SEO + Follow

Static websites? Isn’t that old-school? In the early days of the web, all websites were static. Today, turning your dynamic WordPress site into a high-performing static one might be a viable option for you. Visitors get a super-fast browsing experience, while content managers continue to use the WordPress authoring experience and plugin ecosystem. Hackers have …

Showing related posts below your post are a great way to keep visitors on your website. That’s why lots of site owners already use related posts to reduce the number of visitors that leave their site after reading an article. You could say that a related posts section is the glue that binds posts together. But …

Get ready for a brand new version of Yoast SEO! The 14.8 release is so full of remarkable free and premium features we’re having a hard time mentioning them all in this short introduction. So, to make everyone’s life easier, let’s start this post with a list of new features. In Yoast SEO 14.8, you’ll …

Today, it seems that everyone is talking about Schema as being the next hot thing. It has a rich history, and it took a long while for it to gain momentum. Talk of a machine-readable web started when the internet was still in its infancy. It was Sir Tim Berners-Lee — the computer scientist best …

I’m happy to welcome two new members to team Yoast, who will spend their time making WordPress core better. Justin Ahinon and Ari Stathopoulos are both joining our ranks. This means they’ll have even more time than they already did to spend on making WordPress better for everyone. All of this in line with our …

Mobile SEO helps you to offer your visitors a perfect experience on your site. Find out how you can improve performance, findability, and UX!

It’s here! The official release of WordPress 5.5, a major update stuffed with new features and improvements. Not only does this release come with improvements to the block editor, it also allows you to edit inline images, gives you an improved content preview and much (much!) more. To give you an idea of what this …

Optimizing your site structure should be an important aspect of your SEO strategy. A good site structure is of crucial importance for your SEO, as it makes it easier for both your users and Google to navigate your site. But how do you improve a site’s structure? Where do you start and how do you …

Successful positioning adds value to your store and gives you a head start on the competition. Positioning is the art of standing out, distinguishing your business from others in the mind of your audience. You can stand out with high product quality, great service, low prices, or dedicated care for the environment. But it’s important to communicate this position to your target group, …

Your post is optimized, all your bullets in Yoast SEO are green and still, the post you want to rank with does not rank for that keyword. And yet, another page on your website does show up in the results. But that’s not the one you wanted to rank highest with. Why is Google ranking …

Our users often cite the redirect manager as their favorite tool in Yoast SEO Premium, but the internal linking tool is also high on the list. For months, we worked hard to improve the internal linking tool making it smarter and faster. I sat down with our developers Natalia Shitova and Hans-Christiaan Braun, two of …

Say hi to Yoast SEO 14.7, chock-full of enhancements to help you with your site’s SEO. Have you heard about the addition of XML sitemaps in WordPress 5.5? The Yoast SEO plugin is completely prepared for this. We also have some great news for users of the Web Stories plugin. But most importantly, we’re releasing …

A website gives you the opportunity to target the entire (online) world. Local SEO, on the contrary, is focused on ranking higher in your local area. Especially now, in the COVID-19 crisis, when people are trying to reach you more often online than offline, it’s worth investing in it. You’ll have to make sure your local …

August 1 is World Wide Web Day. On this date, back in 1989, the world wide web was born at the CERN lab in Switzerland. Something that started as a way to share knowledge between scientists, has grown out to something none of us can imagine life without. And because the web is such an …

In our recent post about local landing pages, we explained what they are and how you can set them up. These pages can be seen as a part of local SEO, which is focused on increasing your visibility on a local level. Today I want to discuss another factor that can help you with local …

Search engines are getting better and better at understanding language. Does that mean they can also understand questions? And what does that mean for the way you should write and optimize your content for questions? We’ll find out in this post! First, we’ll explore how Google understands and uses questions. Then, we’ll go into why …

More than half of all internet traffic comes from mobile devices (fact). So if you are ignoring your mobile site, you might be missing out on on a big part of your audience. In this post, I’d liked to go over a couple of ways you can check your own mobile sites. After this post, you’ll be …

We have a new release for you: Yoast SEO 14.6. This release has some pretty cool enhancements, plus new additions for Yoast SEO Premium users. We’re continuing our run of languages that get word form support with two new ones: Indonesian and Portuguese. Find what’s new in Yoast SEO 14.6! Word form recognition in Yoast …

As simple as they sound, landing pages might be a confusing topic for site owners. What qualifies as a landing page and what doesn’t? Is every page you land on a landing page? What about Landing Pages in Google analytics? And, can you optimize them for conversion and search engines? Let’s dive in! What is …

As you might know, Google is rolling out mobile-first indexing as we speak. In September 2020, all websites will be ported over to the mobile-first index. But what does that mean for your ranking? Should you be worried? Should you do anything? Google has been pretty vocal on mobile-first indexing. This post serves as a …

Google is rapidly expanding the capabilities of Search Console — its must-have tool for site owners/managers. We’ve seen a lot of cool structured data reports appear. In this post, we’re examining an enhancement report dedicated to site speed. It’s important to have a fast site with a good user experience and Google’s new tool helps …

Every few weeks we have an SEO News video in which Jono Alderson and I, along with other experts, share the latest SEO news with our academy subscribers. Last week, we decided to try this in the form of a webinar where viewers were able to ask us questions right away. Because this was such …

When we talk about site structure on WordPress we often focus on blogs post: “Use taxonomies and link to related posts!” But you probably have hierarchical post types on your site too. An example of a hierarchical post type is the Page post type; a page can have parent, child, and sibling pages. Inherently, these …

Yoast SEO 14.5 is out today! In this release, we fixed a number of bugs, disabled the XML sitemaps that will arrive in WordPress 5.5 and added two new block editor blocks for our Premium users. These blocks help you with internal linking for hierarchical pages. Let’s find out more! Meet the new internal linking …

Now more than ever, you have to make sure that your local audience is able to find you online. One way to make this happen is by creating local landing pages, which are designed to help you rank higher in local areas. So, if you want to increase your visibility on a local level or …

Search engines are trying to understand language: they want to understand what users are searching for, and they want to be able to provide them with the best results. Before I started working at Yoast, I studied linguistics: the scientific study of language. During my years at Yoast, I’ve noticed that linguistics and SEO have …

Some of the pages of your site serve a purpose, but that purpose isn’t ranking in search engines or even getting traffic to your site. These pages need to be there, as glue for other pages or simply because regulations require them to be accessible on your website. If you regularly read our blog, you’ll know …

Links are an important part of SEO. Without links, Google (or other search engines) may not discover your pages, or might not think that they’re important. Sometimes, though, you might want Google not to follow a link. Or you might want to tell them a particular is sponsored, or added to your page by a …

Sometimes, you have releases that start out small and end up with a substantial improvement. Yoast SEO 14.4 is one such release. Initially plannend as a bug fix release, this turned into something that markedly improves the publishing workflow in WordPress. Plus, you can now mark your external links as nofollow or sponsored. You see, …

Some posts and pages should not show up in search results. To make sure they don’t show up, you should tell search engines to exclude them. You do this with a meta robots noindex tag. Setting a page to noindex makes sure search engines never show it in their results. Here, we’ll explain how easy it …