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This month, Google held their annual I/O conference, an event at which they announce new product releases and other interesting stuff. They introduced us to MUM, their new language model and the next step in understanding online content. But meeting (their) MUM wasn’t all. There was lots of SEO news in May 2021 and our …

Have you ever looked at a piece of content online and thinking: Hmm, I’m not sure I can trust this? Who wrote this? Why should I believe a word of what they are saying? This happens more often than you think, especially if you are looking for content that you use to make decisions that …

When publishing a new video on your website, there are several considerations you need to take into account for video SEO. Not only does the video itself need to be optimized, but so does the page it’s embedded on. In this post, we’ll explain what you can do to work on your on-page video SEO. …

Wondering what a niche is, and how can you find yours? Google defines a niche as: “products, services, or interests that appeal to a small, specialized section of the population”. That’s a bit abstract, but the chances are that you already have a good idea of what your niche is, and you just need to …

Natural language understanding has been a tough nut to crack, but thanks to Google’s continued investment in AI, it has reached a whole new level. At I/O 2021, Google introduced MUM — Multitask United Model. According to Google, this new language model is 1000x powerful than BERT, released in 2019. MUM is coming to Google …

If you have a website for a business, it’s essential to maintain a good contact page so that (potential) customers can contact you or find your store. Not only is it detrimental to UX if your visitors end up struggling to contact you — you could lose out on sales, too. So it’s not good …

Rich search results are everywhere. Years ago, search engines presented search results without much adornment. Today, the search results look very different, especially on mobile. We see extra information beneath the links, plus a couple of big blocks of rich — often visual or action-oriented — content, depending on what you look for. In this …

Making sure search engines can understand your site is one of the top priorities in SEO. One of the most effective ways of getting that understanding is to add Schema.org structured data. This describes the different parts of a page to get what every piece is about. Yoast SEO adds structured data automatically, plus it …

This month we are commemorating 5 years since the Yoast SEO readability check was first released! Since then, we’ve continued making improvements. We sat down with our Linguistics team lead, Manuel Augustin, and researcher-developer, Hanna Worku, to get a deeper view of how the readability check works and how they adapt the tool to add …

Creating content is essential for SEO. However, if you’re a blogger or content creator of some kind, chances are that you feel stuck from time to time. You’ve made the time to write, but nothing comes to mind. A writer’s block. This is where creative writing exercises can help: they give your brain the space …

Writing seems simple enough, but writing a compelling text that keeps the attention is quite hard. Especially online. To keep people on your page, you need to write quality content that’s easy to read. Easier said than done? You’re absolutely right. That’s why we introduced a readability analysis in our Yoast SEO plugin five years …

When it comes to writing, it can be hard to look at your work objectively. Of course, most of us are able to write a few paragraphs or article on a certain topic. But making sure that your text is entertaining and easy-to-read is where it gets more challenging. Using too many difficult words, long …

If you have a business nowadays, your website might just have become your lifeline. There’s no time to waste: Let’s get started with SEO and improve your rankings in Google. Keyword research is an essential first step. Here, you’ll find out what it is and which factors you should take into account. What is keyword …

WordPress wouldn’t be WordPress if it wasn’t for the people. A strong community that’s open to anyone that wants to do something with this open-source platform. But also a community that’s made up of a lot of volunteers, people investing a lot of their time and other resources to make WordPress even better. To make …

If you take your SEO and users seriously, you’ll be working on a kick-ass site structure. But, setting up a decent site structure can be challenging. Maintaining a decent site structure when your site is growing, is even harder. With all these new pages on your site, it’s easy to overlook something or make a …

Going to the gym regularly might get you fit, but dropping that routine will get out out of shape in no time. The same goes for your website — without a good fitness routine and proper maintenance, it might become a mess. Yoast SEO helps your site with its technical SEO fitness and gives you …

One of the focal points of Yoast SEO is getting out of your way. If we look at the technical aspects of SEO, Yoast SEO gets stuff done. Plus, most of it happens in the background, without you noticing it. But whenever you need to dive deeper and customize your setup for specific use cases, …

In April 2021, Google changed how they assess content which ‘reviews’ products and services. The “Product reviews update” made it harder for pages that do little more than “summarize a bunch of products” to rank highly. But, unlike many other Google updates, this one came with a cheat sheet that describes what site editors need …

One of the big questions with video SEO is whether you’re better off hosting all your videos on YouTube or whether you should host them on a different platform. Hosting your videos on YouTube means driving traffic to your content on youtube.com. Hosting your videos on another platform allows you to make your website the …

A bit of a scandal involving hospitals and the noindex tag, a postponed deadline for your Core Web Vitals and a whole new editing experience in WordPress. Our SEO experts Joost de Valk and Jono Alderson discussed the latest SEO news in April 2021 in our monthly webinar. If you’ve missed it, or simply want …

Have you been in the SEO industry for a couple of years? Then you’ve probably noticed that keyword density (or keyphrase density) has a bad reputation. So why do we still include it in Yoast SEO’s content analysis? When used correctly, the keyword density metric can be a great way to help writers keep their …

The web, and our online habits with it, are never at a standstill. One result of our fast-paced online behavior is that we scroll through our social media channels like nobody’s business. Or without having our full attention on it. Most of the time, your social image is the first (or only) thing that users …

If you’re not already working on it, now is definitely the time to start with SEO. You need to rank high if you want customers to find you online. So, what should you do? How do you get started with SEO? Or, how do you start with SEO on a brand new site? In this …

Can you tell me which video hosting platform is best for SEO? This is the question I get asked most frequently on the topic of video SEO, and it’s worth stating up-front that the categorical answer, like everything else in SEO, is “it depends.” Let’s discuss what you need to consider when choosing the video …

‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen’. The first line of George Orwells’s book titled 1984. Kind of pulls you in right? That’s the idea of storytelling anyway. Creating content that people won’t want to put down until they’ve read the very last letter. Nowadays, storytelling isn’t just …

“If only I could simply wave my wand and have a super fast website!” This has probably crossed your mind as well, right? Optimizing site speed and user experience is a lot of work and gets technical — and complicated — really fast. Most site owners or managers quickly need to talk to their developers …

Many of you log into your site every day, or, at the very least, once a week. But, if you’re managing a small business or team, you can’t always spend a lot of time on your SEO. You probably have tons of other things to do! Here, we discuss a few small yet impactful things …

If your website is all about news, there’s a lot you can do to optimize it for search engines (and your users in the process). In this post, we’ll address some things you need to keep in mind, specifically when optimizing your news website. In other words, let’s talk about SEO for news sites. Getting …

Today, we’d like to welcome another release: Yoast SEO 16.1. In this release, you’ll find a list of fixes and enhancements. That’s not all, as we’re also releasing News SEO 12.7. News SEO now comes with an improved user experience and a new spot in the WordPress sidebar. Read on! Enhancements Yoast SEO 16.1 comes …

There was quite a bit of discussion about a study that said that nearly 65% of Google searches in 2020 did not result in a click. This is one of the topics that our resident SEO experts Joost de Valk and Jono Alderson talked about in this month’s webinar. Want to know what they had …