should make it clear to Google (and your visitors) by linking to that particular article from other (related) content. Read more about solving the problem of orphaned articles in our article about orphaned content.
Pro tip: Use our orphaned content SEO workout in Yoast SEO Premium to quickly find and fix pages with no incoming internal links.
Deal with content cannibalization
Once you’ve been writing content for a while, you might have dozens of articles on any given topic. If these articles are kind of saying the same thing, search engines and users might get confused. Not to mention the fact that your content might compete against itself in the search engines. This is called keyword cannibalization. It’s not inherently bad, but it’s something you need to take a look at. Are your articles performing as well as they should, or is the competition hurting the chances at a higher ranking? Luckily, it’s not hard to find and fix keyword cannibalization.
3. Copywriting for content SEO
The third and final aspect of a successful content SEO strategy is copywriting. Two very important things to remember: Write articles that are attractive to read, and that will make your audience want to stay on your site. However, you shouldn’t forget to make your SEO content attractive for Google. Just don’t go too far by optimizing your content so overtly that it becomes terrible to read. At Yoast, we suggest optimizing your text for search without adversely affecting the originality of your idea or the readability of your text.
The first requirement for high-quality copywriting is to write original content. Your post or article should be ‘fresh,’ new, and original. It has to be different from all the other posts and articles that are already on the internet. Plus, it should be content that people want to read.
If you did your keyword research well, you now have a long list of terms that you want to be found for. This list can be a guide for you to choose from. A keyword isn’t necessarily a topic, though. You should make sure to come up with an original idea for your blog post – an idea in which the desired focus keyword has a prominent place.
But don’t worry! Original SEO content doesn’t mean brand new content. Giving your (professional) opinion on a particular topic also counts as original content. Because your personal angle to a story will make your content unique and original. Of course, if your story is completely new, that automatically means it’s original.
Think about your audience
If you want to write original content, you should think about your audience and who they are. Also, ask yourself:
What do you want your audience to do after they’ve read your article? (Do you want them to engage, buy your products/service, or read more posts?)
Thinking about these questions will help you to come up with an original idea for your post or article.
Content design and content SEO
Content design is a process that helps you produce content based on actual user needs. It doesn’t just help you figure out what your user wants, but it also focuses on what the user actually needs. Thinking about your content in this way will help you create content in the language and format that your user needs.
However, content design isn’t just a technique to help you produce better content – it’s a new way of thinking about content. If you want to know more about content design, read our post on content design: a great way to make user-centered content.
Copywriting requires readable SEO content
A key requirement for writing high-quality content is to write content that’s easy to read. Readability is important both for your audience and for Google. After all, not only people read your articles but Google does too.
If your text is well structured and clearly written, readers will be able to clearly understand your message. And so will Google! If your main message is clear to Google, your post is far more likely to rank well in the search engines.
As Google is getting smarter, it starts to understand content on sites better — thanks to a lot of developments in the natural language processing sphere, like BERT. It’s no longer just about the number of times a keyword pops on a page. It also takes into account the context of those keywords, like co-occurring terms and phrases, related words and synonyms. On top of that, as mentioned before, Google is able to understand queries of users better: it tries to determine what the search intent of the user is. Are they looking for a product or just information? Which pages fit that intent best?
All these developments mean that you should focus on more than just using your keyword often enough. It means you should also think about the words you use around it: do they make clear what topic you’re discussing? And, do you have the purpose in mind of the post or page you’re creating? Does it just provide information or are you trying to sell something, and does that align with what your users are actually looking for? Yoast SEO Premium lets you optimize your SEO content with synonyms and related keyphrases, making it even easier to add context to your articles.
The final requirement for writing high-quality content is to make sure the content is optimized for search engines. You want your SEO content to be easily found. Findability has to do with increasing the likelihood Google will pick up your content for the result pages. It’s important that you take this final step after you’ve written an original and readable post.
Yoast SEO helps you tweak your text just a little bit more. If you’ve written your article, focused on that original idea, and optimized the readability of your post, you should take a look at the SEO analysis in Yoast SEO. Red and orange bullets indicate which aspects of your findability need a little bit more attention. You don’t need a green bullet for every aspect though, as long as your overall score is good.
Content SEO is such a huge part of SEO. It encompasses every aspect of writing and structuring content on your website. Content SEO is essential. No one will read your content if it’s crappy. Like visitors, Google reads and scans your website text. Google’s algorithm decides the ranking of your site largely based on the content you publish. And we all know content is king. So, you need to write awesome SEO content, focus on the right keywords and structure your website in such a way Google understands it. It’s a lot of work, but it will pay off in the long run.
As you’ve learned from this guide, there’s a lot you need to do to keep your site’s content SEO fit. Take this short test and find out if there are some aspects of content SEO you may need to improve!
Get ready for another release of Yoast SEO! Our team has been working hard to bring you new features, enhancements, and bug fixes that help improve Yoast SEO. In Yoast SEO 20.6, we’re introducing a readability assessment that helps you avoid using center-aligned text in your content. Plus, we have other upgrades that enhance your favorite SEO plugin. Update now!
A new readability assessment: don’t center-align text
To provide the best reading experience to users, we have added a new readability assessment. This warning reminds you not to use center-aligned text in your content, as this can make your content harder to read.
Text aligned to the center can create readability, usability, and user experience problems. This is due to the uneven spacing between words, making it difficult for readers to stay engaged with the text flow. As a result, it is hard to identify the start and end of each line when the text is centered. Thus, making it challenging for people to keep track of their reading.
Yoast SEO recommends avoiding center-aligned text in your content. This way, reading your content is much easier, and your page layout has the best user experience.
Yoast SEO will give you a heads-up if you are using too much center-aligned text
A heads-up: we’re deprecating the Zapier integration
Yoast SEO users depending on the Zapier integration, should take note of the upcoming changes. Here’s a short timeline of what’s happening:
Starting May 2, 2023, the Yoast SEO integration with Zapier will be soft-deprecated. Existing Zaps using the Yoast SEO integration will only work for users who haven’t updated to version 20.7 of Yoast SEO. If you have updated to version 20.7 or higher, your Zaps using the Yoast SEO integration will stop working.
On May 9th, 2023, support for the integration with Zapier will end with Yoast SEO 20.7.
To continue using Yoast SEO with Zapier, it’s recommended to check your Zaps and identify which ones will be affected by the end of support. By configuring your API calls using Webhooks by Zapier, you can continue to use Yoast SEO’s features in your Zaps. Please check out our help documentation for guidance if you have any questions.
WooCommerce SEO 15.7: Product identifiers now for grouped products
In WooCommerce, a grouped product is a type of product that allows you to group multiple simple products and sell them as a single item. To help you improve the metadata of your grouped products, we now support these in the SKU and product identifiers assessment in WooCommerce SEO 15.7.
In the WooCommerce SEO analyses, we’ll check if your (grouped) products come with SKUs or product identifiers. Adding these makes it easier for search engines to understand your products as this information is passed via Product structured data for them to use.
Yoast SEO 20.6 is out today!
We hope you’re excited about the new version of Yoast SEO! With all the recent bug fixes, enhancements, and the new readability assessment, this release will help you take your website’s SEO and user experience to the next level.
YoastCon 2023 is right around the corner and we can’t wait for you to hear from our fantastic lineup of speakers. They will be sharing their expertise on a range of topics to help take your digital marketing to the next level. Will you join the greatest experts in the world of SEO on Thursday, May 11th, in Nijmegen? Here’s a quick rundown of some of the speakers and their presentations.
Bring a friend at 30% off!
Share the YoastCon experience! Bring a colleague/friend/relative and save 30% on a second YoastCon ticket! Simply get a ticket yourself and we’ll send you your unique discount code to share.
The absolute top of the SEO industry
If you looking to take your SEO knowledge to the next level and achieve your business goals, YoastCon 2023 is the perfect opportunity to do so! You’ll learn from the best SEO experts in the world, including the current #1 and #2 in SEO, who will share their expert insights and strategies on our main stage. Plus, a representative from Google will be joining us for an interactive fireside chat. Don’t miss this awesome opportunity!
One of our speakers is Jes Scholz, currently ranked #1 in the world championship SEO. She will talk about “Google’s glow up: Why you need to optimize beyond search.” As the Head of SEO at Ringier, Jes has a deep understanding of Google’s ecosystem and will share her insights on why it’s important to optimize beyond search. She will convince you why you need to stop running in the rat race for rankings and focus optimizations on the bigger picture.
Our own Jono Alderson, currently ranked #2 in the world championship SEO, will provide a behind-the-scenes look at Yoast SEO. As head of SEO at Yoast, Jono has unique insights into how Yoast SEO works. And how to get the most out of it. He has tons of tips on how to fix websites, implement growth strategies, prepare for the future and win markets!
The future of search
The web, and in fact, humanity, is at a crossroads. We’re struggling to keep our planet healthy. We, as creators of the web, have a responsibility to be conscious about what we do. The recent developments in AI, for example, make creating content and in fact, websites and code, easier and easier. But with every new develoipment, we have to keep asking ourselves one simple question: Does this make the web better?
In their talk, Joost de Valk (Founder of Yoast & partner at Emilia Capital) and Marieke van de Rakt (Chief Growth Officer at Yoast and partner at Emilia Capital) will dive in and ask the questions that need to be answered by content creators and web developers.
Get as close to the source as possible and join the fireside chat with Googler Thierry Muller
Thierry Muller is part of the Web Platform team at Google. During a fireside chat, we’ll talk to him about the state of performance on the web, user experience, and whether WordPress should worry as it is falling behind on performance. He’ll also share a few first thoughts on how AI could make its way into web development and performance. Don’t miss out and learn more about what Google is doing to help site owners make the right decisions.
YoastCon for everyone!
From copywriting & local SEO…
A well-written sales page, email series, chatbot, or video can sell your products and services while you sleep. Let Kate Toon tell you all about conversion copywriting tactics! Or learn all about local SEO during Greg Gifford’s talk and leave with a detailed playbook that outlines specific strategies and tactics that will help you dominate local search results for 2023 and beyond.
… to news SEO & GA4
News takes a special place in Google’s ecosystem. Users expect Google to show the latest and best articles on any given topic. This provides us with detailed insights into Google’s crawling and indexing ecosystem and the signals it uses to determine authority and expertise. Let Barry Adams share (almost) all he has learned about Google’s inner workings.
Want to learn how to catch huge opportunities in the world of ecommerce? Luke Carthy tells you exactly how you can use Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to collect custom and super-powerful data to boost conversion and grow sales.
User research, WordPress and SEO agency landscape
User research expert Els Aerts tells you all about ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of user research’. In this talk, she highlights the most important pitfalls to be aware of when doing research.
And in Miriam Schwab’s talk, she’ll examine five trends that keep WordPress relevant and exciting to a wide range of users. Trends that can play a role in keeping WordPress the leading CMS for many years to come.
If you want to dive deeper into the SEO agency landscape, Hannah Thorpe will talk about what to do – and what not to do – whilst setting up your SEO team and how to tackle those common problems. This actionable talk is great if you’re looking for inspiration on what makes an agency successful.
YoastCon workshops: put theory into practice straight away
Want to sharpen your keyword research skills or enhance your SEO copywriting? Attending the YoastCon workshops is your chance to learn from the best in the industry. Seats for these workshops are filling up quickly, so make sure to get your hands on your YoastCon ticket and register for the workshop of your choice!
Don’t miss out on all these top-notch talks
Are you ready to be blown away by the amazing talks at YoastCon? With such a fantastic lineup of topics, we’re curious – what are you most excited about? Get your thinking cap on and take in this unforgettable experience at YoastCon 2023 in Nijmegen! And, don’t forget, you can get 30% off every second ticketto bring a friend and share your YoastCon experience!
