EDITS.WS

Tag: seo basics

  • What is on-page SEO?

    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.

    Learn about writing high-quality content in our Ultimate guide to SEO copywriting, or take our SEO copywriting training course.

    3. Improve your site speed

    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!

    Read more: What is off-page SEO? »

    The post What is on-page SEO? appeared first on Yoast.

  • SEO basics: What is crawlability?

    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.

    Read more: SEO basics: what does Google do »

    And what is crawlability?

    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 crawl everything 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!

    Keep reading: Bot traffic: What it is and why you should care about it »

    The post SEO basics: What is crawlability? appeared first on Yoast.

  • How to use social media to reach your audience

    Your social media endeavors need to be a part of your SEO strategy. Especially now that the younger generations (Gen Z) are using platforms like TikTok and Instagram instead of Google. This means your site’s popularity on social media ties into your SEO more than ever!

    But which social media should you focus on? With so many platforms out there, you can feel overwhelmed with choices. Don’t worry, though! You don’t have to be active everywhere. That isn’t always sustainable. And if your most loyal customers are on Twitter, and you’re focusing on Pinterest, then you miss out on many opportunities.

    Instead, decide which platform your audience uses the most, then find a rhythm that works for you and build on that. Once you’ve got your social strategy in place, it’s time to start posting! Below are some tips you can use to set up or improve your social media strategy.

    1. Keep your account alive

    The most crucial advice when using social media is that you need to keep your account alive. But what does this mean? You’ll see a lot of advice about posting daily, but that’s not always realistic, especially if you’re a small business owner.

    Our advice: keep your account alive by posting regularly and going at your own pace. If you can only post a couple of times a week, then do it. A good starting pointing is:

    Gif of woman saying be yourself, because who you are is brilliant

    People will be able to tell that you’re being genuine and fall in love with you for that. What’s more, they’ll want to continue to follow you if you’re posting genuine content that they can relate to.

    Of course, everybody needs a vacation, but you don’t want to abandon your followers. That’s why we recommend scheduling posts for the time you are away or letting people know when you’ll be back. And be sure to share some photos of your vacay!

    Save time by automating

    If you also have a blog where you write regularly, Yoast SEO Premium can help you automate some of your postings. With our Zapier integration, you can automate your social sharing and stay in control of what your social link posts look like. This integration makes it possible to automatically post to your favorite social network whenever you publish new content to your site. It saves you time without compromising on the quality of your social posts.

    For social media like Instagram and TikTok, there are also a number of platforms that you can use to stay on top of your schedule and keep all your media in one place, ready to post.

    2. Write captivating excerpts

    Depending on the type of content you want to share, you need to make sure the copy that goes with your posts is appealing enough to draw people in. There are a number of ways you can approach this. For instance, you can choose the most important sentence or the main point of the blog post you’re going to share. You could also share the introduction of the post if you feel that is captivating enough.

    Depending on the platform, you could share a story behind a photo you’re posting or the failures you’ve had when testing new products. Or maybe you just want to jump on the latest trend and apply it to your brand.

    Is it thumb-stopping?

    You want this piece of copy to get people to click on the link in your bio or read the whole caption on the platform. But the basic formula is:

    Hook: Something that is going to grab their attention.

    Pain point: What is it that your followers are struggling with?

    Solution: Well, it’s a good thing you have an answer!

    CTA: Don’t forget to ask your readers to do something.

    If you want to learn more about copywriting for social media, check out our article about social media writing tips.

    3. Diversify your posts

    Having a few solid content pillars is important. They are particularly helpful in keeping you on track with your content creation. Need some inspiration? Here are a few different types of posts you could create. Remember, you’re no longer limited to just posting photos!

    To help you out, let’s look at a few examples. First, you could share your blog posts with a link post. This is one of the most basic post types you can use:

    But don’t be afraid to change it up. Not all your social media posts need to necessarily direct people to your website. They can also be focused on informing people about a recent piece of news or simply increasing engagement on your social media platforms themselves.

    And like we said in the intro, short-form videos are huge right now. They’re a great way to give your audience a few quick tips or take your fans behind the scenes.

    @yoastseo

    Hey TikTok! #YoastSEO

    ♬ original sound – Hamilton

    To decide which posts do well on social media and which content you should make more of, you need to analyze the numbers. This could be the number of views, the number of comments, and how many times a post was shared or saved. Of course, numbers won’t mean anything if you don’t have a goal in mind. However, it’s a good rule of thumb to post more of the content that received numerous views, saves and shares.

    Speaking of diversifying your content

    At Yoast, we believe in the importance of inclusivity. In addition to diversifying when it comes to types of posts, you should also pay attention to making your content accessible and relatable, for as many people as possible. You need to show diversity to make this happen and being as visual as it is, social media is a great place for that. That being said, the topic of diversity shouldn’t be limited to your social media presence. This is a company-wide issue that you need to take seriously and nowadays is non-negotiable in both marketing and social media. Be aware of the image that you’re currently putting out there and invest time and resources into making that relatable to everyone.

    But it’s not all about visuals. You should also use inclusive language, language that avoids excluding marginalized groups of people as much as possible. You might not get all of it right in one go, but becoming aware of it and changing it as you go is a great start. Not only does inclusive language help you reach a bigger audience, but it also helps all of us move toward a more inclusive society. And you might have noticed that social media platforms are being used a lot to talk about this and create more awareness on the topics of inclusiveness and diversity. So be part of the change and use inclusive language on your socials and in your website content. If you’re not sure where to start, our inclusive language analysis in Yoast SEO gives you feedback on which words might be harmful and provides you with alternatives to use!

    4. Handle comments

    If you share your posts on social media, you’ll get comments. This is something many people forget about, or try to do in some cases. Because sometimes comments will be good, and sometimes they will be bad. But the comment section is also where conversations are happening. Answering questions, then following up with one of your own is a great way to keep your audience engaged.

    Don’t forget to monitor your comments!

    While you may get the odd troll in the comments, most of the time you’ll find your fans cheering you on and recommending you to their friends. There are some wonderful people in the comment section. Longtime followers can also become huge advocates for you and your brand, so make sure to have a chat with them.

    But you should handle the trolls quickly! You don’t want your comments section to become a toxic place. Your fans won’t like it, but it can also have an effect on your mental health. So make sure your comments section is a safe space.

    5. Use eye-catching photos or illustrations

    Even with all the recent updates and focus on short-form video content, Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, said there is still a place for photo posts on Instagram. Just like on Facebook, where visual content is also essential. And let’s not forget Pinterest, which is all about images.

    However, you might not have a graphic designer on staff or a photography department at your disposal. Don’t worry, though! There are plenty of online tools that can help you create your posts. Just remember to use clear images that either show your products or yourself. This could either be a crisp photo or a delightful illustration. Great quality will make your post stand out in someone’s feed, which can increase the post’s engagement, saves and shares.

    Thankfully, if you’re using Yoast SEO Premium, you can check what your blog posts, product page or collections will look like before sharing them on social media. So you can easily adjust your content before posting it online. See how easy it is!

    6. Be part of the community

    If you’re not already part of a community, make one! Being active in a certain community or niche can help build allies, brand ambassadors, and new ideas. In any community, you’ll soon discover other interesting people. What’s more, talking to customers and end-users can be a great way for you to develop your product. And make sure to let people know that they are always welcome to join.

    Additionally, you can make these people fall in love with your brand quicker by giving them exclusive access to discounts, Betas or just generally behind the scenes.

    7. Add metadata

    All the social platforms are becoming their own little search engines. So in order to be found, you need to make sure that you’re including some metadata in the form of hashtags. These can help your growth immensely. For instance, if you are at an event, include the hashtag for that event in your post. Everyone searching for the event will then come across it. There are also hashtags for certain interests or technology.

    Some people also have bots set up that retweet everything that is posted in a certain hashtag, which is a great way to boost your post. But don’t go overboard! Nobody likes a post that is filled with all kinds of random hashtags. Keep them relevant to your post, and make sure they are accessibility-friendly!

    Note that tags on social media work a lot differently than tags on your site. If you’re using tags on your site the same way you would on social media, take a look at this post to find out why that’s not good for your SEO.

    Conclusion

    Social media is a key aspect of every (off-page) SEO strategy. Setting up a comprehensive social media strategy can be hard. It will certainly ask for a bit of creativity, and it’ll definitely be time-consuming. But trust us when we say that it’ll be worth it! And if you think about it, social media and blogging are very similar in many aspects. You just need to get into the flow of it! Good luck!

    The post How to use social media to reach your audience appeared first on Yoast.

  • The beginner’s guide to Yoast SEO

    Let’s say you have a website but know little about SEO. But you’ve heard about Yoast SEO, and people have told you it’s a great tool to optimize your site for Google, Bing, Yandex and other search engines. So you install the Yoast SEO plugin. What now? Well, our plugin needs your input to help your pages rise to the top of the search results. In this beginner’s guide to Yoast SEO, we’ll guide you through the most important steps to get the most out of this plugin and your content!

    SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which means optimizing your pages to get them to a high position in the search results of Google or other search engines. If you have a website and want to attract more people to it, SEO should be a part of your marketing strategy. Our plugin, Yoast SEO, helps you with that by fixing a lot of the technical stuff. But also by giving you feedback on your content to optimize it for SEO and your website users.

    A beginner‘s guide to Yoast SEO

    Before we start, note that this isn’t a guide to every single detail of the Yoast SEO plugin. This post introduces some important things that you should use or configure first. In this beginner’s guide, we assume that you have the plugin installed. Not quite there yet? Check out how to install Yoast SEO Premium or our free Yoast SEO plugin before you read on.

    In this post, we’ll cover the following:

    Table of contents

    The first-time configuration

    The Yoast SEO first-time configuration is a great starting point to set up your plugin. You will get the option to start the first-time configuration right after installing Yoast SEO. Don’t see the welcome screen or already have the plugin installed? You can also the configuration in the backend of your WordPress website by going to Yoast SEO > General and clicking the First-time configuration tab:

    the first-time configuration in Yoast SEO
    Start your Yoast SEO journey with the first-time configuration

    The first-time configuration guides you through several steps that help you set up our plugin to suit your site’s needs. By answering a few simple questions, Yoast SEO will learn more about your website and how it can help out with your SEO. Even if your site has been around for a while, it still pays off to complete the configuration. It’s also a good idea to repeat it now and again to make sure your settings are still up to date. Because the information you fill in here helps Google and other search engines understand your site better.

    For example, in the second step, you’ll be asked if your website is about you or an organization you represent. This is relevant because the information you fill in here is used in Google’s Knowledge Graph. What is a Knowledge Graph, you ask? It is the block of information you often see on the right-hand side of the search results when you search for a company or person. So make sure to fill in all the fields you can in this step to provide Google with this information and increase your chances of a Knowledge Graph. But the first-time configuration also improves your site’s technical settings with SEO data optimization and asks for your social media profiles to help Google understand these belong to the same person or company. If you want more help getting Yoast SEO configured correctly for your site, check out the help article on how to use the first-time configuration.

    The tip of the technical iceberg

    There are many aspects to SEO and many more settings you can tweak in the plugin. But we set the first-time configuration so that it correctly configures the plugin’s general settings for your website. And there’s also loads of other stuff that Yoast SEO handles for you, to give you a head start on your technical SEO. Here are a few of the things Yoast SEO automatically takes care of in the background. Our plugin:

    • Outputs structured data for your pages, helping Google understand them even better.
    • Creates an XML sitemap that search engines use to find and index your pages.
    • Yoast SEO Premium also avoids dead ends on your site by automatically creating redirects when you move or delete content.

    There are lots more hidden features and settings that you control, we’ll talk about those later on. For now, it’s good to know that all of this allows Yoast SEO to roll out the red carpet for the search bots, making it easy for search engines to find and understand your content.

    Using the Yoast SEO sidebar or meta box

    Yoast SEO is known for its green, orange, and red traffic lights, giving you feedback that helps you optimize your content. Back in the day, you’d find these in the Yoast SEO meta box below your post editor. Nowadays, if you’re using the WordPress Block editor, you can also find them in the Yoast SEO sidebar on the right side of the editor.

    Are you using the block editor, but not seeing the sidebar? Make sure to click on the Yoast SEO sidebar icon at the top right of your screen:

    screenshot of Yoast SEO icon that opens up the Yoast SEO sidebar
    Click the Yoast SEO icon to open the Yoast SEO sidebar

    Here, we’ll highlight four essential elements you’ll find in both the Yoast SEO meta box and the Yoast SEO sidebar:

    • The Focus keyphrase
    • The SEO analysis
    • The Readability analysis
    • The Google preview

    When you write a post or page for your website, checking these four elements should be the bare minimum before publishing your content. If you have more time and want to fully optimize a post, we’d advise following the steps described in this blog post checklist.

    The focus keyphrase

    The focus keyphrase field is the first in the Yoast SEO sidebar and the meta box. In your Yoast SEO sidebar, on the right side of your editor, you’ll find this field at the top:

    the focus keyphrase field in the Yoast SEO sidebar
    The focus keyphrase input field in the Yoast SEO sidebar

    Below your post, you’ll find it in the SEO tab of the meta box:

    the focus keyphrase field in the Yoast SEO metabox
    The focus keyphrase input field in the Yoast SEO meta box

    In this field, you can enter the phrase you’d like this specific post or page to rank for in the search engines. By adding this keyphrase (or keyword), Yoast SEO will give you feedback on how well you’ve optimized the content for that specific keyphrase. It’s good to note that adding a keyphrase here doesn’t mean that Google will ‘know’ that you want the page to rank for that keyphrase. It simply helps Yoast SEO give you helpful feedback, so adding the keyphrase without looking at any of the feedback will not do anything for your rankings.

    You can add this keyphrase at any moment, but we suggest adding it immediately as a reminder to keep your content focused on this topic. Wondering how to choose the perfect focus keyphrase? Read our guide on choosing a focus keyphrase, as it will help you select the right keyphrase you want to (and can) rank for. You can select a keyphrase post-by-post, but if you’re serious about your rankings, you must conduct keyword research first.

    Yoast SEO Premium allows you to set related keyphrases and synonyms too, which is great if you want to take your SEO copywriting to the next level. You need user-focused and high-quality content to rank high in a (competitive) market. Because Google is getting smarter, Yoast SEO Premium recognizes variations of your keyphrase and helps you write natural and user-friendly content.

    The SEO analysis

    When you’ve added a keyphrase (and ideally a bit of content), Yoast SEO is able to run the SEO analysis. This analysis evaluates how well your content is optimized to rank for that keyphrase. For instance, it checks whether you’ve used the keyphrase enough and not too often. But also whether it’s in your SEO title, meta description, images, or subheadings. Moreover, it checks other SEO aspects of your content that are not related to your keyphrase, for instance, if you have any internal links to other articles on your website which is also important for search engines to understand your content.

    The SEO analysis in the Yoast SEO sidebar

    Getting orange or red traffic lights? Look at the feedback the analysis gives and try to make improvements where possible. To dive deeper into this, read our article on how to use Yoast SEO’s content analysis.

    The readability analysis

    Below the focus keyphrase field and SEO analysis, you can find the Readability analysis tab (in the Yoast SEO sidebar). It’s best to look at this tab after you’ve written the first version of your post or page. It gives you a red, orange, or green traffic light, which reflects your text’s readability score. This analysis contains a few different checks that our plugin automatically does on your content. Open the tab to find out how you score on all the individual checks and what you can improve on. You may wonder why you should look at this tab, but trust us: readability is crucial for SEO!

    The Yoast SEO readability checks in the sidebar

    If a traffic light is green, you’re doing great in that field. Is it orange or red? You can follow the instructions along with the traffic light to improve on this front. If there’s an eye icon, you can click that to see what part of the text still needs some checking. Now you don’t need to get every traffic light green but try to get the overall traffic light for the readability analysis green to end up with readable text. That way, the readability analysis helps you write easy-to-read content that your readers will love!

    Our readability analysis works for many languages, and our team is working hard to add more languages as we go. If you’re interested in finding more about the logic behind this analysis, you can read more on how to use this analysis in Yoast SEO.

    The inclusive language analysis

    The third analysis that you can find in Yoast SEO is the inclusive language analysis which gives you feedback on any potentially non-inclusive words or phrases you’re using in your text. We at Yoast strongly believe that you should inclusive language in your content. Because creating inclusive content is good for both your users and SEO. Wondering how that works? Read more about it in our post on inclusive language and SEO.

    The Yoast SEO inclusive language analysis in the sidebar

    Wondering how it works and what the analysis looks at? You can read all that and more on our page dedicated to the inclusive language analysis. Also, it’s good to note that the inclusive language analysis is opt-in, so it won’t be activated by default. It’s up to you whether you want to get feedback on the inclusiveness of your content. 

    Does every traffic light need to be green?

    No, not every single traffic light in the different analyses has to be green for your post or page to rank. Similarly, getting your post and traffic lights ‘all-green’ in no way guarantees that it will rank. While it’s tempting to aim for all-green traffic lights on every post or page without working on other aspects of your SEO, this isn’t the best SEO strategy. Proper keyword research and site structure always come before getting green bullets. Read more about properly using the colored traffic light system in Yoast SEO.

    The Google preview

    In addition to analyzing your content, we provide an editable snippet or Google preview. In the meta box below your post, it’s in the SEO tab, and in the sidebar, you can find it here:

    screenshot of Google preview tab in Yoast SEO sidebar
    You can find all the features of Yoast SEO in the sidebar in the block editor

    The Google preview shows you how the Yoast plugin displays your page to Google and other search engines. In other words, it gives an idea of how your page can appear in the search results:

    The Google preview feature in Yoast SEO
    The Google preview makes it easy to optimize your post for the search results

    In the Google preview, you can set an SEO title and meta description. Make an effort and write a title and meta description that reflect what your post or page is about. Let people know they’ll find what they’re looking for on your site and entice them to visit your page. There’s no guarantee that Google will display your meta description in the results pages. But if the meta description you add here is good, you’ll increase the odds of it being used.

    Other items in the sidebar and meta box

    As said before, we believe this is the minimum investment you should make before publishing a page or post. You may have noticed more items in the Yoast SEO sidebar and meta box, like the internal linking suggestions, social previews, Schema, cornerstone content, insights, and advanced section. It’s worth looking at those, as these can also help your SEO efforts!

    A bit more advanced: Yoast SEO Settings

    Of course, there is so much more you can do with Yoast SEO. You can access and change lots of settings in the Yoast SEO settings overview. There’s usually no need to change anything. Especially if you’re new to SEO, it’s wise to start with the settings you set with the first-time configuration. But let’s quickly look around to give you an idea of the options.

    Go to Yoast SEO > Settings in the left-hand side navigation in your WordPress dashboard to go to the Settings overview. Here you can select which features you want to use, how your site should appear in search engines and loads more! Use the menu on your left to navigate the different settings that are divided into four categories: General, Content types, Categories & Tags and Advanced.

    The Yoast SEO settings overview

    When you go to the Yoast SEO Settings, you land on the Site features page in the General section. Here you can select which Yoast SEO features you want to actively use and which ones you want to opt out on. Each feature that is listed there comes with a short explanation of what it does and you can use the toggle below to activate or deactivate the feature.

    Site basics

    In the General section, you can also find Site basics. As the name suggests, you can configure the basics of your website here. Take the Title Separator, for instance. You can choose whether you want a dash, asterisk, or something else between the different parts of your SEO title that will be shown in the search results. But, if you change your mind later, you can always change it here. Read more about the options in our help article on the Yoast SEO Settings: Site basics.

    Simply pick what you want, but the default option is usually the best one

    In addition to the separator of your SEO title, you might also want to change how your SEO titles are set up. Simply go to Content types, click on Posts or any other content type (depending on which one you want to change) and go to Search Appearance. Here you can change how our plugin sets up your titles and meta descriptions. Set up by using snippet variables that tell the plugin what the title of your post is or the separator of your choice.

    Change the variables in any way you like

    This simply means we will use the title of your page or post as the page title. Then we add a title separator (which we discussed in the first paragraph of this section) and the site name you set when creating your site. So, for example, the title for this Beginner’s guide to Yoast SEO post would look like this:

    Beginner's guide to Yoast SEO: Page titles

    Feel free to change this setup, but this is the one we recommend. It’s focused on the page title (Beginner’s guide to Yoast SEO) and has proper branding at the end (Yoast). We’re highlighting this to give you an example of the type of settings that you can find here, but of course, there are loads more.

    We hope this gives you an idea of the options that Yoast SEO gives you. Throughout the years, we’ve introduced a lot of new features to our plugins. With that said, there are also many things we haven’t done in Yoast SEO, a few of them being things that we probably won’t ever do. If you’re curious as to what these are, check out our blog post on things we don’t do in Yoast SEO and why.

    That’s it for our beginner’s guide to Yoast SEO. With Yoast SEO properly installed, your website is ready to take on the competition and climb to the top of the search results!

    If you want to become a pro user of the Yoast SEO plugin, here are a few more reading recommendations:

    Or some more general SEO guides for beginners:

    We also have a free Yoast SEO for WordPress training course that tells you all you need to know about our plugin, with the help of videos. It helps you master our plugin and take the first few practical steps into SEO! Or if have a question that you could use some help with, consider joining one of our live Q&A sessions to get the most out of Yoast SEO!

    The post The beginner’s guide to Yoast SEO appeared first on Yoast.

  • What is link building?

    Link building is an essential aspect of SEO. It helps search engines to find and rank your pages. You can write the perfect post, but if search engines can’t follow at least one link to it, it will most likely wait forever in vain for visitors to admire its outstanding content. For Google to find your post, it needs links from other websites. The more links, the better. But, beware, the quality of links does matter! Not every link is as valuable as others. Even worse: some links could negatively affect your site. Here, we’ll explain how link building works. We’ll also guide you to more in-depth articles if you want to learn how to do it well.

    Before we dive in, if you want to learn more about link building strategies and other essential SEO skills, you should check out our All-around SEO training! It doesn’t just tell you about SEO: it makes sure you know how to put these skills into actual practice!!

    Simply put, a link, or a hyperlink, is a connection between two pages on the internet. With a link, you can refer people to a page, post, image, or another online object. Links exist for people in the first place: with a link, you can easily “travel” from one web location to another.

    But links serve search engines too – search engine robots follow links to discover pages on the internet. This is called crawling. For a robot to find your website, you’ll need at least one link to it from another website that was crawled already. Making sure you get that first link is one of the things you need to do when you launch a brand new website.

    In the coding language HTML, a hyperlink looks like this:

    <a href=”https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/”>Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress</a>

    The first part contains the URL you’re linking to. In this case, it’s the URL of the Yoast SEO plugin page (https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/). The second part (Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress) shows the clickable text that you’d see on the page. We call this piece of text the ‘anchor text’.

    Internal and external links

    There are two kinds of links that matter for SEO: internal links and external links.

    Internal links are links on your website connecting your various pages together.

    External links, otherwise known as incoming links, are links that other people place on their websites to refer their users to your pages (or the other way around). People working in the SEO industry describe these external links as ‘backlinks’. If other websites link to your pages, you’re getting backlinks from them. On the other hand, you’re giving them backlinks if you link from your pages to theirs.

    Internal linking isn’t the same thing as link building. In this post about link building, we’re only looking at the process of getting other websites to link to your pages. Also known as getting ‘backlinks’ from other websites.

    Anchor text

    The anchor text serves two purposes: it should describe what the linked page is about and entice people to click. A link with a well-crafted anchor text has two advantages:

    • more people click on it, leading to more direct traffic, and
    • it will help search engines understand what your page is about, possibly leading to more traffic from search engines.

    Of course, you can’t control the anchor text used when others link to your site. But you can use anchor text to improve your own internal links.

    Link building refers to the marketing efforts to get links from other websites to your website. It’s seen as one of the most powerful tools to achieve higher rankings in search engines. Google’s Andrey Lipattsev even confirmed in a Q&A session that backlink is an important ranking factor.

    This makes sense when you think about it. If a page gets a lot of high-quality backlinks, it should/must be a good page. Therefore, search engines will consider it a popular or meaningful page, and they’ll rank it higher.

    It’s good to realize that not all backlinks are equal in value. Next to that, since getting links from external websites is a strong ranking factor, it creates an issue for the SEO industry. That is: websites would try shady link building techniques to get more backlinks.

    Links aren’t all equal. Some links are way more valuable than others. For instance, a link from an authoritative website, preferably topically related to yours, is worth more than a random link from a small website nobody knows.

    Let’s say, if you have a restaurant, you’d rather get a link from a restaurant review (on topic) on The Guardian website (high authority), than a link from your aunt’s horseback-riding school website. This makes choosing sites you’d love to get links from easier. But at the same time, it makes it a lot harder to get those coveted high-quality links.

    Shady techniques

    Because link building isn’t easy, lots of shady link building methods emerged in the past. People tried to game the system, for instance, by buying links from link farms. That’s why link building has got a somewhat nasty reputation.

    Consequently, Google intervened with serious penalties as a result. If a page gets lots of backlinks from websites with a questionable reputation, it can completely disappear from the search results. So you’re better off avoiding these risky link building tricks. If you play it fair and smart though, you can gain a lot from link building.

    Now we get to the million-dollar question: what should you do to get those valuable links?

    We believe in a holistic link building approach. You’ll have to create a website that people want to link to. It sounds so simple: Create high-quality, funny, original, or exceptional content people want to share. But how do you do this?

    First and foremost, find out who your audience is. Who are you trying to reach with your content? Then, think about what kind of content they need. What information are they looking for and what kind of questions do they ask? Which words do they use? And, what kind of websites do they visit?

    If you can answer these questions, it will be easier to create content that fits your audience’s needs (for instance, by using the principles of content design). Also, when you’ve created that page with valuable content for your audience, and you know which websites they visit, you’ll have a starting point for your link building activities. That is: you can start reaching out to those website owners.

    That’s what link building is, in a nutshell. It’s about reaching out to other parties and sharing your article with those that might be interested in sharing it too. That’s why it’s key to target the right niche. This help to decrease the number of people you’ll have to contact and increases your chances of actually getting a link.

    People will only link from their website to yours if it’s in their audience’s (or their own) interest. Convincing them to link will only happen if your product or content really is exceptional. Offering to let them try or use your product (if you have one) for free might help convince them. And always make sure to contact them personally, as this will lead to better results. Read all about this process in our step by step guide to link building.

    Have you got the basics about link building and want to take it a step further? Then we’d advise you to read this article with advanced link building tips by Kris Jones. You’ll learn which tools you can use to find out which sites already link to you and what you can do to get more of those. Find out everything about broken link building, reclamation link building, the so-called skyscraper technique, and more.

    Pssst… if reaching out really isn’t your thing, you can always start with some “internal link building”: fix your internal linking structure! But ideally, you should work on both internal linking and link building to improve your site’s SEO.

    The post What is link building? appeared first on Yoast.

  • How to use Google Search Console: a beginner’s guide

    Do you have a website or maintain the website of the company you work for? Of course, to do this right, you need to keep a keen eye on the performance of your website. Google offers several tools to collect and analyze data from your website. You probably have heard of Google Analytics and Google Search Console before. These tools are free for everyone maintaining a website and can give you valuable insights about your website. Here we’ll explain how to use Google Search Console for SEO!

    Table of contents

    Why everyone should use Google Search Console

    Google Search Console helps you track the performance of your website easily. You can get valuable insights from your Google Search Console account, which means you can see what part of your website needs work. This can be a technical part of your website, such as an increasing number of crawl errors that need to be fixed. This can also give a specific keyword more attention because the rankings or impressions are decreasing.

    Besides seeing this kind of data, you’ll get email notifications when Google Search Console notices new errors. Because of these notifications, you’re quickly aware of issues you need to fix. That’s why everyone with a website should learn how to use it!

    Search Console is structured around various sections

    Search Console has several sections, which keep expanding as Google adds more:

    • URL Inspection
      • The URL Inspection tool lets you get insights on specific URLs and how Google sees and indexes these. You’ll also see if the page is eligible for rich results.
    • Performance
      • In the Performance section, you’ll discover how your site is doing in the regular search results, on Discover, and on Google News, if your site is eligible for that.
    • Indexing
      • In the Indexing section, you’ll find all the insights you need to see how Google discovers and indexes your pages.
    • Experience
      • The Experience section gives you an idea of how Google values the performance of your page in the form of Page Experience, Core Web Vitals, and mobile usability.
    • Shopping
      • In the Shopping tab, you’ll find more information about how Google sees your products — if you own an ecommerce site or sell something else online.
    • Enhancements
      • The Enhancements section lists all the structured data that Google found on your site and whether or not these are eligible for rich results.
    • Security & Manual Actions
      • The Security & Manual Actions shouldn’t be a much-visited destination as this lists security issues found by Google or when it issues a manual action against your site.
    • Links
      • The Links section overviews your site’s internal and external links.

    Setting up an account

    You’ll need to create an account to start using Google Search Console. Within Google Search Console, you can click on ‘add a new property’ in the top bar:

    adding a new site property to google search console
    Add a new property to get started

    You can insert the website you want to add by clicking on the ‘Add property’ button. If you choose the new Domain option, you only need to add the domain name without www or subdomains. This option tracks everything connected to that domain. With the ‘old’ URL prefix option, you have to add the correct URL, so with ‘HTTPS’ if you have an HTTPS website and with or without ‘www’. To collect the correct data, it’s essential to add the correct version:

    Choose domain if your want to track all your URLs or URL prefix if you want to track specific URLs

    You must verify that you’re the owner when you’ve added a website. There are several options to verify your ownership. The Domain option only works with DNS verification, while the URL prefix supports different methods. You can learn more about the differences in Google’s documentation: adding a new property and verifying your site ownership. You can also use Google’s Site Kit WordPress plugin to connect Analytics and Search Console while giving you statistics in your site dashboard.

    Add to Yoast SEO

    For WordPress users who use Yoast SEO, get the verification code via the ‘HTML tag’ method from the Ownership settings in Search Console. Copy the long, random string of characters.

    See your verification methods in the Google Search Console ownership settings

    You can easily copy this code and paste it into the ‘Webmaster tools’ tab within the Yoast SEO plugin:

    Paste your code into the Google field to finish the process

    After saving this, you can return to Google Search Console and click on the ‘Verify’ button to confirm. If everything is ok, you’ll get a success message, and GSC will start collecting data for your website.

    Features in Google Search Console

    Now you’ve set up your account, what would be the next step? Well, it’s time to look at some of your data! We’ll explore some of the reports and information available in the rest of this article.

    Performance tab

    In the Performance tab, you can see what pages and keywords your website ranks for in Google. You’ll also find reports on your content’s performance in Google Discover and on Google News if you’re eligible for that. It wasn’t that long ago that you could only see the data as far back as 90 days, but today, it’s possible to see the data for up to 16 months.

    If you check the performance tab regularly, you can quickly see what keywords or pages need more attention and optimization. So, where to begin? Within the performance tab, you see a list of ‘queries’, ‘pages’, ‘countries’, or ‘devices’. With ‘search appearance,’ you can check how your rich results are doing in search. You can sort each section by the number of ‘clicks’, ‘impressions’, ‘average CTR’, or ‘average position’. We’ll explain each of them below:

    The Performance overview harbors a ton of information

    1. Clicks

    The number of clicks tells you how often people clicked on your website in Google’s search results. This number can say something about the performance of your page titles and meta descriptions: if just a few people click on your result, your result might not stand out in the search results. It can be helpful to check what other results are displayed around you to see how you can optimize your snippet.

    The position of the search result also impacts the number of clicks. If your page is in the top three of Google’s first result page, it will automatically get more clicks than a page that ranks on the second page of the search results.

    2. Impressions

    The impressions tell you how often your website or a specific page is shown in the search results. The number of impressions after this keyword shows how often our website is shown for that keyword in Google’s search results. You don’t know yet what page ranks for that keyword.

    To see what pages might rank for the specific keyword, you can click on the line of the keyword. Doing this for a keyword, the keyword is added as a filter:

    You can query the data in many ways

    Afterward, you can navigate to the ‘Pages’ tab to see what pages rank for this keyword. Are those pages the ones you’d want to rank for that keyword? If not, you might need to optimize the page you’d like to rank. Think of writing better content containing the keyword on that page, adding internal links from relevant pages or posts to the page, making the page load faster, etc.

    3. Average CTR

    The CTR – Click-through rate – tells you what percentage of the people that have seen your website in the search results also clicked through to your website. You probably understand that higher rankings mostly also lead to higher click-through rates.

    However, there are also things you can do yourself to increase the CTR. For example, you could rewrite your meta description and page title to make it more appealing. When the title and description of your site stand out from the other results, more people will probably click on your result, and your CTR will increase. Remember that this will not significantly impact you if you’re not ranking on the first page yet. You might need to try other things first to improve your ranking.

    4. Average position

    The last one on this list is the ‘Average position’. This tells you the average ranking of a specific keyword or page in the time period you’ve selected. Of course, this position isn’t always reliable since more and more people seem to get different search results. Google seems to understand better and better which results fit best for which visitor. However, this indicator still shows whether the clicks, impressions, and average CTR are explainable.

    Indexing

    The’ Indexing’ section is a more technical but treasured addition to Google Search Console. This section shows how many pages are in the index of Google since the last update, how many pages aren’t, and what errors and warnings caused difficulties for Google indexing your pages correctly. Google split this section into parts collecting your regular pages and video pages while giving a home for your XML sitemap and the removals sections.

    You can see how Google indexes your content over time

    We recommend you check this tab regularly to see what errors and warnings appear on your website. However, you also get notifications when Google has found new errors. Please check the error in more detail when you get such a notification.

    You may find that errors are caused when, e.g., a redirect doesn’t seem to work correctly or Google finds broken code or error pages in your theme. Google has a long list of possible reasons why pages aren’t indexed and what you can do to fix that.

    Clicking on one of the issues, you can analyze the error more in-depth to see what specific URLs are affected. When you’ve fixed the error, you can mark it as fixed to make sure Google will test the URL again:

    Fixed the specific error? Validate it so Google can check if it’s gone for real

    Things to look out for

    There are a few things you should always look for when checking out your indexing coverage reports:

    • If you’re writing new content, your indexed pages should steadily increase. This tells you two things: Google can index your site, and you keep your site ‘alive’ by adding content.
    • Watch out for sudden drops! This might mean that Google is having trouble accessing (all of) your website. Something may be blocking Google; whether it’s robots.txt changes or a server that’s down: you need to look into it!
    • Sudden (and unexpected) spikes in the graph might mean an issue with duplicate content (such as both www and non-www, wrong canonicals, etc.), automatically generated pages, or even hacks.

    We recommend you monitor these situations closely and resolve errors quickly, as too many errors could signal low quality (poor maintenance) to Google.

    URL Inspection

    The URL Inspection tool helps you analyze specific URLs. You retrieve the page from Google’s index and compare it with the page as it lives now on your site to see if there are differences. You can also find more technical info on this page, like when and how Google crawled it and how it looked at that moment. Sometimes, you’ll also notice several errors. This might be regarding Google’s inability to crawl your page correctly. It also gives information about the structured data found on this URL.

    The URL Inspection tool gives insights into every URL on your site

    Experience

    The experience report is an invaluable addition. This report gives a good idea of how fast your site loads on mobile and desktop and how Google grades its page experience and core web vitals. In addition, it also shows which pages have issues that keep them from performing well. The data is based on the Chrome UX report, so it’s accurate data from real users.

    Site speed, page experience, and user experience are complex topics containing many moving parts, so it’s good to learn how to think about page speed. You can find the answer here: how to check site speed.

    Find out which pages offer a bad experience and how you can fix that

    Mobile usability

    The mobile usability tab in the Experience section shows you usability issues with your website or specific mobile pages. Since mobile traffic is rising worldwide, we recommend checking this regularly. If your mobile site isn’t user-friendly, many visitors will leave it quickly.

    See if you need to improve your mobile pages

    Enhancements: rich results

    If you have structured data on your site — provided by Yoast SEO, for instance — it’s a good idea to check out the Enhancements reports in Search Console. The Enhancements tab collects all the insights and improvements that could lead to rich results. It lists all the structured data that Google found on your site. There’s an ever-expanding list of rich results, and you can find the following, among other things:

    • breadcrumbs
    • events
    • faqs
    • how-tos
    • jobs
    • logos
    • products
    • reviews
    • sitelinks searchboxes
    • videos

    All these tabs show how many valid enhancements you have or how many have errors or warnings. You get details about the kind of errors and warnings and on which URLs these are found. There’s also a trend line that shows if the number of issues is increasing or decreasing. And that’s just the start of it.

    Here’s an example of a job posting enhancement. You can overlay Impressions to get more context for the stats

    The Enhancements reports help you find and fix issues that hinder the performance of your rich results in search. By checking the issues, reading the support documentation, and validating fixes, you can increase your chance of getting rich results in search. We have a more expansive guide on the structured data Enhancement reports in Google Search Console.

    Sitemaps

    An XML sitemap is a roadmap to all important pages and posts on your website. Every website would benefit from having one. Do you run the Yoast SEO plugin on your website? Then you automatically have an XML sitemap. If not, we recommend creating one to ensure Google can easily find your most important pages and posts.

    You can find an option for XML sitemaps within the Indexing tab of Google Search Console. Here, you can tell Google where your XML sitemap is located on your site:

    Don’t forget to check your XML sitemap

    We recommend everyone enter the URL of their XML sitemap into GSC to make Google find it easily. In addition, you can quickly see if your sitemap gives errors or if some pages aren’t indexed, for instance. Checking this regularly, you’re sure Google can find and read your XML sitemap correctly.

    We recommend regularly checking the XML sitemap section in our plugin to manage which post types or taxonomies you include in your sitemaps!

    Shopping

    A recent addition is the Shopping section. Here, you can check how Google sees your products and if they get proper rich results. You’ll see if they are valid or if they are missing fields that make the product snippets more prominent. Click on a product to see which fields are missing for particular products and if these are essential parts or nice-to-haves. If you’ve added these to the structured data of your products, you validate the fix in Search Console.

    In the Shopping section, you’ll also find your Google Merchant listings and an option to enable shopping tab listings to show your products on the Shopping tab in Google Search. With these options, Google gives ecommerce site owners — and people selling stuff — more ways of checking how their listings are doing.

    Optimize your product listings in Google search

    Within the links to your site section, you can see how many links from other sites are pointing to your website. Besides, you can see what websites link, how many links those websites contain, and what anchor texts are used most in linking to your website. This can be valuable information because links still are vital for SEO.

    Find out which pages receive lots of links

    Within the internal links section, you can check what pages of your website are most linked from other spots on your site. This list can be valuable to analyze regularly because you want your most important pages and posts to get the most internal links. By doing this, you make sure Google understands as well what your cornerstones are.

    You can even see how many links individual pages get

    Manual Actions

    You don’t want to see anything in the manual actions tab. You’ll get more information if your site is penalized by Google. If your site is affected by a manual action, you’ll also get messaged via email.

    Several scenarios can lead to these kinds of penalties, including:

    • You have unnatural/bought links
      Ensure links from and to your site are valuable, not just for SEO. Preferably your links come from and link to related content that is valuable for your readers.
    • Your site has been hacked
      A message stating your site’s probably hacked by a third party. Google might label your site as compromised or lower your rankings.
    • You’re hiding something from Google
      If you’re ‘cloaking’ (that is, intentionally showing different content to users to deceive them), or using ‘sneaky’ redirects (e.g., hiding affiliate URLs), then you’re violating Google’s guidelines (now known as Google Search Essentials).
    • Plain Spam
      Automatically generated content, scraped content, and aggressive cloaking could cause Google to blocklist your site.
    • Spammy structured markup
      If you use rich snippets for too many irrelevant elements on a page or mark up content hidden from the visitor, that might be considered spammy. Mark up what’s necessary and only necessary things.

    Security issues

    Within the security issues tab, you’ll get a notification when your website seems to have a security issue.

    Search Console: an incredibly helpful tool

    Reading this post should give you a good idea of what Search Console is capable of and how to use it, so I’d like to ask you this: Do you already use Google Search Console for your website? If not, create an account to collect data about your website. Do you think something is missing? Feel free to leave a comment!

    Read more: How to make your site stand out in the search results »

    The post How to use Google Search Console: a beginner’s guide appeared first on Yoast.

  • What is site structure and why is it important?

    Site structure is a vital aspect of your SEO strategy. Why? Because the structure of your website shows Google which pages of your site are most important. This means you can influence which content will rank highest in the search engines with your site’s structure. And good news: You can start improving your site structure today! In this post, you’ll read why site structure helps SEO, and we’ll give you three quick tips on how to start improving it.

    What is site structure?

    Site structure refers to how you organize your website’s content. In other words: the pages and posts on your website. These often have a variety of – related – topics, and site structure deals with how this content is grouped, linked and presented to the visitor. You can use taxonomies, like categories and tags, but also internal links, your navigation, and breadcrumbs as tools to improve your site structure. If you do this well, your users will find their way around your website more easily. Plus, Google can index your URLs better!

    Learn how to do this well. Our site structure training teaches you how to set up the best site structure for your visitors and Google!

    As your site grows, it’ll get cluttered

    As you’re writing more blog posts or add more product pages, your site will get cluttered. You need to organize it neatly to make sure that you, your visitors, and Google will be able to find what they’re looking for. But why is that? Well, let me tell you a little story.

    Once upon a time, there was this young woman. Her name is Alice. Alice gets up every morning, sits down at her desk and starts to write a beautiful story. She writes one story every day. Alice types all her stories on this beautiful old-fashioned typewriter. Whenever she’s done writing, she pulls the paper out of the machine and puts her lovely new story on her desk. As you can imagine, her desk will slowly get cluttered with all these sheets of paper. After a year of writing, she’ll have 365 sheets of paper on it. After three years of writing, she’ll have more than a thousand. Alice will not be able to find her favorite story, because of the abundance of stories on her desk.

    Conclusion: If you don’t structure your stuff neatly, your stories, blog posts and product pages will get lost. In addition, your visitors won’t be able to find what they’re looking for, and Google will also get lost (which is bad for your SEO).

    Why is site structure important for Google – and users?

    There are three reasons why site structure is important for Google and, therefore, your chance of ranking in the search engines.

    1. Structure is a guide for Google

    The way your site is structured will give Google clues about where to find the most essential content. Your site’s structure determines whether a search engine can understand what your site is about and what you’re selling.

    Google crawls websites by following internal and external links, using a bot called Googlebot. By following those links, Google determines the relationship between the various pages. In other words: Your site structure is like a guide to Google, and therefore very crucial.

    2. Not competing with your content

    You probably have blog posts or articles on your site that cover the same topic. At Yoast, for example, we write a lot about SEO. We have multiple posts about site structure, each covering a different aspect. But Google won’t know which of these is most important unless we ‘tell’ Google.

    A good tip is to order your content by importance. Think about Alice’s cluttered desk. She could clean up by making piles of her sheets of papers. She could order her stories by topic: bumble bees, flowers, and fairies. But, if Alice were to make these piles without any kind of structure and without putting the most beautiful stories at the top of the pile, no one would ever know which story is most important to her.

    In conclusion: If you don’t tell Google which posts are most important, all of your posts will be competing for attention. You’ll be competing with your own pages for a high ranking in Google. Luckily, the solution is rather simple: Let Google know which page you consider to be the most important. To do this, you need a good internal linking structure.

    3. Site structure is important for UX

    Did you know that your site structure is also important for your User eXperience (UX)? After all, when people can easily find their way on your website, they’ll have a better browsing experience. This will also increase your chances for people to convert: buy your products; subscribe to your newsletter or return for another visit. And Google likes sites that perform well too! So make sure your site structure is reflected in the navigation of your website.

    How to get started with site structure

    What do you need to do to improve your structure? And what can you do to avoid your site structure becoming an issue?  Read on for three basic tips on how to quickly improve your site structure.

    1. Remove old content

    Lots of shops sell a different collection of products (clothes, shoes, etc.) every season. And when the season is done, the item pages are removed. This is a great practice if you don’t expect to sell the same product again. But what about all the links that point to the deleted product page? As you know, links to your page are valuable for your SEO! That’s why you should redirect the URL. This way, you still benefit from the links, even though the page doesn’t exist anymore.

    2. Evaluate your categories

    You should ensure that categories are about the same size. Think of Alice and her stories. Alice could categorize her stories by making piles. Now imagine one of these piles becoming huge, while the others remain much smaller. It would be hard to find a specific story in that big pile, while it would be much easier to search through a small pile. At the same time, that big heap is probably very important, because Alice wrote a lot of stories about that specific topic.

    Categories can become too large when you write a lot about one specific subject and less about others. At some point, you should divide the big category into two smaller categories. A good rule of thumb is to make sure that no category is more than twice the size of any other category. When one category is significantly larger than other ones, your site becomes unbalanced. You’ll have a hard time ranking with blog posts within a huge category. The pile has become too large to search through. In this case, you should evaluate and optimize your categories; perhaps merge or split some of them.

    3. Improve your internal linking structure

    You should link to the most essential content on your site to show Google that these are your best and most complete articles. But it makes sense to users too. You want them to read your best posts, right? Read Meike’s blogpost about Internal linking for SEO to learn how to improve your internal linking structure.

    Read more: Avoid these site structure mistakes! »

    Yoast helps you out!

    Yoast SEO premium can really help you set up and improve the structure of your site. The redirect functionality will allow you to easily redirect pages you deleted (so you’ll pass on the linking juice to another page). And our related links functionality will make sure you are interlinking articles with similar topics.

    On top of that, we have a site structure training. This can be especially helpful if you need some guidance when starting with site structure. This training will guide you through the process. So, take a look!

    Conclusion: Get started with improving your site structure

    It’s important to remember that site structure is part of a bigger, ongoing process. Your site will grow and therefore, the structure will require maintenance. Improving and maintaining the structure of a site should be a core aspect of every SEO strategy. It’s a very actionable part of SEO, because it’s something you can control and improve rather quickly. So, let’s get started!

    Keep reading: Site structure: the Ultimate guide »

    The post What is site structure and why is it important? appeared first on Yoast.

  • What is SEO? An explanation for beginners

    Do you have a website? And do you want more traffic? If yes, then there’s no doubt about it: SEO should be part of your marketing efforts. It’s a great way to get and keep people on your website. But what does it actually entail? In this post, we’ll explain what SEO is and how you can get started!

    What is SEO?

    SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimization’. It’s the practice of optimizing your web pages to make them reach a high position in the search results of Google and other search engines. In other words: People will be more likely to encounter your website when searching online. SEO focuses on improving the rankings in the organic – aka non-paid – search results.

    Google's search results for the term neptune planet
    Google’s search result page for the term ‘neptune planet’

    In the image above, we see the first few results when someone searches for the keyphrase ‘Neptune planet’. In this case, Wikipedia is the first result and this means that their page on Neptune ranks #1 on this search term. The idea behind SEO is that when you optimize your page to become the best result, you can climb those rankings and become one of the first results that people see. Which will get you more clicks and traffic to your site!

    Although this example only shows us organic results, that isn’t always the case. Depending on the search term someone uses, there can also be ads or a rich result at the top, or a few products by Google Shopping. There are a lot of different possibilities. What Google shows can also depend on what it knows about the searcher (the country they live in, for example).

    Why is SEO important?

    You’ve created a website because you want people to buy your product, subscribe to your service, or read your content. Whatever your goal, you want people to visit your website. If you own a donut shop in Amsterdam, for example, you want your website to be number 1 when people Google: “donuts Amsterdam”. Because the chances of people clicking on your website are much higher when it’s the top result!

    But how do you make this happen? One word: Search Engine Optimization! SEO is a great way to get people to your website for free. Which is especially useful if you’re a small business owner who doesn’t have a lot of money to spend on advertising.

    What determines how high you rank?

    How high each result ranks is determined by Google’s algorithm. And although parts of Google’s algorithm remain secret, years of experience in SEO have given us insight into the most important ranking factors. These ranking factors can be divided into two categories:

    On-page SEO factors

    The ranking of your pages is partly determined by on-page factors. On-page factors are all the things on your website that you have a direct influence on. These factors include technical aspects (e.g. the quality of your code and site speed) and content-related aspects, like the structure of your website or the quality of the copy on your website. These are all crucial on-page SEO factors that you can work on.

    Off-page SEO factors

    In addition to on-page SEO factors, your rankings are also determined by a few off-page SEO factors. These factors include links from other websites, social media attention, and other marketing activities that happen off of your own website. Although not impossible, these off-page SEO factors can be more difficult to influence. The most important of these off-page factors is the number and quality of links pointing towards your site. The more quality, relevant sites that link to your website, the higher your position in Google will be.

    Another off-page factor that plays a role in SEO is your competition relating to the niche of your particular business. In some niches, it is much harder to rank than in others. The competitiveness of your market therefore also has a major influence on your chances of ranking.

    Holistic SEO: A long-term strategy

    At Yoast, we practice ‘holistic SEO‘. With holistic SEO, your primary goal is to build and maintain the best possible website. You don’t try to fool Google; Instead, you invest your time and effort in a sustainable long-term strategy. If you work on improving your pages and having a high-quality website, then your chances of ranking will improve too. After all, Google wants to offer its users the best results to their search query, and the best results often have great content and are user-friendly, fast, and easily accessible.

    Ranking well in search engines like Google asks for an extensive SEO strategy focused on every aspect of your website and its marketing. The technical side, the user experience (UX), the content on your website: all need to be top-notch. To keep ranking well in Google, you should develop – what we call – a holistic SEO approach.

    A holistic SEO approach isn’t just better for your rankings — it also helps users find what they need more quickly. And that’s better for environmental sustainability too!

    How can we help you get started?

    At Yoast, our mission is to make SEO accessible for everyone. That’s why we have a few plugins that can help you with that, like our popular Yoast SEO plugin. We have a free and premium version of this plugin. One of the main advantages is that it helps you create high-ranking content. Our free SEO and readability analysis gives you detailed suggestions to create copy humans and search engines enjoy!

    The premium version of our plugin will help you get to that next level and optimize your content for synonyms and related keywords and boost your site structure with our internal linking suggestions. You’ll also get access to all of our SEO courses, where you can learn vital SEO skills that you will be able to apply immediately!

    Go Premium and get access to all our features!

    Premium comes with lots of features and free access to our SEO courses!

    Get Yoast SEO Premium Only €99 EUR / year (ex VAT)

    Conclusion

    SEO is the practice of optimizing websites to make them reach a high position in Google’s – or another search engine’s – search results. At Yoast, we believe that holistic SEO is the best way to rank your pages because you focus on optimizing every aspect of your site.

    Don’t use any black-hat tricks, because eventually, this will have negative consequences for your rankings. Instead, practice sustainable SEO with your user in mind, and you will benefit in the long run. Read more on how to rank high in Google or if you use WordPress, make sure to check out our ultimate guide on SEO in WordPress:

    Read on: The ultimate guide to WordPress SEO »

    The post What is SEO? An explanation for beginners appeared first on Yoast.