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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 …

Google is really smart, amazingly smart. The algorithm is very close to reading texts like human-beings. At the same time, parts of Google’s algorithm aren’t smart at all. Computers aren’t that good at understanding ‘what is what’ on a page. If you have a recipe site, you’ll need to tell Google what an ingredient is, …

You see them in search results a lot: product listings with added metadata, like price, availability, reviews, and specifications. However, not every site offering the same product has the same rich results or rich snippets. This could have two reasons. One, Google doesn’t deem the site important enough to show additional metadata. Or two, the …

You might have heard the term parity before in SEO, or more specifically, mobile parity. It all comes down to one thing: you should see your site as being a single thing. You shouldn’t have a ‘mobile site,’ as distinct from a ‘desktop site.’ You should have one site — which may use CSS to …

How does Google work? What does Google actually do? For many of you, this will be fairly old news. But for everyone who is new to the world of SEO: let me explain what Google does and how SEO works. In a way that is easy to follow, because understanding this really helps you create …

In this post, we’ll go over a number of contact page examples, so you’ll be able to review your own contact page and improve it. For a lot of companies, that contact page is the main reason they have a website in the first place. For others, the contact page filters or manages all incoming …

For local businesses, doing well in the local search results is essential. Luckily, the Local SEO add-on for Yoast SEO is a great help for your business. The plugin makes it much easier to get your site to perform better in Google. For instance, it helps you improve your local business’s contact page so customers …

Video is great for explaining a topic in just a couple of minutes. Or, to give people an idea of that product they’re thinking of buying. You can also use video to share your vision or insights with a very large audience. But what do you need to do to make your videos stand out …

We’ve said it way back when, but we’ll repeat it: it keeps amazing us that there are still people using just a robots.txt files to prevent indexing of their site in Google or Bing. As a result, their site shows up in the search engines anyway. Do you know why it keeps amazing us? Because …

Google’s knowledge panel is the block you’ll find on the right side of your screen in the search results. Nowadays, you’ll see it for a lot of queries. It presents the results of Google’s Knowledge Graph, which can be seen as an engine connecting all kinds of data Google finds on the web. If you …

This week marks the 16.0 release of Yoast SEO and we’re quite proud of how far we’ve come. That’s why we thought it would be fun to look back at more than 10 years of work on Yoast SEO. And who better to ask than someone who has been there all along: our founder Joost …

SEO should be for everyone. Everyone -big or small- should have a fair chance in the search engines. That’s why we build software for everyone at Yoast. With WordPress, everybody can build a website and publish their ideas. Add our plugin and you’ll also be able to outrank your competition. And today is a happy …

Many years ago, Joost de Valk launched version 1.0 of a plugin the world would know as the number one WordPress SEO plugin: Yoast SEO. Today, we’re celebrating the sweet sixteen of Yoast SEO with the release of Yoast SEO 16.0. Of course, we’re not letting this go unnoticed! Happy sixteenth, Yoast SEO! While the …

Some time ago, Google caused quite a stir by announcing a new ranking factor for 2021: page experience. User experience has always been an essential part of building the best site out there, but now, it will play an even bigger role in helping you build awesome sites for your customers. All this is powered …