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20% off Yoast SEO: 7 features that’ll make you happy!

Mon, 18 Jan 2021 09:47:47 GMT

Time to brighten up your Blue Monday! What better way to do this than with a special Blue Monday discount? Get rid of the blues instantly: claim your 20% discount now – valid just today. Here are 7 features in Yoast SEO that will definitely cheer you up!

Get Yoast SEO Premium Only €89 EUR €71.20 EUR (ex VAT) for 1 site – Now at 20% off!

1. Access to 15 Yoast SEO academy courses

Every Yoast SEO Premium subscription comes with complimentary access to Yoast SEO academy. This means that you don’t just get access to the most comprehensive SEO plugin out there — you’ll also unlock 15 SEO training courses! Learn all about the basics of SEO, SEO copywriting, keyword research, structured data and many other topics related to SEO!

Try out the Yoast SEO academy courses!

2. Advanced content analysis – just like Google

Setting a focus keyphrase is one of the greatest features in our free plugin. But did you know that Google also looks at synonyms and understands different word forms? That is why Yoast SEO Premium comes with automatic detection of grammatical variations of your keyphrase and a separate field for synonyms. It helps you to make your texts more readable and attractive and the plugin helps you analyze your content like Google does.

Keep reading: Target more keyword variations with state-of-the-art text analysis »

If you optimize for [training for puppies], the Yoast SEO analysis will also recognize these forms

But, you aren’t just making great content for no one to see… Attracting visitors to your site by creating engaging posts on social media is indispensable nowadays. In Yoast SEO Premium, you can optimize your social posts and see them through the eyes of your audience on Facebook or Twitter!

Read on: See your social posts through the eyes of your readers »

Optimize your social posts especially for Facebook or Twitter

4. Optimize your site structure

The structure of your site is really important to improve your SEO results. You don’t want to create content that Google can not index and therefore your customers can not find? With Yoast SEO Premium we help you easily linking pages with the same topic and also make clear which pages or posts still miss some referring to.

When your site is filled with a lot of content, you know how hard it is to keep an eye on the bigger picture. Maintaining a clear site structure can be quite a puzzle. You don’t want your visitors to get lost or miss relevant content while visiting your site.

Whether it’s suggestions for internal linking, spotting orphaned content or keeping your cornerstone content fresh; Yoast SEO Premium has your back. Our internal linking suggestions, orphaned and stale content filters will help you keep a clear picture of your site structure. Visitors will be guided through your site how you want them to!

Keep on reading: Make content findable with our internal linking suggestions tool »

Internal linking suggestions in Yoast SEO Premium

5. Prevent broken links with the redirect manager

Experienced the frustration of clicking on a link that leads to a 404 page? If a page or post is deleted or unpublished it is still part of the Search Results in Google. That’s where those 404 pages can really bother you. You don’t want YOUR customers to be willing to visit your page and end up on a dead road? And, with the redirect manager, you don’t have to be afraid anymore that a 404 will guide your visitors to a dead link. It will help you prevent and fix dead links! 58% of our customers even praise the redirect manager as the best feature in Yoast SEO Premium!

Automatic redirect suggestion in Yoast SEO Premium

6. Find high-performing keywords with the SEMrush tool

Doing keyword research can be quite time-consuming and hard, right?! Not with the SEMrush tool in Yoast SEO! In just a few clicks, it enables you to find related high-performing keywords and keyphrase insights right in the WordPress editor and write relevant high-quality content!

If you use Yoast SEO Premium with the SEMrush keyword research tool, you will be able to find and immediately add related keywords to your text with a simple click of the button. Yoast SEO then immediately analyses your use of the additional keyphrase and gives you real-time SEO feedback on it. It will help you a great deal in getting your SEO thoroughly polished!

Boost the quality and relevance of your content with high-performance keywords in Yoast SEO. Available for 100+ countries

Keep reading: Find high-performing keywords that boost the quality and relevance of your content »

Related keyphrase suggested by SEMrush

7. Unlock the smart Yoast SEO blocks

If you install Yoast SEO Premium, you’ll get access to 6 preformatted blocks, that make optimizing your site a lot easier. Leverage the smart Yoast SEO blocks to improve your internal linking, get rich results, and boost your SEO! How about an instant, formatted Table of contents block, a Related links block or a Subpages block? Make sure to check out al 6 easy-to-add blocks!

Read on: Use the Yoast SEO blocks to improve internal linking and get rich results »

A few of the smart Yoast SEO blocks

We get it like no other: running a business takes time! You need to be in charge of finance, operations, account management, and of course your online visibility so customers can find your business easily on the web. When you’re using the free Yoast SEO plugin you are already doing a lot to rank high in search engines like Google. But as you now know, there’s more! If you upgrade to Yoast SEO Premium, you’ll unlock many SEO tools that will save you a bunch of time. Don’t forget to get it today and save 20%!

Get Yoast SEO Premium today and save 20%

Unlock time-saving SEO tools
Get FULL access to Yoast academy
Become an SEO expert in no-time

Get Yoast SEO Premium Only €89 EUR €71.20 EUR (ex VAT) for 1 site – “Now

The post 20% off Yoast SEO: 7 features that’ll make you happy! appeared first on Yoast.

How to rewrite and republish content with Yoast Duplicate Post

Thu, 14 Jan 2021 14:08:35 GMT

We all want to write the best possible content on our favorite topic. As writers, we also know that that not always happens on the first try. While you do need to deliver quality on that first try, it doesn’t hurt to dive back into published articles to updated and improve them wherever you can. We have a helpful tool that makes the process of rewriting and republishing content a lot easier on WordPress.

The importance of content maintenance
Rewriting content the easy way
- How to use Rewrite & Republish in Yoast Duplicate Post
Rewriting content in WordPress became a lot easier

The importance of content maintenance

You’ll often hear us urging you to publish only high quality content, but we understand that’s not always a given. There are dozens of reasons why you’d want to improve your existing content. Maybe your heart wasn’t really in it when you sat down to write. Or maybe you lost focus during the writing process and ended up with something a bit off the mark. Many writers struggle to find the right moment to write and end up hitting the deadline, rushing things to get it published. Or maybe you became a better writer over time! Whatever the reason, if an article is important, but doesn’t give you — or your readers — enough joy, you can edit it or rewrite it.

Of course, it doesn’t always have to concern your writing skills. There are many outside factors that might force you to update your content. Your product might have changed, you have new competitors, your audience has changed or Google launched new rich results that might prove a fresh source of traffic. Also, outdated content isn’t very trustworthy for readers so it’s a good idea to fix what you can.

There’s also the case of evergreen content. When you have a lot of evergreen content — articles you see as the cornerstones of your site — you want to make sure these stay in perfect condition. Your cornerstone content should always be awesome, so you should work on it regularly. Updating and rewriting such a piece of content can be quite an undertaking but it is a necessary one. At Yoast, we try to redo our Ultimate Guides at least twice a year but in your niche, developments might go so fast that you have to keep up with it on a regular basis.

Rewriting content the easy way

Once you’ve found a post in desperate need of an update or rewrite, you need to start planning your update. Read the post and try to determine how much time it would cost to update. Need to redo a couple of sentences? No problem, you can fit that in when you have time. Rewrite a large part of it? Or need to redo some research? That would take longer and so you need to plan ahead.

Once you have everything you need to rewrite that article, the real work starts. Start going over the article and read every sentence critically. Can you improve it? Do you need more examples in the text or new stats? Make sure that everything is easy to read and structured properly. Add a table of contents to improve scannability. The various analyses in Yoast SEO can help you to improve your writing for both search engines as well as humans.

We also have another big help for you, but chances are you haven’t discovered this yet — meet Yoast Duplicate Post!

How to use Rewrite & Republish in Yoast Duplicate Post

Rewriting content has always been quite a struggle in WordPress. You were always bound to the way WordPress is built: you can have one version of a post or page. Once you’ve published a post you can’t simply update it without your changes appearing on the front-end whenever you save your post.

Of course, several plugins solved this problem by letting you duplicate or clone a post with one click. This made it possible to do big content updates in silence as you are working in a new draft. When you are done, simply copy and paste the new text over the original post content and publish. One of those invaluable plugins is Yoast Duplicate Post. But Yoast Duplicate Post comes with something unique: Rewrite & Republish. This makes updating articles a seamless process!

Install the free Yoast Duplicate Post WordPress plugin
The Yoast Duplicate Post plugin is available free of charge. You can find it in the WordPress.org plugin repository or straight from the plugin section in the WordPress backend. Install and activate it. In the settings of Yoast Duplicate Post you can determine how you want it to function. After that, you’re good to go!
Open the post you want to rewrite and republish
There are two way to go about this process. You can open the post you want to edit and hover with your mouse over Duplicate Post icon in the top toolbar. You’ll notice the Rewrite & Republish option. Click on it to open the post in a new draft ready for you to edit. In the yellow bar, you’ll see that you are working in the new version of the post.

The second way to open the post you want to edit in Rewrite & Republish is via the post overview in WordPress. Find the post in the overview and click the Rewrite & Republish option once you hover over the title. This will open a new duplicate of your post to work in.
Rewrite and update your content
Your original post stays untouched for the time being and you can work in the draft. Now, you can do whatever you like without accidentally letting your visitor seeing you work in your content. Update your article, enhance readability, add new images, improve the SEO — everything! While you are working, you can compare the differences between the current version and the new one. This helps you keep track of changes and get a better sense of the work that you did.
Republish it
Once you are done, you can simply Republish the draft and the plugin will automatically publish the rewritten content over the old one. It’ll also trash the old draft, making sure that you won’t publish that one by accident.
Bonus: Schedule your update for publication later!
One of the greatest options in the rewrite and republish feature is the possibility to schedule content updates to go live at a later date. This way, you can finish your update in your own time and only publish the changes online when you need them to. Simply rewrite your post and when you are done, click on the republish date in the Post settings and pick the date you need to updated post to go live. After that, click on the blue Schedule republish button to schedule the post. The plugin will automatically overwrite the old version with the new one at the given date. Easy and awesome!

Rewriting content in WordPress became a lot easier

While the task of rewriting content still is hard, the technical work around that has just become much easier. The Yoast Duplicate Post plugin now has a feature called Rewrite & Republish that makes it really a one-two-three step process. At Yoast, this has saved us a whole lot of time and frustration. That Reschedule feature alone… *chef’s kiss*! We hope you like it too!

The post How to rewrite and republish content with Yoast Duplicate Post appeared first on Yoast.

How to respond to positive and negative online reviews

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 13:00:00 GMT

Online reviews are important for any business. With the current situation, they’ve even become essential when you own a local business. More than ever, people are searching for businesses and products online. Having positive reviews and ratings will help you stand out and attract traffic to your site. But what should you do when you have negative reviews? And do you need to do anything with the positive ones? Here, I’ll explain why and how you should respond to online reviews.

For potential customers, online reviews are critical. Every one of us would check out reviews before booking that expensive holiday home in the south of France. It’s how we determine whether a site or business is trustworthy.

Online reviews are also important for SEO. For a few years now, there’s an overall consensus among SEO experts about reviews being a ranking factor for local search. You should read the article David Mihm wrote for us for more information on the impact of reviews on your local rankings. Or learn how to grow your business with ratings and reviews.

Why should you react to positive and negative reviews?

Reviews tell you what other people, your customers, think of your product. If you respond to reviews, you’re showing your customers that you care about their opinion. And that’s something they will appreciate. It will also make your business stand out from other companies, as a lot of them do not make an effort to respond to online reviews, especially when it comes to negative reviews. Apart from that, responding to reviews will help you gain the trust of new customers.

If you write a response to a review, you’re not only writing to the person who wrote the review. Your response will be out there for all of your potential customers to see. Handling reviews with grace, gratitude and a little bit of wit, can have a huge impact on the way people perceive your brand.

To which reviews should you respond?

Reacting to reviews appears to be a wise thing to do. That does not mean you should respond to every single review. In my opinion, you should react to negative reviews. Responding to negative reviews will show potential customers how you handle problems and solve solutions to dissatisfied customers.

I would also react to very positive reviews, especially if the response is elaborate and detailed. Responding to positive reviews will give you the opportunity to promote your brand and show your passion for your company. Responding to positive reviews is not that hard to do and also quite fun. Just make sure to be enthusiastic and not respond to every positive review with the exact same response. Be genuine and thankful in a way that fits your normal way of communicating as a business. It’s the negative ones that need a strategy.

How to respond to negative reviews

How do you respond to those negative reviews? What should you do and which pitfalls should you avoid? I’ll share seven tips on how to handle them!

1. Keep calm

It’s never easy to get a negative review. In some cases, it can feel unfair. Perhaps the tone of the review is harsh, personal or condescending. Your first reaction will most likely be an emotional one. Perhaps you’ll get angry or very frustrated. In such a case, it’s wise to take a moment before you write your response.

2. Have a plan

Negative comments and reviews will always come up at one point in time. It’s a good thing to prepare yourself for it. You could have some standard replies ready. Be careful never to use the same answer more than once. Always adapt a reply to the specifics the situation requires. Having some nicely drafted sentences ready can help you to formulate the response in the heat of the moment.

3. Own the problem

A negative review means that someone has had a bad experience with your business. Maybe they didn’t like the food you served in your restaurant. Of course, this could be due to their lack of taste, but such a response will not be satisfying to your potential audience. In most cases, start with apologizing for their negative experience, even if it’s not (entirely) your fault. You are sorry that they had a negative experience. You are sorry the food did not taste good.

If something went wrong because of a mistake on your site, tell people that, own up to your mistake and apologize for it. If someone did not get their dessert and is pissed off about that, investigate the specifics of the situation. Did you, in fact, forget about their dessert? Admit to your mistake, apologize and try to fix the problem. In this case, invite them back to have dessert another time.

Everyone makes mistakes and people are really forgiving if you are willing to show your human side. Own up to your mistakes, apologize and try to come up with a solution.

4. Let someone proofread your response

You’re never an objective author of responses to negative reviews. You’re involved; what might sound reasonable to you, might sound crazy aggressive to someone else. If you’re not sure about your response, letting someone else read it first (someone objective) can be a good idea.

5. Short and sweet

Don’t write responses that are too lengthy. Make them short and sweet. Nobody wants to read through a reply of thirteen paragraphs. Even if someone personally insults you in a review, you should never get personal. Try to remain professional and polite, at all times.

6. Don’t get trapped in long discussion

Never get trapped in lengthy discussions. Reply once, maybe twice if necessary, but stop replying after that. Nobody wants to read a complete discussion between a dissatisfied customer and a business. Or maybe some people do like to read such a thing, but it does not reflect well on your business.

7. Take the discussion offline

Someone had a bad experience with your business and you are able to solve it? Try to contact them outside of the review-channel. Ask them to get in touch with your sales or support department. Did people not get their dessert? Invite them over to your restaurant. People can’t get in touch with your support department? Help them to make a connection. Respond to their negative review, letting them know that you’ve contacted them personally, and take the discussion elsewhere to solve their problem.

After responding to negative reviews

If you have had some negative responses, you’ll probably want to bury them underneath a big pile of positive ones. Maybe you’ll encounter customers that have positive experiences. By all means, invite them to leave a review. You’ll notice that a lot of people are willing to do that!

If you can solve the problem with a dissatisfied customer, you can also ask if they are willing to edit or remove their review. You should only do that if the air is cleared between the customer and your business.

The post How to respond to positive and negative online reviews appeared first on Yoast.

Yoast SEO 15.6: Estimated reading time and Norwegian word forms

Tue, 12 Jan 2021 08:56:28 GMT

Yoast SEO 15.6 is out today! This release comes with a lot of goodies, like support for the Norwegian language, a new estimated reading time feature and improved support for web stories. But that’s not all! We’ve added a brilliant new feature to the free Yoast Duplicate Post plugin to help you seamlessly rewrite and republish your content. Curious? Find out all about it here!

Estimated reading time with Yoast SEO Premium
Norwegian language support
Enhancements in Yoast SEO 15.6
Yoast Duplicate Post: Rewrite & Republish
Wrapping up the release of Yoast SEO 15.6

Estimated reading time with Yoast SEO Premium

We’ve added another cool new feature for Yoast SEO Premium users: you can now let your readers see how long it takes to read your articles. Simply showing the number of words in an article is a relatively bad way of finding out how long an article is. It would be much better to get an indication of the time it would take to read an article. That’s why we’ve added an estimated reading time feature. For this, we calculate how long it will take for someone to read an article based on the average reading time.

Adding the estimated reading time to your articles helps manage expectations for potential readers. Sometimes, you don’t have the twenty minutes it would take to read that article. It would be handy know that upfront rather than after reading for ten minutes — and scrolling down to see how far you still have to go.

The estimated reading time feature consists two parts:

A helpful way to show you the estimated reading time in Insights
A simple block you can drop in anywhere to show your reader the estimated reading time (only works in the block editor)

Here’s how that Insights page looks:

You can find the reading time for an article in your post’s Insights

And the estimated reading time block for the block editor:

A simple block for the block editor you can drop in any place you want

Norwegian language support

Last year, we added a ton of new languages to Yoast SEO and we’re not about to slow down. In Yoast SEO 15.6, we can welcome Norwegian to the club! This is the fifteenth language that receives support for grammatical forms in Yoast SEO Premium. Unfortunately, it’s not full language support yet as the readability analysis will be updated at a later date. With this release, we also improved keyphrase recognition in Norwegian by filtering out function words.

The word form feature helps you write more naturally as you don’t have to spend any time fitting the focus keyphrase awkwardly into your sentence. It recognises grammatical forms of your keyphrases and the words don’t even have to be in the same order to be found. It gives you more time to focus on the writing and editing part of your job — helping you to write that awesome piece of content.

The following languages now have support for word forms in Yoast SEO Premium: English, German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Swedish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Hebrew, Arabic and Farsi. There’s a lot more to come, so stay tuned!

Enhancements in Yoast SEO 15.6

Yoast SEO 15.6 comes with a lot of enhancements and bug fixes. For one, we improved Google preview in the Yoast SEO Elementor integration. We’ve not only added the Tag, Category and Primary Category snippet variables in the Google preview of our Elementor integration, but also the advanced snippet variables.

Googler Pascal Birchler, helped us make Yoast SEO work better with Web Stories. We now make sure that there’s always a meta description for Web Stories and we’ve simplified the way we remove the default metadata from stories.

Yoast Duplicate Post: Rewrite & Republish

Another update we want to highlight is a brand-new version of the free Yoast Duplicate Post plugin. In version 4.0, we’ve added an essential feature: Rewrite & Republish. Many people use Yoast Duplicate Post to clone or duplicate an existing post to work on in the background. But in this process, after you did your updates you had to manually copy over the rewritten content to the original post. In addition, you had to make sure to not forget to manually delete the draft you made. We wanted to simplify this process. With Rewrite & Republish, we’ve made all of this one seamless experience!

You can access Rewrite & Republish via the WordPress toolbar or from the post overview

When you want to update a post with Rewrite & Republish, you simply hit the button to have the plugin start the process. It makes a new duplicate draft of your original post for you which you can edit in your own time. Once you are done, hit the Republish button to have the plugin automatically merge your updated post into the original one. It also automatically cleans up the draft for you!

Done? Hit Republish and your draft will be merged into the original post

That’s not all, because you can also schedule those updates! Yes, you can update your content in your own time and publish that update at a later date. Awesome, right? At Yoast, we are very excited about this new version of Yoast Duplicate Post as it will save us — and you! — tons of time and stress updating posts.

Note: Rewrite & Republish doesn’t work in Elementor yet, but we’re working on that!

Wrapping up the release of Yoast SEO 15.6

Yoast SEO 15.6 has a number of interesting additions, fixes and enhancements. In addition, Yoast SEO Premium brings word form support for Norwegian and a new estimated reading time feature — with a cool block for the block editor. Last but not least, the Yoast Duplicate Post plugin has now become an essential tool for anyone regularly working on their content!

The post Yoast SEO 15.6: Estimated reading time and Norwegian word forms appeared first on Yoast.

How to write a mission statement for your site

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 13:55:00 GMT

Having a site for your business is quite common nowadays. Chances are that you’ve also created one to make sure that people can find and contact you online. But have you really thought about the goal of your website? And is this reflected in the structure and content of your site? Writing a mission statement for your site can help you keep this in mind while making improvements on your site. But it’s also a great way to communicate your values and brand to your audience.

Why should people visit my website, read my posts or buy my stuff? What’s the purpose of my website? You should be able to answer these questions in a heartbeat. In this post, I’ll explain how a mission statement helps you grasp the goal of your website and how to write a great mission statement that communicates what you have to offer.

What is a mission statement?

Your mission statement consists of the ideas you have about your site and your company. Every business owner has certain expectations of their potential customers and site visitors. You want them to read your posts, or to buy your products. Perhaps you want to inform or entertain them to eventually improve their lives with your awesome products. We realize that a goal can be to sell as many products as possible or have lots of visitors on a site or blog, but a mission statement goes further than that. A mission statement is unique for every business, it’s the reason why it exists and what it wants to accomplish. What problem it wants to solve for its audience.

So, before you start making any other improvements to your website you’ll have to think about your mission statement. Do not think too lightly of this. It’s really hard to have (and keep) clearly in mind what it is you want to do. And what the goal of your website is. This is actually a problem we still see on lots of websites. Businesses that do not make clear what it is they offer and what makes their offer so special. Make sure to focus on clarity first.

How to write a clear mission statement

Take the time and literally write your mission statement down. On a piece of paper, on your laptop or iPad, whatever works for you. It’s important to understand that your mission shouldn’t revolve around making more money, it should be focused on what you can offer your audience. To give you an example, this is Google’s mission statement: “Our company mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

As you can see from this example: your mission should be short, long-term and reflective of your products or actions as a business. Make sure to focus on the value that your products, services or blogs can have for (potential) users. Also, try to find the balance between being clear but not so specific that you’re limiting yourself or the market you’re in. For example, our mission is SEO for everyone, and not SEO for everyone in Europe, or SEO for everyone in the US.

To help you formulate the mission statement and goal of your website, we’ve created a list of questions you should be able to answer:

What can people do with the products or information you’re offering?
What makes your products or business unique?
How can your products/services enhance your clients’ lives?
Why should people buy your products/services and not your (e.g. cheaper or better known) competitors’? Or why should people read your information and take your advice instead of information on another website?
What’s the reason you’re offering these products/services or information, besides making money?

Use these questions to ask yourself what the goal of your business and (with it) of your website is. Also, don’t be afraid to change it along the way, as changes in your market can ask for changes in your mission and what you have to offer. When you’ve written down your mission statement, make sure to discuss it with your employees to make sure everyone agrees and your mission statement reflects your brand. Once your mission is clear to you and your team, you’ll be able to communicate it much better to your audience!

Ways to communicate your mission

Once you’ve written your mission statement, you need to make sure that it’s reflected on your website. It’s a good idea to create a page that tells people about your business and mission. But it doesn’t stop there! You need to make sure that your mission is reflected on your other pages as well. That’s why you should have another look at your introductory content, your headlines and images.

1: Mission statement page

Does your site have an about us page or section? If the answer is yes, great! Create a mission statement page to tell people what your business is all about, or add your mission statement to your about us-page. If the answer is no, consider adding an page or section that tells people more about your business and team. This doesn’t just do wonders for branding, it also increases visitor’s trust in your website. Take a look at our mission page if you’re looking for inspiration.

2: Optimize your introductory content

You might be wondering what your mission statement has to do with the rest of your content. But composing a mission statement gives you more insight into the value that your products or services have. What makes them unique and how they can help your audience. It’s important to check whether this is reflected in your (introductory) content.

Why? Because the online world moves fast and the people using it also move fast. Be aware of the fact that you literally have a few seconds to get your most important point across. People’s attention span is really short, particularly online. So make sure to tell the important stuff first and tell it quickly. What is your website about? What do you ‘sell’? Make sure this text is really clear and adapt the language of your audience. Focus on your homepage and landing pages first, as these are the pages where your visitors enter your website.

3: Think about your headlines

Another way to communicate your mission to your audience is to make good use of your headline and tagline. The headline is the title of a page or post. A tagline is a small amount of text which serves to clarify a thought. Make sure that headlines and taglines clearly communicate the core goal of your product and write them from a user’s perspective to get their attention.

If possible, try to write your headlines in an action-oriented way. You can do this by using verbs and sentences that imply an action. For instance, we could have a headline saying: ‘Keep your site optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin!’ This shows people one of the core values of our plugin, and making it active will motivate a lot more people to actually try it.

4: A picture is worth a thousand words

Don’t underestimate the importance of great and authentic images. They can also help you make the mission of your business and site clear to your audience. For most products, it is easy to find pictures that reflect the purpose of your website. Think about what you want to tell your audience, keep your mission in mind, while choosing your images.

If you are selling candy, make sure to put pictures of tasty candy on your homepage. If you’re selling solar panels, you could definitely take some great shots of your panels right after placing them or happy customers in front of their house. For those of you that sell things like consultancy or plugins, it can feel difficult to find suitable pictures. Try to think about what images support the message you’re trying to send or images that are recognizable to your audience.

5: Be consistent in your communication

As you can read above, it’s important to keep your mission in mind with everything you do and create. That’s why you should make sure that your content, headings, images and site structure match the mission statement on your site. This is also the case for your other ways of communicating, such as social media posts, customer service, offline store, advertisements and what else. Make sure to create an experience that’s the same on every page or any other way that people come into contact with your business.

Final words on your mission statement

Businesses are born of ideas, some of which are great, some are not. But they’re all born out of the idea that what you have to offer is special, and adds something to the market. That is your mission! And that mission, that goal, that promise, should be well reflected on your website! That’s why it’s important to write down your mission statement, but also communicate it to your audience.

The post How to write a mission statement for your site appeared first on Yoast.

10 tips to improve the quality of your page

Thu, 07 Jan 2021 11:50:00 GMT

Is your page not attracting the number of people you thought it would? Or are you wondering what you can improve to get your page higher up in the search results? And to get people to stay on (and come back to) your site? There are a few things you can do to give your page a better chance at performing well. In this blog post, we’ll discuss how you can determine which pages could use some extra love and what you can do to turn them into high-quality pages!

How to determine the quality of your page
Tips to directly improve page quality
Tips to improve site performance
Time to improve that page quality!

You may already be familiar with SEO and have a few pages that just don’t perform the way you would want them to. Or perhaps you’re not that experienced with SEO (what even is SEO?) and dread the thought of having to master it. In that case, we would like to assure you that it’s not that hard when you know the basics.

It is important to realize that SEO can have a huge impact on your business and online findability. It’s not just about using the right keyword a few times, search engines nowadays look at the whole picture. That’s why we’re such fanatic advocates of Holistic SEO. But before we go into that, let’s discuss how to determine the quality of your pages and which ones you need to work on.

How to determine the quality of your page

It’s important to determine which pages need improving and in what order. It can be tempting to just get started with the first page that comes to mind, but take some time to work out how your pages perform. This helps you prioritize and decide on what page needs your attention first.

Have a look at the metrics

You probably know your audience to some degree, but it’s unlikely that you know exactly what they want. Or how they search online and navigate through your site. Even if you have a hunch or hear from them regularly, make sure to look at the data to validate what people do on your site and where you can improve. A great tool to do this is Google Analytics.

A Google Analytics Dashboard showing site data

Google Analytics gives you access to lots of data about your site. It can tell you how many people visit your site and where they’re coming from. But also, which pages are being visited most and how long people tend to stay on this page. All of this helps you determine the quality of your individual pages. Our guide on tracking your SEO with Google Analytics helps you understand this data and use it to determine where you can improve your page.

Be aware of duplicate content

When you maintain a site, especially a growing site, it can be tempting to use the same content on different pages. Don’t give in to this temptation! When the exact content can be found on different pages, you have a case of duplicate content. This will hurt your chances of ranking high in the search results. Google can even penalize you for having them since they introduced the Google Panda algorithm.

You might have it on your page without knowing it. That’s why we’ve listed the most common causes and solutions for duplicate content. Tools like Copyscape are your first step in doing a DIY duplicate content check, but please investigate a bit more like described in the article.

Identify low-quality pages with Screaming Frog

A tool you can use to easily identify low-quality content is Screaming Frog SEO Spider. When you run a query for your website in the SEO spider, you will get a list of all the URLs on your site. Now scroll through that list and visit every URL that makes no sense to you. The thing is, low-quality pages often occur in groups, not as a single page.

Think along the line of old .html pages, where you end your URLs with a trailing slash now. Think about your attachment pages or anything with too many numbers in it. These should all make you feel suspicious. Visit the page, see if it shows low-quality content that shouldn’t be on Google. Test if these pages are indexed and see if there are more pages like them. Just go about it like that and you’ll find these low-quality pages in no-time. Take a critical look at the pages you’ve found.

Moz describes an even more in-depth analysis of low-quality pages in one of their Whiteboard Fridays, you might want to check as well.

Tips to directly improve page quality

When you’ve determined the quality of your individual pages, it’s a good idea to make a list in which you give priority to the pages you want to work on first. After that, the real fun begins. So let’s have a look at the first six suggestions we have to improve your page quality.

1. Decide on what you want to do with the page

Chances are that you resurfaced a few outdated pages or pages that don’t need to be shown in Google, even if you want to keep them on your site. The first step is to decide what you want to do with them. On the pages you want to keep, but don’t want to have shown in Google, you can use the noindex tag. If a low-quality page still holds relevant links to other parts of your website and has some traffic due to, for instance, links from other websites, you can use noindex, follow in your robots meta tag. This way, Google can find the page, follow the relevant links, but it will keep the page itself out of the search results.

You can find these indexing options in the Advanced tab in the Yoast SEO meta box

As for pages that are not up to date anymore, ask yourself the following question. Can you update the page by making a few changes to it? Great, then you can go to the second tip on this list. But for pages that no longer have any business being on your site anymore, it might be best to remove them.

Did you know that Yoast SEO Premium makes redirects super easy? No more unwanted 404s: easily create a redirect whenever you delete a post. Find out more about the redirect manager!

What to do with the URLs? If they still receive a decent amount of traffic, redirect them. To a similar page or post if possible, otherwise to a related category or tag page, and if all of that doesn’t fit, to your homepage. If there is little to no traffic, properly delete your page and let Google find the 404 or 410 error message. Your page will vanish from the search results and Google will be able to focus on relevant pages on your site instead.

2. Think about search intent

When you want to improve the quality of a page, it’s good practice to take search intent into consideration. Search intent (or user intent) is the term used to describe the purpose of an online search. To be more exact, it’s the reason why someone conducts a specific search. Over the years, Google has worked hard to improve its algorithm to be able to determine people’s search intent. That’s why you need to think about matching your content to someone’s search intent when they land on your page.

The reason we’re discussing this here is that you want to make sure your pages show up for the right search intents. When someone is looking for information, you don’t want to send them to your product page right away. They’re probably not ready for that yet. And when someone does have a transactional intent, you don’t want them to land on one of your blog posts discussing the latest news. You want to make sure they go to the right product (or category) page right away.

3. Create unique content

An important factor that determines the quality of your page is content. There are a few basics that you need to tackle right away. For one, always base your content on the right keyphrases by conducting keyword research. Also, if your low-quality page doesn’t have a lot of text and doesn’t hold a lot of information, this could be considered thin content. Your users and search engines aren’t fans of this type of content, as it has little or no value to them. This is also the case with duplicate content, as we discussed earlier. So make sure to write extensively on the topic you want to be found on.

Optimizing existing content?

Use the Duplicate Post plugin to copy an existing post or page to your drafts. This enables you to edit your content without it being published right away. That way you can take your time on improving this content.

When you’re happy with your revised content, you can copy this to your existing page or post and simply click update. Your post or page is ready to start ranking well, with just one revision!

Try to be critical of your writing and become the source for people instead of copying another source. Although it’s always good to keep an eye on your competition and the content they’re putting out there, make sure to have your own voice. If you write unique, insightful, useful content, people will be much more inclined to actually read it and even share your content on social media or link to it. Google will see that content as an addition to its index.

We don’t want to change the way you communicate with your audience. It’s what makes you unique. The readability analysis in our Yoast SEO plugin can help you tweak a few things to create an easy to read text everyone will love. Our plugin also gives you free access to our courses like the one on SEO Copywriting, if you want to brush up on your writing skills. When it comes to writing great content, Google also gave us a kind of checklist in 2011 that’s worth checking out. Most of what’s in there is still relevant ten years later.

4. Show expertise and trustworthiness

Everyone can own a website nowadays. Which is great, as this opens up the web for everyone. But this online growth has also resulted in trust issues when it comes to sites you’re not familiar with yet. That’s why it’s so important to show readers, and search engines, that you can be trusted and that you’re an authority in your field. This doesn’t just help your pages show up in the search results, it also helps users reach the level of trust they need to do business with you online.

Show your trustworthiness and expertise through your site and the content on your site. You can do so by using testimonials, being open about your business, security seals, and writing lots of content that shows your expertise. All of these will improve the quality of your pages, while also helping you build a strong brand online.

5. Work on your site reputation

Another factor that is closely related to trustworthiness is the reputation of your site. This is something search engines also take into account when determining the quality of the pages on your site. But how do they determine your reputation? By analyzing what others are saying about you online. For example, user ratings about your site and how positive these are. But also other experts or established sites mentioning your business on their site. Or any other information about your business or authors mentioned on other sites.

6. Link to and from your page

For people and search engines to be able to find your page, you need to make sure to link to it. From other pages on your site that are related to the one you’re currently working on. So make sure to work on your internal linking and connect the content on your site to each other.

That being said, it’s important to not go overboard and link to every page you own in one post. Always keep the user in mind. So make sure to link to pages or posts that are actually relevant and that you can link naturally to. Our plugin has a great internal linking tool that suggests related content for every post or page.

Tips to improve site performance

We still have 4 tips to go, and they’re all related to the performance of your site. Some of them may take some more time, but these aspects are essential if you want to improve the quality of your pages and site. Not just for the search engines, but especially for your users.

7. Improve your site’s speed

The speed of your website determines whether you get a good ranking in Google, and its importance keeps growing. Why? Because faster sites are easier for search engines to process. And because search engines know that users don’t like slow websites. Users tend to buy less from slower sites and don’t read and engage as much as they would do on a site with great site speed. So work on improving your site speed, you’ll be thankful for it later. Google also announced that their new ranking factor page experience will roll out in May 2021, making speed and user experience on your site even more important.

8. Consider user experience

User experience, also called UX, is all about how users experience a site or product. So why should UX be part of your SEO strategy? Search engines want to provide their users with the best result for their question or search query. The best result doesn’t only mean the best answer, it also means the best experience. So even if you’ve written an excellent answer in a post, but your site is slow or a mess, Google won’t consider your post the best answer.

Think about the goal of your site and specific pages. What do you want visitors to do on your page? Buy stuff? Read your articles? Your design and content should support this goal. Having a clear goal in mind will also help you prioritize the improvements for your site. This ties in with the search intent of a certain page, but you should also consider whether the design and structure of your pages support the goal of your site. And how does your site work on mobile devices?

9. Don’t forget about accessibility

The last question mentions your mobile site, and with good reason. Mobile is such a big part of most people’s life nowadays, that you don’t have the luxury of not having a well-performing mobile site. Make sure your site work on different devices and in different browsers to cater to every one of your site visitors. We have an ultimate guide on Mobile SEO that helps you determine the state of your mobile site, and what you can still improve on.

10. Keep your site healthy and safe

The safety and health of your site is important for the visibility of your site, but it’s also important for you and your business. So make sure to check how safe your site is right now and make the necessary improvements to keep your site happy and healthy. If you’re using WordPress, we have blog posts that help you with your site’s health and your security in a few easy steps.

Time to improve that page quality!

All of these tips will help you improve the quality of your pages. And give Google a website that truly helps their visitors, and in the end, simply answers their question. As soon as you have cleaned up all that low-quality content and all high-quality pages surface in Google, you know you’ve made yet another sustainable step towards better rankings. Have fun!

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

The post 10 tips to improve the quality of your page appeared first on Yoast.

What is anchor text and how to improve link text?

Wed, 06 Jan 2021 13:00:00 GMT

Anchor text — or link text — is the visible, clickable text of a link. It usually appears in a different color than the surrounding text and is often underlined. Good link text tells the reader what to expect if they click on the link. Getting your anchor text right increases the chance of someone clicking on your link, and helps search engines by giving them context.

Get Yoast SEO Premium now and you’ll also get free access to all the training courses in our SEO academy!

What does an anchor text look like?
Why are link texts important for SEO?
Different kinds of link text
Link focus keyphrase check in Yoast SEO
How to improve your anchor link texts
Internal links and anchor texts
This is anchor text

What does an anchor text look like?

Anchor text describes the article being linked to and entices visitors to click. Even search engines understand that the linked article is relevant because the URL and the link text correlate. So, for example, if you were to link to this article, you might use the link/anchor text like this: What is anchor text? So you link to other articles in a way that looks natural to the reader.

What does anchor text look like in HTML? The first piece of code is the URL, while the second part describes the link – and this is the anchor text. Like this:

The anchor text or link text is the piece of content describing the link

Why are link texts important for SEO?

Links are important for SEO: you need to add internal links, for example, to make your site structure clear to search engines. The text of the link helps search engines make sense of your (internal) links; it gives them more context. When you link to other content, Google uses the link text as an indicator of the topic of the linked page. If the link text matches your keyphrase, Google will not be able to tell which article is the most relevant for that topic and should rank for that keyphrase. So yes, anchor text is a ranking factor for Google.

Besides adding context to links for search engines, link text is also important to your users. The anchor text clarifies the value of a link and tells them where it leads them. So, using the focus keyphrase in the link text can be confusing for both search engines and your users. That’s why you should actively avoid competing links.

Different kinds of link text

Anchor text is relevant for both your internal links and your incoming external links. External sites can link to your content in various ways.

Branded links: A link with your brand name as an anchor, like Yoast.
The URL itself: Just your site’s URL without a text, like https://yoast.com. Not that helpful in most instances.
Site name: written as Yoast.com.
Article title: Exact matching the article, like What is anchor text?.
Exact keywords: Your focus keyword/keyphrase as anchor text
Partially matching keywords: Using variants of your focus keyword to make a readable link.
Related keywords: Not a direct match, but a keyword or keyphrase that is closely related to the main one.
Generic links: Try to avoid these ‘Click here’ and ‘Read more’ links. Tell people what a link is about. Otherwise, they’re guessing.

Link focus keyphrase check in Yoast SEO

The Yoast SEO plugin comes with a link focus keyphrase check, which can help you improve your link text. This check warns you when it detects competing links in your text. A link is considered a competing link when its anchor text contains the focus keyphrase that you want your page to rank for. So, the link focus keyphrase check assesses the links on a page and their anchor text and notifies you if you have competing links. If you have Yoast SEO Premium, the check will also look for the synonyms of your keyphrase.

Let’s consider an example. Say you have written an article about potato chips, so your focus keyphrase is ‘potato chips.’ If you then use a link with the anchor text ‘potato chips’ in that same post, that link is considered a competing link.

When Yoast SEO detects a competing link, it displays a warning message in the SEO analysis results.

Warning message in the SEO analysis results in Yoast SEO

How to improve your anchor link texts

So, what do you do if Yoast SEO warns you that you have competing links in your text? Follow the tips below to improve your link texts!

1. Create a natural flow

Writing, in general, should have a natural flow. The same is true for link texts. When adding links, make sure they fit well with the rest of the text. Look at it like this. If you are struggling to squeeze in a link in a sentence, the link probably doesn’t belong there. It’s better to put it somewhere else, and avoid making your texts unnatural and difficult to read. So, while links are important for SEO, you should make sure that they don’t get in the way of the message you want to convey.

2. Match the link text with the content you’re linking to

A good practice for writing link texts is matching the text of the link with the content of the page you are linking to. When a reader sees the linked text, they should immediately know what to expect if they click on it. Take a look at the text in the image below.

Example of good link texts

The links in this example blend in seamlessly with the rest of the text. Moreover, you know precisely what to expect if you click on a link. For example, the link text “content analysis in the Yoast SEO plugin” clearly leads to a post explaining the Yoast SEO content analysis features. How about the link text “meta description.” The sentence the link belongs to is about optimizing your text. So, you would expect that the link leads to a post about optimizing meta descriptions. And that’s what it does.

3. Don’t trick your readers

In the example above, the link texts are used responsibly. That is very important. You should not try to trick your readers with links. For instance, if your link text says “potato chips,” it would be bad practice to have that link take the reader to a car dealership page.

4. Make clear the link text is clickable

Lastly, make it evident to the reader that the link text is clickable. You can do that by using a different color for the link, underline it, or both.

Keep reading: Blogging: The ultimate guide

5. Bonus tip: put your entire keyphrase in quotes

Let’s say you are writing an article with the long-tail focus keyphrase ‘learning how to knit.’ If you use any of those words from the focus keyphrase in a link text, you may get feedback from Yoast SEO advising you to change it. To avoid getting a red bullet for the focus keyphrase in link check, you can put the entire keyphrase in quotes, so the analysis only matches the entire phrase, instead of the individual words.

Internal links and anchor texts

We all know that internal links are essential. Yoast SEO has a built-in internal link tool that makes it a lot easier to find related content to link to on your site. Whenever you add a relevant link to your article, you also need to think about the anchor text. By thinking carefully about how and why you link these articles to improve your internal linking structure you can help both users and search engines navigate your site easier.

To make the most of internal links try to only add links that add real value to users. Write great anchor text for them, so readers know this link has been carefully selected to help them find out more. Don’t link for the sake of it. Make it relevant and useful. And of course, don’t spam!

An example of an exact match

An example of a more free-flowing form of linking

This is anchor text

Anchor text helps both users and search engines decide whether a link is worth visiting. Some people try to game this system, but don’t fall into this trap. These days, Google has is pretty good at spotting links that are unnatural and even harmful. So, keep it natural and relevant, and you’ll be good to go!

The post What is anchor text and how to improve link text? appeared first on Yoast.

What’s technical SEO? 8 technical aspects everyone should know

Tue, 05 Jan 2021 11:52:00 GMT

An SEO Basics post about technical SEO might seem like a contradiction in terms. Nevertheless, some basic knowledge about the more technical side of SEO can mean the difference between a high ranking site and a site that doesn’t rank at all. Technical SEO isn’t easy, but here we’ll explain – in layman’s language – which aspects you should (ask your developer to) pay attention to when working on the technical foundation of your website.

What is technical SEO?

Technical SEO refers to improving the technical aspects of a website in order to increase the ranking of its pages in the search engines. Making a website faster, easier to crawl and understandable for search engines are the pillars of technical optimization. Technical SEO is part of on-page SEO, which focuses on improving elements on your website to get higher rankings. It’s the opposite of off-page SEO, which is about generating exposure for a website through other channels.

Why should you optimize your site technically?

Google and other search engines want to present their users with the best possible results for their query. Therefore, Google’s robots crawl and evaluate web pages on a multitude of factors. Some factors are based on the user’s experience, like how fast a page loads. Other factors help search engine robots grasp what your pages are about. This is what, amongst others, structured data does. So, by improving technical aspects you help search engines crawl and understand your site. If you do this well, you might be rewarded with higher rankings or even rich results.

It also works the other way around: if you make serious technical mistakes on your site, they can cost you. You wouldn’t be the first to block search engines entirely from crawling your site by accidentally adding a trailing slash in the wrong place in your robots.txt file.

But it’s a misconception you should focus on the technical details of a website just to please search engines. A website should work well – be fast, clear, and easy to use – for your users in the first place. Fortunately, creating a strong technical foundation often coincides with a better experience for both users and search engines.

What are the characteristics of a technically optimized website?

A technically sound website is fast for users and easy to crawl for search engine robots. A proper technical setup helps search engines to understand what a site is about and it prevents confusion caused by, for instance, duplicate content. Moreover, it doesn’t send visitors, nor search engines, into dead-end streets by non-working links. Here, we’ll shortly go into some important characteristics of a technically optimized website.

1. It’s fast

Nowadays, web pages need to load fast. People are impatient and don’t want to wait for a page to open. In 2016 already, research showed that 53% of mobile website visitors will leave if a webpage doesn’t open within three seconds. So if your website is slow, people get frustrated and move on to another website, and you’ll miss out on all that traffic.

Google knows slow web pages offer a less than optimal experience. Therefore they prefer web pages that load faster. So, a slow web page also ends up further down the search results than its faster equivalent, resulting in even less traffic. And, in 2021, Page experience, referring to how fast people experience a web page to be, will even become a ranking factor. So you better prepare!

Wondering if your website is fast enough? Read how to easily test your site speed. Most tests will also give you pointers on what to improve. You can also take a look at the Core Web vitals as Google uses them to indicate Page experience. And, we’ll guide you through common site speed optimization tips here.

2. It’s crawlable for search engines

Search engines use robots to crawl or spider your website. The robots follow links to discover content on your site. A great internal linking structure will make sure that they’ll understand what the most important content on your site is.

But there are more ways to guide robots. You can, for instance, block them from crawling certain content if you don’t want them to go there. You can also let them crawl a page, but tell them not to show this page in the search results or not to follow the links on that page.

Robots.txt file

You can give robots directions on your site by using the robots.txt file. It’s a powerful tool, which should be handled carefully. As we mentioned in the beginning, a small mistake might prevent robots from crawling (important parts of) your site. Sometimes, people unintentionally block their site’s CSS and JS files in the robot.txt file. These files contain code that tells browsers what your site should look like and how it works. If those files are blocked, search engines can’t find out if your site works properly.

All in all, we recommend to really dive into robots.txt if you want to learn how it works. Or, perhaps even better, let a developer handle it for you!

The meta robots tag

The robots meta tag is a piece of code that you won’t see on the page as a visitor. It’s in the source code in the so-called head section of a page. Robots read this section when finding a page. In it, they’ll find information about what they’ll find on the page or what they need to do with it.

If you want search engine robots to crawl a page, but to keep it out of the search results for some reason, you can tell them with the robots meta tag. With the robots meta tag, you can also instruct them to crawl a page, but not to follow the links on the page. With Yoast SEO it’s easy to noindex or nofollow a post or page. Learn for which pages you’d want to do that.

3. It doesn’t have (many) dead links

We’ve discussed that slow websites are frustrating. What might be even more annoying for visitors than a slow page, is landing on a page that doesn’t exist at all. If a link leads to a non-existing page on your site, people will encounter a 404 error page. There goes your carefully crafted user experience!

What’s more, search engines don’t like to find these error pages either. And, they tend to find even more dead links than visitors encounter because they follow every link they bump into, even if it’s hidden.

Unfortunately, most sites have (at least) some dead links, because a website is a continuous work in progress: people make things and break things. Fortunately, there are tools that can help you retrieve dead links on your site. Read about those tools and how to solve 404 errors.

To prevent unnecessary dead links, you should always redirect the URL of a page when you delete it or move it. Ideally, you’d redirect it to a page that replaces the old page. With Yoast SEO Premium, you can easily make redirects yourself. No need for a developer!

4. It doesn’t confuse search engines with duplicate content

If you have the same content on multiple pages of your site – or even on other sites – search engines might get confused. Because, if these pages show the same content, which one should they rank highest? As a result, they might rank all pages with the same content lower.

Unfortunately, you might have a duplicate content issue without even knowing it. Because of technical reasons, different URLs can show the same content. For a visitor, this doesn’t make any difference, but for a search engine it does; it’ll see the same content on a different URL.

Luckily, there’s a technical solution to this issue. With the so-called, canonical link element you can indicate what the original page – or the page you’d like to rank in the search engines – is. In Yoast SEO you can easily set a canonical URL for a page. And, to make it easy for you, Yoast SEO adds self-referencing canonical links to all your pages. This will help prevent duplicate content issues that you’d might not even be aware of.

5. It’s secure

A technically optimized website is a secure website. Making your website safe for users to guarantee their privacy is a basic requirement nowadays. There are many things you can do to make your (WordPress) website secure, and one of the most crucial things is implementing HTTPS.

HTTPS makes sure that no-one can intercept the data that’s sent over between the browser and the site. So, for instance, if people log in to your site, their credentials are safe. You’ll need a so-called SSL certificate to implement HTTPS on your site. Google acknowledges the importance of security and therefore made HTTPS a ranking signal: secure websites rank higher than unsafe equivalents.

You can easily check if your website is HTTPS in most browsers. On the left hand side of the search bar of your browser, you’ll see a lock if it’s safe. If you see the words “not secure” you (or your developer) have some work to do!

6. Plus: it has structured data

Structured data helps search engines understand your website, content or even your business better. With structured data you can tell search engines, what kind of product you sell or which recipes you have on your site. Plus, it will give you the opportunity to provide all kinds of details about those products or recipes.

Because there’s a fixed format (described on Schema.org) in which you should provide this information, search engines can easily find and understand it. It helps them to place your content in a bigger picture. Here, you can read a story about how it works and how Yoast SEO helps you with that. For instance, Yoast SEO creates a Schema graph for your site and has free structured data content blocks for your How-to and FAQ content.

Implementing structured data can bring you more than just a better understanding by search engines. It also makes your content eligible for rich results; those shiny results with stars or details that stand out in the search results.

7. Plus: It has an XML sitemap

Simply put, an XML sitemap is a list of all pages of your site. It serves as a roadmap for search engines on your site. With it, you’ll make sure search engines won’t miss any important content on your site. The XML sitemap is often categorized in posts, pages, tags or other custom post types and includes the number of images and the last modified date for every page.

Ideally, a website doesn’t need an XML sitemap. If it has an internal linking structure which connects all content nicely, robots won’t need it. However, not all sites have a great structure, and having an XML sitemap won’t do any harm. So we’d always advise having an XML site map on your site.

8. Plus: International websites use hreflang

If your site targets more than one country or countries where the same language is spoken, search engines need a little help to understand which countries or language you’re trying to reach. If you help them, they can show people the right website for their area in the search results.

Hreflang tags help you do just that. You can define for a page which country and language it is meant for. This also solves a possible duplicate content problem: even if your US and UK site show the same content, Google will know it’s written for a different region.

Optimizing international websites is quite a specialism. If you’d like to learn how to make your international sites rank, we’d advise taking a look at our Multilingual SEO training.

Want to learn more about this?

So this is technical SEO in a nutshell. It’s quite a lot already, while we’ve only scratched the surface here. There’s so much more to tell about (the technical side of) SEO! Want to learn more? Take a look at our free Structured data for beginners training. Want to learn all? If you get Yoast SEO Premium, you’ll get access to all our training courses and great tools such as our redirect manager!

The post What’s technical SEO? 8 technical aspects everyone should know appeared first on Yoast.

Clean up your site structure: how to reorganize your website

Mon, 04 Jan 2021 13:00:00 GMT

At a certain point, your website can grow to a monstrous collection of pages. You may realize that you have too many items in your menu and that the coherence of your website is nowhere to be found. Time to clean this mess up! But where to start? It’s a tough job, and sometimes it takes a lot of rethinking, rewriting and even creating new pages. That’s why we’ll help you reorganize your website and create a structure that Google and your users will appreciate.

To create a new structure for your website you’ll have to gather some information first. Here, we’ll guide you through this process step by step.

1. What’s your goal?

It’s tempting to just start shuffling the content you already have. But if you do that, you might skip one of the most important steps of reorganizing your site: thinking about the purpose of your website. Most likely, you’ve already done that when you’ve created your website some years ago. Or, when you started your keyword research. But, goals can change over time, as can the topics you write about or the products you sell.

So, first, take a step back and think about the mission of your blog, online store, or business. If you work for a larger organization with multiple stakeholders of the website, make sure you’re all on the same page about this. Of course, you can also agree on various sub-goals of parts of your website. Don’t forget to note these goals down for later reference.

Read all about defining the mission and goals of your website.

2. What content do you have?

Create an overview

Let’s create an overview of the content you have. You can use a simple spreadsheet for that. If you have thousands of pages, you might not want to mention all your pages in this spreadsheet. Most likely, your pages will belong to a certain section or category, for instance, your blog, services, or product pages. Or, if you have an online store you probably have some high-level categories, so you can mention these in your spreadsheet instead of every individual product page. You can place the most high-level sections/categories in the first column and get more specific in the second, third or fourth column. If you don’t have any sections or categories, but you do have lots of pages on your site, make sure to create some kind of hierarchy first!

Gather data

Don’t forget to check your (Google Analytics) data on the performance of these sections/pages/posts too. How much traffic do they get? Where does the traffic come from? Newsletters, Google, or somewhere else? And what is the page value or eCommerce conversion rate? It also makes sense to perform user research, to analyze what people search for/click on on your home page. This will give you loads of information on what your audience is looking for, which is essential if you want to serve them well!

The structure of your website is, in most cases, presented in the menu of your website. Of course, breadcrumbs and permalinks help as well, but these are not the things most visitors will take into account. The menu is. Your menu ideally consists of a limited number of top-level items, to keep your menu focused. To take a closer look at your menu, you may want to visualize it in the form of a table or document and keep it next to the other documents you’ve made.

If you’ve followed the steps above, you’ve now got three things: the goal and sub-goals of your website, information about its content and how it performs, and your current menu. Now ask yourself these questions:

What’s my most important content according to my mission?
Is that the content my audience is looking for too? (What does the data say?)
Can my users find it in the menu or on the homepage?
If I look at my goals, is there anything essential missing on my site?
Do I have content in my menu or high up in the hierarchy that isn’t essential after all, or doesn’t perform well?

Answering these questions will give you ideas on how to reorganize the structure of your site. In your spreadsheet, you can highlight the most important pages, sections, or categories. These should be accessible through your menu and/or homepage. That way, they will be easy to access for visitors and search engines.

You may find pages that are still good but don’t seem suitable for your menu anymore. Take them out of your top-level menu because you don’t want it to become cluttered. Just make sure to link them on related pages, your XML sitemap, and, for instance, in the footer of your site. This way Google and your visitors will still be able to find these pages. Having somewhere between 5 and 8 items (depending on the size of your website or store) in your main, top-level menu enables people to scan and find what they’re looking for at a glance.

When designing your homepage, obviously think about your goals, but also consider the user journey of your audience. Try to figure out where (most) people are in their journey when they land on your homepage and what they expect to find. You don’t want to bombard people with lots of sales-oriented content if they’re not ready for it yet! Content design is a great approach to providing users with the content they need at a certain point in their user journey.

5. Clean up!

If you look at your spreadsheet closely you may also find out that some of your pages should be updated or deleted. Or that complete sections or categories should be moved, merged, or split.

Update or delete?

You’ll probably find pages that need updating or worse: that actually shouldn’t be on your website or simply don’t fit the current or new site structure. For example, services you used to offer or information that just isn’t accurate anymore. Not sure what to do? Learn when to update or delete a post on your website.

Make a list of your pages or posts that need updating. If you have many pages that need an update and multiple people working on them, Trello is a great system to keep track of the process of updating your content.

If a page shouldn’t be on your site anymore, delete it from your website. Redirect that page to a page that is closely related to it. Preferably you should redirect the URL to a related article, to preserve any traffic that this page had. If that related article doesn’t exist, redirect to a related category page, or as a last resort to your homepage. If you want to let people and Google know it’s been deleted on purpose, serve a 410 Content Deleted error. Here you’ll find everything you need to know about properly deleting pages from your site.

The redirect manager in our Yoast SEO Premium plugin is a great help here because it allows you to create redirects yourself, no need for a developer! It will even ask you what to do with a URL when you’ve deleted a post or page.

Yoast SEO Premium will ask you what to do with a URL when you’ve deleted a post

Merge and move content

Sometimes it might be necessary to merge content. For instance, if you find out you have a lot of (similar) content on a topic. To prevent keyword cannibalization you can decide to merge multiple articles in one. Here you’ll find a guide on how to fix cannibalization.

If you move or merge categories or complete sections, keep in mind that the URLs of these (and underlying) pages might change. Fortunately, Yoast SEO Premium will automatically create a 301 redirect for you if you move a child page to another parent. That way the new URL will reflect the new location of this child page on your website. But, at some point, you might want to replace these 301s with the actual new URLs to prevent redirect chains.

Do consider: Internal linking, cornerstone content, and taxonomies

When talking about restructuring a website, we cannot skip discussing these two topics: Internal linking and cornerstone content.

Internal linking and cornerstone content

Cornerstone articles are posts or pages that are essential to you and your target audience. The idea is that you’ve got one main, very complete article that is of huge interest to your audience. You probably have other articles about subtopics of this topic, but this main article covers all you need to know. If you’re smart, you’ll also link from these sub-articles to your cornerstone content. You’ll not only guide users to it, but Google will also see this as a sign of importance, and will therefore rank it higher.

If you’re restructuring your website, you might want to grab the opportunity to scrutinize your internal linking structure as well. Are you linking your topically related posts with each other? Do you have a cornerstone strategy and are you linking to your most valuable posts most often? If not, Yoast SEO Premium offers you a helping hand. When writing a post, Yoast SEO Premium will suggest related content on your site to link to, based on the copy of the post you’re currently working on. If you’ve marked your most important posts as cornerstone content, it will even show these at the top of these suggested links. How awesome is that?!

With Yoast SEO Premium you’ll find internal linking suggestions in your sidebar

Rethink your taxonomies

When using WordPress, an apparent site structure is provided by the categories and tags you have used to divide your posts and perhaps pages. In WordPress, these are called ‘taxonomies’. In general, 8 to 10 categories would suffice for a website. Perhaps an online store could have more, but the top-level should preferably consist of that number of categories to keep your site and site structure focused.

If you don’t think you’ll reuse a tag, don’t apply it to a post. And if an eleventh category comes knocking on your door, you should probably consider reorganizing them, perhaps with sub-categories. Several WordPress plugins can help you reorganize your taxonomies, but most of them don’t seem to add redirects after merging or deleting taxonomies – be sure to do that, of course. Read all about taxonomy SEO.

Need some help restructuring your site? Yoast SEO Premium offers you everything you need: a Redirect manager to prevent people from landing on pages that don’t exist anymore and InternaI linking suggestions if you want to make sure all your related content and cornerstones are connected and found by search engines. And, because Yoast SEO Academy is part of Yoast SEO Premium now, you’ll automatically get access to our Site structure training too!

Don’t take this lightly

Although one can write this down in a couple of paragraphs, reorganizing a website can be a lengthy process that shouldn’t be taken lightly. When changing the structure of a large website, it could make sense to change the permalink structure as well, which can have a lot of consequences and isn’t something we’d advise doing if you don’t know the drill. In that case, it might make sense to consult an experienced SEO to help you do it right.

The post Clean up your site structure: how to reorganize your website appeared first on Yoast.

Looking back at Yoast in 2020

Thu, 31 Dec 2020 10:07:49 GMT

The year 2020 is coming to its end and what a wild year it’s been! The pandemic has had a huge impact on all of us, and this isn’t different for our team at Yoast. As many shop owners turned to the web to stay in contact with their (potential) customers, we saw the importance of improving our plugin even more. That’s why we’ve added lots of features and new languages to our Yoast SEO plugin in 2020. But we’ve also launched our new board this year! All while working from home and attending lots of fun events virtually. Let’s look back at everything that happened at Yoast HQ in 2020!

A year of working from home

Although we have colleagues all over the world, the largest part of team Yoast works from our offices in Wijchen (the Netherlands). From March on, we’ve had the advice to work from home as much as we can in the Netherlands. And so we did! Work from home as much as we could. We’re very happy that this was possible with our team, but it did call for big adjustments. In the way we worked, the way we brainstormed, and the way we kept each other informed. But also in our time management, as a lot of our colleagues had their kids at home as well.

How our team kept in touch

From the first day we started working from home I started doing daily vlogs! To keep each other informed, to share fun work projects and lockdown hobbies with each other, but also to remind everyone to take time off when they needed it to relax. As working from home can be tiring without your colleagues around. We made a fun compilation of our daily vlog up until now and plan to keep them going for as long as needed!

Travelling all over the world – virtually

Logically, a lot of WordCamps and other fun events looked a bit different in 2020. Most of them took place online, which meant that we attended lots of these events virtually. That was also new, but still loads of fun! It allowed us to travel the world virtually, think of new fun games for our virtual Yoast booth, and made it possible for lots of us to attend different WordCamps. Some of them even on the same weekend! We can’t wait to see all of you offline again, but in the meantime, these online events were a great way to meet up with everyone in our community.

Improvements to Yoast SEO in 2020

A year of new and improved features

In 2019 we solved a lot of technical debt, in 2020 we released lots of new features in Yoast SEO. From our very first release of Yoast SEO 12.8 on January 7, 2020 to our latest release of Yoast SEO 15.5 on December 15, 2020. That’s more than 20 releases in one year! As you can imagine, this allowed us to make lots of improvements to our plugin and released lots of cool new features as well.

I won’t mention all of them here, but let’s take a look at a few highlights. For example, Yoast SEO now comes with an improved sidebar that helps you tick all the boxes when it comes to optimizing your content. We’ve also improved the publishing flow by adding the option to share your post right after publishing or even setting Zaps to fully automate this process. Yoast SEO also helps you make your URLs stand out on Slack. Yoast SEO Premium now comes with different blocks that really help you improve site structure and get those rich results.

Of course, this isn’t everything we’ve added. Both our free and Premium plugin have had lots of other new features added to them. Additionally, we’ve added support for different languages to make our plugin more accessible for people writing in any other language than English.

Also a year of new languages

In March 2020, we made a few changes to our language analysis to make it easier to add new languages. This improved language processing system allowed us to add heaps of new languages to our plugin. From Spanish to Arabic, we added support for 13 different languages this year! So make sure to check out in which languages you can now write readable and SEO-proof content with Yoast SEO.

A year of integrations and fun partnerships

This year we also partnered up with other companies to make some awesome integrations happen. Firstly, we partnered up with our friends at SEMrush to help you find high-performing related keyphrases while you’re working in the post editor. Secondly, we worked together with Zapier to help you automate your publishing flow by setting Zaps that automatically run when you publish something. Lastly, we just released a seamless integration with Elementor, allowing users of Elementor to fully optimize their content with Yoast SEO while they’re working on their content!

A screenshot of the SEMrush integration in Yoast SEO Premium

Plus: we’ve combined our two biggest products

Last in this list, but definitely not least: we’ve combined Yoast SEO Premium with Yoast SEO academy this year! This means that when you buy Yoast SEO Premium, you’ll now also get free access to all of our SEO training courses in Yoast SEO academy. So the price of our plugin hasn’t changed, but what you’re getting has. This will allow you to take your SEO to the next level as Yoast SEO academy is full of in-depth courses on different SEO subjects. Read more on how and why we’ve combined our two biggest products.

New at Yoast in 2020

In addition to the improvements we made to our existing plugins, we also had other fun stuff that was new at Yoast in 2020. Such as a new plugin, a monthly webinar that is now accessible for everyone and our Yoast SEO Podcast series.

Welcoming Duplicate Post

In June 2020, we welcomed the plugin Duplicate Post and its creator Enrico Battocchi to Yoast. We were already big fans of Enrico and his work, as this plugin does one task simple and very well. Duplicate Post lets you duplicate any post or page in WordPress with one click. Allowing you to copy everything on that page and saving you lots of time. We’re very happy that Enrico joined our team and together, we’ll work on improving Duplicate Post even more.

Monthly webinar that are accessible for everyone

Every month, our SEO experts Joost de Valk and Jono Alderson discuss the latest news in SEO and WordPress. These webinars were always acessible for users of Yoast SEO academy, but this year we decided to open it up for everyone. Meaning that you could watch these webinars live, on Youtube or Facebook, and even ask questions! These are always great fun, so check out the December SEO news webinar and make sure to join our next one on January 26, 2021!

The start of our Yoast SEO Podcast

This year, we also launched the Yoast SEO Podcast. This is a podcast series in which our founder Joost de Valk talks to well-known friends in the SEO world. These podcasts can give you lots of relevant insights into SEO and how to optimize your own site(s) to rank higher in the search results. As our Yoast SEO Podcast series launched at the end of 2020, it’s still early days, but you can expect lots of new podcasts on a regular basis in 2021!

Our very first Yoast SEO Podcast with Christi Olson

What else happened at Yoast in 2020?

Last year also came with some changes when it comes to the way we run our company. With loads of people joining our team and all of us working from home, we wanted to make sure to keep our fun and familiar work environment going. While still providing our users with a reliable product that makes SEO accessible for everyone.

An even stronger focus on our core values

At Yoast, we all work to make the web a better place. For everyone. That’s why our mission is SEO for everyone. We believe in having fun at work and sharing knowledge with others. But we also value inclusiveness and equality. All of these core values are part of Yoast, they’re in our DNA. But to always keep them in mind in our day-to-day business, we decided to write our core values down this year.

This helps us remember what (and who) we’re doing this for. And what decision best serves our mission to make SEO possible for everyone, from big companies to the local shop around the corner. Something that became even more important in this year of doing business online.

We launched our new board

We had another piece of exciting news in December of this year. We were able to welcome two new board members and partners: Chaya Oosterbroek and Thijs de Valk! Chaya is our new COO and knows everything about optimizing business processes. That’s why we’re very happy to have her on our team. You can read more about her background and focus in this interview.

Thijs is our new CCO at Yoast and has a gift for optimizing conversion and sales. That’s why he’s a perfect fit for this role in our team. Thijs will help us grow Yoast even further, and with it, improve the web as a whole. Of course, I will remain the CEO of Yoast, Joost de Valk is still our CPO and Omar also stays on board as our CTO. Read more about these changes, or watch our video, in the blog post announcing our new board.

From left to right: Thijs de Valk, Omar Reiss, Chaya Oosterbroek, Marieke van de Rakt and Joost de Valk

That was it for Yoast in 2020!

All in all, this was a year that we’ll never forget. A year that brought us lots of challenges due to the pandemic, but also chances to improve our products and business in a creative way. We want to thank all of you for the fun events we had, and thank you to our users for staying with us another year. We hope to see you in 2021!

The post Looking back at Yoast in 2020 appeared first on Yoast.

Optimize product images for your online store

Wed, 23 Dec 2020 13:00:00 GMT

Product images can make or break your online shop’s success. You can hire the best designer in the world to create a killer design, but when images are bad, sales will be bad. It’s the first thing a customer will look at. In this post, we’ll go over a number of things you need to consider when adding product images to your e-commerce site.

The importance of good images
- Not just for people, but for machines as well
Product images set a mood
Quality of your product images
Ability to zoom
Any color you want as long as it is black
Alternate views or products
To wrap things up

The importance of good images

Over the years, there’ve been many studies that show the online consumer values high-quality product images. Customers trust credible online stores to have a way to view or experience the product online. They want to see product in all available colors and from all different angles. Online shoppers can’t touch the product so they have get everything they need from your description, images and videos. So, they better be good!

And in the year of the pandemic, the surge in online shopping has made it shoppers even more aware of good product information and images. With shops closed, they need to be able to see your products in the best light on your site.

Recent research from Periscope (a McKinsey brand), shows that many shoppers make the move to online for the first time. What they value most is good product descriptions and clear images.

“The need for informative product descriptions and clear product images at a time when consumers couldn’t see, feel or test products in a store ranked as one of the top three factors for a great online browsing experience in all the countries we surveyed, increasing in importance by 12 to 23% from pre- to post-shutdown.”

Not just for people, but for machines as well

Today, great images aren’t just consumed by people but machines as well. Increasingly, search engines and other platforms can ‘read’ images to make sense of what’s on them. As a result, they can provide you with a search result. So, you could take a photo of a cool pair of shoes your friend bought and have the search engine tell you where they came from and what they cost. Or, they can do a live translation of a road sign in a foreign language. This is called visual search — and it’s gaining speed!

The technology for this is getting better by the day and machines can read evermore complex images. But here, again, clear images of high-quality is increasing the chance of a machine understanding the image.

Product images set a mood

Product images are a big part of every type of online store. But sometime, you find e-commerce site with big images that just don’t do justice to the products the company sells. The images of the featured products simply don’t ‘pop’. If you want to stand out for the thousands of other stores, your photography needs to do that as well.

One of the things you could try is to use photos of people using the product. Or the product in use. It doesn’t matter if you sell coffee machines or dresses. If you add people, your product will look friendlier and people will see themselves using your products.

A bed in a fully furnished room or a basic, empty stock photo? What’s more enticing?

In the photo above, we’ve combined two images of the same bed to demonstrate what you can do with your photos. See the difference? That Ikea bed is much more appealing when it appears in a room — you can easily imagine how it will fit in your own room. Ikea does an awesome job in this, both in their magazines, on their website and in their stores. Product images like this are becoming more and more common, so be sure you’re not the last one to do this!

Using product images with the products in use works best, because people will be able to see themselves using that product. It’s as close as you can get to an in-store experience. People want to buy the product online, but an image will never replace picking a product up, looking at it from all angles or trying it on. We need to try to give our customers that same experience. You can even add small videos to present your products in another way, or to demonstrate certain features.

Quality of your product images

It seems so obvious to use high quality images. But we have been telling you to reduce the file size for years, right? First of all, that doesn’t mean you have to use a crappy, blurred image of just a few kBs. The tools mentioned in our image SEO article don’t reduce the quality of an image, for instance. They remove meta / Exif data and things like that, but your image will still look awesome. Plus, browsers can now work with a number of new image formats (like WebP) that provide drastically better quality images at a smaller size. And WordPress can now lazy load your images, so your site won’t load all the images at once — making it appear faster.

Also, internet connections are still getting faster. In many countries, broadband internet is everywhere. That also means people’ll have less difficulties downloading your larger product image files. You’ll need larger images anyway, as that leads us to another necessary feature of online shops: ability to zoom product images.

Ability to zoom

Have you ever picked up a backpack or daypack to inspect the lining? Is it waterproof, does it protect your stuff well? You want to be able to take a closer look at details. That’s what zooming product images is for. But, it’s so annoying when the zoomed image is exactly the same size (or even smaller) than the product image that was already shown. This still happens frequently! A lot of online shops simply import product images from manufacturers (or even download them from other shops that sell the same product) without testing the image first. This ruins user experience.

If there is no proper product image available, create one. Even your iPhone’s camera can provide you with a decent, large image that can serve as a zoomable product image. If you want to DIY your photography, Shopify has a great guide that’ll help create great photos for your online store.

If we look at image sizes, Shopify‘s guide on product images states:

Your product and collection images can be any size up to 4472 x 4472 px, or 20 megapixels. Product and collection images need to have a file size smaller than 20 MB to be added to Shopify. High resolution photos look more polished and professional to your customers. For square product images, a size of 2048 x 2048 px usually looks best

Woocommerce states that the minimum dimensions should be 800×800 pixels. That seems to make sense, as it will perfectly fit most tablets as well without any problem. Smaller will lead to distortion, and we have established you want quality images, right?

Any color you want as long as it is black

Henry Ford wrote in his autobiography “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black”. Times have changed. Today, you can get your products in many, many colors. Of course, you need people to show all the different color options in the same way as your ‘main’ color variant.

Bottom line: if you want to buy a blue sweater, you want to be able to see that sweater in that color. Clothing stores like Blue Tomato do this, by not just showing colored squares, but a thumbnail of the product in another color:

This store not only shows the different color options, but also has detailed photos and even a video of the product

Especially for products that consist of one main and a few other colors, this works really well.

Alternate views or products

You want to be able to look at a product from all angles. Let’s look at that Blue Tomato example again. It shows that sweater being used, from the back and front, plus some details. You can really check the sweater from multiple angles.

If you are looking for furniture online, you want to check that chair from multiple angles as well. You want alternate views for the kitchen appliances, even though you’ll hide the dish washer behind a cabinet panel. And let’s take a closer look at the fabric of those drapes, or the back cover of that book. Again, it’s all about replacing the in-store experience.

Zappos does all that and adds a video of (in this case) an employee telling you more about the product itself:

Many sites offer a video of the product in action — and rightly so!

The way that shoe is bent and rotated makes that you really ‘feel’ what kind of shoe that All Star is, so to say.

To wrap things up

If you have an online business selling actual products, you need to make sure to optimize your product images. Your customer will most definitely appreciate that. Make sure to:

use high quality images;
add an option for zoom;
make sure to show the product in all available colors;
provide alternate views of the product.

These are the main things to take into account when optimizing your shop’s images. We trust this article will make you rethink your own product images, or make you realize you are actually doing a pretty nice job!

What is content marketing?

Tue, 22 Dec 2020 13:20:00 GMT

Content marketing consists of all marketing activities that focus on the creation and sharing of information. If you’re serious about your SEO, it should definitely be part of your strategy. But nowadays, it’s also crucial for branding. Sharing valuable information is a great way to attract an audience and show them that you’re an expert in what you do. In this post, I’ll explain what content marketing is, why it’s important for SEO and how you can set up your own strategy!

What is content marketing?
- Types of content marketing
Why is content marketing important?
How do you set up your strategy?
Content is the way to go

What is content marketing?

Content marketing comes down to sharing valuable and relevant content with your audience. Free content that helps them solve their problems or understand more about a topic they’re interested in. Your audience will benefit from the information and will perceive you and your company as experts in a particular field. In the end, your expertise will be the reason why people will buy your products or services. And probably the reason they will keep coming back to your site.

Types of content marketing

A first example of content marketing is a blog where you regularly post new articles on topics in your field of expertise. This can also be the easiest way for you to start. At Yoast, content marketing is one of the main things we do. We share our knowledge on our SEO blog and make sure to also share this on social media and in our newsletter.

To be able to help all our users we write articles for people new to SEO, such as what is SEO? and articles for people with a bit more experience, such as our article on Google’s NLP model BERT. And although it might feel contradictory, sharing our knowledge on SEO has a very positive effect on the sales of our online SEO courses. Our audience perceives us as experts (probably through all the content we share) and is willing to pay money to get access to more of that knowledge.

In addition to a blog, there are lots of other forms of content marketing you could look into. For example, some sites choose to create E-books, informative videos, quizzes, apps, podcasts, and even events. All with a focus on sharing valuable information on a subject that their audience is interested in. And valuable information means that it’s in-depth, educational, and preferably unique. So that does mean that creating this content needs time and should be an ongoing process where you keep updating it when necessary.

Why is content marketing important?

As we just discussed, creating valuable information that you offer for free is the very essence of content marketing. So why are we telling you to create content to give it away for free?

Trust and expertise are essential

The web has given us a whole new way to get in touch with new people, discover new companies and even make our decisions. You probably do it yourself too. Online research before you make your decision on something, from getting a cat to purchasing a new laptop. As new competitors pop up every day, users become more critical about where and what they buy. Their decision on where to buy their products is increasingly based on their trust in and relationship with a company. A well-thought-out content marketing strategy can help you build a strong relationship with your audience, based on expertise and trust.

An example of how this works

Say you’re looking for a new laptop and you’re not quite sure which one to get. You might search for ‘how to choose a laptop’ and get shops that lead you directly to their laptops. However, you’ll also get sites that offer you a laptop buying guide that helps you decide which laptop is the best fit for you. By asking you questions on what you’re looking for, but also giving you easy-to-understand information on what the differences are between their laptops. Would you prefer going directly to a list of more than 100 laptops or go to a page that helps you filter the right ones?

The laptop buying guide above is a great example of content that helps a user with their question. And with it, gains their trust in their products. This shows you how powerful content marketing can be to build a great relationship with your audience. You could compare it to a shop assistant in an offline shop. If a shop assistant is friendly and takes their time helping you, this makes for a much better user experience than if they point you to their selection of laptops without saying much more than good morning. That’s why you should also think about your tone of voice and use storytelling in the content you create.

It’s beneficial to your SEO

In addition to creating trust and building a relationship with your audience, content marketing helps you with your search engine optimization (SEO). An important part of SEO is writing quality content, focused on your users. Because your users aren’t the only ones reading your content, Google and other search engines also read your text to decide when to show your pages in the search results. If you’re new to the world of SEO, consider using our Yoast SEO plugin that takes care of a lot of the technical SEO stuff to roll out the red carpet for search engines.

If content marketing is an integral part of your marketing efforts and you work on creating quality content, you will likely write a lot of content related to the terms your audience is searching for. Your website will start to pop up more and more often, as you write more blog posts. Overall, your rankings will go up. And, all of these new visitors are potential buyers. So, in addition to increasing traffic, content marketing could increase your sales as well.

How do you set up your strategy?

First of all, you need to start with keyword research to make sure you’re writing about the right things. This doesn’t mean you can’t write about what you want, but it can help you use the same words as your (potential) customers. Which is important, as this will help them find your content. Conduct your keyword research to create a list of keywords or keyphrases that you can write about. After you’ve created this list and decided on the priority of these keywords, you can start planning.

Create a realistic planning

Be realistic in how many blogs you and your team can write per week or month, as it is important to spend enough time on your content. Make sure to create an editorial calendar, sit down with your team of authors, and brainstorm about who wants to write what. And from what angle, to make sure you’re sending unique content into the world. Also, keep an eye on the variation in what you write about and leave room in your planning to write about last-minute news that you can’t plan ahead on. A well-thought-out content planning can really help you stay on top of your content marketing.

Choose your cornerstone content

Make sure to think about cornerstone content when you are setting up a new content marketing strategy. You should have about 4 or 5 articles that are invaluable to you, your company and your audience. These articles should be informative posts or pages. When you have written these articles, you should write tons of other blog posts about topics similar to these cornerstone articles. Make sure though, you write each of these new blog posts from another angle or about another subtopic. And don’t forget to link to your cornerstone articles from these blog posts.

Keep reading: What type of content should a cornerstone article be? »

Think about your site structure

Now that you’re starting to create more content, it’s important to think about the effect this will have on your site structure. Creating (or keeping) a clear site structure helps your users find their way to the information they’re looking for. The same goes for Google and other search engines. So, this is important from both a usability and SEO point of view. Check out our ultimate guide on site structure to review the structure of your site and what improvements you can make when it comes to all of this new content you’re creating.

Keep your content fresh

I wish I could tell you otherwise, but hitting publish on your well-written blog post doesn’t mean you should never look at it again. For both your users and rankings, it’s important to revisit your existing content from time to time. This way you can keep your content fresh and up to date, by making the necessary changes to keep it relevant. Make these updates of your existing content part of your content planning and make sure to do this on a regular basis for your most popular blog posts and pages.

If you’re using WordPress our Yoast SEO Premium plugin can help you with all the steps mentioned above. By warning you when you need to update your cornerstone content, providing you with internal linking suggestions, easily redirecting old URLs to new ones and much more! A subscription to Yoast SEO Premium also gives you full access to our academy courses, such as our course on SEO copywriting, site structure and keyword research.

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Content is the way to go

In this blog post, we discussed what content marketing is and why you should consider creating your own content strategy. Which in a way, is a great example of content marketing itself. I hope this article has provided you with valuable information that helped answer your question, as this is the essence of content marketing.

I would like to once again stress the importance of creating enough space for content marketing and remember that this is a long-term strategy. So it will take some time to become the number one search result! But this will definitely be worth it in the long run, so get started with your content planning right now:

Read on: Content planning for a blog 6 easy-to-use tips »

The post What is content marketing? appeared first on Yoast.

Towards a trusted web: Timestamping content with WordProof

Fri, 18 Dec 2020 11:10:07 GMT

The worldwide web is one of the greatest achievements of mankind. It has revolutionized communication and allowed for a stunning amount of innovation to happen. As a place without regulation, the web was allowed to grow tremendously. But today, we cope with the side-effects of that unregulated growth: misuse hurts people and even democracies. Now, there is talk of regulating the web — but some are also talking about bringing trust back to the web. One of the tools that can help bring back trust is timestamping content.

The web has a trust issue
Helping bring trust: the trusted web
Part of the solution: timestamping content
WordProof: using the blockchain to prove ownership
Timestamping and SEO
Towards a trusted web
Try WordProof at a discount

The web has a trust issue

Over the years, huge companies were allowed to grow their reach into every nook and cranny of the web. Of course, many of these companies provide us with valuable tools and insights that we can use to improve our knowledge, work, or even happiness. But today, many of us are concerned about our security, privacy, and loss of self. We see fake news thrive on social media, and regular newspapers struggle to keep their heads above water. We see corruption, foreign interference, and massive disinformation campaigns. This all leads to an important question: Who can you trust?

Looking to try WordProof? Sign up via this link and use to coupon code YOAST2020 to get a special discount!

Helping bring trust: the trusted web

The trusted web is an initiative to give consumers, governments, and companies a way to verify that they can trust what they read. It’s an idea to help the web become transparent about where something came from and accountable for who published what. It should no longer revolve be about machines making their choices for you, but you should be in control of what you do, what you read. You should be in control of how you use what you learn.

The talk for regulating the web is picking up and in Europe, we already have something called the GDPR. This gives European citizens ownership over their digital data. This is not a way to censor things, as that would hurt the web, but a way to enable people to decide for themselves what they want to do with their data.

Part of the solution: timestamping content

There are several initiatives that are working on parts of a future trusted web. One of the most interesting solutions is timestamping content in the blockchain. A timestamp lets readers know they can trust this piece of content as it has been verified and added to the blockchain. In the blockchain, the ownership and status of this content lives on in eternity — for all to see. It gives undeniable proof that this content exists, when it first appeared, who wrote it, and when it was last edited, if so.

Timestamping content provides a sense of trust for your readers. You show that you take your content seriously. Not only that, by adding it to the blockchain, you can prove without a doubt that you are the owner of this content. Timestamping is a relatively easy solution that helps improve trust and paves the way towards a trusted web.

WordProof: using the blockchain to prove ownership

There’s a Dutch company called WordProof trying to restore trust on the web. WordProof has built a solution that uses the blockchain to place and verify timestamps on content. It uses badges or links to show people that the content has been protected. If you want, you can even check the changes made in previously saved versions of the content. This allows publishers to be as transparent and trustworthy as possible. WordProof even lets you view the timestamp transaction on the blockchain.

Here’s how WordProof sees that route toward a trusted web:

A trusted web is more than simply regulating it

And here’s how readers can verify the validity of the content thanks to timestamps. Now, you can simply click on the link and see the WordProof popup appear. Getting your content verified is easy as well, it has a WordPress plugin to get that done for you. We have it running on yoast.com as well, as you see below this article. Check it out! If you like what you see, try it with a special discount we have for readers of our SEO blog. More on that at the end of this article.

Every timestamped article has a link at the end of the page. Click on it to see the details of the timestamp

WordProof has won several awards, like the Dutch Blockchain Awards 2020, and the EIC Horizon Prize for the best blockchain solution for social good. This last one consisted of a prize of 1.000.000 euros awarded by the European Commission. Our CPO and CEO, Joost de Valk and Marieke van de Rakt have a private stake in this company.

Speaking of Joost, he recently sat down WordProof founder and CEO Sebastiaan van der Lans to talk about his view of the trusted web and how he sees the future of the web.

Timestamping and SEO

Trust is a big factor for search engines as well. Over the years, we saw search engines put an ever greater emphasis on trustworthy websites and high-quality content. Especially for the so-called Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) sites, trust and expertise are very important. These are the sites that can impact your life depending on what you do, so stuff like medical and financial information. In these industries, you need to know you can trust the content these sites offer. Plus, is that writer really an expert in the business? Of course, the same goes for news publishers. Trust is essential.

Timestamping can help enhance the sense of trust for readers and publishers alike. But it’s not just the timestamp itself that helps build trust for readers. WordProof is also working on a solution to output the blockchain timestamps as schema.org structured data. Search engines can read this structured data and verify the validity of your content. In the end, this might lead search engines to trust your content more. This is another way of proving who you say you are, where you are from, and what you have written.

Towards a trusted web

The web is such a schizophrenic place — it has so many pros and cons. It can drive revolutionary developments, but it can also drive revolutions. And one of the biggest issues right now is that of trust. In the age of fake news and disinformation, it is getting harder and harder to find sources to trust — and to prove you can be trusted. Luckily, companies like WordProof are working to roll out technologies and policies that will hopefully lead to a trusted web.

Try WordProof at a discount

WordProof has a mission that aligns perfectly with the Yoast mission — both companies are striving for a better web. In this post, you got a bit of a background on the trusted web, timestamping and WordProof. Now, we’d like to offer you something:

Sign up now via this link and use the coupon code YOAST2020 to get an exclusive discount on WordProof. You’ll also get extra timestamps for free!

The post Towards a trusted web: Timestamping content with WordProof appeared first on Yoast.

The latest news in SEO and WordPress: December 2020

Thu, 17 Dec 2020 13:09:13 GMT

It’s December, the last month of the year and that means that we’ve also had our last webinar of 2020. In this month’s edition, our SEO experts Joost de Valk and Jono Alderson discuss the latest in Google, Facebook, WordPress and other SEO news. To give some spoilers, you can expect to hear more about the importance of mobile optimization and the release of WordPress 5.6! Watch the webinar right here or read the highlights of our SEO news webinar in December 2020.

Watch the December 2020 SEO news webinar

In case you’ve missed this edition of our monthly webinar, or if you simply want to rewatch it, you can do so right here. It’s about 45 minutes long, and this is including a few interesting questions at the end. If you simply want to read the highlights, you can find those in the blog post below. Enjoy and don’t forget to join us for our next webinar on January 26, 2021!

What’s new with Google?

True to form, Google has lots of news for us this month. Most importantly, there was the launch of a major core algorithm update in December. But they’ve also given us new and improved crawl stats in Google Search Console, an update on the impact of page experience on your rankings and much more.

The launch of a major core algorithm update

Google has launched a major core algorithm update in December and there’s a lot of news around this. Joost and Jono have discussed this before, but now that the launch has happened we’d like to touch on it again. For the simple reason that some site owners might have noticed some changes in their rankings. Or might have woken up to the fact that they lost some traffic after this major update. Logically, this can cause some commotion.

It’s important to keep in mind that a Google update will not have a huge impact on your business overnight if you make sure that your SEO is in order. Keep your site’s performance up to par, create quality content and work on your technical SEO to prevent things such as a sudden drop in ranking or traffic. Continuously working on your SEO and user experience is and always will be the best advice we can give you. And if you do see any changes, remember that this may very well also be the case with your competitors.

A company in the US, Path Interactive, has looked into who were the winners and losers of this Google Core Algorithm update. Noticeable right away are a few big names in the top 50 losing domains, so make sure to have a look if you’re interested in this.

Improved crawl stats in Search Console

Google’s new Search Console has been gradually rolling out new features and tools since its relaunch. A fun surprise is that it now also gives you some new and improved crawl stats for your site. These stats give you a reasonably detailed overview of how often Google crawls your site, what kind of status codes your site is giving them, and if they’re getting any errors when connecting to the server.

Simply put, this gives you a top-level overview of what Google’s crawlers found on your site. It doesn’t give you an in-depth look as other tools might be able to, but it’s a great overview. Especially for smaller businesses, that tend to have more trouble with finding out where a crawling issue might stem from.

Page experience: a mobile only factor?

For now, page experience turns out to be mobile-only. But, that doesn’t mean you should sit back and relax just yet. As mobile usage keeps growing and, as we discuss later on, mobile shopping is also growing exponentially. Google is officially rolling out the impact of their core web vitals metrics in June 2021. These metrics are a unified way for Google to know how efficient, fast and performant your site is and this will become an official ranking factor from that moment on. For mobile, that is.

This might have to do with the fact that people usually have a faster connection when they’re browsing on their computer. Meaning that a lower site speed will be less bothersome and won’t impact their user experience too much. However, Google is working on icons to indicate page experience in Search. It seems as if this is meant to make users more aware of fast and slow sites before they click on the search result. And this icon can be interpreted as a badge that you can be rewarded for having a fast website.

Example of page experience icons in Search

It’s safe to say that Google has a strong focus on site speed as part of a better user experience. Everything they’ve been doing in 2020, and plan to do in 2021, revolves around speed, performance and network availability. So it would be good practice to focus on these areas and work on your mobile SEO.

Anchor text as a ranking factor

You might be wondering why this is considered news, but Google recently confirmed that anchor text is a ranking factor. This might not feel like news to you, but we would like to discuss it nonetheless. Because an interesting part of this announcement is that they also mention the length of anchor text. Although a longer anchor text isn’t necessarily considered better, it does tend to give more context.

This is interesting to keep in mind when working on your site or blog. The specific text you highlight in your anchor text is a signal that tells Google what that page is about. And something like ‘click here’ as your anchor text doesn’t give Google much insight about the contents of that page. So try to be descriptive and tactical with your anchor texts, instead of using ‘read more’ or ‘click here’ to link to other pages on and off your site.

Google News Showcase expands

We’ve discussed the relationship between Google and the publishing industry during our webinar in July. It’s becoming more difficult for news publishers to get people to click through or go to their site. What we see happening increasingly is Google showing this content directly in the search results. To offer a possible solution Google is expanding their News Showcase.

With these new updates in Google News Showcase, users will get access to content that’s usually behind a paywall. In exchange for their email address that will be provided to the news publisher in question. Note that this is something news publishers will sign up for themselves, as they will also be paid by Google to provide this (limited) access to paywalled content. It will be interesting to see how this evolves.

Google stresses the benefits of AMP again

On their blog, Google once again talks about the benefits of AMP. If you’re not familiar with AMP yet, this is a web standard that you can use to build web pages. It was originally created by Google to help people make faster sites on mobile, because this can be quite hard to do. AMP allows you to build a speedy mobile site without having to master HTML, Javascript or other areas such as security and networking.

AMP has evolved a lot as a platform, it’s open source and there are lots of people from different companies involved in the process of making it even better. And now, this group of people will be joined by our very own Jono Alderson. He has been elected to be part of the AMP advisory committee, a group of people that come together on a regular basis to discuss what direction AMP should take to better it even more. We’re very proud of Jono for joining this committee and contributing to making AMP, and with it the web, better.

What’s new in WordPress?

This December webinar comes with great news when it comes to WordPress. Because earlier this month the latest release of WordPress was launched. This version, WordPress 5.6, is called Simone and it was led by an all-female release squad. It’s a pretty cool release, packed with loads of great features that help bring WordPress to a higher level. As almost 40% of the web is now powered by WordPress, these features are very welcome in turning WordPress into sophisticated software that caters to every user.

Our core team at Yoast has worked on this release quite a bit, and one of the things they’ve worked on is the new default theme Twenty Twenty-One. It’s worth checking out, as it is one of the best default themes when it comes to SEO. Plus it has a beautiful dark mode. Our team has also done quite some work on the PHP side and other features in this latest release, so we’re quite happy to see that the upgrade to WordPress 5.6 went quite smoothly for most users.

What’s the latest at Yoast?

We had the Yoast SEO 15.4 release two weeks ago and this was quite a major release. In Yoast SEO 15.4, we introduced a seamless integration with Elementor. Elementor is one of the biggest page builders out there and now you’ll be able to use Yoast SEO in this editor as well.

Additionally, we had the release of Yoast SEO 15.5 this week, which was a relatively minor release in which we introduced support for the Hungarian language. We hope this will help users of our plugin that (want to) write their content in Hungarian. As December is always a bit of a month to wind down, this was our latest release and the next one will be in January.

But that’s not all! We have other exciting news, as we had our very first episode of the Yoast SEO podcast this month. You can already listen to this first episode, where Joost talks to Christi Olson (Microsoft) about their views on Search Engine Marketing. We plan to make these podcasts a regular thing, so we already have our next one planned. This episode will be with Aleyda Solis and it will air next week. so make sure to check out our Podcast page!

In other news, we’d briefly like to go into Shopify breaking records over the Black Friday weekend and the rise in mobile shopping worldwide.

Shopify merchants break records over Black Friday weekend

Shopify put out some data insights that their merchants broke records with over 5.1 billion in sales during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend. That’s an profound amount of money, even for Shopify that has already had a great streak this year. They’ve grown immensely by a whopping 76% percent in 2020.

One of the things that Shopify has done an incredible job of is making it very easy for small owners to sell stuff online. Also making them a competitor for WordPress in that sense. It’s mostly all small businesses and independent retailers, and we love seeing platforms that help grow these kinds of businesses.

In somewhat related news, everyone seems to be shopping on mobile. As a site owner, this means that you have to optimize your entire customer journey on mobile. From homepage to checkout. There are still a lot of businesses where the mobile site looks okay until you get to the checkout. If you’re looking for a trustworthy payment processor, check out players such as Stripe. They might cost you a bit more, but they make your checkout so easy. And with consumers exceedingly expecting a flawless experience, this is crucial.

That’s it for SEO news in December 2020

That’s it for the highlights of this month’s edition of the Yoast SEO news webinar. If you want to know a bit more about the topics discussed, make sure to check out the rest of our webinar on YouTube. We hope you enjoyed this recap and hope to see you for our next edition in the new year! This edition will take place on the 26th of January 2021 and if you want to stay up to date about this event and others we have planned, make sure to sign up for our newsletter below this blog post. Have a great December and see you then!

Want to catch up on news from the past few months? Check out these posts:

The post The latest news in SEO and WordPress: December 2020 appeared first on Yoast.

Transition words: why and how to use them

Wed, 16 Dec 2020 13:00:00 GMT

Using transition words in your writing can help you enhance the readability of your content. These words help your text flow and show readers the relationship between phrases and paragraphs. That’s why the readability check in Yoast SEO provides feedback on your use of transition words. But what are they exactly? Why are they so important? And how should you use them?

Welcome to our 2nd most-read blog post of 2020! We’re sharing this blog post as part of our holiday calendar, which holds a new surprise every day. So make sure to check it out!

What are transition words?
Exploring transition words with an example
Types of transition words
Why are they important for SEO?
What does the transition words check in Yoast SEO do?
How to improve your use of transition words
- 1. Know the words
- 2. Be aware of how your thoughts and ideas relate to each other
Conclusion

Did you get a red or orange bullet for your use of transition words? Jump to the section about the Yoast SEO transition words check. Or go straight to learning how you can improve your use of transition words.

What are transition words?

Transition words are words like ‘and’, ‘but’, ‘so’ and ‘because’. They show your reader the relationship between phrases, sentences, or even paragraphs. When you use them, you make it easier for your readers to understand how your thoughts and ideas are connected. What is more, they prepare your reader for what’s coming.

Let’s consider an example.

I pushed the domino. As a result, it fell over.

When you start a sentence with ‘as a result’, your reader will immediately know two things:

What happened in the first sentence caused something;
The second sentence is going to describe the effect.

By using the phrase ‘as a result’ here, you show that the two separate sentences are part of one process. Without having even read the rest of the sentence, your reader can already guess what’s coming. In a way, transition words are the glue that holds your text together. Without them, your text is a collection of sentences. With them, the individual parts come together to form one whole.

Transition words don’t always have to be placed at the beginning of a sentence. Consider the following examples.

He’s a very nice guy. He took us out to dinner yesterday, for instance.

In this example, ‘for instance’ is placed at the end of the sentence. Nonetheless, it still provides the reader with information as to how the two sentences are related.

I enjoy his company because he always tells interesting stories.

In this example, ‘because’ doesn’t connect two sentences, but two clauses. Transition words can connect anything from short phrases to entire paragraphs.

Exploring transition words with an example

Let’s use a more concrete example. Below, you see Text A and Text B. Text A contains no transition words. On the surface, Text B is the exact same, only we’ve added transition words to make it easier to read.

Text A
I’m going to discuss a few reasons why practice is important to learning skills. The only way to truly master a skill is by actually doing what you’ll have to do in the real world. I think practice can be a fun way of putting in the necessary hours. There are some people who will disagree. It is said that people tend to remember only 10-20% of what they’ve heard or read. That number rises to as much as 90% when you put theory to practice. Following up explanation with practice is key to mastering a skill.
Text B
In this paragraph, I’m going to discuss a few reasons why practice is important to mastering skills. Firstly, the only way to truly learn a skill is by actually doing what you’ll have to do in the real world. Secondly, I think practice can be a fun way of putting in the necessary hours. There are, however, some people who will disagree. Thirdly, and most importantly, it is said that people tend to remember only 10-20% of what they read or hear. Moreover, that number rises to as much as 90% when you put theory to practice. In conclusion, following up explanation with practice is key to mastering a skill.

Text A is not a terrible paragraph. However, the differences are clear as day. Text B does a better job of showing there are three separate arguments to support the statement with a definite conclusion. The reader never has to wonder whether a sentence still belongs to the previous argument or a new one. Moreover, it even shows the relationship between sentences within one argument. Therefore, people are going to find it easier to read this text and will stay on the page longer. And this is just one short, conveniently arranged paragraph!

Types of transition words

Transition words can be divided into several categories, based on the type of transition you want to make. There are often several words available for one transition. Sometimes they mean exactly the same, sometimes there are slight differences. If you’re not a native speaker or struggle with language in general, you’ll have to study and practice their use so that you can make better choices.

Transition	Example word/phrase	Example sentence
Cause and effect	Therefore, as a result, so, consequently	I’m tired. Therefore, I’m going to bed.
Clarification	That is to say, in other words, to clarify	We’re letting you go. In other words, you’re fired.
Contrast	But, however, on the other hand	I am not fond of fruit. However, I do like bananas.
Example	For example, for instance	In the evening, I like to relax. For instance, I enjoy watching TV.
Emphasis	Above all, most importantly, certainly	There are many reasons to exercise regularly. Above all, it keeps you healthy.
Enumeration	Firstly/secondly, further, and, moreover, in addition	Today, I’m going to write a post. In addition, I’m recording some video lessons.
Time	Meanwhile, during, subsequently, after that	I’ll start by telling you what transition words are. After that, I’ll tell you why you should always use them.
Similarity	Likewise, similarly, in the same vein	She tried really hard to entertain her guests. Similarly, he put all his heart and soul in cooking a great dinner.
Summarize/conclude	In conclusion, to sum up, in short	In conclusion, transition words are an important aspect of SEO copywriting.

Table 1: transition words with example sentences

Check out this article for transition words in other languages.

Why are they important for SEO?

Transition words make it easier to read and understand a text. And readability is very important for SEO. Although they don’t influence your SEO directly, they are one of the key factors to readability.

Transition words also play a crucial role in structuring your text. This leads to a better understanding of your text by your readers. A well-structured text helps to attract readers to your blog and contributes to SEO!

What does the transition words check in Yoast SEO do?

The transition words check in Yoast SEO assesses whether or not you use enough transition words. If at least 30% of the sentences in your text contain a transition word, the bullet will be green. You get an orange bullet if you use them in more then 20%, or in less than 30% of your sentences. The bullet will be red if less than 20% of the sentences of your text contain a transition word. That’s less than 1 in 5 sentences.

Want to read more on how we came to the exact measurements of the transition words check and of the other readability checks? Check out our article about the methodological choices of the readability analysis.

Want to find out which transition words Yoast SEO recognizes? Check out our article on transition words in your language.

How to improve your use of transition words

There are several potential problem areas when it comes to transition words. Let’s start with the good news: everyone uses them in some way. There are very few authors who never use the words ‘and’, ‘but’, ‘or’, and the like. Using them correctly or frequently enough, however, doesn’t come naturally to everyone. Using transition words successfully requires a couple of things. You have to:

Know the transition words;
Have a clear idea of the relationships between separate thoughts and ideas within your text;
Know how to apply transition words properly and in context;

1. Know the words

Actually knowing the transition words is most commonly a problem for non-native speakers. However, many native speakers could also benefit from studying the less frequent ones. In any case, it is easy to do. You simply look up a list of transition words and study their definitions. Don’t underestimate it either, though! They are often quite nuanced and really depend on context.

2. Be aware of how your thoughts and ideas relate to each other

In the blog post assignments, people hand in for feedback in our SEO training courses, we see a clear pattern. People who have a better idea of the structure of their text also use more transition words and do it more effectively. Too often, people just start writing and then basically just see what happens. So what can you do?

Break your text down into an introduction, body, and conclusion, and make sure you know what goal every paragraph serves. Then, survey your text on a sentence level. Find opportunities to make transitions that make sense. If you struggle with this, try reading texts by other authors and see how they use transition words.

Conclusion

Transition words are very important for the readability of your text. However, many people struggle with them. If you do, study them and make sure you practice a lot. Our SEO Copywriting training can help you with that. In addition, make sure you’re aware of the structure of your text. In this way, it will be easier to pick the best transition words available.

The post Transition words: why and how to use them appeared first on Yoast.

Yoast SEO 15.5: Support for the Hungarian language

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 08:26:24 GMT

The year is drawing to a close and we are ready for our final release of 2020. In Yoast SEO 15.5, you’ll find support for the Hungarian language — including word forms in Premium. In addition, you’ll find a number of enhancements and fixes. Let’s meet Yoast SEO 15.5!

Improve your content

Having great content is essential for your site. But getting your content right isn’t that easy. Over the years, we built several language-based tools that we have fine-tuned based on our research and your experiences. For many, the SEO and readability analyses in Yoast SEO have become something of a teacher that gives you a pat on the back when you are doing awesome. Our tools help guide you towards great content — but it’s you who is doing the work. We can only do so much, but that’s why we keep working on sophisticated tools to help you take your writing to the next level.

You can find one of those smart tools in Yoast SEO Premium: word form support. For fourteen languages, we can now better find the keyphrases inside complex sentences. This is because we understand grammatical forms. A very simple example would be the word ‘puppy’, with Premium, Yoast SEO would also recognize the word ‘puppies’ as this is a relevant word form. Of course, this works for complex keyphrases as well.

In Yoast SEO 15.5, we’re adding another language to our roster: Hungarian. For free, we’re adding the passive voice assessment and the consecutive sentences assessments, and improving keyphrase recognition. In Premium, we add full word form support for the Hungarian language.

Buy Yoast SEO Premium now!

Unlock powerful features and much more for your WordPress site with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin!

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Enhancements and fixes

Yoast SEO 15.5 comes with quite a few fixes and enhancements. We’ve added breadcrumb schema.org structured data to the homepage and we’ve removed the Open Graph and Twitter author metadata on pages and other non-post post types. We’ve also removed support for the Facebook App ID, as Facebook has indicated this feature is no longer used on their side. Last but not least, we’ve added a notification that tells you to install and activate the Yoast SEO Multilingual plugin when you have the WPML plugin installed and activated.

Of course, we’ve also fixed several bugs with regards to unable to save settings and missing translations. For all fixes, please see the changelog for Yoast SEO 15.5

Yoast SEO 15.5

It’s time for one final release in 2020, Yoast SEO 15.5! This release mainly features several fixes and enhancements, plus full support for the Hungarian language. For Premium users, this last bit also includes word form support in Hungarian. More languages coming soon!

The post Yoast SEO 15.5: Support for the Hungarian language appeared first on Yoast.

Meet Chaya Oosterbroek: our new COO at Yoast

Thu, 10 Dec 2020 09:15:24 GMT

We’ve had the pleasure of welcoming a lot of new people to our team this year. Including a new board member and co-owner in the company: Chaya Oosterbroek. We’re already big fans of Chaya as our Chief Operations Officer and we think you will be too. So let’s get to know her by asking her some questions about her new role at Yoast, what drives her, and what she thinks the future holds for Yoast.

Chaya's story before starting at Yoast
A new chapter: COO at Yoast
- Sorry to hear that! So how did fair fashion bring you to Yoast?
- What does your day as COO look like?
A look into the future of Yoast

Let’s start with explaining what a Chief Operations Officer, or Chief Operating Officer, is. A COO is a senior executive tasked with overseeing the day-to-day operations of a company. This means that a COO often handles internal affairs and makes sure that the strategy and mission are acted on in the ongoing daily business. This might still feel a bit abstract to you, so let’s go to our questions and let Chaya explain it to you!

Chaya’s story before starting at Yoast

Tell us, what are you like?

You can describe me as an enthusiast, in every way possible. My glass is always half full and I love to laugh. Although I am able to switch to being serious in a heartbeat when the situation asks for it. I also have a wide range of interests and love to look at things from multiple perspectives. You can say I’m quite versatile and able to quickly put things into perspective, which helps me play into every situation that arises.

In my spare time, I play soccer, which I’ve been doing for almost 30 years now. I also love spending time with my family, friends, and especially my girlfriend Sanne. We enjoy traveling around the world and learning about other cultures. She also joined me a few times when I visited India, my country of birth. Which I’ll tell you more about later in the interview.

What did you do before starting at Yoast?

Early on in my life, I realized that going to college or university was not the best fit for me. So I just started working. And one of the managers at my work saw something in me that allowed me to become a team leader in no time. This is where my love for process optimization and team development was able to come out. Learning how people work, how interpersonal processes work, and how you can create and strengthen a great team. Basically, allowing everyone to become their best self, that’s what I thrive on.

In my career, I’ve worked at different companies as a manager or consultant. And I also got the opportunity to be the director of a foundation for young entrepreneurship. This allowed me to meet lots of different people, different cultures, and different processes. And I loved every minute of it. It also allowed me to dive into lots of different fields, such as finance, energy, insurance, and so on. One constant was my focus on customers and strategy with an operational approach.

And you’ve also had your own company, right?

Yes! After 15 years, I decided to quit my job and travel. One of the countries I wanted to visit was India, my country of birth. Which I hadn’t visited since being adopted as a baby. I was nervous about going back but found it to be very fascinating when I got there. During these months I visited India a few times and realized something. I wanted to connect my two worlds, these two countries with each other. India, the country where I was born, and the Netherlands, where I grew up.

Eventually, I met a man who sold bags that were being produced in ethical conditions. So I bought a batch of these bags and created a website. After a while I realized that I wanted to be part of the entire process, to create something from the ground up. So I rented my first space, bought sewing machines, got the materials and hired my first employees with the help of the people I got to know there. All of this with a focus on creating an ethical work environment and product.

My company was founded on a few core values: fair fashion for everyone, empowerment to the workers and happiness before profit. While my company grew, we were able to open up two shops in New Delhi and had customers from all over the world. What an adventure this was. It was wonderful, but it was also challenging and it thought me a lot about our world.

But there is an end to this adventure. My fair fashion company was doing well, but wasn’t prepared for the COVID situation that hit worldwide. Logically, production came to an immediate stop and it became hard for me to stay in touch with some of my employees. I kept on paying the salaries and other costs, but after a while it became clear that we didn’t have enough funds to wait out the situation. Which means that, unfortunately, I’m phasing-out this company and trying to find a buyer. If I can’t find anyone, I’ve decided to donate my remaining stock.

A new chapter: COO at Yoast

Sorry to hear that! So how did fair fashion bring you to Yoast?

Right! When this was happening, I was living in Nijmegen (a city near Wijchen) with my girlfriend Sanne. After a few weeks off, I started looking at vacancies again and came across a job vacancy at Yoast. What really spoke to me is Yoast’s philosophy of putting people first and the mission: SEO for everyone. During the interview, I realized that this was a team of people I would love to work with. And that if I wanted to make an impact, this was the company that would make this possible.

I started as the manager of the Support team and was delighted by the vibe in the company. Even during COVID times, it was clear how much Yoast values their employees and how much positive impact this company has and can have. When the position of COO became available, I realized that this was a perfect match for me. After talking about this with the rest of the board, and defining whether our core values aligned, we decided that I would become the new COO at Yoast.

What does your day as COO look like?

In a nutshell, my day consists of ‘putting out fires’. Of course, I think about process optimization and keep an eye on whether our daily business is still in line with our strategy. But on a day to day basis, this means that I solve problems wherever they arise. And making sure that the team is able to manage and has everything they need.

This means that I check in with the team managers to find out what they need. Additionally, I talk to the other board members regularly to stay up to date on everything that’s going on. In these check-ups with each other, I try to get to the core of what’s happening and whether we should change that. Also, I always leave room to talk with each other on a personal level as I believe this is so important. Especially now, when lots of us are working from home.

So to summarize, my job is to analyze, make connections and anticipate. All to make sure the company and team can happily work on our products and relationship with our customers. Which strengthens our work environments and helps us achieve our goals.

A look into the future of Yoast

What will be your focus as COO?

What became apparent to me right away, is that diversity is important at Yoast. It’s in our core values, it’s in the DNA of Yoasters, it’s something we’re passionate about. In my eyes, this is something we can and should propagate even more. Especially as we’re part of the WordPress community, in which diversity is also considered a priority.

From my own experience, I can tell you that I really missed having a role model when I was growing up. Someone that looks like me and that could show me that we all come from different backgrounds. And that this is something that you can use to your advantage. By bringing something new to the table. So that’s something I want to work on, continuing our focus on diversity and communicating this to the world around us. Because everyone is welcome and we have such a great platform to be advocates for this topic.

What does this mean for Yoast?

I want to lead Yoast to the next level in entrepreneurship. The board and team have created such an awesome product and philosophy that make an impact. I want to take this even further. By growing our company, and with it, our ability to make a positive impact on the people around us. What we’ve already created is great, and now I want to work on professionalizing it in a way that still puts people first.

We work with a lot of talented people. And Yoast allows everyone to grow in the direction they want to go. Which is great. But I want to make sure that we give our people this room in a way that aligns with our strategy, in a way that is innovative and focused on their needs. Now I don’t have all the answers yet, but I do know that these are the topics that I want to focus on right now. By being creative and keeping each other on our toes. Are we still making the right choices? Is this decision in line with our mission of making SEO accessible for everyone?

Will all of these changes impact the mission of Yoast?

To give you a short answer: no. We will continue to focus our work, resources and products on making SEO possible for everyone. From large businesses to the shop around the corner. Also, we’ll continue to work on strengthening our core values and making them a part of our Yoast DNA.

We’re always looking for ways to increase our impact in a positive way. By enhancing our products and service, but also by listening to our users and what their needs are. Because that’s where your focus should always be, on the end-user. Helping our users is my main drive and I believe that this fits very well with the drive I see at Yoast.

The post Meet Chaya Oosterbroek: our new COO at Yoast appeared first on Yoast.

Meet the new board of Yoast!

Thu, 10 Dec 2020 09:14:24 GMT

We have exciting news! We have welcomed two new board members and partners: Chaya Oosterbroek is our new COO and Thijs de Valk is our new CCO. Marieke van de Rakt will remain our CEO, Joost de Valk is unstoppable as our Founder and CPO and Omar Reiss will stay on board as our CTO.

Welcome Chaya and Thijs!

Chaya Oosterbroek is the new Chief Operations Officer at Yoast. Chaya is a social entrepreneur, a seasoned business-woman and an experienced director. She knows everything about optimizing business processes. “I am really excited about working at Yoast,” Chaya says, “I am really excited about leading Yoast to the next level of entrepreneurship to improve the web even further. I truly believe embracing diversity, enabling talent and creating opportunities is the way forward.” Read our interview with Chaya to get to know her better.

Chaya Oosterbroek is the new Chief Operations Officer at Yoast — photo by Rob Voss

Thijs de Valk is the new Chief Commercial Officer at Yoast. Thijs is a user experience expert and has a gift for optimizing conversion and sales. He’ll help us grow Yoast even further. “I’ve known Yoast since its inception and have always marvelled at its products and its growth. It’s such an honor to now be made responsible for the growth and sales of Yoast.” Thijs says, “Helping Yoast grow will not only grow the company, but also the impact we have on WordPress and open source. I truly believe that this impact will improve the web as a whole!”

Thijs de Valk is the new Chief Commercial Officer at Yoast — photo by Rob Voss

Let’s hear what the board has to say

Want to know even more about our board? Our page about the board of Yoast contains everything you want to know!

Why the changes in our board of directors?

Yoast has grown rapidly over the last 10 years. Today, more than 120 people work for Yoast. We’ve hired people from all over the world to work with us. We had to say goodbye to one of our former directors. A lot has changed. Those changes ask for directors with strong leadership and management skills. We’re really lucky to have found those people. The new board of Yoast now consists of five true entrepreneurs, partners that will lead and share responsibility for the growth of Yoast. Our new board is ready to take on the world!

The post Meet the new board of Yoast! appeared first on Yoast.

Twenty Twenty-One: New default theme for WordPress 5.6

Wed, 09 Dec 2020 09:05:22 GMT

Almost every year, WordPress gets a new default theme. This theme is bundled with the last major release of WordPress for the year. This time, we welcome a new theme in WordPress 5.6. The theme is called Twenty Twenty-One and it is a stunner. It was designed by Automattic’s Mel Choyce-Dwan and built by a team of developers led by Carolina Nymark. Let’s meet the new theme and one of its creators: Carolina.

A beautiful and practical theme for WordPress

Twenty Twenty-One is a great theme with a design that makes it stand out. The colors, the whitespace, the typography — it’s all very clean and well-thought-out. The design is like a new canvas waiting to be painted! And you can paint it in any way you want, because of block patterns.

As usual, Yoast contributed to the release of WordPress 5.6. We have a dedicated WordPress Core team, led by Francesca Marano, that works on all part of WordPress — from documentation to core code. This time, we also worked on the brand-new theme Twenty Twenty-One.

Twenty Twenty-One has design that makes it stand out

The design

Design is subjective, of course, but in our opinion, there hasn’t been a default theme quite like this. Twenty Twenty-One is a knock-out. It’s clean, has great typography, and a selection of color palettes that will find use in a lot of situations. It even has an awesome dark mode, built by Ari Stathopoulos.

Clean and fast

One of the most eye-catching things about Twenty Twenty-One is how graceful it looks. If you look closer, you’ll also notice that it turns out to be a fast theme. The theme avoids the use of unnecessary complex JavaScript behind the scenes and, since it uses a native font stack, doesn’t load additional web fonts. This all contributes to a major speed boost.

Flexible, thanks to block patterns

When you dig deeper into Twenty Twenty-One, you’ll notice all these awesome color palettes and flexibility in the theme. You can really paint this canvas. The development team added support for block patterns and shipped the theme with a selection of patterns that give you great flexibility in adapting the theme to your liking. These patterns were designed by Mel Choyce-Dwan with the help of Kjell Reigstad. Of course, you can always make your own patterns that fit your use cases.

Use block patterns in Twenty Twenty-One to create a layout that fits your needs

Accessibility first

One of the goals of this project was to make the new theme as accessible as possible. The team wanted to comply with accessibility guidelines wherever they could. Since the design is so elegant, it makes it easier to build in an accessible way. You can use the theme with keyboard navigation and it’s screenreader-proof. Yoast’s in-house accessibility expert, Andrea Fercia, evaluated the theme and made improvements.

How did Twenty Twenty-One come about?

The development team worked on Twenty Twenty-One alongside the rest of WordPress 5.6. The people involved in the project first met in June 2020 and consisted of a team of six designers and developers. Unfortunately, due to various reasons, several of them abandoned the project at an early stage.

Carolina Nymark is from Stockholm, Sweden and she’s been building WordPress themes for over ten years. Carolina is a very active and respected member of the WordPress.org community. Also, she is one of the Themes team global representatives. She volunteered for a place in the release team for WordPress 5.6 and ended up leading the development team for the new default theme Twenty Twenty-One. We talked to her about her experiences building the theme.

Designing a new theme

The design process started on Pinterest, says Carolina. The team had different mood boards with inspiration, with different types of typography and layouts. From these styles came a selection of three topics:

Speak Up: Black with a bold type and an orange secondary color, this was inspired by current events like the civil rights movement, protests, and hand-made signs.
Magazine: Consisted of large serif fonts, white and stylish with spots of gradients in the background.
Portfolio: A colorful design, with elements with clear borders and lines, focus on large images.

Carolina: “It was very interesting to follow the design process. All three designs had their merits, and the topic of the first one felt important, because of everything that has happened in 2020. It was a theme design specifically to help people get their voices heard. This would fit nicely with the WordPress mission of democratizing publishing. In the end, I was glad that the third design was picked, the portfolio variation, because it was the most versatile. This is something you can use to create many different types of websites.”

Building the theme

With the design finished, the development team led by Carolina could start their work. Her team consisted of several developers that devoted some of their time to help get this theme off the ground. To help Carolina focus on the task at hand, Yoast stepped up and sponsored her for the duration of the process. Since the collaboration was working so well, Yoast asked Carolina to join our WordPress Core team full time.

Several Yoast developers helped out, developed parts of Twenty Twenty-One, and brought structure to the project. The initial goal was to get the theme ready for inclusion in Beta 1. This would be the first time you get to test the new version of WordPress as a whole, including the default theme. For this, we put together a temporary team for a two-week sprint. Rolf Siebers, Guido Offermans, Simon Resok from Yoast’s front-end department joined the WordPress team to lend their expertise and expedite the process.

Building from an existing theme

To improve the process and to get a solid foundation, the team decided to work off an existing theme to make the work easier. Carolina: “We started from a theme called Seedlet which was built by Automattic. We kept the base of the theme but needed to remove some features and add our own. One of these features was a menu that can be used both with text links and social media icons.”

Twenty Twenty-One being a default theme brings another challenge according to Carolina: “You can’t narrow down the target audience. There isn’t one specific use case, everyone is your user, with different wants and needs. The theme needs to work for a portfolio site, a blog, or a small store or restaurant. You have to select the features you want to include and limit yourself. Getting carried away is easy. Not only that, because if you include too many features the theme may become difficult to use.”

Looking back, Carolina is very proud of the work everyone has done. The end result is stunning — a great-looking, lightning-fast theme that works well in a lot of settings. “I can’t wait for the world to see what we’ve built!”

The learnings

Building something as part of an open-source project is hard work. It’s crucial to manage expectations, get everyone on the same path, and to communicate properly. The last one was the hardest, says Carolina: “Yeah, the technical part was hard work, but that wasn’t the most difficult part of the job. Leading a team is about finding ways to communicate so that no one gets upset, including me. Loads of people helped me with this, including Francesca Marano, and many other members inside and outside the team. Besides all the Yoasters mentioned, I would like to give a shout-out to Justin Ahinon and Tim Hengeveld who helped out along the way. I’m grateful for all the help.”

Try Twenty Twenty-One now!

WordPress 5.6 comes with a lot of great features and a beautiful new theme. Be sure to try out Twenty Twenty-One and go make some awesome layouts with it. At Yoast, we’re proud of everyone who spent many hours designing and building it. Enjoy using it!

The post Twenty Twenty-One: New default theme for WordPress 5.6 appeared first on Yoast.

Five awesome new features in WordPress 5.6

Wed, 09 Dec 2020 09:02:25 GMT

Today, WordPress 5.6 sees the daylight! This release is chockfull of good stuff, with a new default theme called Twenty Twenty-One, application passwords, loads of editor updates and an automatic update feature. This release was led by an awesome team and they did a really good job. Here’s an overview of some of the best new features in WordPress 5.6!

Test your site in WordPress 5.6

As always, a big new update means loads of fixes, enhancements and changes. Most of the time, everything will work without issue but there’s no harm in being careful. In WordPress 5.6, there’s a change that might break some plugins or themes. In three stages, WordPress is moving from an outdated jQuery JavaScript library to a modern one. Some themes and plugins might not be compatible with this and that might cause stuff to break. So, test the release on your staging environment before rolling it out to your site.

With that out of the way, let’s move on to the good stuff. In no particular order, five great features in WordPress 5.6. Curious about how WordPress 5.6 came together? Read the road to WordPress 5.6.

1. New default theme: Twenty Twenty-One

One of the major new feature in WordPress 5.6 if the new default theme: Twenty Twenty-One. It looks awesome, plus it’s lightning fast, accessible and SEO-friendly. One of the coolest features is that you can quickly build a complex layout thanks to block patterns. These block patterns were introduced in WordPress 5.5 and this new theme uses them nicely. The theme comes with a couple of patterns, but you can make your own to suit your needs. The Twenty Twenty-One theme was designed by Mel Choyce-Dwan and built by a development team — consisting of several Yoasters — led by Carolina Nymark. You can read about how Twenty Twenty-One came to be.

Twenty Twenty-One comes with a number of great color palettes, plus support for block patterns

2. Automatic updates

Keeping your site and plugins up to date is a chore — but an essential chore to keep your site safe and secure. It’s one of the reasons why the WordPress team is working hard on making that process a little bit easier by providing automatic updates. Luckily, WordPress can already automatically update minor versions, but with 5.6, it can also update to major versions automatically. This is an opt-in, so you have to activate it yourself in the WordPress Updates screen if you want to make use of this. Remember, automatic updates of major versions has its pros and cons, so think before you activate.

By turning automatic major updates on, WordPress can always update itself

3. Application passwords

Application passwords offer a new way of providing access to certain parts of your site. You can’t use them to log into your account, but you can use them to help give external sources access to your site without you having to give away your password. You can easily generate access keys and share them with your users. Keys are easy to understand and come in a familiar format like abcd EFGH 1234 ijkl MNOP 6789. Revoking access is just as easy. Simply hit the Revoke button. Keep an eye on this feature as many plugins and platforms will adopt this.

Application Passwords makes managing external authentication easier

4. Loads of Gutenberg updates

We’re big fans of the new block editor, but we know there are still a lot of naysayers out there. Luckily, the Gutenberg team keeps chugging along and put out great release after great release. In WordPress 5.6, you’ll find the results of not one or two Gutenberg updates — but no less than seven releases. Among many things, you’ll find improved support for video positioning in cover blocks, enhancements to the block patterns, better dragging and dropping of blocks, improved keyboard navigation, et cetera. It comes with many performance and accessibility improvements as well.

5. Beta support for PHP 8 in WordPress 5.6

PHP 8 has just been released and it is a huge deal for developers. It’s the latest version of the programming language in which WordPress is written and it brings a whole lot of cool stuff that will help developers use modern code practices and features. As of WordPress 5.6, the CMS is considered beta compatible with PHP 8. Still, there’s a lot of work to do to get WordPress fully compatible with PHP 8 and before developers can use all the new goodies that it brings.

Ready to update to WordPress 5.6?

There’s so much more to find in WordPress 5.6. It’s a great update all around and the things highlighted here are just the tip of the iceberg. Read the WordPress 5.6 Field Guide If you want to dive deeper into the cool stuff you can find in this new update. After you’ve read up, go out and test the release on your staging environment. When you’ve done your testing, update away!

What are you most excited about in this release?

The post Five awesome new features in WordPress 5.6 appeared first on Yoast.

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How to rewrite and republish content with Yoast Duplicate Post

Table of contents

The importance of content maintenance

Rewriting content the easy way

How to use Rewrite & Republish in Yoast Duplicate Post

Rewriting content in WordPress became a lot easier

How to respond to positive and negative online reviews

Why should you react to positive and negative reviews?

To which reviews should you respond?

How to respond to negative reviews

1. Keep calm

2. Have a plan

3. Own the problem

4. Let someone proofread your response

5. Short and sweet

6. Don’t get trapped in long discussion

7. Take the discussion offline

After responding to negative reviews

Yoast SEO 15.6: Estimated reading time and Norwegian word forms

Table of contents

Estimated reading time with Yoast SEO Premium

Norwegian language support

Enhancements in Yoast SEO 15.6

Yoast Duplicate Post: Rewrite & Republish

Wrapping up the release of Yoast SEO 15.6

How to write a mission statement for your site

What is a mission statement?

How to write a clear mission statement

Ways to communicate your mission

1: Mission statement page

2: Optimize your introductory content

3: Think about your headlines

4: A picture is worth a thousand words

5: Be consistent in your communication

Final words on your mission statement

10 tips to improve the quality of your page

Table of contents

How to determine the quality of your page

Have a look at the metrics

Be aware of duplicate content

Identify low-quality pages with Screaming Frog

Tips to directly improve page quality

1. Decide on what you want to do with the page

2. Think about search intent

3. Create unique content

Optimizing existing content?

4. Show expertise and trustworthiness

5. Work on your site reputation

6. Link to and from your page

Tips to improve site performance

7. Improve your site’s speed

8. Consider user experience

9. Don’t forget about accessibility

10. Keep your site healthy and safe

Time to improve that page quality!

What is anchor text and how to improve link text?

Table of contents

What does an anchor text look like?

Why are link texts important for SEO?

Different kinds of link text

Link focus keyphrase check in Yoast SEO

How to improve your anchor link texts

1. Create a natural flow

2. Match the link text with the content you’re linking to

3. Don’t trick your readers

4. Make clear the link text is clickable

5. Bonus tip: put your entire keyphrase in quotes

Internal links and anchor texts

This is anchor text

What’s technical SEO? 8 technical aspects everyone should know