SEO + Follow

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 …

HTTPS secures the connection to the website you are visiting. I’m sure you have seen this in action; look at the address bar in the browser and find the lock icon on the left-hand side. Is the lock closed? Then the connection is secure. Is it open, or is there another type of icon or …

Thanks to contributors from all over the world, the improvements to WordPress are never at a standstill. This continuous work on WordPress is reflected in the number of new features that can be found in any new release. The latest release of WordPress 5.7 “Esperanza” is no exception. It comes with a few great enhancements, …

If you want to measure your content SEO strategy’s success, you first need to establish your goals. What’s the purpose of your strategy? Do you want higher rankings? More traffic? To evaluate your content SEO strategy, you should identify what success means to you! Once you’ve established your goals, you can measure the success of …

Online shops rarely sell just a few products. If your shop has a few hundred or a thousand articles, it might help if you offer your customers a filtering option. You must do whatever you can to help your customer get to the desired product as soon as possible. Ecommerce filters can help you solve …

When you think of a blog post, you’re probably picturing a page with lots of written text on it. Which isn’t wrong. In the early days of blogging, most blog posts were just that. Lots of written text. Without too much design to it or images to break the text up. Nowadays, most of us …

Today we released a patch release of Yoast SEO, 15.9.1, to prepare for some of the changes in WordPress core. There were two changes in WordPress itself that we needed to account for, one to do with updates and one to do with meta robots output. We also had to fix an issue with how …

The robots.txt file is a file you can use to tell search engines where they can and cannot go on your site. Learn how to use it to your advantage!

Every month, we organize a free webinar to discuss what’s new in the world of SEO and WordPress. During these webinars, our SEO experts Joost de Valk and Jono Alderson guide you through the latest news and tell you what you need to know for your site. This time there was lots to discuss, from …

A great blog or an entertaining vlog helps you attract people to your site. Both also allow you to engage with your audience, increase brand awareness and show your expertise. That’s because you can use blogs and vlogs to dive into a certain topic related to your site or business. So which one is better? …

Today sees the release of Yoast SEO 15.9 and Video SEO 13.7. In Yoast SEO 15.9, we focussed on performance improvements and general enhancements. In addition, we made Video SEO available in Elementor. Find out more! Performance improvements Improving the performance of our plugins is always on our radar. Sometimes, we do big changes that …

We love to watch videos, don’t we? Online video has been booming for years and there is no end in sight. Every second, hundreds of hours of video are uploaded to YouTube alone. Not to mention all the short-form video content that appeared in recent years on apps like Instagram and TikTok. If you produce …

The automation tool Zapier works with Zaps that you can create from scratch. These Zaps can link different apps and services to each other to create a smarter workflow and save you lots of time. But that still doesn’t give you a clear answer to this question: What is Zapier exactly? In this post, we’ll …

With the meta robots tag you can control what search engine spiders do on your site. Learn what it does right here!

Sites get bigger. We keep on adding content but tend to forget to clean up. As the web grows older, more and more sites are growing older and bigger as well. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Google loves authority, so being around for a long time pays off. However, your website does need to …

Yoast SEO 15.8 is out and it comes with a cool new gift: a breadcrumbs block for the WordPress editor. This makes it easy to just drop your breadcrumb in a page, without having to touch any code. Now available for everyone! We also have a cool new update for our Video SEO add-on that …

Out of the box, WordPress is a great system for blogging and managing websites. But to truly unlock its power, you need to add plugins to tailor it to your precise needs. Adding some of our top plugin recommendations can make really turbo-charge your site! People frequently ask us for recommendations on which WordPress plugins …

Rich results, structured data, Schema.org. You might have bumped into these terms online, but what do they mean? And what should you do with them?