Accessibility trends in 2024
Accessibility is still as important as ever in 2024. Not just because it makes your website accessible to everyone, ensuring you’ll be able to reach your entire audience, but also because Google thinks accessibility is important. After all, they want to provide helpful content to their users. And what’s more helpful than content that everyone […]
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What is inclusive language?
You might have been hearing more and more about it in the last few years: inclusive language. But what do people mean by it exactly? Is it a new thing? And why should you think about it when writing web copy? Find the answer to all of these questions in this post. We’ll do some […]
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Inclusive language and SEO: Does inclusive language help you rank?
If you own a blog or a business, SEO is probably important to you. Then you also know that Google cares a lot about user experience. But there’s one aspect of user experience that’s often overlooked: inclusive language. But why should you care? Creating inclusive content is good for your users and your SEO. On […]
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New in Yoast SEO Free: the inclusive language analysis
Earlier this year, we added a new feature to our Premium plugin, the inclusive language analysis. Now we’re excited to say that we’re bringing it to Yoast SEO Free as well. Why? Because we believe that using inclusive language is essential in making the web a better place. Taking a stance We believe that inclusive […]
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Writing accessible content: 4 checks you can do with Yoast SEO and the block editor
Having an accessible website means that more people can use your website and the information that you share. There are a couple of checks you can do yourself before publishing an article to make sure your article can be read and understood by as many people as possible. Did you know Yoast SEO and the […]
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How to improve the accessibility of your website
Accessibility matters. And making sure that your website is accessible for everyone shouldn’t be an afterthought. It plays a big part in the usability of your website and that’s why Google is also focusing more on how accessible your content is. Fortunately, awareness is growing and platforms such as WordPress offer lots of possibilities to […]
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How to add captions to your videos
Getting captions onto your videos is one of the most important things you can do in order to optimize your videos for search, but it isn’t immediately obvious how to do this. Especially as each of the common video platforms has a slightly different approach to acquiring and adding captions. Also, after you’ve got the […]
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Syntax-highlighting Code Block, theme accessibility news and Gutenberg 6.2
After a short break, we’ve returned with a new WordPress Watch. In today’s edition, let’s check out a cool new way to share your code in the block editor. We’ll also look at some nice updates to the Gutenberg project – which includes new features for the block editor in the next major release of […]
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Image SEO: alt tag and title tag optimization
Adding images to your articles encourages people to read them, and well-chosen images can also back up your message and get you a good ranking in image search results. But you should always remember to give your images good alt attributes: alt text strengthens the message of your articles with search engine spiders and improves […]
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Things that hurt your SEO rankings and how to fix them, part 2
Accessibility and indexation, broken links and bad redirects, not maximizing Google Search Console, and missing / poor meta tags can hurt SEO rankings.
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Ask Yoast: Using your keyword in the alt text box
At Yoast, we firmly believe that websites should be usable by everyone, including people with a visual impairment. The alt textbox plays an important part in this, as it clarifies the content of an image. Visitors of your site that use a screen reader can listen to the alt text read aloud, to better understand […]
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Ask Yoast: WordPress themes and heading structure
Headings play an important role in structuring text, whether it’s on paper or online. Since reading from a screen is already quite difficult, you should make sure you make proper use of headings. There’s a hierarchy in heading tags, with <h1> being the most important, and <h6> the least important. This will help both your […]
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Yoast SEO 5.2: Accessibility, compatibility and bug fixes
Today we’re releasing Yoast SEO 5.2. In this brand new version you’ll find some feature enhancements, accessibility improvements and a couple of bug fixes. In addition to that, we’ve laid some groundwork that will help us make Yoast SEO work well with the plugins our users use most. Read about all the improvements here! Accessibility Web accessibility […]
How do I make sure my site is mobile friendly? A checklist
Last week, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller confirmed on Twitter that the latest wave of changes to Google’s mobile-friendly ranking signal has now finished rolling out.
WordPress plugins and accessibility
WordPress recently announced that “all new or updated code released into WordPress core and bundled themes must conform with the WCAG 2.0 guidelines at level AA.” This means WordPress will be making the product more accessible with every new update. Rian Rietveld‘s article WordPress goes WCAG clearly reflects her enthusiasm about this step forward in terms of accessibility. It aligns […]
Why accessibility is key for search and visibility
If you’re involved with search visibility and SEO, you’ve no doubt thought about all sorts of ways to boost your site up the search rankings. But if your site isn’t web accessible, your efforts will be in vain for one-fifth of your potential visitors.
The main accessibility checks
Accessibility checks help you optimize your website. For every visitor. By thinking about accessibility, you are actually thinking about your design, the use of textual and multimedia content, and the structure of your website. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has a list of accessibility checks for you. In this post, I will dive into […]
Easy-to-use accessibility tools
Is your website ready for the visually impaired? Have you ever tried to navigate your own site without a mouse? Just some of the questions I asked you in my article Accessibility matters. In Joost’s recent article on the Google Webmaster Guidelines update, he explains that these new guidelines also focus more on accessibility. Accessibility […]
Directing smartphone users to the page they actually wanted
Webmaster level: all
Have you ever used Google Search on your smartphone and clicked on a promising-looking result, only to end up on the mobile site’s homepage, with no idea why the page you were hoping to see vanished? This is such a common annoyance that we’ve even seen comics about it. Usually this happens because the website is not properly set up to handle requests from smartphones and sends you to its smartphone homepage—we call this a “faulty redirect”.
We’d like to spare users the frustration of landing on irrelevant pages and help webmasters fix the faulty redirects. Starting today in our English search results in the US, whenever we detect that smartphone users are redirected to a homepage instead of the the page they asked for, we may note it below the result. If you still wish to proceed to the page, you can click “Try anyway”:
And we’re providing advice and resources to help you direct your audience to the pages they want. Here’s a quick rundown:
1. Do a few searches on your own phone (or with a browser set up to act like a smartphone) and see how your site behaves. Simple but effective. :)
2. Check out Webmaster Tools—we’ll send you a message if we detect that any of your site’s pages are redirecting smartphone users to the homepage. We’ll also show you any faulty redirects we detect in the Smartphone Crawl Errors section of Webmaster Tools:
3. Investigate any faulty redirects and fix them. Here’s what you can do:
- Use the example URLs we provide in Webmaster Tools as a starting point to debug exactly where the problem is with your server configuration.
- Set up your server so that it redirects smartphone users to the equivalent URL on your smartphone site.
- If a page on your site doesn’t have a smartphone equivalent, keep users on the desktop page, rather than redirecting them to the smartphone site’s homepage. Doing nothing is better than doing something wrong in this case.
- Try using responsive web design, which serves the same content for desktop and smartphone users.
If you’d like to know more about building smartphone-friendly sites, read our full recommendations. And, as always, if you need more help you can ask a question in our webmaster forum.
Posted by Mariya Moeva, Webmaster Trends Analyst
