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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 …

“I came for the software and stayed for the community.” In this episode of our series Why we love WordPress, I’ll show you what’s behind the software we love. Software isn’t writing itself (yet), and behind WordPress is a great number of volunteer teams working on the software and everything around it. These people are …

Half of the buttons that are used as the main call-to-action on a web page don’t invite me to click. You could and should test button design but, sometimes, it just starts with common sense. Button UX design has changed a lot over the past decade. A long-standing trend seems to be to blend a …

Today, we’re very proud to announce that Yoast has acquired the Duplicate Post plugin. This plugin, with well over 3 million users, is one of the most popular WordPress plugins right now. The reason for that is clear: it does one task simple and well. Also, its original developer, Enrico Battocchi, will join Yoast as …

Two words you often hear together are mobile and site speed. And that’s not without reason because these two go hand in hand. Mobile-friendliness and site speed are some of the most pressing matters we have to deal with. Measuring page speed has always been something of a dark art. The site speed tools we …

The biggest eye-catcher in Yoast SEO 14.3 is word form support for the Italian language in the Premium analysis. This makes it language number seven to make use of this awesome feature. Find out all about it! Plus, Yoast SEO 14.3 comes with improved French word form support and a number of bug fixes. Another …

Landing pages are a very important part of your website. And if you optimize your landing pages, you can increase both your traffic and your conversion rate. Obviously, you should tailor this page to your preferred audience, but there are a number of things that go for all landing pages. In this post, we’ll go …

Last Friday, May 29th, Yoast celebrated its 10th anniversary, and we invited everyone to join us! And what better way to celebrate than with an awesome, interactive webinar? We had multiple talks, Q&As, live site reviews, all with loads of SEO tips, insights and practical advice. Of course, we understand that not everyone could join …

When users search on your website and find no results, that’s usually a bad experience. But if you track these “zero result searches”, you might find yourself with data that can help you identify new content and service opportunities. It might also tell you a lot about the difference between how you see your website …

Google can read and analyze texts very well. It understands that walk, walks and walking all boil down to the same thing. Also, Google knows that baby is basically the same as babies. How? By using something called keyword stemming. This gives you the freedom to alternate between different word forms while writing your text. …

Woohoo! Yoast’s 10th birthday is coming up on the 28th of May 2020! You might have seen our celebration calendar over the last month, where we’ve taken a trip down memory lane. And we’re so happy that you’re along for the ride. As a thank you, we’d love to give you a gift: for the …

Our linguists are busy bees lately. Over the last couple of releases, we’ve launched word form support for Yoast SEO Premium users writing in Spanish and French. These languages follow the languages that already had word form support: English, German and Dutch. In Yoast SEO 14.2, we’re adding yet another language: Russian! And, once again, …

We all want to increase our sales, lift engagement, and get the best possible result out of our website. That’s why it only seems right to give you a three-step rocket of SEO quick wins to kick-start your website. In this post, I will show you three things you can do right now to improve …

Yoast SEO uses sophisticated language analysis tools to help you optimize your texts. Most checks work for any language, but our Premium analysis relies on word recognition functionality, which we develop custom for every language. It takes a lot of time to get this perfect for every language out there. Starting with French in Yoast …

When you’ve determined your shop’s mission, you should focus on finding the right niche for your business. Merriam Webster defines a niche as “the situation in which a business’s products or services can succeed by being sold to a particular kind or group of people”. If you find your niche, you’ll be able to optimize your …

Writing is hard. Writing for search engines is even harder. What about writing for the search engines and writing for sales simultaneously? Is that even doable? Because, in the end, you want to write copy that ranks in the search engines AND convinces people to buy your stuff, contact you, subscribe to your newsletter or …

The first step in every content SEO strategy should be executing keyword research. In this ultimate guide we’ll teach you how to do that.

At Yoast we love WordPress for multiple reasons. That’s why we decided to make a series of articles about the reasons we love WordPress, starting with an important one: user-friendliness. I’ve tried my share of closed and open-source content management systems. From simple text file based systems 20 years ago to in-house developed closed source …