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Once you finish a Yoast SEO academy training course, you get a shiny certificate of completion and a badge you can embed on your site or share on social media. This way, you can let everyone know about your newly acquired SEO expertise. Awesome! But how useful is an SEO certification, really? Does it make …

When you’re doing SEO, it’s because you want your pages to rank in Google. You will have picked out one or more keywords to optimize your pages for, but ranking for those keywords is just a tiny part of the story. In reality, you could be ranking for queries you don’t even know about! In …

Do you have an old website that’s seen better days? Or a site that’s been offline for a few years? In this post, we’ll explain what you should check to get it up to modern standards, and how to update your SEO at the same time. We’ve tried to cover all the main things you …

Yoast SEO 17.6 is out today. This new release brings several fixes and enhancements to improve how the plugin works. We’re getting it ready for the upcoming WordPress 5.9 release and we also included a great new feature for the News SEO add-on: a new way of generating XML sitemaps for news sites. News SEO …

It’s a topic that remains up for discussion: SEO-friendly URLs. Should you include the category? Do you want to keep the URL as short as possible or is there room for extras? Is it smart to stuff your URL with keywords? First of all, it’s good to know that the best practices for SEO-friendly URLs …

If you’ve been working on your website for a couple of years, chances are that your website has become a giant collection of posts and pages. When writing a post you might find out you’ve already written a similar article (maybe even twice) or you might get a feeling that you’ve written something related that …

Site Kit is an official Google plugin designed for WordPress. It brings together a collection of Google tools to manage and optimize your site. It’s easy to use, even if you don’t have a lot of technical knowledge. So if you’ve ever wanted to check things like which of your pages gets the most visitors, …

Google keeps getting better at handling near me searches. Needless to say, mobile is the de facto way for most people to search for businesses and products — especially while out and about. Location-based ‘everything’ needs to be taken into account while optimizing the mobile and local SEO for location-dependent businesses. It’s clear that Google …

As of last week, Thijs de Valk is Yoast’s new CEO. Thijs used to be the Chief Commercial Officer at Yoast. He’s very excited to start this new role of leading the company. Marieke van de Rakt, former CEO and founder of Yoast SEO academy, will be focusing mostly on content marketing as Creative Marketing …

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 …

In Yoast SEO 17.5, we’re proud to announce a new language getting full language support: Greek! Greek users can now use our cutting-edge language analysis tools to write better content for their readers. This includes the invaluable word forms features, where we take different grammatical forms of your keyphrase into account, making the process of …

With over 450 million active users every month, Pinterest is a platform you don’t want to ignore as an online shop owner. According to the platform, 89% of its users use Pinterest to decide what they should buy next. So whether you’re a small business or sell all over the world, Pinterest is worth investing …

Trust is really important for users browsing content and shopping online. Fake news is a widespread problem, and phishing attacks are becoming more and more common. You might know your content is safe to use — but does Google know that, too? And what about your users? In this post, we’ll explain all about trustworthiness …

Welcome to another recap of the Yoast SEO news webinar. It’s October and we’re fast approaching the holiday season and the end of the year. For this year, we still have two SEO news webinars planned — be sure to join us! This month, hear our experts Jono Alderson and Joost de Valk discuss topics …

Yoast SEO 17.4 is out today! This release comes with several fixes and enhancements for both Premium as well as free. These enhancements help database performance on larger sites by cleaning and streamlining data. In addition, we’re releasing News SEO 13.0 with a new way to pick news-specific structured data for all your background articles, …

Writing fantastic copy isn’t just a skill. It’s an art. We’ve been asking around to find the best copywriting tips from expert writers. Find out how they get started with each piece of writing, what they focus on, and how they craft their content to achieve a goal. If you write for a website or …

The quality of your content is so important nowadays. By creating high-quality content you can improve your rankings, attract new people and build a strong relationship with the audience you already have. If you can show authority on a topic, this lends more strength to your high-quality content and lets users know they can trust …

Did you know Spanish is the second-most spoken native language on this planet, after Mandarin Chinese? Over 500 million people natively speak Spanish. What’s more, Spanish is the fourth-most spoken language in the world. For Yoast, millions of Spanish-speaking people use our tools to improve their websites in their markets. We like to help them …

Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that helps your site perform better in search engines like Google. It also gives you the tools to bring your content to the highest standards of SEO and overall readability. Here, we’ll explain how our plugin helps you build the best website you possibly can! What Yoast SEO does …

Indexing is an important part of what a search engine does. Without indexing, all the pages Googlebot crawls don’t have a place to live — and the ranking systems don’t have the input they need to do their work. If Google can’t index your site it can’t appear in the search results. The basics of …

If you have ever used a search engine like Google, you’ll know that there is loads of content out there. On pretty much any topic that you can imagine. This is great for search engines, as they’re able to show relevant results for any term that people type in. It does, however, require some effort …

Launched just a couple of months ago, the SEO workouts in Yoast SEO Premium turn out to be a real asset for many people. The two SEO workouts we have right now, help you enhance your internal linking structure and improve the quality and discoverability of your content. In Yoast SEO 17.3, we’ve drastically improved …

As the world’s second-biggest search engine (after Google), and the world’s second-biggest social network (after Facebook), YouTube can be an incredibly valuable marketing investment for almost every business. The key to getting a consistently high number of views is to create a channel with a compelling offering. But unfortunately, very few businesses succeed in this …

Every month, our resident SEO experts Jono Alderson and Joost de Valk discuss all the latest happenings in the online world. Topics discussed range from Google’s newest updates to relevant developments with the WordPress CMS or tech news that will influence how you do your work. In the September 2021 edition of the SEO news …

Tags are very popular. On Instagram, we add tags to our posts to help people find them. However, using tags in that way on your WordPress site is devastating for your rankings. Even if you think that you’re not using a lot of them, make sure to read this post. In it, I’ll explain how …

Focusing on long-tail keywords is a great SEO tactic. Long-tail keywords are keywords or keyphrases that are more specific – and usually longer – than more commonly used keywords. Long-tail keywords get less search traffic, but will usually have a higher conversion value, as they are more specific. They allow you to gradually get more traffic …

Is it worth your while making your text easy to read? Will it lead to higher rankings and more traffic? In simpler terms: Does readability rank? At Yoast, we’re convinced that writing in plain and understandable language can and will get you more visitors. We’ve even developed a tool to help people write readable text. …

Did you know there are millions and millions of people with trouble reading? Did you know most people would probably read something that doesn’t strain their brain? The readability of content is an important factor for the success of that content. Yoast SEO comes with several tools that will help you improve readability. Plus, in …

Keyword research for YouTube SEO is a very different process than keyword research for Google and Bing. However, too often marketers take the research they’ve done for Google and apply the learnings directly to YouTube. This never quite works, because the things people search for on YouTube differs greatly from the kind of things they …

Diversity is an important aspect of every community. It fuels discussion, change, and growth. It brings new voices and ideas into the mix. Diversity opens the door to new possibilities, and keeps that door open for everyone, not just a privileged few. That’s why we made the Yoast Diversity fund: to support underrepresented groups that …