Is it worth your while making your text easy to read? Will it lead to higher rankings and more traffic? In simpler terms: Does readability rank? At Yoast, we’re convinced that writing in plain and understandable language can and will get you more visitors. We’ve even developed a tool to help people write readable text. In this post, we’ll explain why search engines love easy-to-understand copy and we’ll give tips on how to create it.

Well-written copy improves user experience

At the risk of stating the obvious: unintelligible copy makes for a bad user experience. Nobody likes to read something that’s difficult to follow, boring or stuffed with keywords. All your online copy should be aimed and focused on your audience. It should be providing them with the information they need, a solution to their problem, or an answer to their question.

To get your pages high in Google, your instinct may be to write a text that the search engines will easily understand. Which isn’t necessarily wrong. But, first and foremost, you should create pages that provide great copy (and a great experience) for your visitors. This fits in nicely with our vision of holistic SEO. If you write a text that’s hard to understand, people won’t find what they need. What’s more, you’ll end up with unsatisfied visitors that bounce back to Google right when they hit your site. Google analyzes user signals like that to determine how visitors experience your site.

Search engines mimic humans

There used to be a time when stuffing keywords in your copy would work. If you’d just mention your keywords enough times in your text, Google would rank it high for those keywords. Those times are long gone. Nowadays, you need to be more mindful when it comes to the keyword density of your text.

Google has gotten much better at recognizing quality content. For instance, Google now recognizes synonyms. It also understands which words, entities, and content are related to each other. In addition to that, search engines are becoming better at predicting what people want to read. From the keywords in someone’s search query, they can make an estimated guess of their search intent.

Overall, Google’s algorithm is trying to mimic a human. It tries to read text like a human being would. As Google becomes more capable of understanding and scanning texts in a human-like way, readability will become more important for your rankings.

Voice search & accessibility

A lot of people use voice search, so Google and other search engines are also very much focused on voice. Imagine a long paragraph consisting of meandering sentences and containing lots of difficult words. Now imagine that paragraph read out loud. The voice result would become impossible to understand. Google wouldn’t want to use an answer like that. Neither in voice search or in normal results. That’s another reason why readability will help your rankings. Google prefers texts that are easy to follow, also when they’re read out loud using voice search.

But readability is also important when it comes to accessibility. You need to keep in mind that not everyone who visits your page will experience it in the same way. Some people with a visual impairment might use a screen reader to go through your content. You don’t want them to leave your page because your text is just way too long. But that’s not all. Much like Google itself, they rely on the proper use of headings to understand what your text is about. Remember that accessibility matters, and not just for SEO.

What makes a text easy to read?

How do people read online text? Of course, we all want to write that text that site visitors will gladly read from beginning to end. Unfortunately, that’s often not the case. Most of the time, people scan through texts, read subheadings and the first sentences of the paragraphs they deem relevant. They look for transition words in order to quickly abstract what the main conclusion of an article will be.

All the things people do while reading your text are things Google will do. That means that the structure of your text, the way you write your paragraphs, becomes increasingly important. Core sentences – the first sentence of every paragraph – will need to contain the most important message of that paragraph. And having a clear and logical structure in your text will be invaluable.

Tips to keep your text readable

Let’s talk about how we can create easy reads. Before you start writing your text, think about the structure. What do you want to tell your audience and in what order? Is that a logical order of topics? Will your audience be able to follow your arguments, your examples and main message? Maybe you should try writing content with the inverted pyramid style?

Try to use short sentences where you can, as lengthy sentences are much harder to process. Avoid or limit the number of difficult words in a text. Try not to use complicated sentences and try to avoid the use of passive voice. Also, make sure to write in an appealing style. That can be really hard; not everyone has a talent for creative writing. It helps to mix it up a bit! Try to alternate long sentences with shorter ones. Use synonyms. Avoid starting sentences with the same word. And check out our 5 tips to write a readable blog post.

We know writing readable copy is hard. Writing an unreadable text is a mistake that we see pretty often. That’s why we developed a readability analysis in Yoast SEO. It checks, for instance, if your sentences aren’t too long, if you don’t use passive voice too often and if the length of your paragraphs is okay. The analysis gives you tips about what you can improve on and you can even see which sentences need a second look. We’re continuously tweaking it, adding new checks and translating it into as many different languages as possible. We’re up to 18 languages right now! The analysis is available in our free and Premium Yoast SEO plugin.

One last tip: read it out loud!

Google’s Gary Illyes once tweeted that you should read your text out loud. If it doesn’t read nicely or sounds strange, it probably won’t rank either.

Let’s be clear: your rankings won’t immediately soar when you improve the readability of your texts. But, writing a readable blog post is an essential part of every SEO strategy. If you want your readers to read your entire blog post or page, your copy should be easy to read. Posts that are readable will definitely result in more returning visitors and a higher conversion rate. So in the long run: readability ranks.

Keep on reading: SEO copywriting: the complete guide »

The post Does readability rank? On ease of reading and SEO appeared first on Yoast.

Did you know there are millions and millions of people with trouble reading? Did you know most people would probably read something that doesn’t strain their brain? The readability of content is an important factor for the success of that content. Yoast SEO comes with several tools that will help you improve readability. Plus, in Yoast SEO 17.2, you can also work on readability in the Farsi language.

How Yoast SEO helps you improve readability

For this release, we haven’t made any changes to the analyses, but we wanted to highlight them anyway. You’ll hear us talk about readability quite a bit. And that’s not without reason as your readers sure like content that’s easy to figure out. Making your content easy to read helps readers understand it better — and more quickly. It makes it easier for them to act upon. Simply because it will take them less time and energy to figure out what you mean.

Readable content is what we should all strive for. Everyone deserves that. By doing that, you are not simply dumbing down that content but opening it up to a much larger audience. But the hard part is that we all work on our own level. Dropping that level is not that easy for most people. It’s hard to lower that level that you’re so used to. Luckily, Yoast SEO helps you out.

Readability analysis in Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO comes with an advanced readability analysis that helps you improve the readability for your audience. For instance, it checks whether you use the passive voice too much. The passive voice can make sentences unnecessarily complex and hard to understand. The plugin looks at sentence length and helps you cut down on very long sentences. The same goes for the length of paragraphs. Yoast SEO also helps you to use enough transition words. These help with connecting sentences and concepts, making the text easier to understand.

By simply keeping an eye on the scores and using the feedback to improve your text, you are well on your way to readable content. If you want to learn more about improving your readability, get Yoast SEO Premium and you’ll also receive free access to the SEO copywriting training. Or, you can sign up for Marieke’s free readability workshop on September 23.

New in Yoast SEO 17.2

Some of the improvements in Yoast SEO 17.2 are focused on the Farsi language. We’ve completed the readability analysis for Farsi by adding the transition words, consecutive sentences, and passive voice assessments, and by adjusting the sentence length assessment to make it more appropriate for the Farsi language. In addition, we’ve improved keyword detection. We’re continually adding new languages to our language analyses.

Performance-wise, we’ve cleaned up indexables for posts with auto-draft post-status, in order to speed up your admin pages.

Update now

One of the most important tools in Yoast SEO is the readability analysis. These writing tools help you to tone down your content and make it accessible for a larger audience. Readable content is awesome content!

The post Yoast SEO 17.2: Readability helps your audience understand appeared first on Yoast.

Keyword research for YouTube SEO is a very different process than keyword research for Google and Bing. However, too often marketers take the research they’ve done for Google and apply the learnings directly to YouTube. This never quite works, because the things people search for on YouTube differs greatly from the kind of things they search for on other search engines. That’s why you need to approach YouTube keyword research differently. In this post, we’ll discuss how!

YouTube is a search engine, but people use it differently than they use Google. For starters, every search on YouTube has a video intent. There are also more implied questions, broader topic queries and regularly repeated queries (where the expectation is that results change frequently).

That’s why you should conduct YouTube keyword research in addition to the keyword research for your content pages. By acquiring and analyzing the date in advance of creative ideation you can ensure your YouTube strategy is likely to drive a large number of views over an extended period of time.

In this post, we offer a five-step approach to YouTube keyword research. Including a mixture of free and paid tools that will give you an actionable framework you can use straight away.

Step 1: Collect your list of topics

First off, you need to collect a list of all the topics that you could create video content about. Your existing keyword list can be the starting point for this. But be sure to think laterally and within the context of YouTube. In practice, this means removing most of the navigational and transactional queries from your keyword list and instead focusing on the informational queries.

When we search on YouTube, we’re looking for a video that relates to a certain entity, covers a certain topic, or solves a specific problem. We’re probably not looking to find a website, purchase a product or find directions. For example, searches for actual product categories tend to be low on YouTube, but searches for “[specific product]+ review” tend to be quite high.

There is a lot of cross over between high volume YouTube queries and queries that contain videos in Google search. So one way of quickly and effectively refining your keyword list is by those that include video SERP features (this information is provided by Stat, SEMrush, Ahrefs, and other popular keyword tools).

Use the expertise in your team

In addition, Google Trends, YouTube autosuggest, and analysis of competing YouTube channels can give you inspiration about the topic areas available. However, I think often the most auspicious route to finding terms to act as your seed list is by surveying your team. By finding out what they know and could contribute videos about.

Internal expertise is often the best starting point for building a YouTube content plan as you can match the knowledge you have internally to the latent demand externally. Remember that YouTube is as much a social network as a search engine. The best ideas for content are not always those inspired by keyword data!

Step 2: Generate keyword ideas

Once you’ve got a topic list and ideas the next step is to expand and refine these into a list of keywords you can optimize for. There are a number of useful tools to do this:

Tube Buddy

Tube Buddy Keyword Explorer is one of the best free tools available for this step. Here you can put in one of your topic ideas and you’ll receive estimated search volume, weighted and unweighted competition scores. Based on how relevant your channel is for the term in question. But you also get a list of related searches, which you can then explore and add to your keyword list.

ahrefs

My favorite paid tool for YouTube keyword research is Ahrefs. It’s very useful for this process of expansion and refinement. With Ahrefs you can explore by both terms and phrase match (use phrase match for topics with two words or more), group and export ideas, as well as view a relative metric for “return rate” which indicates whether or not this is a term that the same user will regularly search for.

vidIQ

Another paid tool that provides search volume and opportunity score metrics aswell is vidIQ. It also gives you a snapshot of the videos that are currently trending related to the provided keywords.

The data provided here is of similar quality and detail to the data you get from TubeBuddy. But the benefit is that you can export everything to a database or spreadsheet.

Keyword.io

A useful freemium tool for this stage in theprocess is Keyword.io. As you can quickly find a list of relevant YouTube keywords and then export them for processing later.

Only the paid version of the tool gives you search volume estimates. However, the free version is still very helpful for generating and exporting more ideas.

YouTube traffic sources report

The report for “YouTube search” under traffic sources in YouTube Analytics is the only place you’ll get direct data from Google about search behavior on YouTube. Unfortunately, no search volumes are available. But you can see the keywords which are currently driving views to your existing videos. And how many impressions and views each keyword is bringing in.

This can serve as a great way to find new opportunities. Let’s say a keyword is driving a lot of views but you haven’t created a specific video for it. This is a great indicator that you may get even better results by creating content to target it.

Step 3: Get search volume data

The next step of your YouTube keyword research is to get search volume data for each of your keyword ideas. After that you can refine the list to include only those with significant enough search volume to represent a valuable opportunity. The only tool which I think is currently set up to do this at scale is ahrefs, as it allows you to input a long list of queries, add additional recommended options, and then export keyword volume for everything.

So, take your list into ahrefs, go through the full list, add any new ideas that seem relevant and remove any that don’t. Then export the data, and bring everything into Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel.

Sort the data by global or local volume (as appropriate, depending on your target audience). Then you can remove all the keywords which don’t have a large number of searches. As a general rule of thumb, anything that has fewer than 100 global monthly searches is too low to worry about.

You should now have a list of relevant, validated keywords for YouTube, sorted by search volume. Dependent on the task at hand, this might serve as sufficient to make some strategic decisions about your content strategy! However, if you have time and really want to validate the creative opportunities available, you can go a step further. By applying a video quality lens onto the keyword data in order to work out which ideas to prioritize.

Step 4: Assess the average ranking video quality

This step requires considerable time and energy. So it’s best saved until you’ve refined your potential keyword list as much as possible using other factors. The goal is to work out how competitive each query is on a qualitative level.

Go to YouTube.com and type in your target query, then watch each of the top 5-10 ranking videos. After you’ve seen them, make a qualitative assessment regarding how good the videos were on average and provide an overall score out of 10. If there was one good video and the rest of the content was low quality and dated, then give it a 4 or a 5. If everything was extremely engaging and well-produced, give it an 8 or a 9. But if the need of the searcher really isn’t being met by the content available, go with a 2 or 3.

The data here doesn’t need to be too precise, as its job is to provide a relative guide to creative competition. Which can then be used to calculate a compound metric that measures opportunity. If there are a lot of great videos already meeting the searcher’s need, you probably won’t be able to generate traction by making another similar video to the existing offerings. But if there is a demand without good content serving it, this represents an opportunity you should take advantage of.

Step 5: Generate an opportunity score

Finally, we can create a YouTube opportunity score, to judge the potential value of each keyword for our channel. Divide the search volume by the average video quality, and use this as a guide for which videos to create.

Once you’ve got this in place, you should have a list of prioritized, valuable creative opportunities that can inform your YouTube strategy. This means that you can get started with your filming!

To conclude

Because people use YouTube a bit differently from Google, you should invest some time in keyword research for YouTube. Although your existing keyword research list can serve as inspiration, you need to be mindful of which ones will work on YouTube. And which ones won’t. In this post, we’ve mentioned a few tools that you can use to do your keyword research for video SEO.

If you want to dive deeper into the stats, check out our post on how to use analytics for your video strategy. Or read more on how to timestamp your videos to get Key Moments from your videos in the search results:

Read more: How to timestamp YouTube videos and create Key Moments »

The post How to do keyword research for YouTube appeared first on Yoast.

Diversity is an important aspect of every community. It fuels discussion, change, and growth. It brings new voices and ideas into the mix. Diversity opens the door to new possibilities, and keeps that door open for everyone, not just a privileged few. That’s why we made the Yoast Diversity fund: to support underrepresented groups that are making a great impact in the WordPress community around the world.

The Yoast Diversity fund in a nutshell

Our 2021 Diversity fund offers financial sponsorship to people that work on a project that benefits WordPress. Projects could range from teaching a group of people how to work with WordPress to writing patches for Core. It’s simple: anyone could apply, as long as the project benefits WordPress and in some way adds diversity to the WordPress project.

Applications have now closed, and the recipients that will receive sponsorship have been decided. So, without further ado, we’re extremely proud to announce the following individuals and projects which will receive funding from Yoast! Check out the fantastic projects below to see what great things our awardees are working on:

Milana Cap / Documentation focus lead

“There’s been a huge gap between release squad and Documentation team. I want to change that.”

Milana has over a decade of volunteering experience at WordPress.org, and has used the Diversity fund to support her in taking on the Documentation focus lead role for the WordPress 5.8 release.

She has a strong vision for improving release processes and workflows to ensure that the Documentation team get all the information they need. As Documentation focus lead she has been responsible for writing developers notes for changes and new features introduced in 5.8, making sure end user documentation (HelpHub) and developer documentation (DevHub) are up to date with the new release.

We think this is a great project and Milana certainly has us convinced about the importance of good documentation! Would you like to help out with projects like this one? You can get involved over at WordPress.org.

Mary Job / Uwani Hub

“We need this coming generation to bring their fresher perspectives to WordPress, including new creative ways to keep democratizing WordPress”

Mary founded Uwani Hub to provide a safe space for teenagers to do tech in her underserved community of the Ijebu-Imusin area of Ogun State. At their village hub, the team introduces teenagers to digital skills, WordPress, technology history, trends, software development, robotics, graphics, arts, and character development.

In short, the Uwani Hub’s goals are to:

• Train 5000 teenagers and women in the use of WordPress software & digital skills by the year 2030.
• Build a community of 500 active contributors to the WordPress software particularly among our teenagers within our hub community by the year 2030.
• Train linguists in our community on translating WordPress to our major local language(s), building a community of Polyglots, ready to teach others what they have learned.

We’re delighted to be able to support this empowering and impactful project. If you’d like to, you can also make a donation to Uwani Hub.

TC Cazy / Contribute to WordPress Documentation

“When underrepresented people see me contribute, they’ll contribute. I love to share what I learn. I can share, learn and grow with the WordPress community”

TC is an early-career developer with a mission: he wants to make the WordPress ecosystem more attractive to underrepresented groups by making the documentation more accessible.

He is following a training course to become a Certified Professional Technical Communicator and will use the skills he learns to contribute five hours per week teaching, mentor and contributing to WordPress documentation. In particular, he wants to work on making plain-language documentation, as exclusive language can create hurdles for underrepresented groups.

We’re very pleased to be sponsoring TC, and we believe his project will make a great contribution to the global WordPress community.

David Towoju / WordPress BootCamp for Nigerians

“There are a lot of underrepresented people in Africa and this will help many people become rock solid developers in Nigeria”

David is taking the initiative to set up WordPress BootCamps for his fellow Nigerians. He will offer thorough interactive training programs, teaching fellow Nigerians how to code and helping them to become WordPress developers. These BootCamps will include subjects like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React/Vue, PHP, and WordPress Framework, for instance.

The goals are to:

• Teach people to be expert WordPress Developers
• Raise the standard of living of the participants by increasing their chances of getting better employment
• Increase the awareness of WordPress in my community.

We’re really happy to support this project, and we believe it can make a tremendous impact on many lives as well as the WordPress project overall.

Estela Rueda Landeros / Redesign of the HelpHub documentation

“The user documentation needs to be easy to find for new and non-technical users”

Estela is working on a redesign of the WordPress.org HelpHub documentation to make sure help articles are up-to-date and easy to find.

This project will involve Estela reclassifying 170+ articles in the end-user documentation, adding new features, and improving accessibility. In particular, she wants to flag outdated information and links, change article titles from one-word titles to action+object form, and add features like change logs, breadcrumbs. Besides that, she wants to create an entirely different navigation menu, too!

We’re glad to support Estela and her project, and we think her hard work and dedication to improving the documentation will benefit countless users.

Abel Lifaefi Mbula / Kali Academy

“We are Kali Academy, a non-profit dedicated to teaching young people from the DRC how to contribute to open source”

Abel is the founder of Kali Academy, a non-profit organization that aims to get developers from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to participate in open source through WordPress and related software.

This new project is for college students and developers from Kisangani and surrounding cities. The project will introduce them to WordPress and open source by providing training and mentorship. Here’s what they plan to achieve:

• Goal #1 – Create awareness of WordPress open source contributions among university students
  • Objective #1.1 – educate the public from DRCongo about WordPress and related open-source software
  • Objective #1.2 – Run contribution days and/or charity hackathons at universities.
• Goal #2 – Support folk developers from DRCongo contributing to WordPress
  • Objective #2.1 – Host monthly online live sessions and answer questions
  • Objective #2.2 – Mentor developers in their journey with WordPress contribution.

It looks like a great project! We’re proud to offer our support to Abel and Kali Academy to work towards these admirable goals.

It doesn’t end here!

It’s great to find out what different people in the WordPress community are doing around the world. We’ve got to admit, we’re feeling pretty awed and inspired after reading about these projects. We wish the best of success to all Yoast Diversity fund 2021 recipients. Stay tuned for updates about our Diversity fund 2021 projects as time goes on!

Finally, there are loads more people out there doing great things and bringing more diversity to the world of WordPress. We can’t offer funding to every project, but they are all amazing and we wish everyone the best of luck with their endeavors. Whether you’re doing something big or something small, every contribution matters when it comes to diversity. So keep up the good work!

Following on, we hope to continue with the next round of the Yoast Diversity fund in 2022. In the meantime, do you know someone who’s making a noteworthy (voluntary) contribution in a Make WordPress team? Nominate them for the Yoast Care fund!

The post Meet our 2021 Yoast Diversity fund recipients! appeared first on Yoast.

Do you have old posts and pages that need some new life breathed into them? It’s worth taking the time to update your content. Not only is it better for user experience, fresh and up-to-date content is good for your SEO too. Follow the 10 steps below to update your content and make it even better the second time around!

This article assumes you already know which piece of content you want to update. Not sure where to start? Find out more about keeping your content fresh.

Preparing to update your content

When it comes to updating your content, it can be tempting to jump into edit mode and start making changes right away. But it’s much better to assess the situation and plan your actions! Making updates and improving your content in a piecemeal way might make it unreadable. It’s all too easy to end up with a ‘Frankenstein’s monster’ text, made up of patchwork parts that don’t really fit together well. Planning ahead and getting an overview of what needs to change will help you avoid this. Plus you can organize your activities more strategically and make sure your content goals are still being covered.

While you’re preparing to update your content, keep the purpose of the page in mind. Why does it exist? What does it offer for users? What role does it play in your website, and what goals do you want to achieve with it? Thinking about the purpose of your content early on will help you to keep it on track as you make changes.

Read more: Why the purpose of your text is important for SEO »

1. Complete rewrite, or small update?

Before anything else, you should read your post or page and assess how much work needs to be done to bring it up to date. You don’t need a detailed list of changes to make, just a good awareness of whether you’ll be rewriting the whole thing, or just adding an extra paragraph, for instance. If you only want to make small changes, things like fixing typos and spelling mistakes, then you can probably just make these changes directly. The rest of this article deals with how to approach making bigger changes to existing content.

2. Refresh your research

It’s a good idea to refresh your research before you make any content updates. Users’ search intent and the search terms they use can change over time, so you might want to take some time to research these again. You could also check out your competition again, too.

In addition, there might be useful clues in your Google Analytics or Search Console data. If your page has been performing well with long-tail keywords, maybe you can start trying to rank for shorter keywords with this update. If your page has been struggling, you can use your data to look at which metrics are below average and get ideas for improvement.

Keep reading: How to do a one-page analysis in Google Analytics »

3. Check what similar content you have

Keyword cannibalization, or content cannibalism, is a problem. Having too many similar pages on your site can make it confusing for users, and it can hurt your SEO too. Faced with similar content, Google doesn’t know which page to rank. And users don’t know which one they should click on, either. So you should avoid creating very similar content if you can. The easiest way to do this is by checking if you have any pages about the same topic. A little bit of similarity between pages isn’t an issue. But when the majority of the content on your page is very similar to another page on your site (or elsewhere), that is an issue.

There are various options to deal with similar content on your site, and some of them fit in very nicely in the update process! For instance, you could merge two similar articles into a single article, combining all the best parts. Or you could differentiate them from each other by adding more unique content to one of the pages. Or another option is to write about the same topic in a different way. Find out what similar content you have before you start writing so you can avoid creating similarity issues, and maybe you can even solve some!

Rewriting your page

Whether you use the Rewrite & Republish tool or not, you’ll want a copy of your old text that you can work on. Then you’re ready to start writing your content update!

Tip: Easier content updates with our Rewrite & Republish tool

When it comes to rewriting your page, we absolutely recommend you use the Rewrite & Republish tool in Yoast Duplicate Post. This is how it works:

• You click the Rewrite & Republish button
• A clone of your existing post or page is automatically created in a new draft
• You can take your time to make all your changes in the draft version
• Once you’re ready to update your content, click on ‘Republish’ (or schedule republishing)
• The new version will automatically overwrite the original version.

With this very handy feature, you can make changes to your content, save your draft and preview your changes — all without users seeing any of your new content until you’re ready. And you don’t need to copy-and-paste anything! Yoast Duplicate Post is a standalone plugin, separate from our SEO plugins, so you’ll need to download it here (for free!) to use the Rewrite & Republish tool.

4. Is your content factually up-to-date?

Give your content a good read through. Has anything changed since it was last written? Is there new information available on this topic that could (or should) be included? Keeping your factual information fresh makes your content more useful for users, and that can give you an advantage over your competition. It also makes your content more trustworthy too, and that brings its own benefits.

Aside from any facts you’re referring to, you should also check things like prices, promotions and ‘upcoming’ events that have already taken place. If you advertise offers that people can’t use, or events that have already happened, you’ll create a bad user experience. And that can stick in people’s minds. If users are disappointed too many times, eventually they might give up on your site and go elsewhere.

Finally, although it can be time-consuming, it’s a good idea to check your outgoing links, too. While the URLs may still be active, it’s possible that the content on that page has changed. So if you want to provide a really stellar user experience, and it’s been a while since you added those links, give them a click and see what you find!

5. What can you add to make it better?

While you’re updating your content, is there anything else you can add to make your page better? If you have a comments section, take a look at how people responded the last time you published your page. If you find questions, why not answer them pre-emptively this time around? You can often find inspiration by looking at what ‘People also ask’ and ‘Related searches’ on the Google search results page of your keyword, too. If you need even more ideas, AnswerThePublic is a great tool you can try as well (it’s free, up to a limit).

Read on: Using Google’s search results to create great content »

6. How’s the overall quality?

After you’ve made all these changes to your content, take a look at the quality overall. Is it a well-structured, easy-to-read text? Does it deliver what its title promises? Are the ideas and arguments connected logically from one to the next, so it’s easy for users to follow what you’re saying? Aside from making sure your content is high-quality and readable, you can also think about your use of media. Could you add an image or a video that will help users to understand? And don’t forget accessibility matters, too!

If you’re using the Yoast SEO plugin, you can take a look at the Readability analysis to make sure your content is up-to-scratch.

Keep on reading: What is quality content and how do you create it? »

7. Final text review before you update your content

When you feel satisfied with the improvements you’ve made and you aren’t planning to change anything else, take the time to read your post or page again, from start to finish. Or better yet, get someone else to read it and give you feedback. Do this the same way you would check a brand new piece of content before publishing. Are there any typos? Have you added all the links you wanted to add? Of course you can always make small changes later, but it’s better to get these things right first time. This is especially true if you’re going to share your content in a newsletter or social media post!

Ready to republish your updated content?

Your content should now be thoroughly updated and ready to see the light of day again! But before you set your updated content live, there are a few final things you should consider.

Note: If you’re not using the Rewrite & Republish tool, then you’ll need to paste your updated content into the existing page in edit mode before continuing with steps 8-10. Things can go a bit wonky when you paste formatted text, so double-check everything is displaying correctly.

8. Check your SEO title and meta description

Your SEO title and meta description should be a good reflection of what users can find on the page. They also need to be appealing to get users to click on them in the search results. Now you’ve updated the content, check and ensure that your SEO title and meta description are still a good advertisement for the page.

Read more: Clickbait headlines and why you should NOT use them »

9. Old comments – keep or delete?

If your previous version of the page has comments on it, decide whether you will delete these or keep them. If the page has changed a lot, it might be better to remove them as they won’t necessarily be relevant anymore. They might even be confusing — if you decide to update the date as well, you could end up with comments that seem older than the page itself.

10. Change the publish date

Last but certainly not least — you may want to change the publish date on your post. If this is shown on your page, it will let users see that your content is recent (which makes it a more reliable source for them to use). If you’re using WordPress, it will also push your post back into the list of ‘Your latest posts’ and other automatic feeds based on the publish date.

The final step to update your content

All that’s left to do now is click on ‘Republish’ or ‘Update’. Now take a look at your updated content on the front end of your site and admire your work!

This was our guide to updating content, but you’re free to make whichever changes make sense to you. Of course, you don’t need to update every aspect — it’s up to you to decide what matters for each piece of content. What do your content updates include? Do you do anything else besides these steps? We’d love to hear about it — let us know in the comments!

Keep reading: Clean up your old content with our SEO workout! »

The post How to update your content in 10 steps (and make it better) appeared first on Yoast.

When looking for information about keywords in relation to SEO, you get bombarded with information about keyword research. And of course, this is crucial if you’d like your page to rank. But it’s also important to understand what the basic principle of a keyword is. And that’s the thing I’ll explain here. I’ll also share some suggestions about how and where to add keywords for SEO.

In this post:

• What are keywords?
• Why are keywords important?
• How to use keywords

What are keywords?

A keyword, or a focus keyword as some call it, is a word that describes the content on your page or post best. It’s the search term that you want to rank for with a certain page. So when people search for that keyword or phrase in Google or other search engines, they should find that page on your website.

Let’s say you’ve got a website about pianos: you sell all sorts and types of pianos. You blog about what to look at when buying a piano and you share reviews about the pianos you offer on your online shop. You sell digital pianos so you’ve created a product category page about digital pianos. Ask yourself this:

• What kind of search term do you want to be found for?
• Which words do you think people will use in search engines to find you?
• What would the search query look like?

Probably [digital piano], right? Because this keyword reflects what’s on the page best. If you’d have to explain the bottom line of your content, how would that look? What words would you use? That’s your keyword or keyphrase – if it consists of multiple words.

We use the word ‘keyword’ all the time; this does not mean it consists of only one word. A lot of times it consists of multiple words. So when talking about keywords, a lot of times we mean a phrase instead of just one word.

Read more: Keyword research for your online shop »

Why are keywords important?

One of the things Google looks at when ranking a page is the content on that page. It looks at the words on the page. Now picture this, if every word on, for instance, a blog post about a digital piano is used 2 times, then all words are of equal importance. Google won’t have a clue which of those words are important and which aren’t. The words you’re using are clues for Google; it tells Google and other search engines what the page or post is about. So if you want to make Google understand what your page is about, you need to use it fairly often.

But Google isn’t the only reason why keyphrases are important. Actually, it’s less important, because you should always focus on the user: on your visitors and potential clients. With SEO you want people to land on your website when using a certain search term or keyphrase. You need to get into the heads of your audience and use the words they use when they are searching.

If you use the wrong keyphrase, you’ll never get the visitors you want or need, because your text doesn’t match what your potential audience is searching for. But if you do use the words people are searching for, your business can thrive. So if you see it like that, your keywords should reflect what your audience is searching for. With the wrong keyphrase, you’ll end up with the wrong audience, or none at all. That’s why having the right keywords is really important.

How to use keywords

There used to be a time where you could add a lot of keywords to your pages and posts, do some old-fashioned keyword stuffing, and you’d rank in search engines. But a text with a lot of the same words in it is not a pleasant read. And because users find this kind of copy terrible to read, Google finds it terrible too. That’s why ranking in Google by doing keyphrase stuffing, fortunately, became hard to do. Nowadays, you’ll need to add your keyphrase in a natural way by writing focused content.

Use them in moderation

Getting the right amount of keywords onto your page is a balancing act. If you don’t use your keyword enough, you will find it hard to rank for that phrase. But if you use your keyphrase too much, your page will become spammy and unreadable, and that will also make it hard to rank.

You need to find that sweet spot where you’re using your keyword enough, but not excessively. Make sure you don’t stuff it into almost every sentence. In general, if your keyphrase makes up 1 or 2% of all words of your copy, then you’re not overdoing it.

Use them naturally

Aside from trying to add enough-but-not-too-many keywords, you need to make sure you include them in a natural way. Your keywords should be part of logical, coherent sentences that tell users something about that topic. Don’t force keyphrases into text (or headings) where they don’t make sense, or where they’re not adding any value for your readers.

And, that’s not all. Make sure your keywords are all well-distributed throughout your text. Don’t put all your keywords in the first paragraph thinking you’re done with that part of the optimization. Naturally spread them throughout your page or post.

Where to add your keyword

As well as distributing your keyphrase throughout your text, there are some other places that you should also add your keyword. Remember, always add keywords in moderation and put readability first!

• Page title and SEO title
  You should always add your keyword in your page title. Ideally you want to add it at the start of your title, especially if your title is long. The same goes for your SEO title, or meta title.
  
• Subheadings
  You should add your keyword to some of your subheadings (H2 and H3), but not all. It’s just the same as with the keyphrases in your main text. Use your keyword in a heading or a couple of subheadings, depending on the length of your page or post.
  
• Introduction
  The introduction is the first paragraph of normal text on the page. Your introduction should get straight to the point, so Google and your readers know what you’ll be talking about. This is a great opportunity to include your keyphrase!
  
• Image alt text
  Hopefully, your page or post includes an image related to the topic you’re writing about. Add some alt text to your images and see if you can find a natural way to include your keyword.
  
• Meta description
  Your meta description is part of the text Google displays in its search results. It should contain a short description of what users can find on your page. It’s another great place to add your keyphrase, too!
  
• URL slug
  The slug is the second part of a URL (web address) that identifies a specific page. For instance, the URL for this post is https://yoast.com/what-is-a-keyword/. The slug is the ‘what-is-a-keyword‘ part. You should try to create clear, descriptive slugs for each page you make, and if possible you should include your keyphrase in them too.

The Yoast SEO plugin checks all this for you

Want to get the right amount of keywords in all the right places? The Yoast SEO plugin makes it much easier! Simply add your focus keyphrase and the plugin will automatically check the points listed above — including whether you’re using it too much, too little, and whether it’s distributed well throughout your text.

These super helpful features are available in both the free and Premium versions. However if you upgrade to Premium you’ll be able to add more related keyphrases in addition to your focus keyphrase, too!

Up next: doing keyword research

Now you have a common understanding of what a keyword or keyphrase is. This knowledge will really help you with your keyword research, which of course is the next and vital step!

Keep reading: Keyword research: the ultimate guide »

The post What is a keyword? appeared first on Yoast.

Product descriptions can make or break a potential sale in your online store. Badly written ones decrease trust — making it harder for customers to pull the trigger on the sale. Plus, depending too much on descriptions provided by the producer is a no-go. But how do you write good product descriptions and how do you apply them to your WooCommerce online store? There’s a handy plugin that can help you write product descriptions: WooCommerce SEO.

What is a good product description?

A good product description describes a product in an attractive way and is written with the proper audience in mind. It differs from stock descriptions that appear on every other site and are tailored for your business. It uses proper, easy-to-understand language — without overusing that language and reaching for hyperbole and superlatives.

To describe your products in such a way that it appeals to potential buyers, you can look at several marketing theories for help. Try to think of your products and see if you can write about them with the problem/agitate/solve copywriting formula in mind, for instance. Or use the age-old AIDA model or something like the feature/advantage/benefit one. So, don’t list features but list benefits to the consumer.

Solve that problem, offer that solution

Here’s an example of an intro written via the problem/agitate/solve formula:

• Problem: Maintaining content is hard, especially when you have to update old content that is no longer relevant or in line with SEO standards.
• Agitate: It is almost impossible to find the time to do everything you have to do, and rewriting outdated content is often seen as a chore.
• Solution: The Yoast Duplicate Post plugin for WordPress makes content management easier thanks to the Rewrite and Republish feature. You can update or rewrite existing posts in just a few clicks.

Writing like this gives you that “hmm, I have that exact same feeling”, while also getting a solution to those problems. Of course, this doesn’t work for all products out there, but still. One of the most important things to remember is that you are offering a solution and not a product — find a way to communicate that solution in a way that makes it a no-brainer for the consumer to want it.

We have a post with seven tips to improve your product descriptions that dives into more detail on that. Of course, our new ecommerce SEO training course has a lot more on how to turn your online store into a money-making machine. In the post you are reading now, we’re showing you how the WooCommerce SEO plugin can help you write better product descriptions for your online store.

WooCommerce SEO has a dedicated product-analysis

WooCommerce is one of the leading platforms for online stores. It works very well, but there are some things to improve upon. To help with that, we’ve come up with the WooCommerce SEO WordPress plugin. Recently, we’ve added product-focused SEO and readability analyses to it which helps you write a product description that is both SEO-friendly as well as buyer-friendly.

The plugin has always used the analysis found in Yoast SEO but that one was not tailored to product descriptions. You have to remember that a blog post is not the same as a product description — both have different rules. Now, we have a way to check product descriptions in WooCommerce SEO. This one uses different ranges to score your product content on and even some new product-specific checks.

For instance, it checks if you use lists in your descriptions and if you haven’t forgotten to fill in your short description. It also loses some checks that don’t make much sense on product pages. One of those is the internal links check because you want to keep it on the product page to buy the product and not send them to another page.

Of course, WooCommerce SEO comes with a lot of other cool stuff. For instance, the plugin comes with a Google preview, especially for products. This means that you get a feel for how your product will look in Google’s SERPs — reviews stars and all. It also improves the product schema structured data of WooCommerce, making it easier for Google to understand your products. If you combine it with Yoast SEO Premium you’ll also get the additional features from that plugin as well

Help your online store stand out!

Get this and much more in the Yoast WooCommerce SEO plugin!

Get WooCommerce SEO ▸Only €69 EUR (ex VAT) for 1 site – incl. 1 year free updates and support

Inspect the product-specific SEO analysis

As an avid user of Yoast SEO, you’ll feel right at home. And, if you are a user of WooCommerce SEO you’ve probably written quite a few product descriptions following the feedback you get from the bullets. But, as of WooCommerce 14.4, that feedback has been tailored to products.

Readability

Focusing on improving the readability of your product descriptions will pay off. No one wants to read about your solutions in a language that Shakespeare wouldn’t even understand. Simple language is inclusive language. After all, the goal of those descriptions is not only to be found by search engines but more importantly, to get people to buy the stuff.

The readability checks in WooCommerce SEO help you make your content easier to read. Easier to read equals easier to understand equals easier to act upon.

To make the readability analysis make sense for product pages, we made some changes. In a blog post, having loads of content might make more sense than in a product description. So, WooCommerce SEO works with smaller ranges than Yoast SEO. For instance, the text length check now has a minimum of 200 words on one product page. And the subheading assessment only comes into action over 300 words. These kinds of changes make the analysis much more useful for products.

All of these checks and the corresponding feedback help you to produce better product descriptions.

SEO analysis

While the readability analysis aims to improve the content itself, the SEO analysis aims to make that content findable by search engines. Plus, it checks whether you have included everything Google needs to understand and present your site properly.

In the SEO analysis, you’ll find checks for images and image alt text, text length, meta description usage, subheading use, and much more. It also includes several keyphrase-based checks like keyphrase distribution, keyphrase density, keyphrase in introduction et cetera. These serve as a reminder for you to see if you’ve used your keyphrase properly in all the right places.

How to optimize product descriptions in WooCommerce

By default, WooCommerce doesn’t come with special SEO options to improve your product content. Using Yoast SEO, you get the standard SEO analysis, but only with WooCommerce SEO, you’ll get the special product-specific analysis. So, let’s get to meet that analysis — here’s how to optimize product descriptions in WooCommerce SEO.

Write awesome descriptions in WooCommerce SEO

Hopefully, this post gave you a good idea of how to improve your product descriptions using WooCommerce SEO. Keep an eye on the feedback and you’ll get a feel for what the plugin is looking for. Keep in mind, not every single bullet has to be green. Sometimes, you want to make your own decisions and that’s fine! Just make sure that the overall scores are green, as you see in the screenshot above.

The post Write great product descriptions with WooCommerce SEO appeared first on Yoast.

Adding images to your articles encourages people to read them, and well-chosen images can also back up your message and get you a good ranking in image search results. But you should always remember to provide your images with good alt attributes. Because alt text strengthens the message of your articles with search engine spiders and it improves the accessibility of your website. This article explains what alt and title attributes are and why you should optimize them.

Do you have an orange bullet for the Keyphrase in alt attributes check in Yoast SEO? Read how to turn that bullet green.

What are alt attributes and title attributes?

This is a complete HTML image tag:

<img src=“image.jpg” alt=“image description” title=“image tooltip”>

The alt and title attributes of an image are commonly referred to as alt tag or alt text and title tag. But technically, they’re not tags, they’re attributes. The alt text describes what’s on the image and the function of the image on the page. So if you are using an image as a button to buy product X, the alt text should say: “button to buy product X.”

The alt tag is used by screen readers, which are browsers used by people with a visual impairment for example. These screen readers tell them what is on the image by reading the alt tag. The title attribute is shown as a tooltip when you hover over the element. So, in the case of an image button, the image title could contain an extra call-to-action. However, this is not a best practice.

Each image should have an alt text. Not just for SEO purposes, but also for accessibility. Because people with a visual impairment will otherwise not know what the image is about. A title attribute is not required. What’s more, most of the time it doesn’t even make sense to add it. They are only available to people who use a mouse (or other pointing devices) and the only one case where the title attribute is required for accessibility is on <iframe> and <frame> tags.

If the information conveyed by the title attribute is relevant, consider making it available somewhere else, in plain text and if it’s not relevant, consider removing the title attribute entirely.

But what if an image doesn’t have a purpose?

If you have images in your design that are purely there for design reasons, you’re doing it wrong. Those images should be in your CSS and not in your HTML. If you really can’t do anything about these images being there, give them an empty alt attribute, like so:

<img src="image.png" alt="">

The empty alt attribute makes sure that screen readers skip over the image. If you’re using WordPress, you can leave the field for “Alt text” in the Image settings empty.

alt text and SEO

Google’s article about images has a heading “Use descriptive alt text”. This is no coincidence. Google places a relatively high value on alt text. They use it to determine what is on the image but also how it relates to the surrounding text. This is why, in our Yoast SEO content analysis, we have a feature that specifically checks that you have at least one image with an alt tag that contains your focus keyphrase.

What does the ‘keyphrase in image alt attributes’ check in Yoast SEO do?

The keyword in image alt attributes assessment in Yoast SEO includes two checks: a) if there are images in your post and b) whether these images have an alt text with the focus keyphrase. Firstly, you should always think about adding images to your posts and pages, as these make your content more descriptive and appealing. But by also adding alt text to your images, you provide users of screen readers and search engines with a textual description of what’s on that image. This improves accessibility and if you include your keywords, your chance of ranking in image search too.

We’re definitely not saying you should spam your focus keyphrase into every alt tag. You need good, high-quality, related images for your posts, where it makes sense to have the focus keyword in the alt text. Here’s Google’s advice on choosing a good alt text:

When choosing alt text, focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and is in context of the content of the page. Avoid filling alt attributes with keywords (keyword stuffing) as it results in a negative user experience and may cause your site to be seen as spam.

If your image is of a specific product, include both the full product name and the product ID in the alt tag so that it can be more easily found. In general: if a keyphrase could be useful for finding something that is on the image, include it in the alt tag if you can. Also, don’t forget to change the image file name to be something actually describing what’s on it.

Assessment scores

If your content has more than 4 images, you’ll only get a green bullet if the percentage of images with the keyphrase in the alt text falls within 30 and 70%. When you use the keyphrase in more than 70% of your images, your bullet will turn orange to prevent you from keyword stuffing. If you have Yoast SEO Premium, the plugin will also take synonyms you’ve added to your keyphrase into account.

Go Premium and get access to this feature!

Get access to lots of features and all of our SEO courses with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin:

Get Yoast SEO Premium ▸Only €89 EUR (ex VAT) for 1 site

Image alt tags assessment in WooCommerce SEO

Yoast SEO isn’t the only one of our SEO plugins with an assessment that focuses on the images on your page. We’ve recently updated our WooCommerce SEO plugin to help people fully optimize their product pages. This update comes with a few changes to the checks that are specifically focused on product pages. One of these changes is the addition of the image alt tags assessment, which checks if all images on the page have alt tags. Because all the images you use on your product pages should be relevant images of your product. Images that need to have a description.

alt and title attributes in WordPress

When you upload an image to WordPress, you can set a title and an alt attribute. By default, it uses the image filename in the title attribute. And if you don’t enter an alt attribute, it copies that to the alt attribute. While this is better than writing nothing, it’s pretty poor practice. You really need to take the time to craft a proper alt text for every image you add to a post. Users and search engines will thank you for it.

How to add alt attributes in WordPress

WordPress makes it really easy to add alt attributes. Follow the steps below to add them to your images. Your (image) SEO will truly benefit if you get these details right. Users with a visual impairment will also like you all the more for it.

Read more about image SEO

We have a very popular (and longer) article about Image SEO. That post goes into a ton of different ways to optimize images but is relatively lacking in detail when it comes to alt and title tags — think of this as an add-on to that article. I recommend reading that article if you want to learn more good practices on image SEO.

Read more: Optimizing images for search engines »

The post Image SEO: How to optimize your alt text and title text appeared first on Yoast.

Do you want to learn SEO? Good for you! There are loads of resources to choose from, so we’ve put together this guide to help you navigate all the options. Find out about the different aspects of SEO, which parts you’re likely to need, and how to get started. In addition, check out our top tips for learning SEO effectively!

Anyone can learn the SEO basics!

Learning the basic elements of SEO (search engine optimization) is something anyone can do – whether you’re a small business owner, part of a digital marketing team, an aspiring SEO specialist or just plain old curious. All kinds of people can benefit from knowing how search engines work and how to optimize content to reach the right audiences!

When you’re starting with SEO, and you set out to search for knowledge, you may get overwhelmed. Of course, as a beginner, it is difficult to make sense of it on your own. To spare yourself the hardship, you could follow an online course. An online SEO course is a good beginner’s resource because: 

• Firstly, an online course typically contains bite-sized lessons that move from basic to more complex. That ensures you understand each concept before you move on to the next one. 
• Ideally, a course is created by instructors whose goal is to make sure the material sticks in your memory. 
• Following and completing a course is not only educational, but it can also bring satisfaction and increase motivation.

You can start learning SEO for free with our SEO for beginners training or read our SEO tutorial for beginners. After that there’s still loads more to learn, if you want to!

Pro tip: Get the Yoast SEO Premium plugin for WordPress to make loads of SEO tasks easier — PLUS enjoy complimentary access to all our SEO courses too!

What to learn next

There’s a lot more going on beyond the SEO basics! What you need to know more about depends on why you’re learning SEO in the first place. For some people, just knowing the foundations will be enough. But if you need to do SEO for your work, or if you want a career doing it, then you may need to learn about SEO in more depth. However, which topics you need to know about depends on what you plan to do:

Content SEO

If you’re copywriting for SEO or managing content for a website, there’s a lot more you can learn about topics like keywords, audience research, readability, search appearance, site structure, internal links and duplicate content. These topics will help you to make great content that supports the goals you’re aiming for. Besides these SEO topics, you’ll probably need to know how to work with content in a CMS (content management system) such as WordPress. At the very least, it will certainly help if you know how to draft and publish blog posts and pages.

Technical SEO

If you want to work in web development or technical SEO, that requires more technical skills. These kind of SEO experts usually already know how to build websites using languages like HTML or JavaScript, or are advanced CMS users. On top of those foundations, you’ll need to learn about topics like HTTP status codes and HTTPS, crawlability and indexing, structured data, XML sitemaps, and redirects, to name a few specifics. In general, you should develop a good understanding of how to configure a website in a way that makes it fast to load and easy for Google to ‘read’.

All-around (holistic) SEO

Some people need to have all-around SEO skills, covering both content and technical aspects. However, the amount you need to know about these topics can vary a lot.

For instance, you would probably expect an SEO consultant to have good knowledge of all the factors influencing SEO. If you want to become a real SEO expert, eventually you’ll want to know about everything mentioned here (and more).

On the other hand, a small business owner or SEO freelancer might need to create or maintain a website on their own, so by default all of the SEO considerations fall to them — however, they don’t need to know every aspect inside-out. The suggested learning materials below can help you cover all your bases without needing to become an expert.

How will you learn SEO? Choosing a learning format

There are loads of different ways to learn SEO! It’s really up to you to choose which route you take, and you’re not limited to choosing one way. The best way to learn SEO will probably include a combination of learning methods, both theoretical and practical. And even if you complete a course now, you’ll need to keep refreshing your knowledge to keep up with all the latest changes, because SEO changes over time.

SEO courses and SEO certification

While lots of SEO courses cost money to join, there are plenty of free SEO courses available too (especially if you only need basic knowledge). Some SEO courses might have a tutor or coach to deliver information or give feedback, but there are lots of online courses you can use to learn SEO on your own too. In Yoast SEO academy you can find free courses about SEO and WordPress, and we have even more courses available for our Premium users too!

Pro tip: Want to learn all about SEO? Enjoy access to our full range of certified SEO courses with Yoast SEO Premium. You’ll also get loads of awesome tools and features to help put what you learn into practice!

When it comes to SEO certification, this can be nice to have, but it’s not always essential! There isn’t a standard system of SEO certification in place (yet), so it can be hard for employers to judge exactly what each certificate means, especially if it’s from a company they’ve never heard of. However, when your SEO certification is from a company with a good reputation like Google or Yoast, it can still be great way to show off your knowledge. Make sure to choose a quality SEO course people will recognize and value.

Read more: 4 ways you could benefit from a Yoast SEO training certification »

Learn SEO on your own with self-study

If you prefer, you can learn about SEO on your own by reading books and online articles, or listening to podcasts and watching videos. There are loads of free resources out there to cover all kinds of SEO topics and needs! However, as with anything online, be careful about which sources you get your information from, as not all sources are accurate and reliable. And regardless of how reliable your source is, pay attention to when your chosen resources are published, too! A few years is a long time in the SEO world, so it’s important to make sure your information isn’t old and outdated.

Keep reading: Find loads of articles about SEO topics in the Yoast blog »

Learn SEO by doing it

Theoretical knowledge is a great foundation, but it’s no substitute for real experience doing SEO! If SEO is part of your work, then you already have opportunities to put what you learn into practice. If you don’t have a website to practice on, then you should seriously consider making one. Actually doing SEO can help to understand what you’ve read about and remember it better. Plus once you start building your site and writing content, you might find new questions arising that you hadn’t thought about before! Really doing SEO for yourself is a great way to learn, and keep learning.

Read on: How to make a WordPress website »

Tips for learning SEO

Whether you are using an online course, a book, or online posts, there are some strategies you can use to direct your learning.

1. Set goals

A successful learning journey begins with goals. Goals, especially challenging ones, are most likely to motivate you to persevere and reach the finish line. When setting goals, you should ask yourself a crucial question: What do I want to accomplish, and what goal will help me get there?

Knowing precisely what, when, and why you want to accomplish something can keep you motivated. And, specific goals are easier to evaluate compared to more general ones. 

Now, you try it, use this formula: I will [insert how and what you will do] in/by [insert time], because [insert reason].

2. Make a plan 

Goals are even more powerful when you make a plan on how to accomplish them. A helpful planning strategy is implementation intentions, which uses a simple If…then formula. Its purpose is to get you to think about the best time and the conditions that allow you to learn. In that way, you can set a realistic and concrete plan that should be easy to follow. 

What is your situation? Can you evaluate your schedule and decide when the best time for you to learn is? 

3. Don’t binge-learn

Most of us binge series. Streaming services have enabled us to. It can be tempting to also binge (or cram) learning. Get as much information as possible, as fast as possible. It’s fast, so it must work, right? Well, no. In short, learning needs to be slow and spaced. By spacing learning, you allow the material to get etched in your long-term memory. Later, when you encounter a problem or a new situation, you can summon the knowledge from your memory to come up with solutions. 

4. Actively ask yourself questions 

Self-explanation means pausing while learning and thinking about the topic. You can do that by simply asking yourself questions such as  “Why does this work this way?”. Then, instead of looking up the answer, try to answer it to yourself from memory. It may sound crazy, but it works!

5. Use what you learn

Speaking of application, you probably know that no matter how much theory you learn, it will not mean a lot unless you start using it. So, as soon as you feel you’ve understood a concept, put it to the test. With SEO, there are many opportunities to get working straight away.

6. Don’t be afraid to ask for help

Feedback is a good way to learn. So ask for it! You can easily send your site to a friend or a colleague and ask them to give you their impression. Let them go through it and be the judges of your texts or your site structure. In addition, if you dare, you could even post the site on forums or social media to ask feedback from a more general audience.

7. Evaluate

When you feel that you have completed all your goals, it will be good to evaluate what went well and what could have gone better. Did you stick to your goals? Was your planning too ambitious? Could you apply what you learned? Did you need help, and did you ask for it? Learning about your learning in this way can help you improve and be even more effective next time! 

Can you do SEO without learning SEO?

The answer to this question is “yes and no”. If you use one of our Yoast SEO plugins, you’ll get access to loads of handy optimization features. Moreover, after some basic configuration the plugin will automically take care of lots of important behind-the-scenes technical SEO stuff too. So using the plugins means you can avoid learning a lot of aspects for yourself, especially when it comes to the technical parts. However, the plugins can’t do everything, so you really need to learn about SEO to get the best results!

Get access to all Yoast SEO academy courses

Enjoy our best SEO features in Yoast SEO Premium, plus get all SEO academy courses included!

Get Yoast SEO Premium ▸Only €89 EUR (ex VAT) for 1 site

Keep on reading: How to start with SEO »

The post How to learn SEO: A guide for all backgrounds appeared first on Yoast.

Schema.org takes care of all the structured data needs on your website. Search engines like Google can pick up this data and present your page in an enhanced way if you use it to describe products, reviews, events, and recipes. If you want rich results like snippets, interactive mobile results, voice-activated actions, or a listing in the knowledge graph, you need to describe your pages with structured data. This ultimate guide is an overview of this wide-ranging topic.

What is structured data?

Structured data is a way of describing your website to make it easier for search engines to understand. You need a so-called vocabulary to make it work, and the one used by the big search engines is Schema.org. Schema.org provides a series of tags and properties to describe your products, reviews, local business listings, job postings, et cetera in detail.

The major search engines, Google, Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo, collectively developed this vocabulary to reach a shared language to understand websites better. Today, search engines use it for many things, from fact-checking content to COVID-19 alerting!

If implemented correctly, search engines can use the applied structured data to understand your page’s contents better. As a result, your site might be presented better in search results, for example, in the form of rich results like rich snippets. However, there are no guarantees you’ll get rich results — that’s up to the search engines.

Why do you need structured data?

Describing your products, reviews, events, job postings, and more with structured data in the Schema.org vocabulary makes your site instantly comprehensible by search engines. This means that they can tell exactly what every part of your site is about — and how everything connects. Search engines no longer have to guess that a product listing is a product listing; you can now say it is. Plus, you can define how everything relates.

Is structured data important for SEO?

To cut a long story short: yes, structured data in the form of Schema.org is important for your SEO. Correctly implementing data might not give you better rankings, but it will indirectly make your site a better search result.

Enhanced search results give searchers an easier way to pick a result from the list of links. If your listing is rich and your page does what your listing promises, you are a valid result for the customer, leading to a lower bounce rate. A lower bounce rate tells Google that your site is a well-regarded result that promises and delivers.

Also, since structured data is still picking up steam, you have a good chance of getting a head start on your competitors.

Structured data leads to rich results

By describing your site for search engines, you’re allowing them to do interesting things with your content. Schema.org and its support are in constant development, so it is improving and expanding all the time. As structured data forms the basis for many new developments in the SEO world — like voice search –, there are bound to be more shortly. Below is an overview of the rich search results currently available; you can find examples of them in Google’s Search Gallery. At the moment, these are a couple of the available rich results:

The rich results formerly known as rich snippets

Rich results are the extra pieces of information and interactive features shown on a search result page. In addition to the regular black lines of meta description text, you can enhance a search result with product information like prices or reviews or extra navigational tools like breadcrumbs or site search.

Read more: Rich snippets everywhere »

Rich results on mobile

Rich results are even more prevalent on mobile. Search results for certain items, like local restaurants, recipes, movies, how-tos, and courses, can get special treatment in the mobile results. These are often presented in a touch-friendly, swipeable way, also known as the carousel.

Google is incredibly interested in getting you to do as much as you can within these results. So, you can book your flight tickets, reserve a spot in a popular restaurant, order movie tickets and send a tasty-looking recipe for cheesecake straight to your Google Home so it can assist you while baking it. Structured data power almost everything. And this is only the beginning.

Knowledge Graph

The Knowledge Graph is the big block of information on the right-hand side in Google. This block details different bits of information about a particular search result. Google fills this graph by checking and evaluating related content about this specific subject. One of the sources it checks is the structured data of a site.

If you have a validated company or an authority on a certain subject, you might see your name, logo, and social media profiles appear.

Featured snippets

OK, this might be a sneaky addition because featured snippets are rich results, but they do not get their content from structured data. A featured snippet answers a search question directly in the search results but uses regular content from a web page to do so.

Does structured data work on mobile?

Yes, the results of implementing structured data work everywhere. Mobile is one of the places where the results of a Schema implementation are most visible.

If a page meets the criteria set by Google, you can now book movie tickets or reserve a table at a restaurant directly from the search results. If you implement structured data correctly, you could also be eligible for several interactive extras on the mobile search results pages. In addition, if you add AMP to the equation, you can get even more Google-approved interactive goodies on mobile.

Different kinds of structured data

If you look at the Schema.org website, you’ll notice that there is a lot of information you could add to your site as structured data. Not everything is relevant, though. Before you start implementing structured data, you need to know what you should markup. Do you have a product in an online store? Do you own a restaurant? Or do you have a local business providing services to the community? Or a site with your favorite cheesecake recipes? Whichever it is, you need to know what you want to do and explore the possibilities. Don’t forget to check the documentation by search engines to understand what they need from you.

Don’t go for the most obscure ones; pick the ones that are relatively easy to implement. Some Schema.orgs appear on less than a thousand sites, but others appear on millions. Let’s take a look at a couple of the most important ones:

Creative works

The Creative Work group encompasses all creative things that have been produced by someone or something. You’ll find the most common ones below, but the list is much longer. You’ll also find properties for sculptures, games, conversations, software applications, visual artworks, and much more. However, most of these properties don’t have a rich presentation in search engine results, so they are less valuable. But, as mentioned earlier, if your site has items in the categories below, be sure to mark them up with Schema.org.

Articles

An article could be a news item or part of an investigative report. You can distinguish between a news article, a tech article, or even a blog post.

Books

A book is a book, be it in paper form or in digital form as an eBook. You can mark up every type of property, from the author who wrote it to any awards it has won.

Courses

Courses can also appear as a rich result.

Datasets

Google understands structured data for datasets and can use this to help surface and understand these datasets better. Find out more on Google’s developer pages.

FAQ pages

Make a great FAQ page to answer frequently asked questions your customers might have. Yoast SEO helps you turn those FAQs into beautiful rich results in Google with the Schema structured data FAQ content block.

How-tos

Today, you can markup your how-to articles with HowTo structured data. In the new WordPress block editor, you’ll find our new and free structured data content block for how-tos. By following a step-by-step process, users can get a specific task done. At the moment, there’s no rich result attached to this.

Music

Music also gets the structured data treatment. There are a couple of Schema.orgs of interest for music, like MusicRecording, MusicAlbum, MusicEvent, and MusicGroup.

Q&A pages

Question and answer pages are eligible for rich results as well. According to Google, Q&A pages are different from FAQ pages, where you can find multiple questions and answers on a page. More in Google’s Q&A page documentation. Use the Yoast SEO structured data content blocks to provide structured data for your FAQ pages.

Recipes

By adding Recipe data to the recipes on your cooking website, you can get your recipes featured directly in search results. What’s more, with the advent of mobile rich results, recipes might even be presented in a stunning new way on mobile featuring great images — if you add them. And that’s not all, because you can now send your recipes to Google Home and get Assistant to speak it out loud for you. How cool is that?

Speakable

Google is currently testing the implementation of speakable Schema.org. With this code, you can tell a search engine that a piece of content is specially written to be spoken aloud by digital assistants like Alexa, Siri, Cortana, or Google Assistant.

TV & Movies

Movies and TV shows get their own piece of structured data as well. Searching for a movie in search engines will yield a rich result with reviews, poster art, cast information, and even the ability to directly order tickets for a showing. You can even mark up lists of the best movies ever made or your favorite TV shows. What’s more, get your visitors to watch the content directly by adding ViewAction or Watch Action structured data.

Videos

It’s possible to do all kinds of interesting things with video. Google, in particular, is working on new ways to display videos in the search results.

Podcast

Have a podcast? Why not mark up your podcast with structured data so Google can do cool stuff with it, like showing each episode’s description and even adding a play button as well.

Commerce

There are also structured data for commercial goals. Here, you’ll find a couple of important ones:

Events

Marking up your event listings with the correct Event Schema.org, might lead to search engines showing your events directly in the search results. This is a must-have if you own a nightclub, a venue, or any business that regularly puts on events.

Businesses and organizations

If you make money with your website, chances are you own a business. If you’re a site owner or work on a company site, you’ll find the business and organization Schema.orgs interesting. Almost every site can benefit from the correct business Schema.org. If you do it well, you could get a nice Knowledge Graph or another type of rich listing in the search engines. You can even add special structured data for your contact details so customers can contact you directly from the search results. For local businesses, our Local SEO plugin helps you take care of all your local structured data needs.

Keep reading: Local business listings with Schema.org and JSON-LD »

Job Postings

Have job postings on your site? Mark them up with the job postings structured data to have them show up nicely in Google. We use this on all our Yoast job postings as well.

Products

Schema.org for products is almost as important as the one for businesses and organizations. Using Product Schema.org, you can give your products the extra data search engines need to give you rich snippets, for example. Think about all the search results you see with added information, like pricing, reviews, availability, etc. If you have products, this should be a major part of your structured data strategy. Don’t forget to mark up your product images.

Read on: Rich snippets for product listings with Schema.org »

Reviews

Reviews and ratings play an important role in today’s search process. Businesses, service providers, and online stores all use reviews to attract more customers and show how trustworthy their offer is. Getting those five stars in search engines might be the missing link to creating a truly successful business.

Keep on reading: Grow your business with ratings and reviews »

Actions for voice assistants

Voice assistants are all the rage, and we will see a lot happen in this space. Take recipes, for instance; you can send a recipe from the search results — powered by structured data and AMP — to your Google Home to read aloud while cooking. These are called Actions, and there are a whole bunch of them. If you want your recipes to appear in the Google Assistant library, you need to add a specific structured data set and adhere to additional rules. You can find more on that on the Creating a recipe action page. Visit Google’s Assistant site to get a feel for what’s possible (a lot!).

The technical details

To get started with marking up your pages, you need to understand how Schema.org actually works. If you look closely at the full specs on Schema.org, you’ll see a strict hierarchy in the vocabulary. Everything is connected, just like everything is connected on your pages. Scroll through the list to see all the options at a glance and note down the ones you think you need.

Let’s look at the hierarchy. A Schema.org implementation starts with a Thing; this is the most generic type of item. A Thing could be a more specific type of item, for instance, a Creative Work, an Event, Organisation, Person, Place, or Product.

For example, a movie is a “Thing” and a “Creative Work”, which falls under the category “Movie”. You can add a lot of properties to this, like a “Description”, a “Director”, an “Actor”, a poster “Image”, “Duration” or “Genre”. There are loads of properties to add, so you can get as specific as you want. However, don’t go overboard since not search engines use every property – at least not yet anyway. You should look at the specifications in Google’s documentation, for instance, to see which properties are required and which are recommended.

A sample Schema.org hierarchy

If we put what we know now in a hierarchy, this is what you will end up with:

• Thing
  • Creative Work
    • Movie
      • Description (type: text)
      • Director (type: person)
      • Actor (type: person)
      • Image (type: ImageObject or URL)
      • etc.

If it would be a local business, you could use something like this:

• Thing
  • Organisation (or Place)
    • LocalBusiness
      • Dentist
        • Name
        • Address
        • Email
        • Logo
        • Review
        • etc.

For local businesses, you could pick a more specific type of business. This makes it easier for search engines to determine what kind of business you own. There are hundreds of types of local businesses, but your business might not fit one of the descriptions. Using the Product Types Ontology you can get more specific information if your listing is too broad.

Sticking to the local business example, you’ll see that Google lists several required properties, like the NAP (Name and Phone) details of your business. There are also loads of recommended properties, like a URL, geo-coordinates, opening hours, etc. Try to fill out as much of these as you can because search engines will only give you the full presentation you’re looking for. You’ll find our Local SEO plugin very helpful if you need help with your local business markup.

What do you need to describe for search engines?

Looking at Schema.org for the first time might feel a bit daunting. The list is enormous, and the possibilities are endless, so it’s easy to become overwhelmed. To get over this, you need to go back to basics. Think about what your site, business, or product is about and write down the specifications and properties you feel are important, then work your way up from there. Also, Yoast SEO covers the most important properties automatically — so need to worry about those!

Having said that, there are a couple of sections you should prioritize in your plan to add structured data to your site. If you start with these three, you’ll have the basics covered, and then you can build on that. You should absolutely start with structured data for your business details, products, and reviews. These will have the biggest effect in the short term.

How to implement structured data

Don’t be frightened, but here comes the technical part of the story. Before we do that, we’d like to remind you that Yoast SEO comes with a crazy good structured data implementation out of the box. For most sites, it’ll automatically take care of the most pressing structured data needs. Of course, you can extend our structured data framework, as mentioned below, as your needs become bigger.

There’s nothing scary about adding the data to your pages anymore, thanks to JSON-LD. This JavaScript-based data format makes it much easier to add structured data since it forms a block of code and is no longer embedded in the HTML of your page. This makes it easier to write and maintain, plus both humans and machines better understand it. If you need help implementing JSON-LD structured data, you can enroll in our free Structured data for beginners course, our Understanding structured data course or follow a high-level course on Google’s Codelabs.

Structured data with JSON-LD

JSON-LD is the preferred method of adding structured data to your site. However, not all search engines have been quick to adopt it — Bing being the last hold-out. Thankfully, Microsoft came round in August 2018 and now supports this, the most efficient method.

Ever since Yoast SEO 11.0, the plugin comes with a fully-featured Schema.org implementation. Yoast SEO now creates a structured data graph for every page on your site, interconnecting everything. While working on this, we’ve also created complete and detailed documentation on Schema, including a specification for integrating structured data. Here you’ll also find some example graphs for various kinds of common pages on your site.

If you want to learn more about working with all this on your site, you should read our article on how to use JSON-LD to add Schema.org data to your website, adding structured data to your site with Google Tag Manager, or learn how to add structured data with our training on structured data and SEO, part of our Yoast SEO academy training subscription.

The old ways: RFDa and Microdata

The classic way of writing structured data for inclusion on your pages involves directly embedding it into your HTML. This made a really inefficient and error-prone process and is much of the reason why the uptake of Schema.org hasn’t been swift. Writing and maintaining it via RDFa or Microdata is a pain. Believe us, try to do as much as you can in JSON-LD.

Microdata needs itemprops to function, so everything has to be inline coded. You can instantly see how that makes it hard to read, write and edit.

Structured data and Google AMP

The open-source AMP project (Accelerated Mobile Pages) has been causing quite a stir. The project aims to get pages to load lightning fast on mobile using a special kind of HTML. Google is pushing AMP pretty hard and also mentions its reliance on structured data. If you want particular rich results, you might have to use AMP and add that specific structured data.

Tools for working with structured data

Yoast SEO handles a lot of structured data for you automatically in the background. You could extend our Schema framework, of course — see the next chapter –, but if adding code by hand seems scary, you could try some of the tools listed below. If you are still not sure how to go about this, ask your web developer for help. They will probably fix this for you in a couple of minutes.

• Generators
  • Google Data Highlighter
  • Google Structured Data Markup Helper
  • JSON-LD Schema Generator by Merkle
• Validators and test tools
  • Yandex Structured data markup
  • Yandex Structured data validator API
  • Structured Data Testing Tool
  • Google Search Console Rich Cards
  • Google Rich Results Tester
  • Bing Webmaster Tools Markup Validator
• WordPress Plugins
  • Yoast SEO Local (Our Local SEO plugin adds Schema.org for your business details, like address, geo-location, opening hours, etc.)
  • The Yoast SEO WooCommerce plugin outputs product Schema to get your products highlighted in search.
  • Yoast SEO uses JSON-LD to add Schema.org information about your site search, your site name, your logo, images, articles, social profiles and a lot more to your web pages. We ask you if your site represents a person or an organization and adapt our structured data based on that. Also, our structured data content blocks for the WordPress block editor make it easy to add structured data to your FAQs and How-to’s.

The Yoast SEO Schema structured data framework

Implementing structured data has never been really easy. Also, the results of the majority of those implementations were often lacking. At Yoast, we set out to enhance the Schema output by millions of sites. For this, we built a Schema framework — ready to be adapted and extended by anyone. One of the things we did, is combine all those loose little bits and pieces of structured data that appear on many sites, improve these, and put them in a graph. By interconnecting all these bits, we offer search engines all your connections on a silver platter.

Of course, there’s a lot more to it. We can also extend the output of Yoast SEO by adding specific pieces of Schema, like how-tos or FAQ. For this, we built structured data content blocks for use in the WordPress block editor. Together, these help you remove barriers for search engines and users alike — as it has never been easier to work with structured data.

Read the Yoast SEO Schema documentation if you want to learn how Yoast SEO works with structured data, how you can extend it via an API, and how you can integrate it into your own work.

External links

Most search engines have their own developer center where you can find more information on the inner workings of their structured data implementations. Read these to see what works and what doesn’t. It would be best to stick to their rules because a bad Schema.org implementation could lead to a penalty. Always check your code in the structured data test tool to see if it’s correct. Fix errors and regularly maintain the code on your site to see if it is still up to scratch.

• Google’s Introduction to Structured Data
• Bing’s Marking Up Your Site with Structured Data
• Yandex’ Schema.org for Webmasters

In the end

You can’t run away from structured data anymore. If your site means anything to you, you should look into it and figure out the best way to make use of Schema.org. Still need some help? Read more on how Yoast SEO makes it easy for you. Or check out our digital story on rich results, structured data and Schema. Because implemented correctly, it can do great things for your site, now and in the future. Search engines are constantly developing new ways to present search results, and more often than not, they use Schema.org data.

Adding structured data to your site is an essential part of technical SEO. If you’re wondering how fit your site’s overall technical SEO is, take our technical SEO fitness quiz to find out. This quiz helps you figure out what you can still work on!

Read more: How to check the performance of your rich results in Google Search Console »

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WooCommerce is one of the most popular platforms to run an online store on. It gives you everything you need to build a successful store — well, almost everything. WooCommerce can use a little help to get the most out of it. One of the tools that can help you maximize its performance is the Yoast WooCommerce SEO plugin. For WooCommerce SEO 14.4, we built a greatly improved, product-specific version of the analysis you know and love from Yoast SEO. All aimed at helping you produce fantastic pages that help sell your products.

A better analysis to help you build product pages

Today, we’re giving the WooCommerce SEO plugin an extra dimension with an improved, product page-specific analysis. This is a carefully fine-tuned version of the famous SEO and readability analyses in Yoast SEO, tailored for product pages. You now get extra tools to improve the content of your product descriptions.

Help your online store stand out!

Get this and much more in the Yoast WooCommerce SEO plugin!

Get WooCommerce SEO ▸Only $69 USD (ex VAT) for 1 site – incl. 1 year free updates and support

Improve product descriptions with WooCommerce SEO 14.4

What did we change in WooCommerce SEO 14.4? Quite a lot, actually. To work properly on product pages, we had to set some new boundaries for a couple of existing checks. In addition, we added a couple that only make sense on product pages. Here’s a list of the changes and additions:

• Adds the Image alt tags assessment, which checks if all images have alt tags.
• Removes the Outbound links assessment and Internal links assessment, as they are less relevant on product pages.
• Sets the recommended minimum of the Keyphrase length assessment to 4 words.
• Sets the recommended minimum of the Text length assessment to 200 words.
• The SEO title width assessment no longer penalizes short titles.
• Includes videos in the Images assessments on product pages.
• Sets the recommended number of images and/or videos to 4.
• Adds the following improvements to the readability analysis on product pages:
• Adds the List presence assessment which recommends using lists on product pages.
• Makes the Subheading distribution assessment appear only when the text contains more than 300 words.
• Sets the recommended maximum length of the Paragraph length assessment to 70 words.
• Sets the recommended maximum percentage of long sentences in the Sentence length assessment to 20%. Language-specific percentages can override this default value.

Product descriptions are essential — make them awesome!

Writing unique product descriptions is hard work, but that work pays off. To help you improve your product content and the SEO of your product pages, we’ve decided to give WooCommerce SEO 14.1 a better, tailored analysis. Using it will give you everything you need to build better product pages.

Don’t have WooCommerce SEO yet? What are you waiting for?

The post WooCommerce SEO 14.4: a product-specific SEO analysis appeared first on Yoast.

One of our core philosophies is keeping you and your site up to date with the latest changes in Google’s inner workings and policies. These last couple of weeks saw an interesting new development, with Google rewriting many titles in the SERPs. In Yoast SEO 17.1, we are making a couple of small changes that help you write great titles that stand up to Google’s scrutiny. Another cool thing is a product-specific SEO and readability analysis in WooCommerce SEO 14.4.

Yoast SEO 17.1: Keeping up with changes in search and SERPs

For years, Google has been changing stuff in the search engines results pages if it thinks it can write a better description of your content. Now, Google started to rewrite titles much more aggressively, and the results vary. Still, millions of homepages out there have a page title of ‘Home’ or a contact form that says ‘Contact’ and that’s not good enough. Google does great work writing proper titles for pages like these.

In Yoast SEO, we offer tools to help you write a great page title (the <h1>) as well as an SEO title (the <title>). We even have an assessment that checks if your title contains your focus keyphrase and whatnot. In addition, the assessment checks whether your title fits within a certain range — if it’s too short, you’ll get a red bullet. In Yoast SEO 17.1, we’re changing the title assessment.

Google changes titles, we change the title assessment

In Yoast SEO 17.1, we still check your titles, but we won’t penalize you if it’s too short. Shorter titles are theoretically less likely to be changed by Google, as they’re more precise and concise. They’re more focused and contain fewer superlatives, for instance. We’re not saying that you should write shorter titles, though, but we’re giving you the option.

As of today, we give you more control over your titles — whether they are short or long. Although, we’re not changing the upper limits yet. Of course, we can’t control what Google does with — or to? — your title, so it’s up to you to write a title that clearly describes the page in the best possible way.

If you are worried about how your titles might look you need to analyze the changes in the SERPs. You don’t have to check every page you have, but you need to check up on your most important ones. Search Google to see how they appear and if Google rewrote stuff. Check your analytics to see if there was a drop in CTR to those pages. And, of course, keep crafting remarkable page titles that stand the test of time — and that Google recognizes as such.

The second change is in the title separators. We’ve removed the | and ~ from the title separator settings because Google seems to change these to — in the SERP titles actively. If you want, you can pick another separator.

While we were at it, we also ensured that our Google Preview closely mimics the latest visuals in the search results. This gives you the most up-to-date view of how your post might look in Google — barring Google’s rewriting efforts, of course.

More enhancements in Yoast SEO 17.1

Yoast SEO 17.1 comes with more enhancements, of course. We’ve improved the filtering of function words in Dutch, English, Indonesian, Russian, and Spanish on the language front by including time-related words like ‘minute.’

Looking at performance optimizations, we have made the process of saving posts faster by excluding unchanged items. This is very noticeable on posts with many links. Finally, we now no longer show the SEO Optimization notification on non-production sites, as this is not very useful in that situation.

WooCommerce SEO 14.4: an analysis focussed on products

Today, our WooCommerce SEO plugin also gets a big upgrade. In WooCommerce 14.4, we’ve updated the SEO and readability analysis making it product-specific. We’ve added a couple of new checks, changed the ranges of several of the existing ones, and made sure that they all made sense to use on product pages.

For instance, there’s a new list check to see if you’ve used a list on your product pages — as lists are essential tools to convey information about your products. We’ve updated the images check to see if you’ve added enough images and videos, while also checking if they have proper alt text. Many ranges of the checks have changed as well, so you don’t need to write 900 words for your product pages to have a green bullet. These are just a couple of the changes in WooCommerce 14.4.

Read up on all the cool new stuff in WooCommerce SEO 14.4 and use it to make the best possible product pages out there!

Update now!

Yoast SEO 17.1 is out today. In this release, we fine-tuned some things based on a couple of recent changes at Google. We’ve also worked on the performance, and we’ve added a couple of language enhancements. If that’s not all, we gave our WooCommerce SEO plugin an updated, product-specific version of the analyses to help you build better product pages.

The post Yoast SEO 17.1: an update on page titles appeared first on Yoast.

Accessibility matters. And making sure that your website is accessible for everyone shouldn’t be an afterthought. It plays a big part in the usability of your website and that’s why Google is also focusing more on how accessible your content is. Fortunately, awareness is growing and platforms such as WordPress offer lots of possibilities to make your website more accessible. We’re well on our way, but there’s still lots of work to be done. In this blog post, we’ll tell you why you should focus on accessibility and which tools can help you!

What is accessibility?

Accessibility is about how well your software or website can be used by everyone, including people with disabilities. Wikipedia puts it like this:

Accessibility refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments so as to be usable by people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design and practice of accessible development ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers).

It’s the ability for someone to access and benefit from a system or other entity, such as your website. To ensure this, accessibility focuses on enabling this access for people with disabilities.

In their webmaster guidelines, Google mentions the importance of making your content accessible. And although it’s not mentioned in so many words, they also have the following statement on their website: “Everyone should be able to access and enjoy the web. We’re committed to making that a reality.” Meaning that Google also sees that accessibility matters.

Accessibility matters

Even though the internet isn’t that old, most of us can’t imagine what life without it would look like. The web connects billions of people worldwide, regardless of where or who they are. The great thing about the internet is that it provides loads of information on pretty much any topic you can think of.

However, our worldwide population is made out of lots of different people. And every one of those people should have access to all the information that is freely available online. That’s why accessibility matters. Take, for example, everyone with a vision impairment. Globally, at least 2.2 billion people have a near or distance vision impairment. In addition, color blindness affects approximately 1 in 12 men (8%) and 1 in 200 women (0.5%). That’s quite a lot of people you’re missing out on when you’re not making your website accessible for them.

But there’s more!

Visual impairment is one of the things you need to consider, but definitely not the only one. Think of dyslexia and other reading difficulties or dexterity difficulties. Users with severe dexterity difficulties are unlikely to use a mouse and often rely on the keyboard instead. Have you ever tried to use your website, or our plugin for that matter, without using a mouse? It’s a tough job.

To give another example, a few years ago, we had a customer with hearing difficulties that wanted to take our all-around SEO training. He was faced with over two hours of videos without subtitles. It’s quite easy to add these and so we did.

We know it sounds like there’s a lot that you need to work on, that you might not have thought about before. But luckily there are lots of great tools that can help you figure out what you can still improve on. And if you have a website on WordPress, you’ll be glad to know that there’s actually an accessibility team that dedicates their time to making WordPress more accessible with every release. But that’s not the only platform that sees the importance, for example, Drupal is also working on its accessibility.

Accessibility tools

Do you want to make your website more accessible? That’s great! There are a few things you can do right away. The obvious things that are easily changed are your use of headings, contrast and descriptive links.

Use of headings

Headings help both search engines and users understand your text. It makes it easier for them to find out what a post or page is about. As Web Accessibility initiative W3C puts it: headings tell you more about the organization of content on a page, and web browsers or assistive technologies can use them to provide in-page navigation.

Headings help every one of your visitors figure out what your text is about. So make sure that they’re descriptive and nested the right way. Don’t just use them as a design element (“it’s the only way I know how to enlarge my text”) or to impact SEO (“I use all H1 headings, that makes it all very important to Google”). Both might seem like an easy solution, but they are bad practices as your headings should have a clear structure.

A tool that you can use to test the heading structure on your site is HeadingsMap. This extension for Chrome and Firefox allows you to view the heading structure of a page. It’s good to know that you should only use one H1 heading on your page, which should be the title of your page or post. After that, you can use H2 and H3 subheadings (or even H4 headings and beyond) to define sections in your text. Read more in our article on how to use headings on your website.

Color contrast

Color contrast is the difference in light (technically, luminance) between anything in the foreground, like text, and its background. If you pick a black background for your menu and use text that is very dark, this text will become very hard to read. And choosing two colors that look very contrasting to you, does not mean that this contrast is good enough for everyone. That’s why there are a few tools out there that you can use to audit the contrast on your page. For example, contrastchecker.com that checks contrast levels and gives information on the accessibility levels:

It also gives you a contrast ratio score based upon the W3C contrast guidelines, which consider 4.5:1 to be OK. As you can see in this example, the colors I’ve picked are nowhere near this minimum score.

The contrast checker is pretty straightforward. If you want to play around with contrast to find how this affects visits by for instance people that are colorblind, you might want to check the Color Contrast Analyser that comes with a color blindness simulator. Allowing you to preview designs as they might be seen by users with colorblindness.

If you’re a Mac user, Sim Daltonism is also a great tool. Like the Color Contrast Analyzer, it allows you to hover a website and test a number of colorblindness variations:

Descriptive links, alt text etc.

The last accessibility tool we’d like to highlight is one that tests how well your content holds up when a screen reader is being used. For a lot of people with visual impairment, this assistive technology helps them make sense of a page. A screen reader converts text, images, links and other elements into speech or braille. On a Mac, you can use VoiceOver (which is already on your computer) to test this. On a Windows computer, you can download NVDA for free.

Now, why would you want to ‘listen’ to how your content is being presented through a screen reader? Because it helps you experience your content from the perspective of someone who’s not able to see it. This helps you identify problems with reading order, table markup, images and other form elements and links on your page. Images without any alt text will not be described to this site visitor. And non-descriptive links with a text like ‘read more’ or ‘click here’ give no information whatsoever on where this link is taking you. These may seem like small things, but for someone who is experiencing these issues, it’s enough reason to leave your page straight away.

One more thing

The people at WAVE Web Accessibility created a tool to quickly identify a lot more rights and wrongs on your page. This is done completely automatically and will need a human eye to evaluate what improvements are realistic and which are not. We wouldn’t recommend using this as a replacement for the accessibility tools mentioned above, but it is definitely worth looking into!

All of the tools mentioned above and more can be found in the WordPress Accessibility Handbook.

It’s a continous process

All of this may feel a tad overwhelming, but you don’t have to fix everything today. Being aware of the importance is the first step. Now you can determine how accessible your pages are and what you still need to work on. Just don’t consider accessibility as an ‘extra’. If your website is not accessible, it will feel very unwelcoming for a considerable part of your audience. Also, following accessibility guidelines will improve your website for all of your visitors.

We at Yoast also work hard on making our website and Yoast SEO plugin more accessible. It’s an ongoing process that requires you to reevaluate every piece of software or content you’re putting out there. The important thing is to keep accessibility in mind and work on improving it where you can. If you want to learn more about accessibility and other essential SEO skills, make sure to check out our all-around SEO training.

The post How to improve the accessibility of your website appeared first on Yoast.

Google has made changes to the way they show page titles in the organic search results and the SEO community is up in arms. But that’s not all that happened this month. There was lots of SEO news in August 2021 and as usual, our resident experts Joost and Jono discussed all of it in our monthly webinar. Want to know what they talked about? In this post, we’ll go over the highlights of this month’s webinar.

Watch the August 2021 SEO news webinar

In this blog post, you can find the highlights of our August 2021 edition of the SEO news webinar. If you’d rather (re)watch the webinar, you can find the video below.

Pro tip: Don’t forget to register for our next SEO news webinar on the 28th of September, 2021. We hope to see you there!

The latest Google news

Google is rewriting page titles in the search results

For years now, Google has been changing up meta descriptions to match them with specific search queries. The idea is that they understand the user’s intent and want to make sure that the meta description aligns with that. Now, they’ve started doing the same thing with title tags by rewriting and showing different titles in the organic search results. However, it seems that in some cases this isn’t going as flawlessly as they hoped.

Google is changing the wording and in some cases, this isn’t for the better. As the example above makes clear, these rewritten titles can lead to some weird results and even wrong information. This is a massive issue when it comes to reliability, reputation and even legal aspects. Which, logically, led to quite some commotion around this in the SEO world.

To give some perspective, the reason Google is rewriting these title tags is that there are still a lot of pages out there without proper title tags. Homepages that show up with the title ‘Home’ in the search results, or page titles that are stuffed with keywords in the hope that they will rank better. With this new update, Google wants to make sure that page titles describe what the page is about and give enough context.

Now, keep in mind that in many cases this isn’t going wrong. Your page titles might be exactly the same or might have even changed for the better. But to be sure, we advise you to keep an eye on your key pages. Make sure to provide your pages with great page titles that are specific and not stuffed with keywords. And monitor your pages by checking out how they are showing up in Google and by looking for possible places where your CTR might have dropped (or your bounce rate might have increased). If you are noticing any wrong titles, Google has a thread where you can give feedback.

Google announces new ways to find deals and shop

Google is launching new sections and tools to showcase deals in their search results and in Google Merchant Center. Now, promotions and deals uploaded in the Merchant Center will be automatically surfaced to Shopping users. Google is investing a lot of time into these new ways to find deals and shop online.

We’ve talked about Google Merchant Center quite a bit these past few webinars and that’s not without reason. If you are selling something online you should really look into getting your products on there. You can simply add all of your product information and they will become eligible for Google’s services (Images, Search, Discover and YouTube). Even if you’re not running any paid advertising. More and more, the lines between organic results and Google’s Merchant Center are blurring and you want to make sure that you’re part of this ecosystem.

Google adds author URL property to identify authors

Google has been trying to identify authors of online articles for quite a while now. Which they are now able to do, by adding a recommended author URL property. To elaborate, this author.url property is a link to a page that identifies the author of an article. This can be an author’s social media page, about me page or any other page that helps identify them.

Our Yoast SEO plugin has actually been doing this for quite a while. If you’re a user of Yoast SEO, do make sure that you have links to your social media pages on your WordPress author profile page. That way Yoast SEO can output the necessary information on your authors. This news is also validation that we’re using the right approach when it comes to Schema in Yoast SEO. When you use our plugin, it will output lots (and we do mean lots) of structured data that makes it easier for Google to understand your pages and show them as relevant results.

Larger images in Discover improve click-through rate

This is a bit of fun, but probably not shocking, news. Google did a case study and found out that using larger images in Discover positively impacts the click-through rate. It’s great to see that both examples highlighted in the case study are running Yoast SEO. This came out of a change they made in 2020 when they introduced a meta tag that allowed them to feature publishers’ images in larger formats.

This change has led to publishers reporting greater visibility of their content, including increased traffic to their site and improved click-through rates. So if you have large images on your website, make sure to add the max-image-preview:large meta tag to your pages to benefit from this. Both WordPress and Yoast SEO can actually do this for you by default.

The latest internet news

YouTube is overhauling its search results

If you’re not doing anything with video right now, this might be the moment to get started. YouTube is making a few changes that can be very interesting in regards to marketing and SEO. One of the things they’re doing is making more content available to users by using automatic translations. This means that when you search for something on YouTube and there aren’t any fitting results in your own language, it will now return results in other languages by translating them automatically.

Another thing they’re working on is the integration of Google’s search results. When there’s not enough relevant video content to return, YouTube is experimenting with showing Google search results. For a while now, we’ve seen YouTube videos show up in the search results and now Google is looking into an integration that works both ways. The line between the two platforms seems to become less hard and the distinct difference in format mediums blurs with it. This calls for an evaluation of the mediums that we’re using to communicate content to our audience. Some searches or user intents might be much better served by a video than by text. Video is becoming more important and should be a structural part of your marketing efforts, instead of an extra. And you need to think about whether to host your videos on YouTube or your own website.

US Apple maps users get the ability to rate places

If you’re not familiar with it, Apple Maps is a web mapping service that works similarly to Google Maps. And now with their latest update, users are also able to rate places on Apple Maps. The difference with giving a review on Google Maps is that you’re not able to give a written review, but you can give a thumbs up or down on several aspects.

This update is another indication that Apple is becoming more involved in search. If you want to know more about this, Tom Anthony actually did an interesting talk on what an Apple search ecosystem might look like. He discusses how this would look different from Google’s search and how Apple would use data that they can collect through their own apps. This Maps update, for example, can have a profound effect on the discoverability of shops and restaurants, so it’s worth keeping an eye on.

Twitter is testing a newsletter subscription button

Twitter recently acquired Revue, a newsletter platform. Now they are testing a feature that will allow Revue users to add a newsletter subscribe button to their Twitter profile. If you are a Revue user and you’re not seeing this feature yet, don’t fret. Initially, the button is only being shown to a smaller test group but it will be available to everyone using Revue.

This feels like an elegant and subtle integration. It also feels like it’s part of a bigger trend that we’ve been seeing during the pandemic: the rise of a creator economy. We’re seeing more focus on the individual that writes and analyzes online. Journalists that aren’t just part of bigger companies, but that you can now also follow or subscribe to on social media or through a newsletter. This shows us that your company website isn’t the only way to reach people and that selling products isn’t the one and only way to monetize your business.

Having a content model that produces content that gets people interested, in exchange for their email address, opens up a whole new world of possibilities. It can help you get discovered, it’s great for branding, and establishing trust and a relationship with your audience. And if you have an ad-based website, which isn’t great for SEO, this also opens up new possibilities when it comes to your advertising model.

The latest Yoast news

Yoast was acquired by NewFold Digital

Perhaps you’ve already seen this news flying around somewhere, but we are joining NewFold Digital. NewFold Digital is a big company that has lots of brands that can help customers of all sizes build a digital presence that delivers results and brings value to businesses. There are already lots of fun conversations happening on what we achieve together. Our team is staying on, so it’s still the same people who are working on Yoast SEO and all of our other fun projects. And of course, we’ll continue to work towards our mission of SEO for everyone.

Newest releases of Yoast SEO

We’ve had a few releases of Yoast SEO during the last few weeks. With our 16.8 and 17.0 releases, we’ve added support for Slovak and Norwegian. This means we now support a total of 18 languages when it comes to readability! With our 16.9 release, we’ve introduced another SEO workout that helps you clean up your content. This is kind of cool as this workout walks you through your orphaned content (content that doesn’t have any links to it) and helps you figure out what to do with it. We’ll be adding more of these workouts to Yoast SEO Premium to help you improve your website, step by step. Where Yoast SEO is your gym, Yoast SEO Premium becomes your personal trainer.

If you are thinking of going Premium, it might be worth your while to rewatch this month’s webinar for a fun surprise. You can find the video at the top of this post!

Other events and fun stuff

In August of this year, we’ve held our very first Summer School. And it was a blast! We had four workshops on different topics and loved the interaction with everyone attending these virtual events! If you’re wondering what you’ve missed, make sure to read our recap of the best bits. But you can also rewatch all of the workshops (for free) in Yoast Academy.

We also did two podcasts this month! The first one was with Cindy Krum and it was all about passage ranking, PWA, voice search, and the new MobileMoxie SEO tools. The second one was with Marcus Tandler and it’s on making the web carbon neutral and the importance of online user experience. Topics that are quite different from each other, but both podcasts are a lot of fun and give you interesting insights. Make sure to give them a listen when you have some spare time.

That’s it for our SEO news in August 2021

Those were the highlights of this month’s SEO news webinar. We hope you’ve enjoyed them! If you’re left wanting more, I would suggest watching the entire webinar as Joost and Jono discuss lots more in it. They also answer some interesting questions asked by the audience. And if you have a question that you would like to ask them, make sure to register for our next webinar on the 28th of September. Hope to see you there!

Read more: Register for our next SEO news webinar in September »

The post SEO news in August 2021: Google’s new title tag update, a new button on Twitter and more appeared first on Yoast.

Writing great page titles is an essential skill for anyone doing SEO. Why? Because the title tag can be the first thing a user sees in the search results and it’s also one of the most important factors that Google uses to determine the topic of a page. This makes page titles essential to SEO and this article covers both why you need great page titles and how to create them.

Yoast SEO also checks if you’ve used your keyphrase in the SEO title. Read about how that check works, and how to use your keyphrase in the title.

What is a page title? 

Let’s start with the basics. If you look at the source of a page (right-click on the page, then choose View Page Source), you find a title in the head section. It looks like this:

<title>This is an example page title - Example.com</title>

This is the HTML title tag, which we also call the page title or SEO title. When you look something up in a search engine, you get a list of results that appear as snippets. Often, the SEO title is part of the snippet together with at least a URL and a meta description. Of course, some rich results also display ratings and other additional information.

In most cases, the first thing people see, even before they get on your site, is the SEO title. Just to be clear, you should not confuse the SEO title with the main heading of the page. The main heading is what users see after they click on the SEO title and get on the page itself.

In tabbed browsers, you will usually also see the SEO title in the page tab, as shown in the image below.

But, Google won’t always use your page title

In August 2021, Google announced an update on how they generate web page titles. This means that sometimes they will show a different title in their search results than the one you set. Before we get into that, it’s good to note that in most cases (more than 80% of the time) the HTML title tag that your page outputs is still the most likely used.

Although we’re talking about an update here, Google deciding on how to display your page title in the search results is nothing new. They’ve been doing this for a while now. What is new is that they now want to use one title only, and won’t change it up anymore for different search queries. And that they will use different elements on your page to decide on what this title displayed in the search results will be. Elements such as your title tag, headings, prominent text on the page, and even how you link internally to this page.

So what does this mean for you? Right now these changes don’t require you to do anything different. The page title you set is still very likely to be used, and more importantly, your page title helps you rank for a keyword. These changes don’t impact your page rankings. The title you give is what Google will look at when deciding how your page ranks. Just like before.

But, with all these changes, it doesn’t hurt to keep an eye on how Google displays the titles of your most important pages! So we recommend you monitor the situation with your site for the time being. Keep an eye on Google Search Console, spot-check your search results, and look out for changes in the click-through and bounce rates for your key pages. If you find anything problematic (or just really, really wrong) you can let Google know in this feedback thread.

What’s the (SEO) purpose of a page title?

The purpose of your SEO title is to make people click on it, visit your website and read your post or buy your product. If your title is not good enough, people will ignore it and move on to other results. Essentially, there are two goals that you want to achieve with a title:

1. It must help you rank for a keyword;
2. it must make the user want to click through to your page.

Google uses various signals when deciding how relevant you are for a specific keyword. Even if you’re initially ranking well, but nobody is clicking on your result, your rankings might deteriorate over time. The opposite is also true. At first, you may be positioned lower in the search results. But, if your title gets people to click on it, Google will notice. Consequently, over time, your rankings may improve.

Also, as mentioned before, Google uses what has been specified as your page title as ranking input. So it’s not just about those clicks, you also need to make sure that your page title reflects the topic being discussed on your page and the keyword that you’re focusing on. The page title you use has a direct influence on your ranking.

Now that you know about the importance of SEO titles, you’ll be pleased to know that Yoast SEO can help you craft them. In its SEO analysis, the plugin checks two crucial aspects of the SEO title: the width of your title and whether you use your keyword. 

What does the SEO title check in Yoast SEO do?

Note: as Google has recently changed the way they generate page titles, we’re working on updating the SEO title checks in Yoast SEO too. The new checks will be available soon, so don’t forget to update your plugin!

You find this assessment in the SEO tab of the Yoast SEO sidebar or meta box. If you haven’t written a title yet, the assessment will remind you to do so. In addition, Yoast SEO checks the width of your title. When it is too long or too short, you will get a warning. A title with an optimal width gets you a green bullet in the analysis.

How to write a title with an optimal width for SEO

If your title doesn’t have the right width, parts of it may be cut off in Google’s search results. How the result looks may vary, depending on the device you’re using. That’s why you can also check how your SEO title will look in the mobile and desktop search results in the Google preview in Yoast SEO. The tool uses the mobile version as a default, but you can also switch to view it in the desktop version.

Here’s a desktop result:

And here’s the mobile result for the same URL:

Width vs. length

Have you noticed that we talk about width rather than length? Why is that? Rather than using a character count, Google has a fixed width for the titles counted in pixels. While your title tags can be long and Google doesn’t have a set limit on the number of characters you can use, there is a limit on what’s visible in the search results. If your title is too wide, Google will cut it off visually. That might not be what you want. Also, you should avoid wasting valuable space by making the title too short. Not only that, the title often informs other title-like elements, such as the og:title , which also have display constraints.

Luckily our Google preview can help you out! You can fill in your SEO title and our plugin will give you feedback straight away. The green line underneath the SEO title turns red when your title is too long. So keep an eye on that, and use the feedback to create great titles.

What does the keyphrase in title assessment in Yoast SEO do?

This assessment also appears in the SEO tab of the Yoast SEO sidebar and meta box. It checks if you’re using your keyphrase in the SEO title of your post or page. The plugin check for this is quite strict. Since Google uses the title to figure out your page’s topic, not having the focus keyphrase in the title may harm your rankings. In addition, potential visitors are much more likely to click on a search result that exactly matches what they were looking for. For the best results, you should try to add your keyphrase at the beginning of the SEO title.

How to use your keyphrase in the SEO title

Sometimes, when you’re optimizing for a high-competition keyword, everyone will have the keyword at the beginning of the page title. In that case, you can try making it stand out by putting one or two words in front of your focus keyword, thereby slightly “indenting” your result. In Yoast SEO, if you start your SEO title with “the”, “a”, “who” or another function word followed by your keyphrase, you’ll still get a green bullet.

Other times, like when you have a very long keyphrase, adding the complete keyphrase at the beginning doesn’t make sense. If your SEO title looks weird with the keyphrase at the beginning, try to add as much of the keyphrase as you can, as early in the SEO title as possible. But always keep an eye on the natural flow and readability of your title.

Want to learn all about how to write a text that’s pleasant to read and optimized for search engines? Our SEO copywriting course can help you with that. You can get access to this course, and all of our other SEO courses, with Yoast SEO Premium. This also gives you access to extra features in the Yoast SEO plugin.

Go Premium and get free access to our SEO courses!

Learn how to write great content for SEO and unlock lots of features with Yoast SEO Premium:

Get Yoast SEO Premium ▸Only $89 USD (ex VAT) for 1 site

Should you add your brand to the SEO title?

For quite some time it was a fashion among some SEOs to leave the site name out of the page title. The idea was that the “density” of the title mattered, and the site name wouldn’t help with that. Don’t do this. Your page title needs to have your brand in it, preferably in a recognizable way. If people search for a topic and see your brand several times, even if they don’t click on it the first time, they might click when they see you again on their next page of results.

If you don’t include your site name in your title tag, you’ll also run the risk of Google automatically changing the title for you. As explained in our article on why isn’t Google showing my page title, Google thinks it needs to be there too. If you want to read more about branding, be sure to read this post by Marieke: 5 tips on branding.

Optimizing page titles after publication

A while ago, while looking at our Google Search Analytics data for yoast.com, I noticed that, while we ranked well for [wordpress security], we weren’t getting a lot of traffic for it. I optimized the page title and meta description for our WordPress security article and this increased traffic by over 30%. My changes to the title were done around the same time as the update – indicated by the vertical line in the graph below:

The change was fairly simple. Instead of the title being:

WordPress Security • Yoast

I changed it to:

WordPress Security in a few easy steps! • Yoast

As you can see, this doesn’t necessarily improve the rankings of this page at all. From a keyword perspective, the title isn’t much better, but it is more enticing, and it did lead to many more clicks, which, of course, was the desired result.

Titles for social media

What might be a good title tag for SEO isn’t necessarily a good title for social media. In social media, keyword optimization is less important than creating a title that entices people to click. You often don’t need to include the brand name in the title. This is especially true for Facebook and Twitter if you include some form of branding in your post image. Our social previews in Yoast SEO Premium can help you with that.

If you’re using Yoast SEO, you can have a separate title for Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Just enter the Google title in the Yoast SEO snippet editor. The Facebook and Twitter title can be entered on the social tab in their respective fields. If you don’t enter a specific Twitter title, Twitter will use the Facebook title instead.

Conclusion: Page titles – craft them well!

In conclusion, the main point of this article is to encourage you to invest a little more time in writing good page titles. It really is worth it. Going back and optimizing some of your page titles after publication might also be worthwhile. This is especially true if you’re already ranking well, but aren’t getting very many clicks.

Read more: How to create the right meta description »

The post How to craft great page titles for SEO appeared first on Yoast.

To write appealing copy for your online audience, you need to know them. Who are those people that read your stories? Who are the people that search for the terms you want to be found for? Where do they come from? How old are they? What are they interested in? And how will you be able to reach those people again? In this post, I’ll help you with researching and analyzing your audience, as this is essential for SEO.

Why it’s important to analyze your audience

If you don’t know much about your audience, it can be quite hard to write texts for them. Should you write texts that are difficult or very easy to read? Which topics will interest them the most? Which search terms do they use? What blog post will make them come back to your site? These questions are especially important if you want your audience to become regular visitors of your website or if you want them to buy something in your online shop. And that’s when audience analysis comes in handy! If you know a lot about your audience, it will be much easier to adapt your texts to fit their needs. As a result, you’ll become more successful in selling your stuff and gaining those return visitors. 

What kind of people are your online audience?

A good place to start researching your online audience is in your website or social media user data. This can help you find out all kinds of helpful information about your audience. Or audiences. You may not have considered it before, but there could be different groups of users visiting your site for different purposes! You should analyze your audience to find out what kind of people are visiting your site, and use that information to adapt your content.

Audience analysis in Google Analytics

The best way to start analyzing your audience is by using Google Analytics. Google Analytics will tell you at what time a day your audience is on your site; where they’re from (at least from which country); which pages they like most and whether they use a desktop or a mobile device. That’s all valuable and usable information.

Closely monitor which pages and blog post generate much traffic and investigate possible patterns. Perhaps posts about a certain topic generate a lot of traffic, while posts about other topics don’t get many visitors. Use that information when choosing the topic of your next blog post.

Social media audience analysis

Google Analytics can tell you a lot about the visitors on your website, but if you want to know more about the people you reach on Facebook you’ll need to use Facebook Insights. Check which posts get many views and which posts don’t get attention from your audience. Experiment with buying ads on Facebook too.

Of course, every social media platform has its own analytics (we’ve also written about YouTube Analytics, Twitter Analytics and Pinterest Analytics). Monitor the analytics of the channels you use on a regular basis.

Not the audience you were hoping for?

If you find yourself surprised by the kind of people in your online audience, there are two things you can do with that information:

Firstly, you could ask yourself why your website isn’t reaching your target audience, or why your content isn’t appealing to them when they see it in the search results or on social media. Are you using the same keywords those people will be searching in Google? Do your SEO title and meta description match with their search intent (and does the content on the page live up to that promise)? These kinds of things can help you reach your intended audience and keep them coming back.

Alternatively, you might not have the online audience you were expecting, but it is an audience, and they came to your site for a reason! So another option is to learn more about your actual audience, and make more content with them in mind.

Finding out more about your online audience

Regardless whether you choose to grow your existing online audience(s), adapt your content to target a different audience, or both, the next step in analyzing your audience is the same. You need to find out more about these people and what they want!

Do surveys

A great way of getting to know your audience is to have them fill out an online questionnaire. In a survey, you can ask them anything you want.  You can, for instance, set up a survey that pops up when someone enters your site or you can send a survey invitation to your newsletter subscribers or to the buyers of your products. There are lots of packages that allow for online questionnaires. Many services offer a free account, which will suffice for most small companies.

Remember that most people do not participate in online surveys. Still, if your audience is large, you’ll easily get a decent amount of people to fill out your questionnaire. To get more participants you can always try to win them over by raffling a nice incentive among the respondents.

Please note that it’s always a certain group of people that’ll be willing to fill out a survey. That group is highly selective and not representative for your entire online audience.

Talk to your audience

Analyzing your audience doesn’t always need to be a desk activity! Just having a conversation with a part of your audience also remains a great way to find out more about them. In an online questionnaire, you can ask a lot of people about your product, but their answers will probably remain shallow. If you’re able to really talk to some of the people from your audience in person, that could help you to get a better idea about who your audience are. Ask them what they like best about your website, your products, or your blog posts. Ask them why they come back to your website. Invite them to talk about their experience and don’t be scared of some criticism.

For instance, if I’m at a WordCamp or a congress somewhere and I encounter people using our Yoast SEO plugin, I always like to ask them what they appreciate most about our product. It helps me to understand our users. And, by understanding our users, we’re better able to anticipate their needs. If we know which features in Yoast SEO they like best, we should optimize or expand those features for sure.

Read comments and discussions

If you want to analyze your audience and find out what kind of people it consists of, you should look at the comments on your blog post. What are people saying about you or about your post in the comments below your articles? Which aspects of your blog post are they talking about in their comments? Which topics are so important to them, that they are willing to engage? Analyze audience comments on your website, and don’t forget to monitor comments on social media too!

Aside from the comments your audience are leaving on your website and social media, you could also take a look at what they’re talking about on other websites too. Sites like Reddit and online discussion forums can be a treasure-trove of information. If you can find out where your audience are hanging out online, be sure to take a look and see what they’re talking about!

Analyzing online audiences is hard, but valuable

In conclusion, researching your audience can be a tough nut to crack. Google Analytics and the analytic tools of the numerous social media platforms are useful, but they don’t tell you much about the intentions or desires of your audiences. Surveys are great, but as most people won’t fill out an online questionnaire, the data aren’t that valid and representative for your entire audience. Talking to your audience can bring useful insights, but you won’t be able to have a conversation with all of them either.

All the different ways of analyzing your audience do add value in their own way though. However, by using them all you will get a clear impression of your audience. So don’t just sit there wondering who’s behind those clicks. Get to know them!

Read more: An introduction to user research »

The post Online audience research: how to analyze your audience appeared first on Yoast.

Google Search Console is a must-have tool for all site owners as it gives you an incredible amount of information about how your site is doing in search. We strongly advise you to add your website to Google Search Console to fully benefit from all the insights. Yoast SEO can help you verify your site so you can make the most of it. It only takes a couple of steps to connect your site to Google Search Console with a little help from Yoast SEO. Let’s see how that works!

What is Search Console and why should you use it?

Google’s free tool Search Console gives site owners loads of tools to check how their site performs. Not only does it show how your site is doing under the hood, but also how searchers see your site in the search results. You’ll get information on keywords and queries that bring traffic, find out which rich results your content has earned, and discover how your mobile site is doing. Also, you can check if Google can access your content. In short, use it! Here’s our beginner’s guide to Google Search Console to get you started.

How to verify your site in Google Search Console with Yoast SEO

It is straightforward to add your website to Google Search Console — it just takes a couple of steps. Here, we’ll guide you through the process. First, you need to have a Google Search Console account. Don’t have an account? Sign up now for Google Search Console. Once you’ve done that, you can follow the steps below:

It’s easy to connect your website to Google Search Console

We’ve made it very easy to connect your site to Search Console, and we strongly recommend you do so. Search Console gives you a wealth of information on the performance of your site. Not only does it show you what goes right, but, more importantly, what goes wrong. The advice you get is very actionable, and most things are easy to follow up on.

PS: How to check your verification tag in Search Console

If you need to check your verification, you can do so easily by following the steps below:

1. Go to the top-left and select your domain

2. Select Settings in the menu bar. After that, click on Ownership Verification

3. Click on HTML Tag and see if the verification tag matches.

Use it to your advantage

Once you’ve got this all figured out, your Google Search Console should be primed and ready to go! Google Search Console is a must-have tool for all site owners as it gives you an incredible amount of information about how your site is doing in search. We strongly advise you to connect your website to Google Search Console to fully benefit from all the insights. For more help fixing your site, Yoast SEO Premium comes highly recommended.

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Ranking in search engines requires a website with flawless technical SEO and great, relevant content. Luckily, the Yoast SEO plugin takes care of (almost) everything on your WordPress site. Still, if you really want to get the most out of your website and keep outranking the competition, some basic knowledge of technical SEO is a must. In this post, we’ll explain one of the most important concepts of technical SEO: crawlability.

What is the crawler again?

A search engine like Google consists of a crawler, an index, and an algorithm. The crawler follows the links. When Google’s crawler — also known as Googlebot — finds your website, it’ll render it, read it and save the content in the index.

A crawler follows the links on the web. A crawler is also called a robot, a bot, or a spider. It goes around the internet 24/7. Once it comes to a website, it saves the HTML version in a gigantic database called the index. This index is updated every time the crawler comes around your website and finds a new or revised version of it. Depending on how important Google deems your site and the number of changes you make on your website, the crawler comes around more or less often.

Read more: SEO basics: what does Google do »

And what is crawlability?

Crawlability has to do with the possibilities Google has to crawl your website. You can block crawlers on your site. There are a few ways to block a crawler from your website. If your website or a page on your website is blocked, you’re saying to Google’s crawler: “do not come here.” Your site or the respective page won’t turn up in the search results in most of these cases.

There are a few things that could prevent Google from crawling (or indexing) your website:

• If your robots.txt file blocks the crawler, Google will not come to your website or specific web page.
• Before crawling your website, the crawler will take a look at the HTTP header of your page. This HTTP header contains a status code. If this status code says that a page doesn’t exist, Google won’t crawl your website. In the module about HTTP headers of our Technical SEO training we’ll tell you all about that.
• If the robots meta tag on a specific page blocks the search engine from indexing that page, Google will crawl that page, but won’t add it to its index.

This flow chart might help you understand the process bots follow when attempting to index a page:

Want to learn all about crawlability?

Although crawlability is just the basics of technical SEO (it has to do with all the things that enable Google to index your site), it’s already pretty advanced stuff for most people. Nevertheless, if you’re blocking – perhaps even without knowing! – crawlers from your site, you’ll never rank high in Google. So, if you’re serious about SEO, this should matter to you.

If you really want to understand all the technical aspects of crawlability, you should check out our Technical SEO training. This SEO course will teach you how to detect technical SEO issues and solve them (with our Yoast SEO plugin). Yoast SEO Academy is included at no extra cost in your Premium subscription

Keep reading: What is technical SEO: 8 aspects everyone should know »

The post What is crawlability? appeared first on Yoast.

There is lots and lots of content out there. Which makes it more difficult to grab and hold the attention of your audience. That’s why you need to make sure that the content on your pages and in your blog posts is new, fresh and above all: original! When you add content to your website, it needs to add value and stand out from everything that’s already out there on the internet. In this post, we’ll explain how you can create original content and give you some examples to draw inspiration from.

Google loves originality

In order to understand why original content is important for SEO, we’ll only need to take a look at Google’s mission. The first line of their mission reads ‘Our company mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.’ In a nutshell, Google wants to offer its users the information that they’re looking for, information that’s valuable to them. If you want to dive deeper into how this works, make sure to read our article on what Google does.

So, if you want Google to rank your content, you need to write something that is accessible and useful for your audience. That means that your information should be easy to access and should add something to all the other information on the internet (about a certain topic). This means that you should write something original that is not yet offered in other blogs, articles or websites.

What is original content?

It’s important to mention that original content doesn’t necessarily have to be new content. Of course, if the story you’re telling is totally new, it will automatically be original. However, giving your (professional) opinion on a certain topic also counts as original content. Your angle to a story could be the thing that makes your content unique and original. Original content could even be an overview of (older) information. Maybe you are able to structure the existing information nicely if that hasn’t been done before.

The main thing to keep in mind is that you want to put valuable information out there. Whether it adds a new take on information that’s already out there or tells a new story. If your content is unique and shows your expertise on a subject, you’re on the right track. You need to make sure that you’re not ‘just writing’ content, but that you’re actually publishing resources for your audience.

Think about your audience

When creating original content, there’s an important factor to keep in mind: your audience. What do you want to tell them? What will be the main message of your article? And what is the purpose? What do you want your audience to do after they’ve read your article? Do you want them to engage, buy your stuff, to read more posts? Thinking about these questions and doing audience research will help give you direction and write original content that you’re audience will want to read.

Another factor to consider is the search intent that someone has when they land on your page or post. You may want them to buy your stuff (or register for a newsletter) right away, but this needs to fit with what they want. If someone is looking for information on a topic and they land on a page where you’re focused on pushing your product, you might lose them. Or when they’re ready to make their purchase and land on a page that doesn’t show any products, you might lose a sale. Think about search intent and you’ll be able to tailor your content to someone’s intent.

Keyword research always comes first

Although an original angle is a key element in writing awesome and SEO-friendly content, every SEO strategy should start with proper keyword research. If you want to rank and attract more traffic to your site, you should focus your SEO efforts on search terms that people are searching for. You might have an idea of what the needs of your audience are, but what words do they use when they search online? What questions do they have? There are a few keyword research tools you can use to get more insight into this.

If you execute your keyword research properly, you will end up with a long list of search terms that you want to be found for. This list can function as a guide for your content creation. By writing content on these keywords, you improve your chances of being shown when someone searches for them. Do keep in mind that a keyword is not always a topic, though. You should make sure to come up with an original idea for your blog post in which the desired focus keyword has a prominent place.

Be original to stand out

When you have an idea of the keywords that attract people to your website, it’s time to write something original around that specific keyword. It can be tempting, though, to write something that’s similar to what’s already been written by others. It might even happen without you realizing it.

Let’s say you’ve done your keyword research and want to rank for a specific keyword like ‘healthy breakfast’ or ‘where to get organic seeds’. You’ll probably have lots to tell about the topics surrounding your keywords. But before you put your digital pen to paper, it’s good to do some quick research into what content is already out there. You don’t want to run the risk of repeating the same story that’s already been told more than ten times.

What we do at Yoast before we create new content, is go to valentin.app and fill in the keyword that we’re focusing on at that moment. This website enables you to take a look at localized search results for that keyword. This gives you an idea of the content that’s already out there. Of course, you don’t have to read anything, but it can help you determine your own angle on the subject and whether your article idea seems like a good addition on this result page.

Staying original vs wanting those clicks

The risk with checking out the competition is that it gives you ideas of what to write about this topic. This isn’t all bad, but you do need to keep in mind that your content needs to be original. Why should Google show your page if there’s already something similar there? Getting inspired by what others are writing is totally fine, but make sure to write from your expertise and your own unique angle. You don’t want to be one of many and you definitely shouldn’t focus on just getting those clicks. A clickbait headline can be tempting, but stay true to the story that your content is telling and the information that people will find on that page.

Examples of great original content

Writing original blog posts is a great way to drive traffic to your website. When you focus on the right terms, original content can be a real boost for your rankings and business. Above that, it’s a great way to show your audience that you’re an expert in your specific niche and therefore can be trusted.

A great example of a blog with original content is Treehugger.com. A blog that in their own words ‘offers advice, clarity and inspiration for both the eco-savvy and the green-living novice. With over 100 writers, they are able to post lots(!) of original expert content that is true to their brand.

Another great example of a blog with original content is Deliciouslyella.com. They describe their blog as a ‘plant-based food & wellness platform sharing delicious ways to feel better’. The founder of deliciously ella started this blog as a personal project to encourage herself to make healthy eating delicious. Her story gives this blog and the company she has built around it a personal and unique touch that seems to be very successful.

What to focus on next

Original content is the first thing you need to focus on when writing a high-quality SEO friendly blog post. When you’ve done your research and have created original content, you should focus on the readability of your post. Your idea could be totally original, but if your text is not easy to digest, your message will get lost.

Want to work on your SEO and the readability of your text? Our Yoast SEO plugin actually gives you feedback on how SEO-friendly your text is and it comes with a readability analysis!

Read more: Keep your content fresh and up-to-date »

The post The importance of original content for SEO appeared first on Yoast.

If your online business is doing well in your country, you might consider expanding to international markets. To be successful in new markets requires some extra investments in SEO, though. You’d better start thinking about international SEO — or multilingual SEO — if you want to ensure your website will be found and used well in other countries! Here, I’ll explain what international SEO is, why it’s important and which elements it consists of.

What is international SEO?

International SEO deals with offering optimized content for multiple languages or multiple locations. Let’s explain this with an example. Imagine you have an online store: you sell WordPress plugins in many countries. To increase your sales in Germany, you’ve decided to translate your content into German and create a German site. Now, you have two variations of the same page: English and German versions. Pretty straightforward, you’d say? Well, there’s more.

Especially if you want to target countries with similar languages or countries where multiple languages are used, this will pose some challenges. Let’s explore the situation displayed in the image below. This is a simplified example; there are obviously many more potential audiences than we’ve included, like British users.

Obviously, you want people who search in German to be directed to the German site. Maybe you even want to have a specific site for German speakers in Switzerland. It would be even better to have a French alternative for speakers of French in Switzerland as well, of course. Let’s assume for now that you don’t have the required resources for that, though. In that case, it’s probably best to send users from Switzerland who speak French to the English site. On top of that, you need to make sure that you send all other users to your English site, as they are more likely to speak English than German. In a scenario like this, you need to set up and implement a multilingual, international SEO strategy.

Because it’s not easy to get the right website ranking in the right market, we decided to set up an International SEO training! In this course, we’ll guide you step by step through all important multilingual SEO elements. Don’t miss it!

Why is international SEO a thing?

You want your website to be found with Google. In a standard SEO strategy, you optimize your content for one language: the language your website is written in. Sometimes, however, you want to target audiences in multiple countries and regions. These audiences are probably similar, but there are always differences. This presents you with an opportunity and you can use international SEO to reap the benefits. By targeting your audiences specifically, it is easier to address their needs. One of these differences is the language they speak. When you make your site available in several languages and target specific regions, you achieve two things:

• You expand your potential audience;
• You improve your chances of ranking for a specific region and in several languages.

Let’s revisit the example we discussed before in light of this. By making a German variation of your original English site, you’ve made it possible for users searching in German to find your product. In the end, international SEO is all about addressing the needs of your users.

It all sounds rather clear-cut, but multilingual SEO can be hard. A lot can go wrong, and a bad multilingual implementation can hurt your rankings. This means that you need to know what you’re doing.

One of the biggest risks of multilingual SEO is duplicate content. If you present very similar content on your website on multiple pages, Google won’t know which content to show in the search engines. Duplicate pages compete with each other, so the individual rankings of the pages will go down. You can avoid this particular issue with hreflang, an element of your international SEO strategy. But there’s more to multilingual SEO. Let’s discuss the main aspects below.

International SEO: content, domains and hreflang

Content for international sites

Content is an essential aspect of your multilingual SEO strategy. If you want to write content in different languages, you’ll need to adapt existing content or create new content. Adapting your content while maintaining good SEO can be a challenge.

Your content strategy should always start with keyword research for the region and language you’re targeting. You can’t just translate your keywords using Google Translate or other AI translation tools. You’ll have to get inside the heads of your new audience. You need to know which words they are using. The same words can have different meanings in languages used in multiple countries, as we explained before.

Translating content is a challenge as well. Take into account the cultural differences that exist between countries. Otherwise, your copy won’t be appealing to your new audience. If possible, you should have native speakers translate or at least check your translated content to avoid making awkward mistakes. If you want a complete list of what to consider when translating content, read Marieke’s post on creating SEO-friendly copy in a foreign language.

Domain structure for international sites

To successfully target your audiences, you need to consider which pages you want them to land on. There are several options as to what domain structure you’re going to use. Do you need to get the ccTLD (country code Top Level Domain) like example.de for Germany? Or could you create subdirectories for countries like example.com/de? Or, will you use a subdomain like de.example.com? And what about countries where multiple languages are spoken? How do you set up a domain structure for those countries?

There’s a lot you have to consider to make these decisions. This is where domain authority and the size of your business and marketing capacities in your target countries come into play. If you want to really dive into this, you should check out our International SEO training, which you can find in our Yoast SEO academy!

Hreflang

Hreflang is the technical implementation you’ll need to put in place if you’re offering your content in multiple languages. Simply put, you’ll tell Google which result to show to whom in the search engines. It’s not as easy as it might sound, though, and this is something that often goes wrong, even on the big sites. Joost wrote an extensive post on how to implement hreflang the right way.

Below is an example of an hreflang implementation using HTML link elements:

<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com/" hreflang="en" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com/en-gb/" hreflang="en-gb" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com/en-au/" hreflang="en-au" />

International ambitions? Get your international SEO right!

International SEO focuses on optimizing content for different languages for the search engines. With a proper multilingual SEO strategy, people in different countries will find your website for their market in their native language. International SEO can be hard, though, and you need to know what you’re doing. It touches on a lot of different aspects of website optimization. If you really want to get it right, take our International SEO training!

Read more: How to create SEO friendly copy in a foreign language »

The post What is international SEO? appeared first on Yoast.