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Does homepage SEO exist? We asked ourselves that in our post on homepage SEO. However, a lot of the people still feel that a homepage should be optimized for a keyword. Perhaps optimizing your homepage for search engines works for some of you, but ranking in Google should definitely not be the only purpose of your homepage! …

The technologies which power the web, and which power parts of WordPress, are changing. It’s increasingly common for developers to use JavaScript to make our websites behave more and more like apps. Done well, these approaches create rich, interactive experiences. When built poorly, they can be catastrophic for SEO. For most WordPress website owners and …

Things are always on the move in the SEO world. Google regularly updates its algorithm and the competition is never far behind. And the current situation is only making things harder, with the shift to online for businesses that might not be prepared. So if you’re not sure what to do, wouldn’t it be nice …

So sorry! This sale has ended… don’t want to miss our discounts? Sign up for our newsletter below! Time to brighten up your Blue Monday! What better way to do this than with a special Blue Monday discount? Get rid of the blues instantly: claim your 20% discount – valid just on Blue Monday. Here …

We all want to write the best possible content on our favorite topic. As writers, we also know that that not always happens on the first try. While you do need to deliver quality on that first try, it doesn’t hurt to dive back into published articles to updated and improve them wherever you can. …

Online reviews are important for any business. With the current situation, they’ve even become essential when you own a local business. More than ever, people are searching for businesses and products online. Having positive reviews and ratings will help you stand out and attract traffic to your site. But what should you do when you …

Yoast SEO 15.6 is out today! This release comes with a lot of goodies, like support for the Norwegian language, a new estimated reading time feature and improved support for web stories. But that’s not all! We’ve added a brilliant new feature to the free Yoast Duplicate Post plugin to help you seamlessly rewrite and …

Having a site for your business is quite common nowadays. Chances are that you’ve also created one to make sure that people can find and contact you online. But have you really thought about the goal of your website? And is this reflected in the structure and content of your site? Writing a mission statement …

Is your page not attracting the number of people you thought it would? Or are you wondering what you can improve to get your page higher up in the search results? And to get people to stay on (and come back to) your site? There are a few things you can do to give your …

Anchor text — or link text — is the visible, clickable text of a link. It usually appears in a different color than the surrounding text and is often underlined. Good link text tells the reader what to expect if they click on the link. Getting your anchor text right increases the chance of someone …

An SEO Basics post about technical SEO might seem like a contradiction in terms. Nevertheless, some basic knowledge about the more technical side of SEO can mean the difference between a high ranking site and a site that doesn’t rank at all. Technical SEO isn’t easy, but here we’ll explain – in layman’s language – …

At a certain point, your website can grow to a monstrous collection of pages. You may realize that you have too many items in your menu and that the coherence of your website is nowhere to be found. Time to clean this mess up! But where to start? It’s a tough job, and sometimes it …

The year 2020 is coming to its end and what a wild year it’s been! The pandemic has had a huge impact on all of us, and this isn’t different for our team at Yoast. As many shop owners turned to the web to stay in contact with their (potential) customers, we saw the importance …

Although it also brought lots of good things, 2020 was a year to quickly forget for most of us. So let us take a look at next year. For most sites, SEO in 2021 is not much different from the past couple of years: you still need to improve the same stuff, but you do …

Product images can make or break your online shop’s success. You can hire the best designer in the world to create a killer design, but when images are bad, sales will be bad. It’s the first thing a customer will look at. In this post, we’ll go over a number of things you need to consider when …

Content marketing consists of all marketing activities that focus on the creation and sharing of information. If you’re serious about your SEO, it should definitely be part of your strategy. But nowadays, it’s also crucial for branding. Sharing valuable information is a great way to attract an audience and show them that you’re an expert in what …

The meta description is a snippet of up to about 155 characters – a tag in HTML – which summarizes a page’s content. Search engines show it in search results mostly when the searched-for phrase is within the description. So optimizing it is crucial for on-page SEO. In this post, I tell you the characteristics …

The worldwide web is one of the greatest achievements of mankind. It has revolutionized communication and allowed for a stunning amount of innovation to happen. As a place without regulation, the web was allowed to grow tremendously. But today, we cope with the side-effects of that unregulated growth: misuse hurts people and even democracies. Now, …

It’s December, the last month of the year and that means that we’ve also had our last webinar of 2020. In this month’s edition, our SEO experts Joost de Valk and Jono Alderson discuss the latest in Google, Facebook, WordPress and other SEO news. To give some spoilers, you can expect to hear more about …

Using transition words in your writing can help you enhance the readability of your content. These words help your text flow and show readers the relationship between phrases and paragraphs. That’s why the readability check in Yoast SEO provides feedback on your use of transition words. But what are they exactly? Why are they so important? …

The year is drawing to a close and we are ready for our final release of 2020. In Yoast SEO 15.5, you’ll find support for the Hungarian language — including word forms in Premium. In addition, you’ll find a number of enhancements and fixes. Let’s meet Yoast SEO 15.5! Improve your content Having great content …

We’ve seen it happen so often. You have a great blog, and at some point, you decide to go for a new look and feel. There are a couple of things you’ll look at, usually in the order: layout/look and feel, usability, and optionally, room for advertising. If the theme meets your needs in all two …

We’ve had the pleasure of welcoming a lot of new people to our team this year. Including a new board member and co-owner in the company: Chaya Oosterbroek. We’re already big fans of Chaya as our Chief Operations Officer and we think you will be too. So let’s get to know her by asking her …

We have exciting news! We have welcomed two new board members and partners: Chaya Oosterbroek is our new COO and Thijs de Valk is our new CCO. Marieke van de Rakt will remain our CEO, Joost de Valk is unstoppable as our Founder and CPO and Omar Reiss will stay on board as our CTO. …

Almost every year, WordPress gets a new default theme. This theme is bundled with the last major release of WordPress for the year. This time, we welcome a new theme in WordPress 5.6. The theme is called Twenty Twenty-One and it is a stunner. It was designed by Automattic’s Mel Choyce-Dwan and built by a …

Today, WordPress 5.6 sees the daylight! This release is chockfull of good stuff, with a new default theme called Twenty Twenty-One, application passwords, loads of editor updates and an automatic update feature. This release was led by an awesome team and they did a really good job. Here’s an overview of some of the best …

It’s here, the release of WordPress 5.6! What a wonderful journey it has been. As one of the release mentors of WordPress 5.6, I thoroughly enjoyed helping the team in any way I could. In this blog post, I’ll tell you more about the process, the people involved, and what we focused on. Essentially, the …

Headings help users and search engines to read and understand text. For example, they act as signposts for the readers and make it easier for them to figure out what a post or page is about. Headings also define which parts of your content are important, and show how they’re interconnected. Here, we’ll give you …

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 …

Today, we’re launching the result of a great collaboration: the Yoast SEO plugin now seamlessly integrates with the Elementor page builder! We’re really excited about this integration. It means that millions of WordPress users can now easily build a page with Elementor and optimize its content with Yoast SEO. To make this happen, we’ve partnered …