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 […]
The importance of original content for SEO
Nobody wants to read old news. The content of your articles and blog post should be new, fresh and original. It should add something to all the junk that’s already out there on the internet. In this post, I’ll explain the importance of original content for SEO to you. Google’s mission In order to understand […]
Related posts need to make sense, not just be there
Related posts are a way to keep a visitor on your website. People use related posts to reduce the number of visitors that leave your website after reading an article. A related posts section is the glue that binds posts together. Does that mean you have to install a plugin that takes care of this for […]
Why every content SEO strategy should start with keyword research
The effectiveness of every content SEO strategy largely depends on the quality of the keyword research that has been executed. If you optimize for words that nobody searches for, you won’t be found. If you optimize for terms that are much too competitive to rank for, you won’t be found either. In this post, I explain why you […]
New: Yoast Keyword research training!
Keyword research is the very first – and most important- step in any content SEO strategy. It’s also the one thing we can’t automate or execute for you. On top of that, it’s super hard. What we can do, is give tips and feedback on how to execute proper keyword research. That’s why we launch […]
Keep your content fresh and up to date!
How do you make sure that all content on your website is still relevant? Why is that even important? For some of you, coming up with new ideas for blog posts seems the biggest challenge of blogging. However, you want your existing posts to show up-to-date content as well. And that could well be an even bigger […]
Ask Yoast: include taxonomies in XML sitemap?
Your tag and category pages could be very important pages on your site. If you’re using these pages in the right way, they can boost your site’s SEO. You might wonder if you should also include these taxonomy pages in your XML sitemap. In this Ask Yoast we explain whether you should, and why! Our support team received the following question […]
7 tips to increase blog engagement
Do you want your readers to engage with your blog? Want them to comment and share your post on social media? Want them to come back to your blog and read your next post? So, how do you achieve that? In this post, I’ll first explain the importance of blog engagement for SEO. After that, […]
Ask Yoast: Links to PDF files
If you’re starting with an (eCommerce) site you might have a lot of content that’s already available in PDF files: product brochures, datasheets, pricing information and so on. So some people might think: why not upload these PDF files and link to them? There are some disadvantages to showing PDF files on your site though. We’ll discuss some of […]