SEO basics: What is content marketing?
Content marketing consists of all marketing activities that focus on creating and sharing information. It should be part of every SEO strategy, but it’s also crucial for branding. The idea of content marketing is that sharing valuable information is a great way to attract an audience and to build a brand. Blogging is one of the most well-known ways of […]
Ask Yoast: change URLs when relaunching website?
Relaunching a website can be an overwhelming project. You need a new design and perhaps new functionalities. What should you do with your existing content? And what about new content? The more changes you want, the more challenging it gets. In this process you might face the question if you should change or keep your URLs. […]
Why you should NOT write clickbait headlines
You’d like your post to rank and your headlines to be clicked on. That’s how you generate traffic from the organic search results. After your headlines have generated those clicks, you’d want your customers to stay on our site and read your posts (and eventually decide to buy your stuff). That’s why writing clickbait headlines are not […]
Why you should use Yoast internal linking
Yesterday we released our new internal linking tool in Yoast SEO Premium. The internal linking tool will help you to link to related content. It will find related posts for you, and it will become much easier to link from your post to these related articles. Using our tool systematically will help you improve the structure […]
Site structure training: now available!
You want your site to appear high in the search engines. You want extra traffic and more customers and/or sales. And what you want most, is to outrank the competition. In order to do so, you can apply all kinds of SEO tactics. Structuring your site in such a way that Google can easily understand what’s […]
Why is site structure important?
Structuring your site is a crucial element of SEO. If you want to generate more traffic to your website, you should create a structure for your site that makes sense to Google and your site’s visitors. In this post, I’ll explain why site structure is such an important aspect of SEO. Structure shows importance to Google […]
Ask Yoast: how to rank globally
Ranking in your own country is one thing, ranking around the globe is quite another thing though. It poses other challenges. Let’s say you’re organizing trips for tourists who visit your country, how to reach those tourists? In this Ask Yoast, I’ll explain what’s essential for your global SEO strategy. We received the following question from […]
We’ve created the fastest related posts ever
When we say “related posts for WordPress“, we say “bad performance”. Without using an external service like ElasticSearch, it’s practically impossible to have related posts work fast in WordPress. That’s why we’ve always stayed away from including any related posts plugin on our site. It’s also the reason we haven’t tried to come up with a solution ourselves before. In the […]
Site structure: the ultimate guide
Your site needs a certain structure. Otherwise, it’ll just be a collection of pages and blog posts. Your users need the structure to navigate through your site, to click from one page to the other. And Google uses the structure of your site in order to determine what content is important and what content is […]
Ask Yoast: how many (internal) links on a page?
Links are valuable for search engines. Therefore, it’s important to understand how Google and other search engines use links. They use the number of links pointing to a webpage to determine how important that page is. Not only external links could help in the ranking of a page in Google, but the internal links could help […]
SEO basics: What is SEO?
SEO is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization. It’s the practice of optimizing websites to make them reach a high position in Google’s – or another search engine’s – search results. SEO focuses on rankings in the organic (non-paid) search results. In this post, I’ll answer the question “What is SEO?” and I’ll explain how […]
Interview with Maile Ohye (Google)
According to Maile Ohye of Google, “SEO is evolving into what Loren George McKechnie described as ‘search experience optimization’. It’s less about top ranking, and more about optimizing the searcher’s journey. It’s the intersection of content, UX, and as always, staying smart about search engines.” We had the chance to ask Maile a couple of questions, […]
SEO basics: What does Google do?
How does Google work? What does Google actually do? For many of you this will be fairly old news. But for all the SEO newbies: let me explain (in easy to understand prose) what Google actually does. Understanding Google could really help you create an SEO strategy that works! How does Google work? Search engines […]
Ask Yoast: SEO tactics for link building
As you might know, links from other websites are an important ranking factor. But you might wonder how to get those quality links. What SEO tactics should you use? First, let us tell you one thing about the SEO value of links: quality often beats quantity. One link from a high ranking site can do more for you […]
Ask Yoast: importance of using excerpts
Do you want to increase click-through rates to your posts or pages? Craft great excerpts! In this video Joost explains why excerpts are important.
Should you blog about Justin Bieber?
You want to rank on the words that are used a lot in the search engines, right? Justin Bieber is a term that is used very, very often. So, should we all start writing about Justin Bieber then? The answer of course is: (please) no. In this post, I explain why blogging about Justin Bieber – […]
How to write a high-quality and SEO-friendly blog post
Writing blog posts that are both nice and easy to read as well as SEO-friendly can be daunting. For some people, SEO-friendly content and high-quality content even seem contradictory. In this post, I’ll explain the three important steps you need to take to write excellent and SEO-friendly content. Holistic SEO At Yoast, we do not […]
Use Yoast SEO to make your content findable
If you want to write awesome and SEO-friendly content, you should write findable content. Findability has to do with maximizing the likelihood your content will be picked up by the search engines. In this post, I’ll explain how the Yoast SEO plugin will help you to make your posts findable. What is findable content? Search Engine […]
Ask Yoast: how to get most out of cornerstone content
You’ve did it! You’ve written that awesome post that’s designated to be one of the cornerstone articles of your site. And now what? How can you show Google that it is one of the most important articles of your site? This is an issue a lot of our site review customers struggle with. The answer is […]
Marketing your blog
If you’re writing posts for your blog, you want an audience. Nobody wants to perform in an empty room! Ranking high in search engines by doing your SEO flawlessly will, of course, help. But you can do more! In this post, I’ll give you lots of blog marketing tips to make sure your audience will […]