SEO + Follow

A “404 error” page is an essential part of any website. It informs your users the page they requested had been moved or changed. Do you need to pay attention to your 404 page and give it some love? Absolutely yes! In this post, we’ll go through the dos and don’ts of a 404 page …

As of today, Thijs de Valk is no longer the CEO of Yoast. He decided to step down and pursue other dreams. Newfold Digital and Yoast will miss him and want to thank him for his time at Yoast and for all the wonderful things he has done. Thijs’ career at Yoast Thijs was one …

If you optimize your articles for similar terms, your rankings might suffer from keyword cannibalization: you’ll be ‘devouring’ your own chances to rank in Google! Especially when your site is growing, chances are your content will start competing with itself. Here, I’ll explain why keyword cannibalism can be detrimental to SEO, how you can recognize …

Today, we’re making Yoast SEO 20.3 available to the world. This release comes with a long list of enhancements, bug fixes, and other improvements designed to help you improve your SEO experience. Improved highlighting in analyses One of the most significant updates in this release is an improved highlighting feature. Yoast SEO helps you quickly …

HTTP status codes, like 404, 301, and 500, might not mean much to a regular visitor, but they are incredibly important for SEO. Not only that, search engine spiders, like Googlebot, use these to determine the health of a site. These status codes offer a way of seeing what happens between the browser and the server. …

Once upon a time, there was a young girl named Wende. She was incredibly intelligent, yet she had difficulty learning things by heart. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t memorize the solar system’s planets. One day, she asked her teacher what she should do. In response, he told her a story about the …

We take security seriously at Yoast and continually look for potential threats and vulnerabilities that could affect our products and customers. That’s why we were alarmed when security firm WordFence found XSS vulnerabilities in another SEO plugin. After carefully reviewing the issues, we found a similar but less severe vulnerability in Yoast SEO, which we …

At Yoast, we believe that the best SEO strategy is a holistic approach. With a holistic approach, SEO has a lot of “teammates” that have to work together. Simply optimizing your page titles isn’t enough. You also need to work on aspects like site speed, great content, and user experience (UX). In this post, we’ll …

In Yoast SEO 20.2, we’ve improved our innovative indexables technology. We’ve developed a faster and more reliable way of indexing your site’s data. In turn, we make better use of this data to improve your site’s SEO. Plus, this technology helps us do our best to make the web greener and lays the groundwork for …

Google Search Console is an essential tool for website owners. This tool shows you how your site appears in Google’s search results. It also shows you what to improve to maximize your listings in the results. One of the many cool features of Search Console is the structured data analyses found in the Enhancement reports. …

Nowadays, short-form content is all the rage. Just look at TikTok’s astounding popularity amongst younger generations. It has lead to the development of new and compelling video formats that are mostly found in feeds with a passive discovery mechanism. Or as the younger generations (ominously) call it: the algorithm. In this post, we’ll take a …

New AI content tools are popping up left and right. These tools can help you write a social post, or a whole blog post, answer any question, or even create a brand-new image! This is great and helpful when you only have a little time or need more inspiration. But the big question is, are …

As someone working on SEO, you must understand the importance of site speed. You must realize that fast sites equal happy users and happy search engines. PageSpeed Insights is an invaluable tool from Google that can help you optimize your website. It enables you to improve your rankings by giving you everything you need to …

On the 11th of May, people from all over the world will come together for another edition of YoastCon. An SEO conference like no other! It will be fun, it will be knowledge-packed and it will be accessible to everyone. So if you have anything to do with online marketing or SEO, you should not …

Your social media endeavors need to be a part of your SEO strategy. Especially now that the younger generations (Gen Z) are using platforms like TikTok and Instagram instead of Google. This means your site’s popularity on social media ties into your SEO more than ever! But which social media should you focus on? With …

After successfully introducing a new settings interface in Yoast SEO 20.0, we have more exciting news! We have built an integration with Mastodon, the decentralized and open-source social network. Yoast SEO Premium users can now verify the link in their Mastodon profile with this integration. We’re also adding your profile to the structured data we …

We’ve said this time and time again: a fast website is necessary for SEO. In a sea of similarly good (or not-so-good) results, Google will favor fast pages that can deliver a good user experience to searchers. If your goal is to attain higher rankings and drive organic traffic from Google, you need to speed …

The meta description summarizes a page’s content and presents that to users in the search results. It’s one of the first things people will likely see when searching for something, so optimizing it is crucial for SEO. It’s your chance to persuade users to click on your result! This post will show you the characteristics …

We are thrilled to announce the release of Yoast SEO 20.0. This release features a brand-new, state-of-the-art settings interface that takes your SEO work to the next level. We took great care to design an interface that’s logical and easy while simultaneously fully featured. This user interface brings Yoast SEO ahead of the curve and …

So you want to write more inclusively? Great! That means more people will feel welcome when they read your content, and you won’t accidentally exclude them. But if that’s not enough reason, just think how many more people will engage with your content if you involve them and make your content relatable to them! So, …

There are two types of search: the regular organic search results and the local ones. Whenever you search for something that might have a local intent, Google will tailor its results around that query. That part is called local search, and when you try to rank your business in the local search results, you are …

Google Search Console is the best data source for tracking the traffic you are getting to video content on your website from Google search, as it provides data directly from Google about the queries actually driving traffic, and can be segmented by video search specifically. In this post, we’ll provide a quick summary of how …

Last year, we launched the inclusive language analysis to help you open up your content to a broader audience. It’s been well-received, with thousands of people already using it to help improve their content. The analysis is free for everyone, so try it if you haven’t. In Yoast SEO 19.14, we’re improving the analysis. Why …

We often get questions from people asking about the influence of domain names on SEO. Is there any relation at all? Does it help to include keywords like product names in your domain name? Is the influence of domain names different per location? And what’s the use of using more than one domain name for a site? …

For most sites, SEO in 2023 will probably be similar to the past couple of years: you still need to improve your work but set the bar higher and higher. Competition is getting fiercer, and Google — and your potential customers — are getting better at recognizing true quality. Also, you should keep an eye …

Page speed is one of the factors which determines whether you get a good ranking in Google. Page speed is a ranking factor, and its importance keeps growing. In this post, we’ll discuss how to check your page speed and which tools can help you do just that. Read on! Why is page speed important for …

Link building is an essential aspect of SEO. It helps search engines to find and rank your pages. You can write the perfect post, but if search engines can’t follow at least one link to it, it will most likely wait forever in vain for visitors to admire its outstanding content. For Google to find …

Content freshness is a ranking factor in Google’s algorithm and has been that way for years. Google tends to favor unique, recent, and timely content on the search results page. However, there’s a repercussion stemming from this – many websites would relabel their old content as new to try to game the algorithm. This is …

Last week, we uncovered a problem in Gutenberg’s upcoming release that breaks the block editor’s link functionality when used in conjunction with Yoast SEO. The result is that users cannot create links using the editor. This release of the block editor will happen this week, so we’re proactively updating Yoast SEO to be sure to …

Site structure is a vital aspect of your SEO strategy. Why? Because the structure of your website shows Google which pages of your site are most important. This means you can influence which content will rank highest in the search engines with your site’s structure. And good news: You can start improving your site structure …