Yoast

Welcoming two new WordPress Core contributors

Thu, 13 Aug 2020 12:06:27 GMT

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 core values of sharing and collaboration and making the web better.

A little while ago we made it known in the WordPress community that we were looking for a couple of new WordPress core contributors to join our team. We had a number of great applications, but Ari and Justin really stood out. Let me introduce them to you:

Meet Ari Stathopoulos

Ari got a strong recommendation from several people in the core community. He has a long history in the WordPress world, is active in the Themes team and well, he checked all the boxes. When I asked Ari why he was excited to join our team here at Yoast, this was his answer:

I’ve been a fan of Team Yoast for years… It is a team striving to improve things for everyone building an online presence, a team committed to open-source with strong principles.
Joining team Yoast will allow me to work alongside people with the same passions and drive as I, towards a common goal: Making life easier and better for everyone online. I’ve always thought of Yoast as a company with a holistic approach to SEO, and an understanding that accessibility and sustainability on the web are important, a true pioneer. Having the opportunity to work with a team like that is exciting!

You can find Ari on the WordPress Slack, or learn more about him on his WordPress profile.

Meet Justin Ahinon

Justin is a prolific member of the documentation team. If you ever read make.wordpress.org, the site to follow all core development, you’ll have seen some of his posts. Recently he coordinated the documentation for the WordPress 5.5 release, a hugely important task that we’re very happy to support him doing. I asked him the same question as Ari, and his answer was:

I knew that Yoast was a company that was committed to giving back to the WordPress project and advancing the community. This information alone put Yoast in the places where I wanted to work, because it’s also something that’s close to my heart. Plus, after reading the description of the position I applied for, I immediately felt like it was a role I would be comfortable in.
I just had to take this opportunity to join this wonderful team.

You can find Justin on the WordPress Slack, here’s his WordPress profile.

We look forward to improve WordPress further with these two gentlemen joining us. But, even with these brand new colleagues, we have not yet fully completed our hiring goals. So… If you or someone you know would be a good fit, see this WordPress core developer opening!

The post Welcoming two new WordPress Core contributors appeared first on Yoast.

Mobile SEO: The ultimate guide

Wed, 12 Aug 2020 12:05:00 GMT

We are addicted to our smartphones. For many people, the smartphone is the first thing they check when they get out of bed in the morning and the last thing they look at before they go to sleep. People use them for everything – it’s become huge! Mobile phones have dramatically changed our lives, the way we use the web and, consequently, it has changed SEO. Mobile SEO helps you to reach customers and satisfy their needs while enjoying the experience. This guide to mobile SEO tells you everything you need to know to deliver the perfect mobile experience.

What is mobile SEO?
Why is mobile SEO so important?
Mobile SEO vs. desktop SEO
Google’s mobile-first index is live
How to improve mobile SEO
- Mobile SEO tools
Mobile SEO is designing for performance
Focus on user experience
Optimize for local
Finetune your mobile content
Add Schema structured data to a mobile site
A mobile SEO guide full of tips

What is mobile SEO?

Mobile SEO is all about offering an exceptional experience to visitors of your mobile site. It’s about making your mobile site load quickly and without issues, and presenting stellar content that matches the users search intent. In today’s mobile-first world, it’s incredibly important to have flawless mobile site.

Why is mobile SEO so important?

Mobile SEO is crucial because it helps you reach your your customers in the right place at the right time and and give them the very best experience. Mobile traffic has now eclipsed desktop traffic. Billions of people have discovered the enormous advantages of the smartphone. Our whole lives are in these devices – it’s almost scary to see how attached we’ve become to our smartphones. Many people call it an extension of themselves and something they can’t live without. To reach these people you need a mobile SEO strategy.

Mobile does not necessarily mean on-the-go. Studies have found that people often grab the nearest device to look something up quickly and more often than not, that’s their smartphone. They use it to inform themselves about products before making the decision to buy something, any time, any place. According to research by Google, smartphone users have a higher buyer intent than desktop users. They’re focused and ready to buy. It’s your job to be there when they are looking for your products or services.

It is easy to see mobile SEO in terms of solving technical problems or content issues, but it is also very much a user experience and branding thing. Getting a bad experience from a brand on a mobile phone might scare away a potential customer forever. Offering a great experience increases the chance of consumers recommending your brand.

According to Google research, negative mobile experiences can really hurt your brand

Mobile SEO vs. desktop SEO

There’s quite a difference between desktop SEO and mobile SEO, but the goals are often comparable. You want to reach your audience and convert them into paying customers. In some ways, desktop SEO tactics also work for mobile SEO, but in a slightly different form. Three major themes still apply: focus on performance, user experience and content. In desktop SEO, you’ll often focus more on the general public, while mobile SEO can also have more of a local focus.

What is different, though, is the results you get on mobile versus desktop. For the same search query, different results may pop up depending on what device you are using. Plus, there are other factors that influence the mobile search results, like the location you’re at. This means that getting a good ranking for your product or content on desktop doesn’t guarantee the same result on mobile. When evaluating your performance on mobile, alway keep an eye on the mobile search results.

In addition, it is always a good idea to regularly check what Google is doing on mobile, in general, but especially in your niche. Google is continuing its push for so-called rich results — often powered by structured data — and these are more prominent on mobile. Think about it: searching for flights, events, jobs, movies, music, products and even simple facts will trigger a Google-owned rich result. We’re going to see a lot more of this going forward.

Google’s mobile-first index is live

The importance of mobile SEO is made even clearer by Google’s 2016 announcement of the mobile-first index. In July 2019, Google switched to the mobile-first index and by March 2021 all sites should be indexed mobile-first. What does this mean? For the first time, Google will determine rankings based on the quality of the mobile version of the site instead of the desktop version.

A smartphone version of Googlebot will crawl your mobile site and determine if its performance, content and user experience are up to scratch. If so, you might get a better ranking. If it is lacking, other sites might rank higher and you could lose out. Even if you’re not focusing on mobile you will still be judged by your mobile site, so now’s the time to take action.

What’s more, in January 2018, Google announced that page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches from July of that same year:

“The “Speed Update” applies the same standard to all pages, regardless of the technology used to build the page. The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal, so a slow page may still rank highly if it has great, relevant content.”

Check Search Console to see what Google used to crawl your pages

Things have changed

Right now, Google uses mobile-first indexing when evaluating sites. To get Google to discover and understand it properly you must keep your mobile site crawlable by taking down all possible barriers such as poorly loading scripts and not blocking stuff in your robots.txt. It also has to load lightning fast if you want to be indexed well.

Google’s Gary Illyes wrote a blog post detailing some of the things you should take care of for the mobile-first index. These include offering the same awesome content on both the mobile and desktop site, investing in structured data, offering the correct meta data, checking your hreflang set up and making sure that your servers can handle the increased crawl rate. In July 2020, added another post with even more possible improvements like making sure that you serve images and video in the proper format.

You can no longer present less information on your mobile site than on your desktop site. Your content has to be identical on both, because you will only rank based on the information on your mobile page. Don’t hide stuff! Michiel wrote a post about the so-called mobile parity. Or, like former Googler Maile Ohye told us in an interview:

“To “optimize” for the mobile-first index, make sure that what you serve to mobile users is the version of the content you’d want Google to index, not a pared down version, or a version that gets updated later than desktop, or a version that redirects to the mobile homepage.”
Maile Ohye

Don’t forget to tell Google your site is mobile-friendly. You can add a viewport declaration – if you’re using responsive design – or a Vary header when using dynamic serving. More on this later – or in Google’s developer documentation.

A new Google ranking factor: Page Experience

In May 2020, Google announced a ranking factor called Page Experience. While Google has been advocating site speed for years, the page experience update adds something new: user experience. For the first time, Google takes into account how users experience a site. Does the site load quickly? Are there images or slow-loading ads blocking the rendering of a mobile site harming the user experience? The new Core Web Vitals metrics help you make sense of the perceived page experience and prioritize improvements. Somewhere in 2021, the new page experience algorithm will see the daylight.

How to improve mobile SEO

Mobile SEO is – just like regular SEO – all about making sure your site is crawlable and findable. Also, you need stellar performance, great content and a flawless UX. To get it right, you need to know how your site is currently performing and what your visitors are doing right now. For example, will people use the same keywords on mobile to find you? People often change how they search while using a mobile device. And what do you want people to do? Offering to navigate to the nearest Whole Foods is less than ideal when you’re on a desktop machine. It makes total sense on your smartphone, though.

Mobile SEO tools

You need to become best friends with Google Search Console. Its search tools are legendary and a big help if you want to find out how your site is doing in the search results. For instance, by using the Search Analytics feature, you can see how mobile and desktop users use words to find what they need. Are you targeting the right words? Should you focus on something else?

Googlebot needs to be able to crawl your JavaScript, CSS and image files to index it properly. There is a handy tool for this inside Search Console: URL Inspection. This tool lets you see exactly how Googlebot sees and renders your content. When the screen doesn’t align and the tool lists errors, you’ve got work to do.

Search Console lets you check how Google sees your mobile site

Mobile Usability tool

Another Google Search Console feature that makes your life easier is the Mobile Usability tool. This tool checks your site and presents an overview of posts and pages that don’t follow Google’s mobile-friendly rules. This is an excellent way to start improving your mobile SEO.

Other tools

Some other great tools to up your mobile SEO game are Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test, Rich Results Test, Lighthouse, Analytics, SEMrush, Ahrefs, Ryte, ScreamingFrog, and SimilarWeb.

Mobile SEO is designing for performance

The number one thing you should be focusing on when you’re trying to improve mobile SEO is performance. Performance almost entirely boils down to site speed. It’s a no-brainer: the faster your site is, the happier your users will be. It’s well known that a site has to load within a couple of seconds or your visitors will give up and go elsewhere. If you combine this with the fact that sites are only getting bigger, it’s clear you have your work cut out.

Better get to work on that page load time

Optimizing performance, however, is a continuous process. Your site will never be fast enough because there’s always more you can improve – and that’s ok. By keeping a close watch on how your mobile site is performing, you can immediately jump onto every opportunity to improve it. Google loves fast sites, and so do your customers.

Responsive design vs. dynamic serving vs. separate domain

While developing your mobile site, you’ll have three options: responsive design, dynamic serving, or a separate site on a subdomain. Google prefers responsive design because you only have one site that adapts to the device it’s used on. There’s only one code base, so maintenance is easy. According to Google, using responsive design will make your site eligible for addition in the new mobile-first index. Always let Google know that your site is mobile-friendly by adding the meta name=“viewport” declaration in the head of your documents.

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">

Dynamic serving takes a different approach. It uses server-side technology to serve a different version of your site to mobile users, depending on the way they access your site. The URL stays the same, but the files sent are completely different. You need to add the Vary header to get Google to crawl your site. This way, Google immediately knows that it will receive mobile-optimized files from somewhere else. A Vary header appears like this when a browser makes a request:

Vary: User-Agent

The third option is a separate mobile site on a different URL – usually an m. domain – and with different content. Google supports this method, but only if you make the correct connections between your regular desktop domain and the mobile domain. Use rel="alternate" and rel="canonical" to tell Google how these pages are connected. More on these different types and how Google uses them on this Developers page. Or you can read our rel=”canonical” ultimate guide.

Improve site speed of your mobile site

One of the most importants aspects of mobile SEO is improving site speed. PageSpeed Insights shows you exactly how fast your site loads on both mobile and desktop. It also suggests performance improving enhancements. Use this alongside the Developer Tools in browsers and the Core Web Vitals Report in Search Console to see how your site is rendering its contents.

Among other things, PageSpeed Insights looks at the three current Core Web Vitals metrics:

CLP (largest contentful paint): The largest contentful paint happens when the largest element of a requested page appears on the screen. A good grade gives users the feeling that the site loads fast. A slow site can lead to frustration.
FID (first input delay): The first input delay is the time between the first interaction of a user with an element on the requested page and the reaction of the browser to that input. How quickly your page reacts to input is of utmost importance for it to appear fast and responsive.
CLS (cumulative layout shift): The cumulative layout shift measures the total time of movement on screen that happens during loading. This gives you an idea if stuff is jumping around which could make your site appear jerky.

Type in your URL and Insights will give you two scores: one for mobile and one for desktop. These will be different. If your score is red, you have much work to do. Orange means an average performance and green is good. It’ll give you suggestions on enhancing the performance of your site. Follow these suggestions, and you’ll be on the right track.

I hear you thinking:

“Nobody has a score of 0/100, right?”

Well, think again. A combination of factors can do your mobile site a lot of harm. Find a bad hosting provider, install WordPress on a crappy shared hosting platform, activate thirty plugins and upload a hundred non-optimized images to your blog and you are going to score badly. Even huge sites with big budgets score badly. But these things can be fixed. Run PageSpeed Insights and other speed analyses tools and follow their advice.

What can you do to improve your site speed?

Optimize images and use fewer images
Invest in quality hosting
Update PHP version to PHP7
Keep your redirects in check
Fix render-blocking content above the fold
Prioritize visible content
Optimize and mini fy CSS, HTML and JavaScript
Cache your assets
Use a CDN
Make the transition to HTTP/2
Upgrade to HTTPS
Load fewer assets like JavaScript libraries
Load fewer ad servers
Improve server response time

To help you, we’ve listed five things you can do to boost your Core Web Vitals. When improving your page speed, you should always ask yourself if you need all these assets, libraries, images, plugins, theme features and so on. The famous saying “less is more” is still as valuable as ever.

Think about implementing AMP

The Google-led open source project AMP, or Accelerated Mobile Pages, has one goal: loading your pages as fast as possible. It’s been around for some time now. In the beginning, AMP was used on static posts, like blogs or news articles, that didn’t need interaction from the user. For e-commerce purposes and other dynamic types of pages, AMP fell short – until a year or so, that is. Today, AMP is capable of powering canonical sites, with more to come. Look into what AMP could do for your site and how you might implement it. Not every site needs it, but the ones that do could gain a lot from it.

Progressive Web Apps (PWA)

PWAs offers another way of targeting mobile users. A progressive web app (PWA) is an all-in-one solution that works on all devices, for all users. It’s the perfect crossover between the app world and the web world. The web app works like an app, without the need to publish it in an app store. PWAs combine the load speeds of mobile sites with the best functionality of a native app. When done correctly, a good PWA might fool users into thinking they are using a native app. Google has a must-read blog post if you want to know how to create indexable PWAs.

Thanks to technologies like service workers, the browser can do a lot more in the background, while keeping the front end updated in real-time. This makes it a good option if you need an app, but can’t justify the cost. There will be a lot happening with progressive web apps in the next couple of years. Every major browser — both mobile and desktop — now supports service workers, even Apple’s Safari on MacOS and iOS. There are, however, still some kinks to be ironed out before Apple’s implementation is solid.

Focus on user experience

Besides being easily found and lightning fast, your mobile site should offer an enjoyable user experience — especially now Google will factor it into their algorithm. Find out which common tasks your customers have on your site. What is their search intent? Try to remove any obstacles and make sure users can achieve their goals quickly. There’s a lot you need to consider when optimizing user experience. Here are a couple of things you need to think about:

First and foremost: don’t forget your customer!
Make your site mobile site useful and enjoyable
Fix your font size: your typography needs to be top notch.
Keep enough room between the clickable elements.
Make your sub-menu clickable, so users don’t automatically go back to home instead of the submenu.
Put your phone number on the homepage and make it clickable. This way, people can call you if they want to do business.
Don’t make users pinch and zoom to see – and use – your interface.
Make your buttons large enough for fingers.
Fix your forms: bad forms are unusable on mobile.
Cut the clutter.
Test, adjust and test again!

Optimize for local

While we use our smartphones a lot in our homes, these devices become even more useful when we’re out and about. Google found that 76% of people who searched for something nearby visited a related business within a day. 28% of those visits led to a sale.

To cope with that local demand, or so-called near me searches, you need to work on your local SEO. Local search results can look very different from regular desktop searches, so you have to know what to target and how to target it. Here are some ways you can improve your local SEO for mobile:

Write locally oriented content: It’s one of the best things you can do to improve local rankings.
Build local links: Ask, and ye shall receive.
Google My Business: Sign up and fill in your details. Here, you can keep your NAP data up to date, respond to reviews and upload photos, among other things.
Reviews: Ask your customers for reviews, mark them up with structured data and present them on a particular page on your site. This does wonders.
Photos: Take beautiful pictures of your business and add them to Google My Business.
Schema.org: Add structured data for NAP details, products, reviews, etc. and you get mobile rich search results like rich cards or carousels.
Contact details: Make sure your contact information is always correct and up to date. If not, fix it.
Yoast Local SEO for WordPress plugin: This plugin can do a lot of the hard local SEO work for you.

Finetune your mobile content

Smartphone screens are small. On that screen, text gets truncated and wrapped in a seemingly never-ending stream of paragraphs. Users have to scroll endlessly. Text on a mobile screen has the potential to give any web designer a headache. But the design – and use – of text is of crucial importance to the success of your site. If your site is unreadable or just plain ugly, people will not read your 1,000-word article. Hell, maybe not even your 100-word summary. Fix your typography.

People read a lot on their smartphones, but you have to make it as easy as possible for them to do so. You also need to make sure that your content is up to scratch.

Write for the small screen

Always keep the restrictions of the small screen in mind when creating or editing content. Don’t use too many long sentences, keep your paragraphs to around four sentences and break up text using bullet points, lists and headings. Nothing is more daunting to your visitor than a massive block of unformatted text. Check your content on a smartphone to see how it looks and find ways to improve it. The Yoast SEO Premium analysis can help you improve your content.

Write better meta descriptions and titles

Google shows less information in the search results on mobile than on a desktop. Your meta descriptions and your titles will be truncated if you make them too long. Think about that when you optimize your posts and pages. You lose several characters when optimizing your meta descriptions and titles for mobile. In Yoast SEO’s snippet editor, you can switch between a mobile and desktop preview. This way, you can compare the differences between the two and find the perfect middle ground. Yoast SEO also uses the titles and meta descriptions to fill your structured data, so make it clear to search engines what your page is about.

Prepare for voice search

When working on your content, you should account for voice search. Yes, it’s been around for a while, but with the advent of Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Home assistant, things are moving faster. More and more people are using their voice to perform actions on the web, and your content has to provide the answers. If done correctly, you might kill two birds with one stone: you’ll not only respond to questions mobile users have, but it might also lead to so-called featured snippets or answer boxes on desktop searches. Getting a featured snippet almost guarantees your content to be a top answer for assistants. Curious what’s powering conversational search?

To prepare for voice search, you need to take a good look at your current content. Ask yourself, does it answer any question a user might have? If not, change it. Find out which questions people use to find your content and optimize for that. Use Google’s autofill or tools like Answer the Public or AlsoAsked.com to find ideas for questions to answer.

Add Schema structured data to a mobile site

Structured data is incredibly important. By using structured data in the form of Schema.org to describe elements on your site, you can open a line of communication with search engines. Structured data makes it clear to search engines what all the different elements on your site mean. If done correctly, search engines can use this data to give you highlighted search results, known as rich results or rich snippets. This way, your site immediately stands out from the crowd, which could lead to a higher click-through rate.

Structured data allows for many new ways of presenting search results. The rich results we see in the carrousel, for instance, uses data you can add to your mobile site. The result is a snippet that is mobile-optimized and very attractive to click. Since Google is heavily investing in improving and expanding the types of rich results these might turn out to be your ticket to enhanced visibility. Try to get those featured snippets!

Structured data is one of the most important topics to get your head around. See our structured data course for an easy way to learn how to add structured data to your mobile site. This course is part of our Yoast SEO academy training subscription.

Yoast SEO takes care of your Schema needs

A mobile how-to rich result

Adding Schema to your site has always been a struggle — but not any more! Yoast SEO is making it easy for you. The popular SEO plugin automatically adds an extensive list of Schema structured data properties to your site. Not only that, Yoast SEO also ties everything together in a neat graph. This graph makes it incredibly easy for a search engine to understand the true meaning of your site. That’s not all, because the free Yoast SEO structured data content blocks turn the WordPress block editor into a helpful tool to craft FAQ pages and how-to articles — with more block types to come. Both of these Schema types have a relatively easy to get rich result on mobile attached to it as well.

A mobile SEO guide full of tips

This ultimate guide to mobile SEO gives you a lot of pointers to improve the performance of your mobile site. Mobile SEO should always be a work in progress because there are always new developments, but also technologies arrive and are superseded. The world is always changing, and you need to keep up. If you do, the rewards can be great.

So, what are you waiting for? Get your smartphone, check your site on a mobile browser and find and fix those issues. Use this mobile SEO guide well, because this is an important time! This is the time to take action because if you don’t, you might get left behind.

Keep reading: WordPress SEO: The definitive guide to higher rankings for WordPress sites »

The post Mobile SEO: The ultimate guide appeared first on Yoast.

WordPress 5.5 is here! 5 things you need to know

Tue, 11 Aug 2020 19:08:41 GMT

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 means for you, we’ve listed the most important features and changes in this blog post. Enjoy!

1. Improvements to the block editor
2. Edit images inline
3. Improved content previews
4. Automated updates for plugins
5. Default XML sitemaps
Welcome to WordPress 5.5!

1. Improvements to the block editor

With WordPress 5.0 we were introduced to a new block-based editing environment, which is called the block editor (also known as Gutenberg). Since the introduction of the block editor, every WordPress release has come with improvements to this editing environment and the release of 5.5 is no exception. Besides a few noticeable changes in the user interface, this release introduces us to block patterns and the new block directory.

Block patterns are quite handy when it comes to more routine elements of your pages or posts. These patterns, which you can find when you add a new block, are ready-made blocks with commonly used settings. Think of two buttons next to each other or a column layout on your page. Block patterns help you quickly set up the layout of a page. And although the number of patterns is limited right now, this number will probably keep growing in the coming years.

The Block Directory

Now the block directory needs some explaining, as it’s a pretty cool feature that can definitely enhance your writing experience. To put it simply, this directory contains WordPress plugins that can add new blocks to your editor. And, at the moment, you can already find lots of new blocks available.

An easy way to use this directory is by adding a new block. When you click ‘add block’, just use the search field above and type in a feature or type of block you want to use. If there is no current block that matches this search, the editor will show other results from the block directory that might match your search. Opens up a world of possibilities right?

2. Edit images inline

The improvements in image editing are something we’re quite excited about. Yes, WordPress has always given you lots of options to edit your images, but this release makes it possible to do so in the editor itself. Which means you won’t have to open the image in the media library, you can simply rotate, resize, crop (and so on) the image right where you are. And see the effects of it right away, in relation to the rest of your content. This saves you time and, in our opinion, enhances the user experience quite a bit.

However, I should note that this might not work for all your images (yet) as this feature is mainly focused on the standard image block. If you add in an image within another block, for example our FAQ block that also lets you add images, you’ll have to edit this image by opening it in the media library.

Lazy-loading images

Also worth mentioning is that images will be lazy-loaded by default from now on. Which essentially means that the images on your page will not all be loaded at the same time, but when they come into viewing range. This saves time in loading your page altogether and needless to say, this will make for some very happy site visitors. As they won’t have to wait that long to view your page.

3. Improved content previews

Writing a post or page in the block editor gives you a pretty good idea of what this page will look like. Nonetheless, the content preview is a great feature to safely preview your content before you publish (or update) it. And this release comes with additional device previews, which makes it possible to preview your content on desktop, tablet and mobile screen sizes. That way, you can make sure your content is more accessible and readable for everyone visiting your site. Which is definitely something you want to check, as mobile traffic has grown quite a lot over the years making your mobile site more important than ever.

4. Automated updates for plugins

Another feature of WordPress 5.5 is the possibility to enable auto-updates for your different plugins and themes. Please note, if this is something you want to use, you do have to enable it yourself. This can be done by going to your admin dashboard, clicking on “Plugins” in your menu, and clicking on “Enable auto-updates” next to every plugin you want to have automatically updated from now on:

Enable auto-updates in the column ‘Automatic Updates’

Want to enable the auto-updates for your theme? Simply click on “Appearance” in your side menu, choose “Themes” and click on “Enable auto-updates” link that you can find under your theme’s name.

When you’re in doubt about whether you should use this functionality, keep the following in mind. It’s good practice to test new versions of plugins in a safe environment like a staging website, before using them on your live site. But we realize that in the real world, many site managers don’t (or can’t) do this. In some of those cases, you might decide that you’re better off keeping your plugins up-to-date to avoid any security issues and avoid missing out on new features, versus the risk of an update introducing bugs or faults. But that’s something that each site manager will need to decide on a case-by-case basis, for each plugin. We always recommend testing when possible, and keeping an eye on changelogs to make sure that you understand what might be new or different in an update.

5. Default XML sitemaps

With this release, WordPress generates its own XML sitemaps. This is a file that gives search engines directions to all of the content on your site. This helps them discover and index your pages and posts, which is quite important for SEO. Now that XML sitemaps are a core feature of WordPress, more than 1 in 3 sites out there will have these enabled by default. That’s kind of awesome!

That being said, if you’re a user of Yoast SEO, your site already has an XML sitemap generated by our plugin. So, what happens then? Are two sitemaps better than one? Don’t worry, we’ve thought about this. While it’s great news that millions of sites will now improve their chances of ranking thanks to this core feature, we’re confident the XML sitemaps in Yoast SEO are richer, better, and more powerful. This means that, although WordPress enables their new XML sitemap by default, Yoast SEO 14.7 automatically disables this default sitemap. Our sitemap is simply more advanced and you won’t run the risk of confusing search engines by having two sitemaps. You can read more about this in our FAQ about XML sitemaps in WordPress 5.5 and Yoast SEO.

Welcome to WordPress 5.5!

In this post, I discussed a few highlights of WordPress 5.5. And although there’s way more to this release than the features mentioned, I hope it gave you some more insights into the improvements of the block editor, inline image editing, the improved content previews, automated updates for plugins, and the new XML sitemaps that WordPress offers. If you have any questions, or other features about this release you’re excited about, let me know in the comments!

Improve your site structure in 4 simple steps

Tue, 11 Aug 2020 12:10:37 GMT

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 keep an eye on the structure of your site if it’s growing? In this post, I’ll teach you to improve your site’s structure in 4 simple steps.

Why improve your site structure?

Google follows links. And these links are also part of a great site structure. If a URL gets many links (whether it’s internal or external links), it must be an important page and search engines might rank it higher. But you shouldn’t just place links for Google. Readers also love sites that are easy to navigate and show suggested readings that make sense. That’s why it’s time to invest a bit in your site structure!

Step 1: Update and improve your cornerstones

Your cornerstone content consists of the most important articles on your site. The ones you want people to read; the ones you want to rank with in Google. They should be the most complete and well-written articles on your website. In this first step, you should take a closer look at them. Are they really of outstanding quality? Informative and easy to read? If not, start improving them!

If you use Yoast SEO, you should check the box in the Yoast SEO sidebar for all your cornerstone content articles:

Mark your most important content as cornerstone content in the Yoast SEO sidebar

Once you’ve checked that box, the content on this page will be assessed more strictly by our readability analysis. You may wonder why we’re so fussy about cornerstone content. The answer to that question is this: for cornerstone articles you should raise the bar because they’re very important! They should be better than your other articles and, therefore, demand more of your writing skills. Our cornerstone analysis will help you to raise your standards (and stick to them). It will be harder to score that green bullet. You have to do all the important things right!

Step 2: Link to those cornerstones!

The second step to improving your site’s structure is to ensure that blog posts about a certain topic all link to your most important article about that topic. Checking this might be a lot of work, but fortunately, Yoast SEO is here to help!

In Yoast SEO, you can use the text link counter to see whether your cornerstones have enough links. In your post overview, you can select your cornerstone articles:

The text link counter in the post overview instantly makes clear which posts need more internal links.

In our example, the Ultimate guide to small business SEO has fewer internal links to it (9, to be exact) than our other two ultimate guides (16 and 31), so we should look into that. It’s easy to lose sight of your internal link distribution, but this tool allows you to steadily work through your cornerstone posts. Use your internal search function and search for the keyword of your cornerstone article. The posts that come up in this search query should be linking to your cornerstones. So, check if that’s the case and add links if they’re not there yet!

Even easier internal linking with Yoast’s internal linking tool

Looking up relevant posts manually probably sounds like a bit of a hassle. Luckily, Yoast SEO Premium makes it even easier with its internal linking feature! It works in two ways. Of course, first and foremost, it reminds you to link to your cornerstones as you’re writing new content. But you can also open cornerstone articles with few links and look at the suggestions of the Yoast internal linking feature. The articles our internal linking tool suggests are great posts to add links to your cornerstones. You should go through these articles one by one and add these links to your cornerstone post for a relevant passage, with a good anchor text.

Do these articles relevant to your cornerstone post also link to it? Time to check and add links!

Step 3: Add links to (good) orphaned articles

Once you’ve improved your cornerstone articles and made sure you’ve added links from all related posts to those cornerstones, it’s time to make sure that there is no orphaned content on your site. Orphaned articles are posts or pages that don’t get any internal links. They are hard to find on your site, for both your audience and Google. To easily identify orphaned articles, Yoast SEO Premium has the orphaned content filter, which instantly shows you all posts without internal links to them. Alternatively, you can use our text link counter to see which posts have no internal links to them.

The orphaned content filter shows you all posts that need some internal links.

Open these posts and check if they’re still up to date and useful. If you use Yoast SEO Premium, just check the suggestions of the internal linking tool. Using the tool, you can make a list of posts that should be linking to your orphaned posts. After that, you can open those similar posts and add links to your orphaned posts. You can also use the search function to find relevant posts to link to your orphaned article.

Step 4: Avoid those dead ends!

Every post should have suggestions for further reading. After all, you want people to stay on your website. But don’t just go adding random links to every post: suggestions should always be on topic. People reading about ballet shoes are probably interested in ballet shoes. So, offer them more reading material on ballet or on ballet shoes, but don’t bore them with posts about karate.

Open your post overview and sort your posts by the number of internal links in the post, using our text link counter.

Open the posts with fewest internal links. Add links to similar posts using our internal linking tool, in the same way as described above. It’s easy and will increase the time people spend on your site considerably.

If you want to easily add related links to hierarchical pages, you can use Yoast SEO Premium’s sub-pages or siblings block in the WordPress block editor. As child pages are often related to each other and their parent page, this makes sense most of the time. Of course, always check if this is the case, as you know your audience best!

Check out this video to find out how they work:

Keep reading: Internal linking for SEO: why and how »

Time to improve your site structure!

Agreed, it is a bit of work. But if you set to mind to it, follow these 4 steps, and use the Yoast SEO (Premium) site structure features, you’ll be able to improve your site’s structure significantly. Which will definitely result in longer visits by your readers and higher rankings in Google. Well worth the effort, wouldn’t you say?

Read on: Site structure: the ultimate guide »

The post Improve your site structure in 4 simple steps appeared first on Yoast.

Positioning your store in the online market

Mon, 10 Aug 2020 12:30:12 GMT

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, as they eventually decide how they view your store. In this post, I’ll help you position your store in the online market.

The fifth P in marketing

If you’re in marketing, you’re probably familiar with the name Philip Kotler. And if that name doesn’t ring a bell, you’ve might have heard of the four P’s: product, price, place, and promotion. When I studied Marketing decades ago, these were the core of every marketing strategy. Since then, many have added their own extra P’s like people and purpose. Philip Kotler also mentions another P: positioning.

Definition of positioning

Kotler defines positioning (your store or company) as:

“the act of designing the company’s offering and image to occupy a distinctive place in the mind of the target market. The end result of positioning is the successful creation of a customer-focused value proposition, a cogent reason why the target market should buy the product.”
(Philip Kotler: Marketing Management, 2003)

This is closely related to finding your niche market. In my post about finding your shop’s niche, I explained how a product and target audience can be considered shop shapers. You can build an entire store just based on the right product and the right market. Since positioning is about finding your spot in the mind of the target market, it’s clear that emotions play a part as well.

Questions to ask yourself

If you want to position your online store, it might help to ask yourself some questions:

What is your ideal customer? (not in terms of budget, but in terms of values)
What are my personal values and how do these relate to my products or company?
What do I consider my company’s core competencies and how can I make these visible?
What brands do I like and how would people associate our company with these brands?
What are the current trends in my market and what can our products contribute to that?

I realize that it’s not that simple to answer these questions. It’s quite heavy stuff and requires a lot of your time. Especially since it’s almost all related to emotions. But thinking about these topics will help you find your store’s position.

Determine your store’s position

There is a simple way to determine and work towards your store’s position. First define the following variables:

Company name
Product
Target market
Needs of your target market
Distinctiveness of your company

That might require some research, and perhaps you haven’t thought about a number of these variables. But when you’ve defined them, your brand position will be something like this:

[Company] supplies to [target market], looking for [needs]. [Company] distinguishes itself from competitors by [distinctiveness].

Have a look at a few examples

This is quite a strict format, but you’re free to alter it to fit your company. To give you an idea of what a store’s positioning can look like, I’ll give you a few well-known examples:

Coca Cola

Cola is popular worldwide and is liked by people of all age groups while diet (and zero) coke targets the niche segment for people who are more health-conscious. Coca Cola uses a competitive positioning strategy to be way ahead of its competitors in the non-alcoholic beverages market. This strategy has always been to associate happiness, positivity and the good life with their products. Something Coca-Cola has been the master of for over 100 years. Source: Marketing91

Patagonia

“Don’t Buy This Jacket”. This Patagonia advertisement (2011) talked about the cost to the environment of one of their own best-selling jackets. And asked consumers to reconsider buying this jacket, recommending to go for a used product. And this might seem weird, but it fits in quite well with their positioning: creating products that last, minimizing our impact on the environment, and using recycled and organic materials. Patagonia also donates to, and is involved in, many environmental initiatives that resonate well with the environmentally-conscious customer it targets. Source: Investopedia

The Body Shop

The Body Shop expects its customers to view its products as beauty products with a focus on health and nature, instead of glamour. They use all natural and organic ingredients in their products. But that’s not all. To further establish their position, the brand puts forward the environmental concern and campaigns against animal testing of beauty products. Source: Marketing91

Note that these aren’t the brand positions these companies set up in their mission statement or marketing plans. These are the positions that others imagine these companies have or had. These examples are simply here to illustrate to you what your position could be and how you can achieve it.

So what to do?

Find the elements that your desired customers would look for in a product or company, which Kotler refers to as ‘points-of-parity’. And find the areas where you are able to distinguish yourself from your competition, which Kotler calls ‘points-of-differentiation’. This way customers will consider your brand and you’ll be able to differentiate yourself from the competition. That sums it up quite nicely, I think.

Positioning is the first thing to do, and creating buzz should be the second. Tell the world about your brand position! Use your blog, use social media, even use your site design to express your values and position your (company and) products in an online market with competition from all over the world.

Make sure your buzz is related to your products. If you want to position your company as conscious, animal testing and the environment could be topics for your blog. Write about promotions and other sales if your desired position is to be the cheapest online perfume outlet ever. Positioning is about distinctiveness and relevance, and making sure your consistent with it.

Over to your online store

What about your online store? Do you have a hard time determining and creating your store’s position? Or do you already occupy a “distinctive place in the mind of the target market”? Share your experience in the comments below!

Keep reading: Building a brand for your business »

The post Positioning your store in the online market appeared first on Yoast.

Why is Google ranking the wrong page?

Thu, 06 Aug 2020 12:23:58 GMT

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 the wrong page? What can you do to change this? In this post, I’ll explore possible causes for why this is happening. And more importantly, I’ll help you fix it!

Explanations for wrong page ranking

If the wrong page turns up in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), it means that Google thinks that this page is a better fit than the post you want to rank with. So why does Google think that? The most plausible cause for having the ‘wrong’ page show up in the search results is keyword cannibalization. But before we go into that, I have to mention another reason, which has to do with search intent.

A mismatch in search intent

One reason that the wrong page is showing up in the search results, is a mismatch in search intent. It could well be that you’ve written an informative article about a product that you sell, but you also have a product page for this specific product. This makes perfect sense, as these pages are focused on a different search intent. But if Google isn’t able to recognize the intended search, the wrong page could end up in the SERPs.

Keyword cannibalization

In most cases, the wrong page showing up is caused by keyword cannibalization. This means that you have more than one post or page on your site that can rank for the same search query. If you have multiple pages and posts about the same topic, perhaps even optimized for similar keywords, Google will get confused. It won’t know which one of your articles to rank highest and this results in your articles competing with each other for a position in the SERPs. You might think this isn’t such a bad thing, but you’re cannibalizing your own content. Which means that both pages end up with a lower position in the results.

Recognize and fix keyword cannibalization

If you suspect that your site might be suffering from keyword cannibalization, it’s important to research this. Just Google your keyword specifically for your site. I’ll explain how this works by using Yoast.com as an example. By typing in site:yoast.com [specific keyword] on Google, it will give you all the posts and pages it finds and considers on Yoast.com for that specific keyword. If you have many pages competing for that same keyword, you’ll probably be experiencing some keyword cannibalization.

In order to start ranking with the right page in the SERPs, you should solve your keyword cannibalization problem. Although finding and fixing keyword cannibalization requires some serious effort, it will definitely pay off. You already know which page you want to rank with. You know which page is most important to you. Now you just have to make sure that Google knows it too.

Solve wrong page ranking with internal linking

Fixing keyword cannibalization helps you assess similar pages and take action to increase the rankings of the right pages. But that’s not all. In order to solve your problem with the wrong page ranking, you also need to improve your internal linking structure. After all, Google follows links. The way you structure your site, the way you internally link one page to the other, gives Google important clues about which pages are important (and which aren’t). Pages that have a lot of internal links will get more visits from the Google bots. But on pages with little or no internal links the Google bots will come around less often.

Pages that have a lot of internal links pointing towards them are deemed important. While pages with little or no internal links will not appear important (in the eyes of Google). That’s something you can act on! Make sure that the page you want to rank with has the most internal links pointing towards it. That way, you’re showing Google which article is most important with the use of internal linking.

The context of internal links

A great internal linking structure only works if your internal links are in context. They have to make sense. The page you want to rank with should have links from pages that are topically related to that specific page. Adding links from random pages to one of your pages does not work. Google just is too smart for that. And it’s bad user experience for your site users. Your internal linking should make sense so that users want to click on internal links, want to read more or to get more detailed information about a related topic.

Example: creating an internal linking setup

Let’s look at an example of how to set up a great internal linking strategy. Because it makes sense to write multiple articles about topics related to your business. So how do you make sure you’re not cannibalizing your own content? And how do you tell Google which article is the most important one?

Imagine you want to rank with the keyphrase [site structure]. That’s a rather competitive keyphrase. If you’re just starting out in blogging about site structure, it might be hard to rank for that term. A great strategy is to write different articles each focussing on a different aspect of site structure, for example: [site structure FAQ], [internal linking], [site structure best practices]. These search terms are less competitive and these articles will each drive some traffic to your website. However, how do you make sure that Google knows which article is most important?

Your internal linking structure is Google’s guide. You should make sure to put an internal link from each of these articles (site structure FAQ, internal linking, and so on) to that most important one – the ultimate guide to site structure. That way, Google will notice all these different blog posts pointing towards one article. That’ll give Google the information it needs to determine which one it should rank highest in the SERPs, in this case – the ultimate guide to site structure.

Also, it’s important to link to the related (and less important) posts from your ultimate guide. That way, your users will be able to navigate your site easily and Google will better understand the relationship between these articles. So make sure to link both ways.

Keep reading: More articles on internal linking »

Need help with your internal linking structure?

Setting up an internal linking structure can be rather hard. Especially if you have a lot of articles on your website. How do you find out which could be candidates to link to the article you want to rank with? Yoast SEO premium offers a renewed internal linking feature which helps you set up an awesome internal linking strategy. In this short video, I’ll explain how it works:

In a nutshell, our tool offers suggestions for internal links to similar articles to the one you’re writing. You’ll find the internal linking suggestions in the Yoast site bar while you’re working on your post. Also, cornerstone articles (those articles you most desperately want to rank with) are shown at the top of the list to make sure you don’t forget to link to them.

Get Yoast SEO Premium Only $89 USD (ex VAT)

Conclusion on wrong page ranking

It can be very annoying when Google ranks the wrong page for a certain keyword. In many cases, this can be fixed by improving your internal linking structure. Make sure that other (less important) posts and pages link towards your most important post. That way, Google will know which post is most important to you and will be more likely to reward that with a higher ranking!

Your internal linking structure, your site structure, is like a guide to Google and therefore really important. Luckily, improving this structure is relatively easy and extremely actionable. So, good luck and start ranking with the right post!

Read on: Keyword research: the ultimate guide »

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