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.

WordProof timestamps in Yoast SEO

Here at Yoast we believe a trusted web is a better web, for all of us. To help make that trust a reality, we’ve added a WordProof timestamping integration in Yoast SEO! You can read all about it right here.

But before we get started, take a look at the video below where Sebastiaan van der Lans (the mind behind this awesome technology) explains WordProof in his own words.

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?

Building a more trustworthy web

The Trusted Web Foundation 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 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.

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

WordProof is the product of the Trusted Web Foundation, and its goal is to restore trust on the web. They have 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. Moreover, WordProof even lets you view the timestamp transaction on the blockchain.

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

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. 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.

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. Yoast’s founder and our head of strategy, Joost de Valk and Marieke van de Rakt, have a private stake in this company.

Content timestamps 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.

Making the trusted web a reality

The web is such a polarized 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 timestamps in Yoast SEO

WordProof has a mission that aligns perfectly with the Yoast mission — both companies are striving for a better web. So we’re really happy that we’re now able to offer integrated WordProof timestamps in our Yoast SEO plugin. And what’s great for you is that you can try out this awesome technology for free!

Add a timestamp on your legal pages in WordPress or WooCommerce

Do you have a privacy policy on WordPress, or a terms and conditions page for your WooCommerce store? With the new Yoast SEO WordProof integration you can timestamp these pages for free!

By adding a timestamp on your privacy policy or terms and conditions page, you can prove exactly when its content was created/edited and guarantee that it has not changed since then. There won’t be any doubt in users’ minds — they’ll have a full, transparent view of exactly what has changed and when. That’s the kind of thing that makes the internet better for all of us!

All you need to do is enable the WordProof integration in your Yoast SEO settings, then go to your privacy policy or terms and conditions page and toggle the timestamp option on in the Yoast SEO sidebar. Your page will then be timestamped every time you update it (up to 10 times per month).

You can read more on our help page about setting up your free WordProof timestamps.

Want more timestamps?

In this post, you got a bit of a background on the trusted web, timestamping and WordProof. If you want to use more timestamps, or add timestamps to your other pages, you can opt for a paid WordProof plan from €7.99/month.

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

Over the last couple of months, there’s been a lot of talk about a new protocol called IndexNow. This new protocol automatically notifies search engines that support it about all the updates on your site. While initially skeptical about this development, we’ve decided to add an IndexNow integration to Yoast SEO Premium 18.8.

What is IndexNow?

The IndexNow protocol was launched in October 2021 by Microsoft Bing, Seznam, and Yandex. The goal of the protocol is to make it easier for site owners to ping search engines when changes in content happen on their sites. In theory, this should make the search engines less dependent on their crawling processes.

By offering a single point of access for the pings, many technical processes of crawling the web might become less important. Crawling has a tremendous impact on every website and the search engines themselves. Every technology that can make them rely less on crawling is good for the environment, site owners, and search engines.

IndexNow is a good idea and has seen much support from search engines. Unfortunately, for now, Google is holding out, but hopefully, that will change when more search engines start using the protocol. Of course, if millions of sites start using the IndexNow protocol, that chance may increase.

First no, now yes — what happened?

Our initial thought was this, while it is a good idea in theory, in practice, the issue of discovering content in a timely fashion was solved years ago with the introduction of XML sitemaps. With sitemaps, you also ping the search engines and notify them of whatever you are doing on your site. With IndexNow, it would depend on the efficiency of the process in practice. Plus, with Google not supporting IndexNow, we’re not reaching the majority of the market.

But over the last couple of months, a few things influenced our thinking. The first and most important thing is that we’ve been deep-diving into the mess called crawling. Our founder, Joost de Valk, again showed that there are a ton of robots that crawl the web at an incredible rate. Small sites with static content get crawled all the time by tens of different crawlers.

The crawl issue became a focus of the focus for Yoast SEO. With the release of the crawl settings in Yoast SEO Premium, we’ve been trying to eliminate overhead in WordPress. We’re trying to clean up sites to make it easier for crawlers to do their work by focusing on what’s important.

In this regard, IndexNow offers a way to focus less on crawling everything all the time and more on doing that in a managed fashion.

The latest change to the protocol is the second significant development that made us change our minds about IndexNow. The IndexNow team changed the endpoint of the API from pinging each individual-supported search engine to a single API managed by the protocol. This means that sites only have to ping a single site, making the process much more efficient.

All of this fits into our view of a sustainable crawling and indexing solution, so now is the time to implement IndexNow with a new integration in Yoast SEO.

What does IndexNow offer you?

The IndexNow integration has only upsides: turn it on, and you are good to go. We’ll ping IndexNow whenever you publish or update your content. You don’t have to do anything — it all works silently in the background. Using it makes you feel safe about getting your content noticed by search engines.

Supporting IndexNow also means helping everyone move to a more efficient and environmental-friendly crawling process. Good for the planet!

Here’s hoping Google will support IndexNow soon

IndexNow is off to a great start, but there is much to win. With our integration, we’re adding millions of sites to the list of IndexNow users. Hopefully, Google will start adopting it too. If nothing else, we’re doing our part to improve discoverability for websites — and reduce our carbon footprint while we’re at it.

The post We’re launching an IndexNow integration in Yoast SEO appeared first on Yoast.

Today is a good day. The next batch of Yoast SEO releases comes with a ton of new stuff that helps your site get noticed by search engines. We’re launching an IndexNow integration, expanded our crawl settings with advanced features, and added a WordProof integration to help timestamp privacy pages on the blockchain. Read up on Yoast SEO 19.2 and Yoast SEO Premium 18.8!

Improve crawling with Yoast SEO Premium, one feature at a time

The last two releases introduced new crawl settings in Yoast SEO Premium. With these settings, we’re optimizing your WordPress site to output less overhead that search engines like Google are eager to crawl but which don’t add any value. We’re on a mission to reduce the crawl load on websites — making it a more straightforward process for crawlers. As a result, we’re reducing the strain on your website and the environment.

In Yoast SEO Premium 18.8, we’re expanding the crawl settings with several advanced options. In addition, we’re adopting the IndexNow protocol supported by Microsoft Bing, Seznam, and Yandex. Google doesn’t support it yet and might never.

IndexNow: towards a future of fewer crawls

The IndexNow protocol is a new way of keeping search engines in the loop about your content by pinging the API as soon as you publish or update a page. IndexNow was introduced in October 2021 and has seen quite some adoption in just a couple of months.

By adopting the IndexNow protocol, we’re helping your content get indexed quicker. Besides, IndexNow also offers a glimpse of the future. We’re hoping that initiatives like this can make the process of crawling and indexing content less impactful for your website and the environment.

IndexNow is available in Yoast SEO Premium and activated by default. There’s a setting to switch the integration on or off, but other than that, there are no settings for you to concern yourself with. Also, we ping Bing with your XML sitemaps only when IndexNow is disabled to prevent unnecessary overheads.

Advanced crawl features in Yoast SEO Premium

We introduced crawl settings in the previous two releases of Yoast SEO Premium 18.6 and 18.7. The first wave was mostly about removing unnecessary feeds in WordPress and cleaning up code from the head; in Yoast SEO Premium 18.8, we’re adding two advanced crawl settings: search clean up and URL parameter clean up.

Go Premium and get access to all our features!

Premium comes with lots of features and free access to our SEO courses!

Get Yoast SEO Premium »Only $99 USD / year (ex VAT) for 1 site

Search cleanup: battling search spam

Spammers sometimes target internal site search URLs on your site for their purposes. Those URLs might get crawled by Google and might be seen by users. That can harm your SEO — and your branding! This feature identifies some common spam patterns and stops them in their tracks, for instance, searches with emojis or extremely long sentences. We’ll tidy these up nicely for you.

URL parameter cleanup: getting rid of excessive URLs

The URL parameter cleanup is cool but it comes with a warning. It’s a feature for power users, for sure. URL parameters, used in marketing campaigns or to track links to your site, can be helpful to find out how your stuff is performing. These parameters, like ?source=email, or ?from=example.com, make for duplicate pages that Google and the like will crawl. Some of these are useful, but most can probably go without you noticing.

You can streamline your site and improve crawl efficiency by redirecting URLs with unknown query parameters to the page’s canonical URL. The URL permalink cleanup does precisely that. If you want to keep specific URL parameters, you can add these to have them excluded.

For utm tracking parameters (used by Google Analytics), we provide a way to change these to use # instead of ? in the URL, which can improve your site’s crawl efficiency without sacrificing functionality.

Keep in mind that this could harm your site. If you’re not sure, don’t touch it. If you plan to use it, please test it on a staging site before rolling it out to your live site.

Yoast SEO Free: timestamp content on the blockchain with WordProof

WordProof is a Dutch blockchain startup focusing on protecting your content by adding it to the blockchain. WordProof automatically adds a unique fingerprint to your content, making it verifiable. It helps fight against fake news and copyright issues while increasing the trust in the content you put out, with a very transparent solution.

WordProof has won numerous European awards for valuable blockchain solutions. For those wanting to know more, we talked to WordProof about what makes their solution useful.

WordProof already has a WordPress plugin that gives you much more control over your timestamps and usage, but with the integration in Yoast SEO 19.2, we make it easier to get started. It is limited, though, to ten timestamps a month and only on the privacy page of your site — and the terms and conditions page if you use WooCommerce SEO. This helps readers verify the trustworthiness of that critical page.

Activate the WordProof integration in the integrations settings, log in or set up an account and start time stamping your privacy and terms and conditions pages.

Other enhancements in Yoast SEO 19.2

Yoast SEO 19.2 is a chockfull release. We’ve mentioned the WordProof integration, but there’s more to be found.

Improvements to the SEO and readability analyses

Yoast SEO is famous for its SEO and readability analyses. Thanks to these tools, you can write content that stands out from the crowd — while making readers and search engines happy. We’re continually improving the analyses, and in Yoast SEO 19.2, we’re doing that with a long list of changes. In addition, we’ve also made the SEO and readability column sortable in the post overview.

The improvements mainly concern the way the text analysis handles various inputs. For instance, it will now exclude blockquote HTML elements and no longer split sentences on semicolon ;. We’ve improved the support for Elementor by not always splitting on ellipsis ..., regardless of whether the following sentence has a valid beginning. Also, we now support sentence detection for declarative sentences in quotation marks.

Social sharing and structured data improvements

In Yoast SEO 19.2, you’ll find several improvements related to social media sharing and structured data:

• We’ve added support for webp images for OpenGraph output.
• We’ve added a meta author tag to ensure that LinkedIn picks up the name of a post author properly.
• To get Pinterest to detect the author of an article, we’ve added this to the author section of the Article schema piece.

Update now to Yoast SEO 19.2 and Premium 18.8

Yoast SEO 19.2 and Yoast SEO Premium 18.8 bring you a boatload of goodies. We have an IndexNow integration, several new features to manage crawling on your site, and a WordProof integration to timestamp privacy pages on the blockchain.

This is one of the biggest releases we’ve done in recent months, and we’re proud of it. We hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed building it!

The post Yoast SEO 19.2: IndexNow, crawl settings, and WordProof appeared first on Yoast.

One of the most important aspects of SEO is ensuring your content is crawled and indexed by search engines. In fact, without your content in the index, your website won’t be able to generate traffic from search at all. But indexing isn’t always a fast process. There are a lot of factors affecting how fast search engines index your website. What if there’s a way to get your content indexed faster? Well, that’s where IndexNow comes in.

The importance of indexing for SEO

Before people can search for your content, search engines must crawl and index your web pages. After your content gets indexed, then the ranking process begins.

Search engines start by sending out crawlers to follow hyperlinks to discover new content (and update old content). After crawlers discover a page, they report to the search engines what they find and index it. While indexing, search engines read and analyze the content, media, tags, and more on that page. Search engines store all this information in a vast database known as the ‘index.’

Why we need IndexNow

In today’s competitive online space, indexing your content is crucial for securing a high ranking in search engines. The faster your content is indexed, the faster it is ranked, and the more likely it will appear correctly in the SERPs. Of course, you need outstanding content to rank, but that’s another story.

But here lies the problem: you can’t control how fast search engines index your website. It may take a few days or weeks before a search engine crawls and indexes your new page. This all depends on many factors like the size of your website, its authority, how complex it is, etc.

Imagine that you own an online store selling clothes, and you have some new arrivals for the upcoming season. You update your store with the latest products, but it’s not until two weeks later that you see the changes on search engines. Meanwhile, you may have lost traffic and potential sales to your competitors. Nobody likes it when this happens.

So to streamline this process and increase the speed of indexing, Microsoft and Yandex came together and created a new protocol called IndexNow.

What is IndexNow then?

IndexNow is an open-source protocol that allows web publishers to inform participating search engines about the latest updates on their websites. Simply put, it is a simple ping to tell search engines that a URL and its content have been added, updated, or deleted. Then search engines can quickly send bots to crawl, index, and reflect the changes.

What makes IndexNow different?

Search engines obtain index data in two ways: pull and push. Traditionally, search engines visit your site to crawl web pages and ‘pull’ data to the index.

Push indexing is when you or your CMS notifies search engines about new changes on particular URLs. The IndexNow protocol follows push indexing, which is different from the traditional ‘pull’ model. You don’t need to rely on search engines coming to your website to look for what’s new. Instead, you will ask them to come to you when there are changes to your content.

Here’s what’s truly impressive about the IndexNow protocol, though. When you submit any URLs via the IndexNow API to a participating search engine, those URLs will be submitted simultaneously to all the other search engines using the protocol. And when you inform the IndexNow API about an update, it will automatically alert the participating search engines.

Which search engines are participating in the IndexNow protocol?

Microsoft and Yandex were the first two search engines fully participating in IndexNow. Together, they announced the IndexNow protocol in October 2021. As of June 2022, the list of participating search engines includes Microsoft Bing, Yandex and Seznam.

Google is currently not a part of this initiative, citing that its crawling mechanism is very efficient and that the company has continued to improve its crawling efficiency. However, Google did confirm that the company would be testing the IndexNow protocol. So we might see Google joining the protocol in the future.

How does IndexNow benefit you?

The IndexNow protocol has the potential to facilitate the evolution of indexing from pull to push. You won’t have to wait for search engines to come and pray they pick up the right changes. Instead, you can direct them to the actual changes and tell them to crawl and index just that.

But the primary benefit of IndexNow is still eliminating the time between updates being made and search engines discovering them. That means your content can be indexed faster across all the participating search engines. Not to mention, it helps streamline the process of finding new content, making the web more efficient while reducing energy usage.

Search engines use a lot of energy on crawling activities, but they are not exactly efficient. They may crawl a page multiple times a day, even when there’s nothing new on the page. This is a waste of energy. With the IndexNow protocol, search engine bots won’t have to perform exploratory crawls to determine whether a page has been updated. This reduces unnecessary site load, reducing energy consumption and enabling servers to work more efficiently.

IndexNow integration in Yoast SEO

If the process of implementing IndexNow sounds complicated to you, worry not because there are workarounds. At Yoast, we’re launching an integration with IndexNow in Yoast SEO Premium. It will be activated automatically, so you can start using IndexNow immediately on your website. We’ll ping IndexNow whenever you publish or update your content. You don’t have to do anything — it all works silently in the background. We will launch this feature in the next update of Yoast SEO Premium, so stay tuned!

The post IndexNow: What it is and how it benefits you appeared first on Yoast.

You can set a focus keyphrase in Yoast SEO for Shopify and WooCommerce. With this focus keyphrase, you signal to the SEO app that you want to optimize this piece of content for this specific word or combination of words. There are various ways to think about this, depending on what kind of product-related content you are writing. In this post, you’ll learn to pick a focus keyphrase for your products. You’ll also learn to think about related keyphrases, synonyms, and more!

Optimizing your products for ecommerce SEO

One of the essential parts of Yoast SEO for Shopify and the WooCommerce SEO addon is the content and SEO analyses. These tools help you write excellent product descriptions, blog posts, and landing pages that will be a hit for customers and search engines. But using it properly requires a bit of thinking — and a bit of research!

Keyword research and search intent

One of the most important aspects of ecommerce SEO is doing keyword research. If you are writing a ton of content, you must know who your audience is, where they are located and what kind of words they use. Doing keyword research for ecommerce SEO can give you these insights. It can also give you loads of ideas to populate your blog with high-quality, product-related content — like frequently asked questions to answer.

Think about search intent

The customer journey can be long, and it can take several sessions for consumers to narrow down their choices. Getting them to buy is hard! When getting your content ready for them, you need to think about search intent. How does the buying process for a specific product work? While some people might be looking for the cheapest, plain black T-shirt, others might have more specific wishes for their product.

For instance, if someone is looking for a highly breathable, comfortable, and technical shirt to help them perform during outdoor activities, they might encounter merino wool as an option. So, that person might go from black outdoor t-shirt breathable to merino t-shirt black to Patagonia Capilene Cool Merino T-Shirt Black. All these search terms might have different content attached to them. For instance, in addition to the regular product pages, you can write a post on the benefits of merino wool for outdoor clothing.

Don’t optimize for head terms

There are a couple of things to remember when determining which focus keyphrase you should target for a product. If you sell black t-shirts, it might make sense in your mind to fully optimize your product pages for the keyphrase black t-shirt. This is what most people are searching for, right? But optimizing all your product content for the same keyword leaves you competing with yourself — it causes keyword cannibalization. Which black t-shirt should Google show in the search results?

Optimizing your category pages for head terms is better and choosing something more long-tail for your product pages. Of course, using the product name and brand itself is important, but you can always amend that with the main keyphrase you are looking to target. So, if you want to sell a specific black t-shirt from Patagonia, you could use the full name: Patagonia Capilene Cool Merino T-Shirt Black.

Use the product name on product pages

When optimizing product pages for specific products, you should optimize that for the product’s name. The example of the black merino wool shirt mentioned above would be at least Patagonia Capilene Cool Merino T-Shirt. Of course, you could append some terms to it, like the color or other product variation options.

Of course, you are free to optimize the page for black merino wool t-shirt as well, but that shouldn’t be the primary goal of this page. You can use the related keyphrase option in the Yoast SEO analyses to incorporate this term in the feedback.

Don’t forget to look at the terms the manufacturer uses to describe the product that you can add to your product descriptions. There might even be some product specifications that you should add to your page — there are people who search Google using product identifiers such as SKUs and UPCs!

Use the generic name elsewhere

You can use different forms of the main keyphrase on the product, category, and landing pages. If you have a landing page collecting the best merino t-shirts for outdoor use, please optimize it, including the product name of the Patagonia shirt we talked about and link to it.

Category pages should not be optimized for specific brand products but the general product descriptions. So you could have a category for outdoor merino shirts, but you could also have one for black t-shirts. You could also do categories for brands. As we said, different roads lead to Rome! Not every client will follow the same path to your money pages.

Improve category pages

Category pages collect a range of articles within a specific selection. Often, these pages rank well in the search results, and you could include a little bit of relevant text to make them stronger. This doesn’t have to be a wall of text — it just has to be enough to give value to the page and offer search engines more context on what they can find on this category page. You can use category type as input for the focus keyphrase, so the SEO and readability analyses can help you improve this text.

Find out how to improve your category pages for ecommerce SEO.

Keyphrases, related keyphrases, and synonyms for products

Our Yoast SEO for Shopify app and WooCommerce SEO plugin come with an excellent feature that makes optimizing your product content much more natural. Thanks to the related keyphrases and synonyms feature, you get loads of flexibility to improve your content.

The related keyphrase feature lets you add several terms related to the main topic. Although we discussed the drawbacks, you could use this to optimize the content for head terms like black t-shirt, although we discussed the disadvantages. You could also use this for other product-specific phrases or features. Once you’ve added terms, the analysis looks for the words in the text and suggests improvements for you.

The synonyms feature does what it says on the tin; it lets you add synonyms for the main focus keyphrase. For instance, when we’re talking about a t-shirt, we could also add top, tee, or teeshirt as synonyms. It doesn’t matter if you use different grammatical forms of these keyphrases as Yoast SEO for Shopify recognizes these.

Why and how to pick keyphrases for your products

Optimizing your product content has become much easier thanks to the intelligent analyses of the Yoast SEO ecommerce apps and plugins. Enter the keyphrase you want to rank for and follow the suggestions to improve your content.

By doing keyword research and thinking about search intent, you can develop the right words you want to optimize which posts for. Don’t try to rank everything and the kitchen sink for the same keyword!

The post How to choose a focus keyphrase for product descriptions and categories appeared first on Yoast.

If you own a website or a blog, you probably often think about what new content to create. But did you know it’s also essential to focus on your existing content? Having many low-performing posts or pages on your website is not a good look for your business or Google. Did you know that outdated, very similar, or thin content can drag your site down in the search results? A practice called content pruning can help you prevent this from happening. Let’s take a look at what it is!

Do you know a little about gardening? Content pruning is the same principle as trimming a hedge. You cut away the dead and dry pieces so the healthy branches have room to grow. The same goes for your content!

What is content pruning?

Content pruning is a form of content maintenance on your website. It focuses on the content that isn’t performing well. This could mean low traffic or low conversion pages, pages with thin or duplicate content, or posts that are not relevant anymore. Content pruning aims to get rid of those pages and to (try to) only show your users up-to-date, rich, relevant content. It also has an added benefit: Google likes fresh, unique, high-quality content. So pruning your content is a best practice for SEO.

Why should you prune your content?

Content pruning means cutting away low-traffic content, so your other content has more room to shine. You will improve the quality of your content and your website, which could improve your rankings. But there’s more:

• Most importantly, having high-quality content on your website will also improve your users’ experience when they browse your site. You don’t want them to land on pages about services or products you don’t offer anymore or outdated business information.
• Even old content gets crawled super frequently by search engines and other bots. This costs money and energy resources: things you don’t want to waste! So please help them by removing those pages that aren’t worth the crawl.
• It will help prevent content cannabilization: if you’ve been writing for a long time, you’re bound to have created content similar to what you’ve written before. If you have many similar articles on a particular topic, Google might find it hard to determine which of your articles to rank for that topic. This could lead to overall lower rankings for that term.
• Regular content pruning will give you as a site owner a more relaxed feeling. Having loads of old content on your website can feel like a burden, and you can lose track of all you have. It puts your mind at ease to know your users won’t land on outdated information, and you won’t be missing out on business opportunities just because people landed on the wrong page. This will help you focus on the things that matter most for your business!

As you can see, content pruning is a win-win for everyone. So how do you get rid of old and thin content intelligently?

The content pruning process

There are several ways to go about this. Here we’ll elaborate on some approaches:

Gathering data and creating an overview

Typically, most people start by creating an overview of all your content and how it’s performing. An Excel file or Google spreadsheet should work. You can export the URLs of your pages and posts from Google Search Console or Google Analytics along with some of the data you want to base your decisions on. But you shouldn’t just consider Google Analytics data like page views, page value, or bounce rate. Other data that you should consider are, for instance, the number of external and internal links pointing to that post. Or, if you share this post in your newsletter on social do you know that it leads to lots of shares, engagement, or even sales? This might not be visible in your data if you haven’t shared it lately, so beware!

There are SEO tools that can help in this process. For instance, tools such as Semrush, ahrefs, and ContentKing can crawl and/or audit your content and even feed you with recommendations. When integrated, these tools can take (some of) of the data mentioned above into account in their advice on that. Of course, you shouldn’t always take these automated recommendations for granted. As you’ve created this page, you’ll know best what the goal of the page was and if it’s meeting that goal or not. Nevertheless, these tools can certainly help you detect low-performing content.

Goals and criteria

It’s good to have clear criteria for determining if a page meets the goal: did you create it to rank? Find out if it ranks, for which keywords, which position, and the CTR. Did you make it to spotlight a product? Obviously, one of the most important things you’ll be checking is how this page converts or the page’s value. So, for every page, think about: what’s the goal of this page, and does it meet the criteria I’ve set for that goal. If it’s not meeting the goal, should I improve the page, or do I have an alternative page that does meet the goal. Or, is this goal still relevant for my business?

This exercise can be overwhelming if you have loads of content and you are working with a spreadsheet. In that case, it might help if you focus on specific topics necessary for your business. Make sure you get all the content on a particular topic in a spreadsheet and the data on how that content performs. This will help you prune your website in smaller steps – more small achievements to celebrate! It might even lead to better results on that particular topic sooner. This approach also really helps in fixing content cannibalization issues.

Internal linking / orphaned content check

A good starting point to prune your content is checking the number of internal links a post or page has. Content with no internal links pointing to it is called orphaned content. Why is this a good starting point? Well, if you didn’t link to a post after you’ve written it, chances are:

• it was a very timely thing (a small announcement, something news-related)
• it wasn’t such a great post after all;
• it doesn’t get a lot of traffic (anymore) unless it did get a lot of external links;
• it doesn’t rank high unless it got many external links.

All good reasons to check whether you should keep this post or get the pruning shears out of the barn!

The orphaned content workout in Yoast SEO Premium can feed you these posts and pages in a super user-friendly manner. Right there, in your WordPress admin (go to Yoast SEO in the sidebar, click on the SEO workouts, and select the Orphaned content workout) so you can take action right away.

First, decide what you want to do with the post or page. You can use the spreadsheet above for that or check it page-by-page. What was the page’s goal, and does it still serve that goal? Is that goal still relevant? Are there other pages that fit that same goal but do better? Consider all these things when deciding what to do with the post.

Pruning content: improve, remove or hide?

But how do you decide what to do with a post? As said, take a look at the goal of the page. Then decide whether improve, remove or hide. Here are some examples to make it easier:

• Improve: content you’ve forgotten about but has great potential. You wrote a high-quality blog post a while ago, but you’ve forgotten because of other priorities. Perhaps it’s ranking on page two for a term you’d like to rank for. This is the time to update and improve it, add the latest developments in this topic, or enrich it with great examples, illustrations, or a video. And don’t forget to add internal links to it from the related content. In the third step, our SEO workout will give some suggestions for pages to link from, which is super easy. And if you’re proud of your work, share it again on social and in your newsletter!
• Remove: old announcements of, e.g., events, topics that were once relevant but no one cares about anymore, posts or pages on topics that you’ve written richer and more up-to-date content for. In the latter case, you might want to check whether there are valuable pieces in the article you’re about to remove. Consider merging those into the preferred article before you start trimming too enthusiastically! And, if you remove a post, don’t forget to redirect the URL to the better equivalent. Otherwise, your audience will land on a non-existing page, which is a disappointing and frustrating experience. Fortunately, our workout will ask you what to do with the URL when you’ve deleted a page so that you won’t forget.
• Hide: a landing page that is tailored to a particular audience that could compete with a more general post on the same topic in the search engines. And you want to keep it because you want to direct part of your audience to it with a specific purpose. Or a yearly recurring sales post. You might want to hide this kind of content from the search engines to avoid confusing them. If you choose noindex in the workout, Yoast SEO will add a noindex tag to the page so it won’t be shown in the search results.

Do you have difficulties deciding which content to improve, remove or hide? Check out our post on whether you should update or delete when cleaning up content on your site.

Tip: keep track of your decisions by writing them down in your spreadsheet. If you’re doing the Yoast SEO premium orphaned content workout, it will automatically keep track of your choices for you! or the orphaned content workout from Yoast SEO premium. The latter will guide you through three steps, making it super easy to clean up your website!

Improve the quality of your content

To recap: Content pruning is a useful (not to mention satisfying) way to improve the quality of your website. By looking critically at your existing content, you’ll figure out what needs to be done to improve your low-performing content. 

If this sounds like a lot of work, we recommend you check out our orphaned content workout. It uses a checklist that will quickly guide you through the steps. Moreover, it automatically creates a list of orphaned content, so you won’t have to sift through data lists. You’ll have a tidy website in no time!

The post SEO basics: What is content pruning? appeared first on Yoast.

More and more people, and more and more developers, are talking about structured data, and Schema.org. We talk and have talked about Schema for quite some time at Yoast and we’ve built loads of things with and on top of it. Recently, the proposed block protocol standard started talking about integrating with Schema, and WordPress’ core team is also taking an interest; see this discussion on Github.

Schema.org metadata is a machine-readable and interpretable version of what’s on a page. We at Yoast are very proud of the schema markup Yoast SEO generates. The main reason we’re so proud of it is that we go to great lengths to ensure that when a machine reads it, it interprets it correctly. To do so, we have determined that Schema should always be one inter-connected graph.

What a good graph looks like

Let’s say we have a page with an article, and that article contains a HowTo. We’ll assume that the HowTo is the “raison d’être” of the article. Our Yoast SEO graph, when parsed, would look like this:

• HowTo
  • Part of Article
    • Part of WebPage
      • Part of Website

The Article and WebPage would have one or multiple authors, publishing dates, images, the website would be owned by an organization, etc. There is a ton of metadata in our Schema, which is super helpful to search engines. Some of the data is page level (like language), some of the data is usually site level (like publisher), and this all works out fine because we tie it all together.

In many Schema implementations, these parts are not tied together as a graph. They are thrown out as separate blocks. So instead of the nice hierarchy above, you’d get:

• HowTo
• Article
• WebPage
• WebSite

And in the case above, that might actually be fine. I say might for a reason. What if the HowTo is actually only a tangential part of the Article? There are cases where it becomes even more critical. Let me give you an example.

When Schema becomes destructive

This is, unfortunately, a case I encountered in real life. A website had a product page for a single product. Below that product, it listed five related products, things commonly bought together, etc. The component used to show those related products’ output Schema for those five products. It didn’t tie into the rest of the page’s schema. So you got this:

• Product (main product)
  • WebPage
    • WebSite
• Product (related product 1)
• Product (related product 2)
• Product (related product 3)
• Product (related product 4)
• Product (related product 5)

Product schema is responsible for getting a site the nice rich snippets that show star ratings, price, and availability of products in the search results. In this case, search engines didn’t know which product to pick; in fact, Google’s rich result testing tool won’t even give you a result. When you look at this schema out of the context of its design, there’s no way to know which product is the main product on the page because the Schema wasn’t tied together into a single graph. The result is a loss of rich snippets for these pages. A change that was directly attributable to a loss of sales.

Fixing it meant connecting the five related products to the main product with isRelatedTo properties, removing the Product part of their output, and then declaring the main product as the mainEntityOfPage. The point here is that those product blocks needed to behave differently based on context and their relationships to other blocks on (and information about) the page. This is the sort of understanding that you need to be able to build working Schema output.

The geeky bits: how we tie it all together

In our graph, we tie all elements together by specifying their relationship. To do so, we reference graph “pieces” as we call them, by @id. A WebPage has an attribute isPartOf, referencing the WebSite piece. An Article has an isPartOf referencing the WebPage. In fact, an Article by default also has an attribute mainEntityOfPage that references the WebPage, declaring itself as the main entity.

If you add a HowTo to that mix, it would declare itself the mainEntityOfPage of the Article. If the HowTo is part of a page that doesn’t output Article schema, it would do the same but automatically attach itself as the mainEntityOfPage of the WebPage. This way, a search engine can parse the graph and see exactly what is going on. That means that each block needs to be aware of its context when its schema is rendered.

So: Blocks and Schema are not one and the same

While blocks in the new WordPress editor are great for use with Schema, they require an extra level of parsing and a layer of business logic to be tied to the rest of the page. Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as just outputting schema for each block and leaving it at that. The idea currently being discussed on the WordPress core GitHub, to tie Schema to Patterns, is, in my opinion, a bit too… Simplistic. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but it needs more work. The same is true for discussions around the Block Protocol.

If you want to implement Schema, you have to be willing and able to determine the whole context of a page. That business logic is complex, interconnected, and continually evolving as Google, and other consumers alter and evolve their standards. This logic cannot live in each individual block, in individual pieces; it needs a “brain” that understands all the moving parts and can describe a cohesive graph of all those moving parts. Like this one.

We take great pride in what Yoast SEO does in that area, and we offer a Schema API that allows other developers to tie into that and add their own implementations. We have also written a full Schema specification of just how our output works and why. Without this “brain”, a block-based approach will struggle to meaningfully and safely describe a page.

The post Why Schema needs to be a graph appeared first on Yoast.

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

What is the crawler again?

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

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

Read more: SEO basics: what does Google do »

And what is crawlability?

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

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

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

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

Improve your site’s crawlability with Yoast SEO Premium

We’ve said it many times, crawlability is an important aspect of SEO. And so optimizing the crawlability of your site is something you should do. Using tools such as Yoast SEO Premium can help make this easier for you.

Crawlers may come to your site multiple times a day. Sometimes they visit your site to discover new content, sometimes they come by to check if there are any new updates. But every time they arrive on your site, they will surely crawl everything that looks like a URL to them. Because of this, it’s very likely for a URL to be crawled multiple times per day.

This is not the way things should be. For the most part, you’re unlikely to make multiple changes on a URL on a given day. Not to mention, almost every CMS output URLs that don’t make sense that crawlers can safely skip. But instead of skipping these URLs, crawlers will crawl them, again and again, every time they come across one. All this unnecessary crawling takes up energy resources which makes this a harmful practice for our planet.

That’s why in Yoast SEO Premium 18.6, we introduced the first addition to our crawl settings, allowing you to better manage what search engines can skip on your site. Within this section, which is still in beta, you can find many toggles that let you turn off various things that WordPress automatically adds to your site that most sites won’t miss. In Yoast SEO Premium 18.7, we’ve expanded on the list of settings you can toggle and we will continue to do so in future releases of Yoast SEO Premium.

Want to learn all about crawlability?

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

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

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

The post SEO basics: What is crawlability? appeared first on Yoast.

Before your content can rank, it needs links. Google finds your posts and pages best when they’re linked to from somewhere on the web. Internal links also connect your content and give Google an idea of the structure of your website. They can establish a hierarchy on your site, allowing you to provide the most important pages and posts more link value than other, less valuable pages. So using the right internal linking strategy can boost your SEO! In this article, we’ll discuss the importance of internal linking, how to approach it and how Yoast SEO can help you with internal linking.

Did you get a red bullet for internal links in Yoast SEO? Jump straight ahead and read how this assessment works in Yoast SEO and how to improve your internal linking.

What are internal links?

An internal link is any link from one page on your website to another page on your website. Both your users and search engines use links to find content on your website. Your users use links to navigate through your site and to find the content they want to find. Search engines also use links to navigate your site. They won’t see a page if there are no links to it.

There are several types of internal links. In addition to links on your homepage, menu, post feed, etc, you can also add links within your content. We call those contextual links. Contextual links point your users to interesting and related content. Moreover, they allow search engines to find out what content on your site is related and determine its value. The more links a significant page receives, the more important it will seem to search engines. Therefore, good internal links are crucial to your SEO.

Internal links vs external links

Every website — even online stores — consists of internal and external links. Internal links connect pages and posts on your website, and external links connect your pages to other websites. In this post, we focus on internal links and what they mean for SEO. See our posts on link building if you want to get more external links pointing to your site.

Why are links important to Google?

Internal linking is an essential factor for Google and other search engines. But why? And where do you start?

As Marieke explains in the video, Google follows links to discover content on websites and to rank this content in the search results. If a post or page gets a lot of links, this is a signal to Google that it’s an essential or high-value article. This counts for internal as well as external links.

Internal linking is something you control as a site owner. With the correct internal links, you’ll guide your visitors and Google to your most important pages. Our internal linking tool (not available yet in Yoast SEO for Shopify) can help you suggest related posts to link to!

Relationships between content

Google crawls websites by following links, internal and external, using a bot called Googlebot. This bot arrives at the website’s homepage, renders the page, and follows the first link. By following links, Google can work out the relationship between the various pages, posts, and other content. This way, Google finds out which pages on your site cover a similar subject matter.

For example, you’ll see links to the ‘Content SEO’, ‘Internal linking’, and ‘Site structure’ tags on top of this post. We make sure Google understands that the content on those pages is related to the content of this post by adding these links.

Link value

In addition to understanding the relationship between content, Google divides link value between all links on a web page. Often, the homepage of a website has the most significant link value because it has the most backlinks. That link value will be shared between all the links found on that homepage. The link value passed to the following page will be divided between the links on that page, and so on.

Therefore, your newest blog posts will get more link value if you link to them from the homepage instead of only on the category page. And Google will find recent posts quicker if they’re linked to from the homepage.

When you get the concept that links pass their link value on, you’ll understand that more links to a post mean more value. Because Google deems a page that gets lots of valuable links as more important, you’ll increase the chance of that page ranking. 

Setting up an internal linking strategy

It’s crucial for your site’s SEO to evaluate and improve internal linking strategy regularly. It’s one of the ways to improve the fitness of your website. By adding the right internal links, you make sure Google understands:

• the relevance of pages;
• the relationship between pages;
• and the value of pages.

To set up your internal linking strategy, there are several things to take into account. How you go about it exactly, of course, depends on your site and your goals, but the following steps are a good rule of thumb.

1. Determine the ideal structure for your site

We always advise website owners to imagine their website as a pyramid. On top of it is your homepage; below that there are some sections or categories, and further down, there are individual posts and pages (possibly with subcategories in between).

If you do it well, your website’s menu should reflect this structure. In our Ultimate guide to site structure you can read how to create the best site structure for your site.

2. Decide what your most important content is

Then, you should determine what your most important content is. If you’re not sure, please read our article on cornerstone content. In short, it’s your best and most complete content; it’s about the core of your business. It’s the content you want people to find when searching for topics or products you specialize in.

Because you want to let Google know that this is your most important content, you need to add many links to it. There are various spots from where you can link to your cornerstone content. Here, we’ll give the most common options, from your post’s copy to your navigation.

(Psst! Want a hand with setting up your links for your cornerstone content strategy? Try our new Internal linking SEO workout feature in Yoast SEO Premium!)

3. Add contextual links

When you’ve written various articles about a certain topic you should link them with each other. This will show Google – and users! – that those articles are topically related. You can link directly from sentences in your copy or add links at the end of your post.

Moreover, you want to show Google which articles are your cornerstone: your most complete article on this topic. You have to add a link to the cornerstone in all of the articles on this topic to do so. And don’t forget to link back from the cornerstone to the individual posts.

Contextual linking: an example

On our blog, there’s a cornerstone content article called ‘The ultimate guide to keyword research’. This post will rank for all related search queries about [keyword research] in Google search results.

So we’ve added links from other relevant articles, such as ‘7 keyword research mistakes to avoid‘, ‘ What is keyword research‘, or ‘Focus on long tail keywords‘ to the main article. And we link back from the main article to these posts. In doing so, Google will understand that the ultimate guide contains the most information about [keyword research]. So, in the end, Google will rank the ultimate guide above the other, shorter posts about keyword research.

4. Link hierarchical pages

If you have hierarchical pages on your website, link parent pages to their child pages and vice versa. Also, don’t forget to link sibling pages to each other. These pages should be related on a well-organized site, and connecting them like this will make perfect sense.

Read all about linking parent and child pages for SEO.

5. Consider adding a related post section

There are many plugins and modules that add complete related posts sections to your posts. If you use one, we recommend testing whether the related posts actually are related posts. If you’re not sure, linking to posts manually is probably best. That’s what we do on Yoast.com – we select a related post manually (or with a little help from our internal linking tool – more on that later) and place a link to that post at the bottom of the article.

Willemien explains this in detail in this post about linking to related posts.

6. Try adding navigational links

Besides linking from topically-related posts and pages, it’s possible to make your cornerstone content more authoritative by adding links to it from the homepage or the top navigation. You should do this with the posts and pages that are most important to your business. This will give these posts or pages a lot of link value and makes them stronger in Google’s eyes.

7. Add links to your taxonomies

Taxonomies, like categories and tags, help you organize your site and help users and Google to understand what your content is about. If you have a blog it could be beneficial to add internal links to the taxonomies the post belongs to. Adding links to the category and tags helps Google understand your blog’s structure and helps visitors to navigate to related posts more easily.

8. Consider adding links to popular or recent posts

The last option to mention is creating internal links to your website’s most popular or newest posts. Preferably create these sections in the sidebar or the footer of your website to have them appear on all pages and posts.

As link value passes to these most popular/recent posts from many different pages, they get a boost. Besides that, the posts will be easier for visitors to access, which will increase traffic – and more traffic is a positive sign to Google.

More on internal links

Nofollow links

You also probably have links that aren’t important for SEO on your website. If you have a login link for your clients on the homepage, for example, you don’t want to leak link value to your login page – that page doesn’t need to rank high in the search results.

You used to prevent losing link value to unimportant links by giving them a nofollow tag. A nofollow tag asks Google not to follow the link: so no link value is lost. Now you might think: “I’m going to nofollow less important links to give the most important links more link value.” While this worked in the past, Google has become more competent. Now it seems that the link value for those nofollow links doesn’t automatically flow to the other links on the page. The nofollow link will be counted as a link and the link value for that link will be lost. Therefore it makes more sense to have fewer links on a page instead of nofollowing some of the links.

Note that adding a nofollow tag doesn’t mean that those target pages can’t be found in Google’s search results. If you don’t want pages or posts to show up in the search results, you should also give them a noindex tag. The noindex tag means that Google shouldn’t render the page and shouldn’t give the content a place in the Google index to show up in the search results.

Read more: Why noindex a page or nofollow a link? »

Anchor texts

Once you have decided which links should be on a page and which pages should get link value, it’s important to use the right anchor text. The anchor text is the clickable text that visitors see. For example, the anchor text of the two internal links in the example below are ‘link schemes’ and ‘paid links’:

If you over-optimize anchor text you might hurt your website. And by over-optimizing, we mean keyword stuffing. Previously, you could give all anchor texts the same keyword and Google made your website rank higher for that keyword. Nowadays, Google is smart enough to understand that the content around the anchor text says more about the relevancy of a keyword than the anchor text itself. So make sure the anchor text looks natural in your copy: it’s fine to use keywords but don’t add the exact same keywords to every link’s anchor text. 

Keep reading: The context of internal links »

Internal linking in Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO includes several checks and features to help you improve your internal linking.

On a post level, the Yoast SEO plugin helps make sure you give internal links some thought. In the plugin meta box — or in the sidebar, as shown below –, the internal link assessment of Yoast SEO checks whether you’ve created links to other pages on your website in your text. It also checks if these links are followed or nofollowed.

For Yoast SEO for Shopify, this check only works on posts or pages. The reason for not having internal links on your product pages or in your product descriptions is that you want to keep customers there — not send them to another part of your site. You need your customer to convert as quickly as possible. An important part of Shopify SEO, right?

• Internal link check in WordPress
• Internal link check in Shopify

To get a green bullet for this check, add contextual internal links to relevant content on your site.

Text link counter

If you have Yoast SEO for WordPress installed, you’ll also get a handy tool in your post overview, called the text link counter. This tool counts the internal links in a post and the internal links pointing to a post. This visualizes which posts should receive more links. This will all help you work purposely on your site structure.

Easy internal linking with Yoast SEO Premium

The internal linking suggestion

By now you are probably aware of the importance of internal linking for SEO. But handpicking articles – and relevant articles – to link to isn’t always easy. Even if you have a small website, you might not have every content you’ve published right on top of your head. And if you’re managing a medium to large website, especially one where various people can write and publish content, it’s really difficult to remember all the content you have on a given topic. When this happens, internal linking can take much more of your time than it should.

That’s exactly why in Yoast SEO Premium, we’ve built a dedicated feature for internal linking – the internal linking suggestion. It’s incredibly easy to use and you only need to setup for this feature once. Yoast SEO will first scan your content in WordPress, analyze and try to make sense of all your content. Then, when you write a post, you can immediately link to a related post by copying or dragging the link directly into the editor. You’ll see the suggestions in the Yoast SEO sidebar on the right-hand side of your screen. For instance, the screenshot below shows the internal linking suggestions for this post you’re reading. The green tick indicates that we’re linking to the suggested post from this one.

This feature makes internal linking much more intuitive. And that’s thanks to Yoast SEO content analysis running in real-time in the background. It analyses and compares your text to existing content on your site to pick out articles that best fit your new post, all while you’re still writing! Even if the articles are written a while ago or by someone else in your team, Yoast SEO won’t miss them. This way, it will help you set up a great structure by connecting related content to each other without overlooking articles you might not think of right away.

The cornerstone approach internal linking workout

Getting your internal links back in shape is important because that helps you rank with the content you want to rank. That’s why we’ve introduced the cornerstone content internal linking workout in Yoast SEO Premium. You can use this workout to improve your internal linking based on the cornerstone approach we discussed earlier. In six easy steps, you can improve your site structure by learning where to find your cornerstones, how many links they have at the moment, and how to add links pointing to these important posts.

The orphaned content internal linking workout

Orphaned content are your pages and posts that don’t have any internal links pointing to them. That makes them hard for users to find, and also hard for search engines to crawl. In the orphaned content workout, we identify your orphaned content for you and give you all the options and tools you need to deal with it! Maybe you don’t want those pages to be found. Maybe you want to delete them. Or maybe you want these pages to rank in Google and be found by your visitors. Whatever you decide for each page, the steps in this SEO workout make it easy for your to clean up your content.

When you have our Premium plugin, you can find these internal linking workouts in the backend of your WordPress website. Just go to SEO in your left side menu, and select the menu item ‘Workouts’. This will take you to a page where you can find our workouts. Of course, we’ll add other SEO workouts as we go along, which you’ll also find here when they’re released!

Go Premium and unlock this feature!

Unlock our internal linking features and get free access to all of our SEO courses with Yoast SEO Premium:

Get Yoast SEO Premium »Only €99 EUR / per year (ex VAT) for 1 site

Child and sibling block

In the WordPress block editor, you can also easily link child and sibling pages with Yoast SEO premium. If you want to make sure you link all child and sibling pages, just select the sibling or subpages block, add it to your post, and you’re done. Of course, this only works for hierarchical post types.

Orphaned content filter

To make it even easier to find posts that aren’t linked to, Yoast SEO Premium has the orphaned content filter. This feature allows you to see which posts and pages aren’t linked to at all, by other posts and pages on your website. Using the filter, finding important posts that need more inbound internal links is a piece of cake!

Go link your content

Without links, your content can’t rank! With a solid internal linking strategy, you can show which content is related and which of your articles are most informative and valuable. If you follow the guidelines in this post both Google and your users will understand your site better, which will, in turn, increase your chance of ranking.

Read on: Site structure: the ultimate guide »

• What is anchor text?
• What is link building?
• How to improve your link text: 4 practical tips
• How many (internal) links on a page?
• How to use the Yoast SEO internal linking tool

The post Internal linking for SEO: Why and how? appeared first on Yoast.

Many online stores powered by WooCommerce sell products in different variations. A t-shirt, for instance, might be available in a range of colors and sizes. As a result, all these product variants might have different EANs or UPCs and other global identifiers that you like to add to the product data. In addition, you want to add all this to your product structured data. Unfortunately, WooCommerce doesn’t let you do this very quickly. Luckily, there’s a solution in our WooCommerce SEO plugin.

What are unique product identifiers or global identifiers?

Every individual product has a code to identify it. This unique product identifier helps us make sense of the different variations a product might have. Not only us but search engines like Google also use these different product identifiers to learn what product variation we are talking about and what they need to show in the search results.

One of the most used unique product identifiers is the GTIN or the Global Trade Item Number. These come in various forms, like GTIN8, GTIN12 (also known as the UPC, the Universal Product Code), or GTIN13 (also known as the EAN, or the European Article Number).

Adding these product identifiers to your product data in your WooCommerce store increases the chance that Google will show the proper variation of your product. You also need to add the correct structured data to your product.

Of course, humans also use these codes to verify that we’re looking at the right product. It’s not just for machines.

What are variable products and product variations in WooCommerce?

In WooCommerce, a variable product is a version of a product that lets you set various variations, like the t-shirt we mentioned before. You get complete control over prices, images, stock levels, and more for these individual variations.

You can make product variations after making a variable product and setting the different attributes they need to have in the product settings. Once you’ve done that, the product variations settings will open. Here,you can fill in every detail — except global identifiers like the EAN and UPC.

Why can’t I add global identifiers to WooCommerce?

We’re not sure why you can’t add global identifiers to your variable products in WooCommerce natively. Also, there’s no easy way to add the necessary product Schema structured data to the product. Google needs this to fully understand the product options to show in the search results. In the Yoast WooCommerce SEO add-on, we have both options available for you.

Help your online store stand out!

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

Get WooCommerce SEO »Only €79 EUR / per year (ex VAT) for 1 site – incl. 1 year free updates and support

How to add product variations with global identifiers in WooCommerce SEO

After installing the latest version of WooCommerce SEO, you can make your product variations the way you’re used to. You will notice a new set of options in the variations screen, labeled Yoast SEO.

You can add your unique global identifiers in the Yoast SEO section of the product variants screen. You’ll find fields for GTIN8, GTIN12/UPC, GTIN13/EAN, GTIN14/ITF-14, and MPN. Fill in the ones that make sense for your product variation.

The details you fill in will be added to the structured data of your product automatically.

Check your product structured data in the validator

After filling in all the details for your product and its variations, you should check the structured data to see if it validates appropriately. Yoast SEO automatically adds the proper product structured data and stitches everything together so search engines can easily digest it.

You will now notice that the global identifiers (e.g., GTIN8, UPC, etc.) you’ve added to the product variations will show up in the Schema structured data of the product. In addition, you’ll also see that the SKU and URL of the variations are visible in the structured data of the product.

Product variations and global identifiers in WooCommerce

Thanks to the WooCommerce SEO add-on for Yoast SEO, you now have an easy way of adding unique product identifiers to your product variations. Not only that, but it also automatically generates the structured data for your product that Google so desperately needs. Here’s to improving your ecommerce SEO!

The post How to add global identifiers on variable products with WooCommerce SEO appeared first on Yoast.

As we’ve said many times, crawlability is an important aspect of SEO. Your site has to do away with technical hurdles that can hinder crawling while keeping the number of crawlable URLs in check. Crawlers are eager to crawl everything they can find on your site — even if you have a small site with content that hardly changes. The overhead is enormous because there are loads of URLs that make no sense for them to crawl. We’re doing something about that. In Yoast SEO Premium 18.7, we’re expanding our brand-new crawl settings with a long list of additional options.

More crawl settings in Yoast SEO Premium

In Yoast SEO Premium 18.6, we introduced the first addition to a new tab called Crawl settings. Within this section, you can find many toggles that let you turn off various things that WordPress automatically adds to your site and that most sites won’t miss. These WordPress additions generate URLs that search engines can and will crawl. At Yoast, we’re on a mission to drastically reduce the number of URLs that any given site outputs, as crawling all of these are a tremendous waste.

Only available in Yoast SEO Premium, these crawling features give you more control over what you want Google to crawl. The crawl settings are in beta, and we welcome your feedback. Together, we can help take your site to another level!

Go Premium and get access to all our features!

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What can you expect from the crawl settings?

Here’s the basic crawling list with stuff added by WordPress that you can turn off to prevent search engines from crawling it. In our help documentation on the crawl settings, you’ll find all these options explained.

• Short links
• REST API links
• RSD / WLW links
• oEmbed links
• Generator tags
• Emoji scripts
• Pingback HTTP header
• Powered by HTTP header

You can also disable a huge amount of feeds generated by WordPress:

• Global feed
• Global comment feed
• Post comment feed
• Post authors feed
• Post type feed
• Category feeds
• Tag feeds
• Custom taxonomy feeds
• Search results feeds
• Atom/RDF feeds

These settings give you much more flexibility in deciding what you want Google to crawl. We don’t activate these settings for you automatically because it might be that your site benefits from or uses one of these things. We don’t want to break stuff!

Yoast SEO 19.1 enhancements

Yoast SEO 19.1 comes with several fixes and enhancements. For example, our content analyses improved, with support for em dashes as punctuation marks in the focus keyphrase field and correctly detecting caps in focus keyphrases with a period.

Among many other things, Yoast SEO recognizes keyphrases with hyphens in the slug. Our word forms feature and the filtering out of function words now works for hyphenated keyphrases. For example, the keyphrase ex-husband will be recognized in the slug ex-husband, but also the keyphrase ex-husbands.

With the word forms feature, we recognize different grammatical forms of your focus keyphrase in various places in your content. You don’t have to write the same form of your keyphrase each time but can diversify your language by changing forms. This makes you write much more naturally!

WooCommerce SEO 14.9: Global identifiers for product variations + Schema

Working with product variations has always been a hassle. WooCommerce, for instance, doesn’t allow you to add global identifiers for product variations — making it hard to add valuable data for Google to discover. Moreover, there’s no simple way to add structured data to this correctly! In WooCommerce SEO 14.9, we’re fixing this.

WooCommerce SEO now outputs the necessary Schema markup for product variations on individual products. Of course, the plugin already outputs all the product variations Schema markup through the offers property. Now, it will also output the global identifiers for product variations under the offers property. In addition, we’ve also added the variations’ SKU and URL to a product’s Schema.

Open the product variations tab in WooCommerce and fill in the global identifier details for each variation in the new Yoast SEO section. The details will be automatically added to the product structured data generated by WooCommerce SEO.

Removing dates from product Schema

Google sometimes shows dates in your search results, which can help users find the most relevant content. But on your WooCommerce product pages, this doesn’t make much sense — so we remove some metadata from your page to discourage them from showing dates here. So, we now remove the datePublished and dateModified attributes on the ItemPage Schema markup for a product.

Update now!

Yoast SEO 19.1, Yoast SEO Premium 18.7, and WooCommerce SEO 14.9 are out today. In Premium 18.7, we’ve vastly expanded the possibilities of the new crawl settings we introduced in 18.6. You now have many options to manage crawling on your WordPress site.

The post Yoast SEO 19.1 & Premium 18.7: More crawl settings appeared first on Yoast.

By SEO for boring products, we mean SEO for products that are really hard to write exciting content for. Products that need a thousand words to describe all tiny details and small print, but are, in the end, just car insurances, paper clips or emergency exit signs. We have all had or have been that customer that just could not come up with the right, engaging content. Sometimes it’s just hard to write something that makes sense about a product, from your own perspective. In this article, we’ll explain how to approach SEO for boring products!

First: get the basics right

Regardless of what product you’re selling, you always need to make sure that the basics of SEO for your site are right. That means that you’ll have to put some decent effort into:

• keyword research
• site structure
• technical SEO

You’re in luck. At Yoast, we offer SEO courses for every one of those aspects. Or you could start out with our Basic SEO training and take it from there. And if you are using WordPress, install our Yoast SEO plugin and we’ll cover a lot of these basics for you.

Are your products boring, to begin with?

Sometimes we feel like a product is boring, but in the end, it really isn’t.  We’re not selling insurance; we’re selling safety. You’re not selling paper clips; you’re cleaning up or organizing a messy office desk. A hammer isn’t used to drive in a nail; we’re using it to hang a painting.

If you look closely at the goal of your product for the end user, you might find that, even though your technical specs might be boring, there is still an engaging story to tell. SEO for boring products could be less about the product itself. Instead, the focus should be on the purpose of the product. That’s just the first step. Don’t be modest about your products, but look at them from your customer’s angle.

Think about the product category, not the product itself

Even with the purpose of your product in mind, we understand that it’s incredibly hard to write engaging content for every one of your 1,500 types of screws. Yes, some may have other uses than others, but in the end, a screw is a screw. When it’s hard to optimize every single product page (but not entirely impossible), you could take a closer look at your category page instead. The same rules apply: look at your product category’s purpose, not at the actual products.

Content ideas for boring products

Content for SEO for boring products could be just informative. But it could also be content that people want to link to and share on social media. So, perhaps you could think along the lines of more entertaining content, like a funny product videos. Or you could even use memes to promote your products. We see a lot of those nowadays, right?

Besides that, keep in mind that your product page isn’t the only place on your website that’s suitable to inform people about your product. You could have general pages about your company that are suitable for product promotion. And what about your blog? Your blog is an excellent spot to talk more in-depth about your products. We do the same on our blog, talking about our courses and plugins. A blog is obviously awesome to help with SEO for boring products.

Some content idea suggestions

Check social media and your competition for ideas

What is the competition doing? You are not the only one in your niche or industry, so you’ll probably get some good ideas on what to do and what not to do. See what the competition is doing, see if something similar fits your brand and create your own stories, blog posts, product pages based on that. Learn, but don’t imitate. Improve what your competitor is doing.

Talk to your users

Talk to your users, get their stories and share them with your audience so they can relate to that. Relatability is a trigger for a lot of people . If you can relate to a story about a product, then the product already becomes more appealing. And it’s not necessarily because the product appeals to you, but because the person or the story is relatable. Think similar social groups, age categories, etcetera. Talk to your users, tell their story about your product. What have they gained by using it, what did it bring them? How did their benefit after purchasing your product or reading your website?

Write an extensive how-to or manual

People are always looking for how-tos, right? How to use travel insurance? How to fix a sink that’s stuck? So, that can be an idea – to write how-to articles/manual that guide people to use your product and tell them what they need to do. If you are selling travel insurances, your visitors may want to know what they have to do when they actually need that insurance. Will it be hard to reach you and talk to you? Probably a lot of them want to know how to do that upfront.

Add videos

Perhaps even more than written articles, people watch videos. It’s becoming a norm nowadays to watch videos about a product you’re going to buy. That’s especially true for purchases that will cost a chunk of your money. Reviews and unboxing videos are two very common types of video people seek when they want to know more about a product. People like to see other people sharing stories, so feel free to ask your customers to create reviews and unboxing videos. From a brand point of view, you have product explainer videos and instructional videos. If you can provide people with instructional videos before your customers do that themselves, then you’re already winning.

Create a user story and start storytelling

Storytelling is effective and you see it more and more. Social media is excellent for this, but your blog also provides a solid base for storytelling. We mentioned before in an article about testimonials that “stories have a positive influence on a customer’s perception of a brand, as well as the willingness to purchase. Stories can affect behavior, given that the story resonates with your visitor.” And you can craft that story to your own needs, as long as you keep it natural. All and all, create a story people can relate to!

Top 10 tips and other awesome ideas with your product

Get creative and think outside the box! We know this is easier said than done. But you’ll be surprised by the number of content ideas you can think of if you think a bit outside the box. The top 5,10 tips type-of-content can be a good starting point. In the case of the travel insurances, the top 10 tips for travels to <insert country> and travel checklist are great ideas that will attract visitors. Again, check the competition and learn from them.

Good luck optimizing

SEO for boring products is about making a product less boring by focusing less on the product and more on the visitor/customer and the reason they need your product. These stories, combined with a solid SEO base and an engaging social media strategy will help you a lot.

The last thing we want to mention, is that there is a real opportunity here. If you manage to make your SEO efforts for boring products work, if you manage to create engaging content for products that you thought were dull and uninteresting, this is going to give you an edge over your competitors. You are not alone in finding it hard to come up with that content. All your competitors are probably struggling as well. Get creative! Good luck optimizing.

Read more: Product page SEO »

The post How to do SEO for boring products appeared first on Yoast.

If you’re serious about your SEO, you’ve probably set (implicit) goals on what you want to achieve. Perhaps you want to rank in the top ten search results for a specific keyword. Maybe you want your organic traffic to rise with a certain number. But what do you do if you are unable to meet your goals? Simply reset your goals? Or do you adapt and improve your SEO strategy? And how should you do that? In this post, I’ll talk you through some best practices in content SEO strategy that’ll help you achieve your SEO goals.

Why set SEO goals at all?

First, let’s look at why it’s important to set SEO goals. Because it is. If you set SEO goals, chances are much higher that your content SEO strategy will be successful. Because specifying your goals will give you the motivation to actually meet those goals. They give focus to your strategy. Additionally, you’ll be able to measure the success of your SEO strategy if you set specific goals.

You could set goals for ranking top 10, top 5, or even the number 1 position in the search engines for specific terms. You can also set goals for the amount of traffic you want to attract from the search engines. Just don’t forget to make your goals specific and give them deadlines! You’ll become extra focused and determined to achieve your SEO goals.

Not meeting your goals isn’t that bad…

It can be disappointing if you’re unable to meet your content SEO goals. Especially if you put a lot of effort into your content SEO strategy. No worries, though. The next step is to analyze what went wrong. If you analyze and evaluate properly, you’ll uncover valuable information. This information will help you set realistic new goals and improve your SEO strategy on all fronts.

Are all technical SEO aspects taken care of?

It’s best practice to regularly check that your technical SEO is in order. Luckily, Yoast SEO takes care of these things for you. Still, you won’t be the first to accidentally have a noindex/nofollow tag in the wrong place. If you’re blocking – perhaps even without knowing it! – crawlers from your site, you’ll never rank high in Google.

Read more: 8 technical SEO pointers for beginners »

3 best practices for content SEO

1. Evaluate your keyword research

A common mistake in content SEO is to aim for keywords that are simply too competitive to rank for. It’s understandable that you want to rank for terms that generate the most traffic. Competition on those terms is killing, though. We can’t all rank for the same terms. If you’re unable to meet your goals for certain keywords or keyphrases, you might be aiming too high.

Instead, consider ranking for long tail keywords. Why is this best practice for content SEO? Because the longer and more specific your keywords are, the less competitive they’ll be. You can actually generate a lot of traffic with long tail keywords. And, after a while, you’ll be able to rank for more head terms as well, as your authority in your domain will increase.

It’s good to note, however, that ranking for competitive search terms is always a long-term SEO strategy. I’m not saying you shouldn’t set goals to enter the top 5 in Google on a competitive term. Just give yourself some time to achieve those goals. In the meantime, set your content SEO goals on entering the top 5 in Google with more long tail and less competitive keywords. You’ll be able to celebrate successes while working towards your ultimate ranking goal.

Keep reading: Keyword research: the ultimate guide »

2. Evaluate your content

Another reason you’re not ranking (yet) could be that your site lacks awesome and SEO-friendly content. A successful SEO strategy requires lots of great quality content. A few thin-content sales pages will not get you in Google’s top 10. That’s why one of the best practices for a good content SEO strategy is to incorporate several awesome, informative cornerstone content pages. If you write informative, unique and well-optimized articles and blog posts, your ranking will most definitely improve.

So, what is quality content? The first step is to write multiple lengthy articles or blog posts that are optimized for the right search terms. Don’t forget to factor in accessibility! You want everyone to be able to read your content. Even on social media. And finally, you should always update your old content. Keep it relevant and informational for your visitors. Writing SEO friendly content might sound like a lot of work, but it’ll pay off in the long run.

Read on: How to measure the success of your content SEO strategy »

3. Update your site structure

A third reason why you’re not ranking well or attracting as much traffic as you’d like could be because of your site’s structure. If your website is about ballet shoes, you’ve probably written many related articles about ballet shoes. That’s great, but you need to tell Google which of these articles is the most important. Otherwise, you’ll end up competing with your own content in the search results. Which in turn could result in lower rankings for all of your articles.

It’s best practice to improve your site structure by choosing a cornerstone approach. Determine which article is most important for each main topic you’re writing about. Link from all other blog posts on that topic to your most important one. Our Yoast SEO plugin has several features to help you improve your site’s structure. Using these will do wonders for your content SEO!

Conclusion

Whether you reach your goals or not isn’t the main issue; you just need to set them. They will give focus to your SEO strategy. Even if you don’t manage to reach those goals, they’re a good starting point and a valuable source of information. Find out why you didn’t meet your goals. Then, improve your content SEO strategy.

Keep on reading: The ultimate guide to site structure »

The post How to adapt your content SEO strategy appeared first on Yoast.

The last step in an online buying process is always the checkout page; your website’s cash register. It consists of a number of steps that lead to a completion of a purchase. It’s not uncommon for people to abandon their shopping carts during the checkout process due to a bad user experience. And it’s a shame when this happens. In this post, we’ll discuss the things you can improve, from the UX of your shopping cart to your thank you page. We’ll tell you how to make your visitors as comfortable as possible while they complete their purchases.

If you want to learn more about user experience (UX) and other essential SEO skills, you should check out our All-around SEO training! It doesn’t just tell you about SEO: it makes sure you know how to put these skills into actual practice!

Before we begin, please realize that conversion and checkout page UX go hand in hand. Improving the UX of your checkout process will influence conversion as well. For instance, a too complicated checkout process accounts for 17% of cart abandonment. So you should be looking to make your potential customers as comfortable as possible while they complete their purchases. Don’t lose out on a purchase because of bad checkout page UX. With that said, let’s explore the various elements on your checkout page that affect user experience.

Design, layout and typography

Let’s quickly talk about the look of your checkout page before going into the actual content of the page. We recommend a clean design for the checkout page no matter the products or services you’re selling. The checkout page is all about completing purchases, and so everything on this page, including the page design should facilitate that. There’s no need to ‘wow’ your customers with fascinating images and interactive web elements anymore at this stage. Instead, try to make it quick and easy for them to go through the checkout process.

That could translate to employing a simple page design with lots of white space to make the important fields and information stands out. And the font choice should be easy to read on both desktop and mobile devices. Take Nike’s checkout page as an example, the page design is clean and simple, which makes it easy to get an overview of the checkout process.

Progress bar

One of the most important things to realize is that checkout page UX is actually about optimizing every single step (page) in the checkout process. Before going into detail, we’d like to mention your visitors’ best friend in the checkout process: the progress bar. It makes it visible for visitors how far along they are in the process. This actually results in gamification, which makes it even more likely they’ll finish the entire process.

At Yoast, we added a little motivational twist to improve the UX of our checkout page: a potential buyer starts in step 2 of the process. Step one is clicking the buy button, which the person has already done, right? That deserves validation as well! Starting in step 2 is like giving them a head start and will motivate them to complete the purchase.

If you don’t have a progress bar on your checkout page, it’s a good idea to design your page in a way that’s clear to customers where they are in the checkout process. For instance, Nike follows this approach on its checkout page (as seen in the example above).

Shopping cart overview

A very important aspect of your checkout page UX is the shopping cart overview. Regardless of what product you’re selling, every shopping cart overview should at least have these elements:

• Product images. These help a visitor remember what products they have added to the cart. Shopping takes time and this is just a friendly reminder.
• Prices. Clearly state the price of an individual article, the amount per article, any discounts if applicable and the total price customers have to pay.
• Shipping (and other additional) costs. Clearly state the shipping options and costs to prevent surprises. You shouldn’t have any additional costs after this point in the checkout process, as it will ruin any checkout page UX! In fact, 16% of cart abandonment is due to people not being able to see the total order cost up-front.
• Security signs. Clearly state that all is done in a safe, secure environment, for instance by a clear SSL certificate and things like Symantec seals. Testimonials also help for social security.

All these things combined create an optimal checkout page UX: a feeling of trust and convenience that will invite the visitor to complete the purchase.

An optional element to have in this overview is a list of available payment methods. You can just display their brand logos here to let customers know. We actually think that payment options should be clear even before going to the cart overview. That means having this information on product pages or on the footer of your website. This will prevent disappointments like the need to use an authentication device when there is none around.

Coupon codes

Nowadays, a lot more people are buying and giving gifts online with coupon/discount codes, so you must not forget about the coupon code option on your checkout page. The coupon code section should be clear and easy to find. There’s not a real harsh rule where you should place this option. But most companies make it convenient by placing it in the payment overview. Some companies also display this option both in the payment overview and in the shopping cart overview.

Next to that, when a customer uses a coupon code, it should be clear to the person that the code is indeed applied. This should also be reflected in the shopping cart overview by indicating the discount customers receive.

Guest purchase

Many online shops ask customers to create an account before they can move forward with completing their checkout process. We understand that a user account is more convenient for the customer and will make return visits and future purchases easier. It’ll allow for wish lists, invoice history and save a lot of support questions about that. And it is beneficial for you as the webshop owners because you can build a database about your users. However, creating that account is a barrier for a lot of potential customers and could lead to shopping cart abandonment.

It’s an extra step and it’s not improving your checkout page UX as such. Instead of that, you can ask customers to fill out their shipping details first and then provide them with the option to create an account after that. A second option would be to ask the customer to create an account for future purchases after the actual sale.

Shipping and invoice address

Many companies ask for this information as the first step in their checkout process (right after asking you to create an account or use the guest purchase option).

One of the most important things any UX or conversion expert will tell you: don’t ask too many details in an online form. You don’t need to know their pet’s name, unless you sell dog food and want to send the dog a present on his birthday, of course. No, not even then! There could be a nice gadget in your sidebar for that, but during the checkout process, only ask what’s necessary. Usually, that means you only need to ask for a:

• company name (in case you’re selling to companies)
• buyer’s name
• delivery/invoice address
• email address
• phone number

In a lot of cases, you don’t even need to ask for a phone number. And a simple checkbox will prevent them from filling in the same details twice: “Shipping and invoice address are the same”. Check. Of course, all these details are entered in a secure, safe environment and you’re using inline validation to guide the visitor through the form.

Payment overview and payment

All of the payment options should be listed clearly here. And as mentioned earlier: prevent surprise costs like additional shipping or other fees (or tax for that matter). Next to that, consider placing the discount code option in this section.

At this point, visitors will most likely finish their purchase. In this step of the checkout process, they will pick their preferred payment method and pay for the product(s). It’s a good idea to have an ‘order overview‘ step after the payment methods step and put your ‘place order’ button there. This gives people the chance to re-check their order one last time before they actually pay for the purchase.

After sales

Now that the deal is closed, you need to guide the visitor to the door of your shop, thank him for his purchase and tell him to come back anytime. Nothing new here, as this is exactly what we do offline.

Thank him for the trust in your company. Tell him that you’ll do anything to make sure he’ll get the products asap and that you’ll handle the shipment with care. That’s just the general text on that thank-you page. There are more things you can do here:

• Create account. If your website has that account option like we mentioned before, you could offer the customer the option to create an account for future visits (again). Explain why this is beneficial.
• Subscribe to a newsletter. Ask the customer to subscribe to your newsletter, so he can stay up-to-date on promotions to come and new products you might have for him. If the buyer is enthusiastic about your website and/or products, he’ll subscribe.
• Discount for the next purchase. Everybody likes discounts and that’s undeniable. There are multiple ways to approach this. Offer it every time (“5% on your next purchase”), or combine it with the newsletter option (“subscribe and get a $10 discount code”). Send an email a few days before the coupon expires to remind people about the discount. Chances are they will buy, just because they don’t want to waste that discount.
• Share on social networks. Your (happy) customers are your marketeers. Ask them to share their purchase or a general promotion for your online shop. They made the purchase, probably like your website and chances are they will be willing to promote your site/products.
• Track & trace. Perhaps this should be on top of this list. If the purchase was for a reasonable amount of money, or the product is something the customer wants asap, track and trace allows them to see where the product is at any time (for instance ‘in production’, in the warehouse’, ‘delivery on its way to your house’).

That track & trace can usually be done by an app or online. But you should really consider sending updates per email as well about delivery dates, delays and things like that. Domino’s Pizza even tells you via push notifications that your pizza is in the oven. Apple sends an email a week before the delivery of your new iPhone. That’s not an email you’ll consider spam, right? Feel free to keep your customers up-to-speed on their purchase/delivery.

As mentioned at the top of this article, this isn’t a conversion guide for your checkout process. It deals with your checkout page UX. We think the checkout page UX shouldn’t have to differ much per webshop. And the checkout page UX shouldn’t discourage potential buyers from completing a purchase!

Read more: Shopping cart abandonment »

The post Checkout page UX – How to provide a good user experience on your checkout page appeared first on Yoast.

Social media plays a huge part in our day-to-day lives. It’s used by people from all walks of life. But are your social posts accessible to everyone? Would you know where to start if someone from your c-suite said that you needed to implement a more accessible approach to your social strategy? In this blog post, we’ll outline what accessibility within the realm of social media is and why you should implement it into your social media strategy.

What is accessibility and why is it important?

Accessibility, at its core, is all about people. People access content and services in very different ways, because people are very different. Some rely on assistive technology to use social media, which is exactly who social media accessibility is intended for. This includes people who are blind or visually impaired, deaf or hard of hearing, people with dyslexia or cognitive learning disabilities, or neurodivergent people. They should be able to “access” your content as effectively as someone without a disability.

Thinking about these people is important. Otherwise, you’d be neglecting a huge part of your audience and in turn, missing out on a bunch of engagement and SEO opportunities as well. Hopefully, if you take one thing away from this post, it’s to remember to not make assumptions about the audience coming to consume your content.

If you were to take and honest look at your own social media. How accessible are your posts right now?

Where to start?

You may well be thinking: Yes, I know I need to get better at this, but I’m not sure where to start. Well, let’s get into it, shall we!

Image accessibility

Images do really well on social media. That’s why a lot of companies are focused on adding beautiful visuals and photos to their posts. And the adage of “a picture can say a thousand words” may work for someone with 20/20 vision, but as we’ve discussed before, that’s not everyone. Your message could get lost if you don’t use enough contrast in your visuals, or colors that easily blur together.

There are specific challenges that come with color and contrast. For example, you shouldn’t rely on color alone to convey a message. So let’s take a closer look at this.

Label your information

For someone who is colorblind, the key information in this chart may be lost, or its meaning may change. This image relies on the user being able to see red versus green. And to understand that “green” is good and takes up more than half of the chart in this context.

This also relies on a cultural context of red being negative and green being positive, which is not as universal as you think. Nor is it very inclusive of everyone’s needs. How can we fix this?

To make this chart more accessible, we need to label the key information that we want to get across. If the information is not there, people can’t engage.

Adding some labels to the chart makes it much easier to understand the message we’re trying to get across.

This also benefits people who are skimming past your posts. All the information is there at a glance!

Contrast in your images

Not only do you need to make sure that you’re labeling the information you want to convey, you also need to think about the colors you use and their relationship to each other. It’s wrong to assume that everyone sees images the same way as a person with 20/20 vision. But thinking about contrast can help.

Let’s look at an example.

To illustrate how some people might experience graphics, we’ve taken most of the color out of this image. See how you can still identify the key parts and the message still makes sense? It’s not perfect, though. The contrast near Holly’s leg – the woman on the right – is not great.

There are a number of tools that you can use to check the contrast ratios. For example, Contrast Ratio is easy to read and has an easily understandable traffic light system (which is why we like it so much!). Another great tool is Tanaguru Contrast-Finder. Tanaguru allows you to go a bit more in depth.

There are even more guidelines and tools that you can use to ensure that the contrast ratio of your text and graphics is sufficient against the background. We highly encourage you to explore these different tools! If you use text, however, do note that there are minimum contrast ratios based on the font sizes.

Image alt text

Having text in your images is one of the easiest ways to get your message across. However, that text is inaccessible to screen readers. So, it’s best practice to include alt text and even caption your images. Because both alt text and captions can be read aloud by assistive technologies.

Images falls into one of three different categories: informative, functional and decorative. You can read more about this on the W3C website. Decorative don’t need an alt text. But informative images do. If you post an image on social media with the purpose of conveying information, you should always try to include an alt text that describes the image and what is in it. There are a few best practices to keep in mind when writing an alt text. Write proper sentences and keep it short. Generally, 125 – 140 characters is the way to go. That’s effectively a short tweet!

Each of the social platforms handles alt texts in different ways, which can be confusing. The platforms are getting better at making people aware of the functionalities they have, but it could be better. We will show you how to find the alt text, but first let’s look at some examples of what you should be writing. We’ll use the same example image as before:

You could start by simply repeating the text that is in the image. Simple is better than nothing, after all!

Yoast SEO is now available for Shopify

This is fine, but it could be better. We’re missing context, after all. So keeping in mind the image above, let’s add some context to the alt text.

The phrase "Yoast SEO is now available for Shopify" above an illustration of two women shopping

Do you see how adding more contexts builds the image in your mind? There is still a lot more we could do, though. Let’s take it one step further.

The phrase "Yoast SEO is now available for Shopify" above an illustration of two women. One holds shopping bags with the Yoast and Shopify logos, and the other holds an example of a search result.

This gives a much clearer description of what the image looks like. Plus, it provides context to the copy that is posted with it.

Of course, you could improve these even further. Just don’t go overboard by describing everything. And don’t worry about getting it wrong. Writing alt text is as much of an art as it is a science. And writing something basic is still better than nothing. If you need more help or inspiration, we encourage you to watch this video from the delightful Jake and Surma about alt text. Don’t worry, we’ll wait.

Great! We now know what we should be writing. But where do we input this on the platforms? Below, you’ll find some screenshots of Sam’s cat Patch. It’s worth noting that we used an android for these screenshots, so things might look different on an iPhone.

Twitter

After you have composed your tweet like normal, look at the bottom right of the image. You’ll see an ALT button. Here, you can write your description and save it. Once saved, it will then show that your tweet has an alt attribute. This has to be done before you tweet, since you cannot edit anything after the fact.

Instagram

On Instagram, these setting are hidden in the advanced settings, so you’ll need to do a bit of digging. Instagram does allow you to alter the alt text after posting. So, if you forgot to add an alt text, you can nip back in and still include it.

Facebook

On Facebook, they have an AI that can add alt text for you. But AI alt attributes are rarely good. They do a reasonable job of identifying what’s in the picture, but they lack your context. That’s why it’s better to practice writing an alt text yourself.

Video accessibility

Videos, especially short-form video, are only getting more popular, and this trend will likely continue to grow. For example, Facebook even added its version of TikTok to the home feed, because video is so popular! But did you know that over 80% of videos on Facebook are watched without sound? Raise your hand if you do this too!

There is a lot to consider when dealing with videos in terms of accessibility. One of the easier things you can do is add captions or subtitles. These terms are used interchangeably on social media, but they are used for specific reasons. Do you know the difference? Let’s go over them.

Closed captions

• Convey all the essential audio: dialogue, music, sound effects, and audio cues.
• Intended for audiences who cannot hear the audio.

Subtitles

• Convey the dialogue only.
• Intended for audiences who can hear but not understand the audio – think translations.

Including these is a great starting point for making your videos more accessible. If you’re still not sure which you should be using, this video – Closed Captioning vs. Subtitles: What’s The Difference? – is really helpful.

Open or closed captions?

What’s the difference? The short answer: closed captions can be turned on and off. But open captions are actually part of the video, so they can’t be turned off. It’s up to you which you want to include. Whichever you choose, you will give your followers the choice of how they want to consume your content on social media: with sound or without.

Transcripts

Transcripts are an outstanding resource to utilize! Not only do they describe the dialogue of a video, but they also describe the sounds and visuals. Not to mention, they provide your followers with a choice in how they consume your video content.

And there’s more good news. Transcripts can also be formatted in a way that is SEO-friendly, and they give you the opportunity to link to other pages and resources. For inspiration, our blog team did a fantastic job for this podcast on user experience. YouTube can create transcripts automatically, but you do need to review them as the tool doesn’t work perfectly.

If writing transcripts feels overwhelming, we encourage you to head over to W3C. They have a great resource for how to handle transcripts.

Better captioning tools on social media

The platforms are starting to take social media accessibility more seriously by adding tools to make your videos more accessible. Some, like TikTok, generate subtitles automatically. These may not always be perfect, but it’s a good starting point. Instagram has also started adding captions to muted videos in your feed.

Other accessibility considerations

Though we have discussed a bunch of important topics already, there are still a few other things to consider when it comes to social media accessibility. So, buckle up!

Emojis

Did you know that emojis have their own Unicode description? This description is what gets read out loud when people use screen readers. There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with using emojis, but they do get abused sometimes. Especially from an accessibility point of view. Let’s look at an example. You may remember the infamous red flag trend that was everywhere.

Screen readers read the emoji description out loud, and there is currently no way to skip this. So, you can imagine how the tweet above might’ve sounded. “I’m not on Twitter” triangular flag triangular triangular flag triangular flag triangular flag triangul… etc.

While emojis are fun, make sure you use them towards the end of your copy. If they are in between sentences, make sure they have context. Ask yourself, does the emoji description make sense in this copy?

Tip: If you want to know a specific emoji’s description, we recommend looking it up on Emojipedia.

#Hashtags

Since the creation of the hashtag (thank you, Chris Messina) they have been used in a number of different ways. When it comes to social media accessibility, it’s best practice to use CamelCase hashtags and capitalize the initial letter of each word in a phrase. This indicates to screen readers to properly read the text in the hashtag. It also makes them easier to read for the rest of the population.

For example, instead of #seoforeveryone, you may write #SEOForEveryone. It’s also worth noting that acronyms and initialism like SEO should always be capitalized. But you knew that already, right?

Custom fonts

Twitter particularly seems to go through phases of using custom fonts to seem cute. Unfortunately, they are not accessibility-friendly. Have a look at this tweet from Kent. It’s a fantastic example of what a tweet with custom fonts sounds like for a person with a screen reader.

Not fun, right?

Conclusion

Social media accessibility helps you open up your content to a wider audience, with the added benefit of giving other followers different ways to consume your content. With just a few tweaks to your workflow, you could see an increase in engagement.

We at Yoast are very passionate about accessibility. Not only for social media, but also for the web in general. That’s why we encourage you to look at what others are doing, and how social media platforms are putting features in place to make accessibility even easier. For example, there are now companies out there that have included tools in their scheduling software. Amazing, right?

The post Accessibility in social media appeared first on Yoast.

One of the most important aspects of SEO is optimizing the crawlability of your site. Search engines have near-endless resources, so they have the power to crawl everything they find — and they will. But, that is not the way it should be. Almost every CMS outputs URLs that don’t make sense and that crawlers could safely skip. With Yoast SEO Premium 18.6, we’re starting a series of additions to clean up those unnecessary URLs, feeds, and assets so that the more critical stuff stands a better chance of being crawled.

Making your site easier to crawl

Google and other search engines crawl almost everything they can find — as Yoast founder Joost de Valk proves in a post on his site. But it can be hard to get them to crawl what you want them to crawl. Moreover, crawlers can come by many times each day and still not pick up the important stuff. There’s a lot to gain for every party involved — from the crawlers, site owners, and environment — to make this process more sensible. Yoast SEO Premium will help search engines crawl your site more efficiently.

In Yoast SEO Premium 18.6, we’re introducing the first addition to our crawl settings, allowing you to manage better what search engines can skip on your site. In this release, we’re starting with those RSS feeds of post comments in WordPress, but we have a long list of stuff that we want to help you manage.

Head over to our new Crawl settings section in the General settings of Yoast SEO Premium and activate the first addition to preventing search engines from crawling the post comment feeds.

This feature is available to all Yoast SEO Premium subscribers in beta form, and we’ve selected not to activate this for every site. In some cases, there still might be sites that use this in a way we can’t anticipate. We’re rolling out more crawling options — big and small — in the coming releases.

Let’s all start cleaning up the crawling on our sites — it’s better for you, your visitors, search engines, and the environment. All with a little help from Yoast SEO Premium. Let’s go!

Go Premium and get access to all our features!

Premium comes with lots of features and free access to our SEO courses!

Get Yoast SEO Premium »Only $99 USD / per year (ex VAT) for 1 site

Keeping Bing updated on your site

Yoast SEO 19.0 and Premium 18.6 also help Bing find your XML sitemaps. Last week, Bing changed the way they previously handled XML sitemaps. Before, we could submit sitemaps URLs anonymously using an HTTP request, but Bing found that spammers were misusing it thanks to this anonymity. You have two options to submit your sitemaps to Bing: a link in the robots.txt file or Bing Webmaster Tools.

To make your sitemaps available to Bing, we’ve updated Yoast SEO to add a link to your XML sitemap to your robots.txt file — if you want. This ensures that Bing can easily find your sitemap and keep updated on whatever you publish or change on your site. If you haven’t made a robots.txt file yourself, we’ll now add one with a link to your sitemap.xml file. You can add the link yourself via the file editor in Yoast SEO if you already have one.

We’ve also updated the robots.txt itself. We have changed the Disallow: /wp-admin/ line to Disallow:. More on that in our updated best-practice guide for robots.txt on WordPress sites.

Also, this might be an excellent opportunity to check out Bing Webmaster Tools — there are some great insights to be gained into your site’s performance on Bing.

Other enhancements and fixes

Of course, we did another round of bug fixes and enhancements. There are two that we’d like to highlight here. We’ve enhanced the compatibility with Elementor, ensuring that our SEO analysis functions appropriately.

In addition, we enhanced our consecutive sentence assessment in the readability analysis. This threw warnings when you had multiple sentences starting with the same word in a list. We handle content in lists differently now, and having various instances with the same word should not throw a warning anymore.

Update now to Yoast SEO 19.0 & Premium 18.6

In this release, we’re introducing more ways to control crawling on your site. For Yoast SEO Premium, we’re starting with a small addition to manage post comment feeds, but we’re expanding that in the coming releases. The feature is in beta, so we welcome your feedback!

In addition, we’ve also made sure that Bing can still find your XML sitemap, and we’ve fixed a couple of bugs with Elementor and our readability analyses.

The post Yoast SEO 19.0: Optimize crawling and Bing discoverability appeared first on Yoast.

The key to converting a visitor into a client is trust. Even if your main product is not very exciting, it can be sold online when visitors know that you’re the best supplier. So, how do make sure your online WordPress or Shopify store looks trustworthy? We’ve compiled a list of seven tips for you to start with. Be sure to read on!

1. Use clear and ‘normal’ language

Speak the language of your audience. Chances are, your audience doesn’t understand complicated and highly specific jargon. That’s why it’s important to use a clear and direct writing style. Focus on providing solid arguments as to why their quality of life improves after buying your product. And above all: keep your audience in mind. When visitors read a text that is focused on them, they’ll know they’re in the right place. And this will understand create trust.

2. Testimonials create trust

Don’t brag about your products yourself. We understand that you’re a fan of your business, but it comes across as less trustworthy. Why? Because visitors know you’re biased. That’s why they are more likely to trust a testimonial written by an actual customer. If possible, list the name and company of the customer and, if they agree, use a picture of them.

A video testimonial is also great. Just make sure you include a written excerpt. This will allow visitors to read the testimonial even if they can’t turn on the sound. Anyone can learn how to create a video to promote your business.

Testimonials are a great way to create trust. But if they’re only on the testimonial page and nowhere else, chances are not a lot of people will find them. So put your testimonials on pages where people will easily find them! For example, on your landing pages and near call-to-actions. Even below your shopping cart would be a good spot. We suggest that you test for yourself which locations work best for your audience!

Visible ratings in search engines

Another great location to put reviews and ratings is the search results. People immediately see that your product is highly rated and therefore more trustworthy!

Google can show these rich results if you add structured data to your site. But what is structured data? To keep it short and sweet: structured data is a piece of code in a specific format, written in such a way that search engines understand it. It might sound complicated, but don’t worry. The Yoast WooCommerce SEO plugin and Yoast SEO for Shopify app automatically implements structured data for your online store, so that your products are eligible for rich results. You won’t have to do a thing!

3. Security seals

Google has made a clear case for secure websites in the past years. By investing in following the guidelines of the right verification companies, you show customers that your online store is trustworthy. However, anyone can create a security seal nowadays, so make sure you stick to the well-known companies. Their seals really do add value to your online WordPress or Shopify store.

Usually, the security seal comes with a link to a certificate. The certificate should be on the website of the company that verified your shop’s security. Even though not many people click the link, it’s advisable to add it anyway.

Sites that list these security seals also come with a nice lock icon in the address bar of your browser. Did you know you can actually click the lock icon for more information on a website’s security? It’s pretty similar per browser, but here’s what it could tell you about yoast.com:

4. Pictures

Too many companies and brands use (the same) stock photos. Now, we’re sure the model in the image is a very nice woman, but she doesn’t work at your company. Visitors might be thinking you have something to hide by using stock photos! Therefore, we recommend you use actual pictures of yourself and/or your employees. This will create trust.

If you use something like a live chat on your online store, the experience will definitely be enhanced by using an actual employer’s photo.

5. List your physical address

People want to know if there is a place they can visit in case they have any problems or questions. Simply put: it’s reassuring. Moreover, having an actual store in addition to an online store allows you to cater to a lot of potential customers. Especially if you have a lot of local customers. Some people prefer to pick up their purchases or window shop before they buy.

6. What happens after checkout?

If you’ve ever bought something online, you probably recognize that moment of hesitation right before you click the Pay Now button. You’re thinking: What happens now? Will I be charged for taxes or import costs? Can I select a wrapping paper? Remove these doubts by explaining what happens after your customers click the button. This ensures that your customers are included in the ordering process and that there are no surprises. This can be done with just a few short lines of text: “This order is 100% guaranteed. There will be no additional charges upon delivery.” A message like this will comfort a lot of your customers. And it’ll make it easier for them to complete the order.

7. Show you care about more than making money

The most important thing, however, is that your website reflects your belief in the product or service you provide. Tell your customers about your company, your main values or mission statement. Show them that you’re not just in it for the money.

At Yoast, we emphasize our enthusiasm for Open Source and WordPress by actively engaging in the community. For example, we regularly sponsor WordCamps and WP Meetups. In addition, we’re one of biggest core contributors to WordPress — we have a dedicated team on it! This not only shows that your company or brand is involved, but also creates a huge sympathy and trust factor.

On to you

Now it’s your turn! Before you get started, consider what you’ve already done to make your brand and website more trustworthy. Then, look at things to improve. Remember, it’s an ongoing process. You want to keep the information on your website up to date, so be sure to schedule in time to work on this topic. Good luck!

Read more: What is E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness)? »

The post 7 ways to increase sales by creating trust appeared first on Yoast.

It’s only been 4 months since the previous major release but we’re already excited to welcome WordPress 6.0. Of course, as with every other major release, you can expect loads of loads of improvements and exciting new features. This new version is no different. WordPress 6.0 continues to refine and iterate on the tools and features introduced in earlier releases. Let’s dive deeper into what WordPress 6.0 brings to your table!

For starters, this release will include all the great new features, enhancements and gains from Gutenberg 12.0 and 13.0. At the same time, developers and contributors continue to work on bug fixes and improvements that significantly impact the overall user experience on WordPress. This translates to over 400 updates, 500 bug fixes, and 91 new features in just one release, which is huge!

We’re getting an improved list view experience, style theme variations, additional templates, new blocks, new enhancements to the block editors and many more. Since there are many new things coming in this release, we’d like to bring your attention to some of the features and improvements that will likely have an impact on the way you use WordPress.

Full site editing enhancements and new features

Full site editing was the talk of the town when this major feature was introduced in previous releases. WordPress 6.0 continues to build upon the groundwork laid in 5.9 and further improves on what you can do with full site editing. You will need to use a block-based theme such as WordPress’s Twenty-Twenty-Two to take advantage of full site editing.

Style variations and global style switcher

Many people in the WordPress community are excited about this feature in the Site editor. You’ll be able to use theme variations derived from one single theme using various color and font combinations. It’s kind of like having several child themes but integrated into one single theme. And it’s incredibly easy to apply a new style variation across your entire site. From now on, you’ll be able to change the look and feel of your website with just a click.

Theme export capability

Another huge improvement to full site editing specifically and the WordPress platform as a whole is the ability to export block themes. Any templates, layouts and style changes you made can be saved and exported to a .zip file. This feature is huge because it’s paving the way for visual theme building. You can create a WordPress theme just by purely using Gutenberg blocks. And of course, no coding knowledge is required!

To export your theme, go to your Site editor and click on the 3 dots icon in your top right corner. There should appear a menu with the option to download your theme.

New templates

Being able to use and customize templates to build your website content is great because it helps you to save time. We had templates to work with in previous WordPress versions, but the options were limited. WordPress 6.0 expands on this and introduces several new templates for specific functions. These include templates for displaying posts from a specific author, category, date, tag, or taxonomy.

List view enhancements

When you access the list view in WordPress 6.0, you will see that your blocks are grouped together and collapsed instead of showing everything like in previous versions. This will make navigating the list view much easier. Next to this, when you’re working on a page with the list view open and you click anywhere on the page, it will highlight precisely where you are in the list view. Anyone who regularly works on complex pages should appreciate this enhancement.

Block editor enhancements

New core blocks

WordPress 6.0 will ship with several new blocks including post author biography, avatar, no result in query loop and read more. We want to point you to the new comment query loop block because it further ‘blockifies’ the comment section of your post. With this new block, you’ll get plenty of customization options to design the comment section the way you want to.

More features and enhancements

There are quite a lot of improvements and enhancements to the block editor that we can’t cover everything in this post. Instead, we will mention a few that we think will be the most beneficial for you.

The first new enhancement in the block editor we want to introduce is block locking. Moving forward, you’ll be able to lock a block so it can’t be moved and/or edited. A locked block will display a padlock when you click on it. And when you open the list view, you’ll also see the padlock indicating a locked block. This feature is especially useful if you work a lot with reusable blocks and don’t want anyone messing around with those blocks. It’s also beneficial for preserving design layouts when you’re creating templates or working with clients.

Next to that, in WordPress 6.0, when you customize a button and then add a new button using the plus button, it will have the same style as the one you’ve just customized. Before, you would need to redo all the customization if you want to add several buttons with the same style.

Another cool feature in this new version is style retention. It’s now possible to keep a block’s style when transforming certain blocks from one type to another and vice versa. It works with quite a few blocks, ranging from quote, list, code, heading, pullquote, verse, etcetera.

Lastly, the cover block can now dynamically grab your featured image and set it as the background for the cover block. All you have to do is select the ‘use featured image‘ setting and WordPress will do the rest.

Writing improvements

You can expect several notable writing improvements in this new version of WordPress. They are not major changes by any means, but you’ll definitely notice and appreciate the refinement in your overall writing experience.

Have you ever tried selecting text from 2 separate blocks and got annoyed because it automatically selected all the text from both blocks? Well, you won’t be bothered by that anymore. From WordPress 6.0 onwards, you can easily select text across blocks and edit it to your liking. This is definitely a quality of life improvement.

Also coming your way is a new link completer shortcut. You can access this shortcut anytime by typing and it will show you a list of links on your site. This feature can be handy when you’re doing internal linkings, for instance.

Lastly, WordPress will remind you to add tags and categories as the last step before you can publish a post. When you publish a lot of posts, it can be easy to forget this step so this is quite a neat feature for forgetful folks.

Design and layout tools

We won’t be diving too much into the improvements in design and layout tools, but we do think the following two features deserve a mention.

The first one is transparency control for background, which is very useful when you want to use a background with columns. You’ll surely elevate your post design if you can make use of this feature. The next fun addition to WordPress 6.0 is gap support for the gallery block. This just means you have more control over the spacing of your images, giving you a bit more freedom on how you want to display your image gallery. Anyone can take advantage of these 2 new features, but photography and fashion website runners can probably appreciate them the most.

The post WordPress 6.0: A major release with major improvements appeared first on Yoast.

We’ll start with a brief summary of YouTube ranking factors. Next, we’ll make a best-guess assessment of how they break down from a practical standpoint.

YouTube ranking factors

There are two core overarching groups into which YouTube ranking factors fit: relevancy and authority.

Relevancy

Transcripts and Visuals

YouTube and Google have two main tools for working out the content of a video. First, the transcripts (both automated and manually uploaded). And second, the visuals from the video frames. The latter is parsed with machine learning that interprets what’s shown.

These tools are steadily becoming more accurate over time. As of 2022, you can largely guarantee that algorithms will get the gist of what’s included in your content without a huge amount of extra work. All you can do, is offer the most accurate possible picture, with accurate transcripts, and ensure your videos are shot well.

Titles

Your video titles are primarily there to attract clicks from users across the YouTube platform. But they also serve as an indicator of the video’s topic, and for which terms it would be appropriate to rank. 

While YouTube titles should be considered more analogous to H1s than meta titles, it’s nevertheless helpful to have an understanding of the broad keywords your videos are trying to rank for. And to ensure they appear somewhere in the title.

Descriptions

YouTube descriptions are where you can include all relevant supporting information about a video. This may include links to external resources, hashtags, and video chapters with the “key moments” feature. YouTube and Google do parse the description of your video. Studies even suggest that videos with detailed descriptions tend to rank higher than those without one.

Hashtags

Hashtags can be included within a YouTube description. They form an increasingly important method of navigating and locating content. If you want to use them, make sure you include appropriate ones. This will increase the overall number of impressions your videos can get from hashtag pages.

Note: Don’t confuse hashtags with YouTube Tags. YouTube Tags is a largely redundant feature that sits in the backend of YouTube creator studio.

Recency

Broadly speaking, YouTube will tend to preference newer videos over older videos. This is particularly true for certain queries, which are likely treated with something akin to a QDF (query deserves freshness) treatment. If you’re trying to rank for a competitive term with a video that’s three years old, we suggest you refresh and republish the video.

Authority 

Quality views

While many companies try to increase their YouTube authority by spending loads on ads to increase view counts, this doesn’t directly help rankings. That’s because the number of high-quality views matters more than the raw view count. But what are high-quality views? They are from genuine, engaged users who watch a significant portion of your video.

There isn’t an easy way to achieve high-quality views. You simply have to work hard to build up a subscriber base and an engaged audience. If you have managed that, then anything new you launch is likely to have a good number of quality views out of the gate.

Retention

Retention refers to how much of your video users watch on average before they get bored and click on something else. But it’s especially important to note how well your video performs in comparison to similar-length videos on a similar topic. So, what are ways to improve your retention? For example, have a compelling start to your video. Promise value to your audience, then keep them hooked with good pacing.

Impression click-through rate

If your video shows up on YouTube’s discover page and a lot of people click on it, your click-through rate will likely be good. In other words: click-through rate (CTR) measures the rate at which users click to watch your video whenever they are presented with it. What’s more, if more people click on your video than other videos, your view count increases and the algorithm understands that your video is a good result for the query.

So, how do you make sure people click on your video? Try to create compelling thumbnails and titles for your videos. And don’t be afraid to switch it up and try something new. You need to find out what catches your audience’s attention.

Channel factors

Authority also has a big impact on how likely a video will rank. If you’re starting fresh, it’s very hard to compete with a channel that generates a large number of views with every video. Especially if they publish a similar video.

But what defines channel authority? Broadly speaking, channel authority is determined by the average quality of the channel’s content (i.e. quality views and retention rates for each video) and the number of active subscribers. If your channel gets a lot of engagement with each new video, it’s much easier to get your new content to rank for relevant queries.

YouTube optimization

Now you know all the ranking factors. But how can you put this information into practice?

Step 1 – clear out the clutter

YouTube is as much a social network as a search engine. It shouldn’t be treated as a repository for all your video content. Instead, think about it like a store. You don’t want your showroom to be your stockroom, so don’t show your audience a muddled and confusing display. Instead, present a few things beautifully! You will probably generate more revenue.

Unlist videos

To give your best work the chance to shine, prune out the lower-quality videos by marking them as “unlisted”. If you’re not sure which to unlist, look for videos that fall into one (or all!) of these three camps:

1. Videos that don’t really work for YouTube
2. Videos that generate low amounts of views from Google Search or the YouTube platform
3. Videos with low retention rates

Let’s look at all three in more detail.

1. Videos that don’t really work for YouTube

These can be videos that require a lot of additional context to be understood. For example, sales videos, product support videos, and customer case studies don’t tend to work that well on YouTube. They’re better off unlisted, so they don’t appear when users are browsing through your channel.

2. Videos that generate low amounts of views from Google Search or the YouTube platform

If all your views come from external sources, then you’re not getting much value from having the videos on YouTube. If your audience doesn’t find these videos through YouTube search, YouTube suggested videos, or Google search, it’s better to unlist them. This way, your best and most compelling content can rise to the top.

3. Videos with low retention rates

Heads up, the next advice might sound harsh. If your videos have low retention rates, this generally tells you that the video is bad. Do make sure to compare your performance to other videos of a similar length. However, if your average retention is less than 30% for a video shorter than 10 minutes, you probably need to consider removing it. You can recut it and upload it again. Especially if you think there is still value in the topic, and a high search volume for the appropriate keywords.

Step 2 – Upload proper transcripts for all your videos

Though YouTube’s automated transcripts are better than they used to be, it’s still better to upload your own. Why? Because the tool can make mistakes. So, if you want total accuracy, it’s better to provide the transcripts yourself.

Additionally, if you are targeting more than one in-language market, uploading international transcripts can massively improve your visibility for searches in those languages.

Step 3 – Clean and improve your titles

Most YouTube titles are too long. This is probably because they try to replicate the style of web page meta titles. Generally, YouTube titles should be no longer than 50 characters. And they shouldn’t include things like pipes or hyphens followed by the brand name. Your channel name already indicates your brand in YouTube search results.

So, what should you include? Consider using words that promise value. You can also hint at what users are likely to find when they click on your video as opposed to others.

Step 4 – Improve your descriptions

Descriptions should have four elements: supporting text, supporting links, hashtags, and timestamps (key moments).

The supporting text works best when it serves the need for additional context, and helps direct users towards a greater understanding. Don’t put a great wall of text in your description. And stay away from generic boilerplate sentences about your business. Instead, explain what your video is about, when and where it was shot, and what users can expect to take away.

After the supporting text, you can include the timestamps that indicate key sections of the video. Next, offer three to five hashtags (maximum), which are then followed by links to other videos and appropriate external pages.

Step 5 – Work out your best thumbnails and iterate

Broadly speaking, thumbnails that perform well have bright, high contrast colors, and include a face. Unfortunately, there is no absolute blueprint for the best kind of thumbnails. So, how do you know what type of thumbnail works best for you?

The most appropriate metric to measure the success of any thumbnail is impression click-through-rate. You can find these stats in YouTube analytics. Simply look which videos have the highest impression CTR and see if you can discern uniting factors.

Once you’ve determined the style that seems to be working best, try to apply that style to all of your existing and new content. Tip: codify this style into a style guide. This will help you be consistent with your thumbnails! However, do try to change it up over time. See if the old style still works best or if another style attracts more clicks. And always keep an eye on your impression CTR.

If you can apply all of the above, you’ll be on your way to many more views in no time!

The post YouTube SEO in 5 minutes appeared first on Yoast.

As an online store, you want to sell as many units of your products as possible. But, every online store will eventually reach a point where products run out of stock. Then comes the big question: how should you handle these out-of-stock products properly for ecommerce SEO in your WooCommerce or Shopify store? As in so many things when it comes to SEO: it depends.

How does Google handle out-of-stock products?

Google can handle out-of-stock products on online stores just fine. Whether Google will continue to show your products in the search results when it’s out of stock is a different matter. Sometimes, Google prefers stores that have the product in stock as that offers potential customers the best experience — they are not looking for stores without stock, right?

Of course, here’s another it depends. If you have a high-quality product page with relevant content for searchers, your product pages might/will still rank depending on the query and competition.

Google might treat product pages with out-of-stock products as soft 404s, which might lead them to drop them from the search results. Here’s how John Mueller from Google put it:

And when it comes to the regular search results, it can happen that when we see that something is out of stock, we will assume it’s more like a soft 404 error, where we will drop that URL from the search results as well.

Of course, having out-of-stock products treated as soft 404s doesn’t harm the ranking power of your entire store, merely the products themselves.

Out-of-stock products: it depends

What to do with out-of-stock products on your WooCommerce or Shopify store depends on many things. For instance, it depends on whether you need to do something about the product pages for stuff out of stock on your online store. Is the product coming back in stock quickly? Or is it sold out forever? Is it unknown when or if it will return?

With the current stock issues worldwide, it’s getting harder and harder to get products in and keep them in stock. Hopefully, the situation will improve soon, but it might become even worse. Do you need to have all those products listed when you are not sure when getting a new shipment?

Besides, online stores come in all shapes and sizes with intricacies and complexities. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to help all stores improve their ecommerce SEO or Shopify SEO.

Ecommerce SEO and international SEO expert Aleyda Solis made an invaluable cheat sheet flowchart that helps make the proper decision easier.

Manage the user experience on your product pages

When people want to buy your product, your product pages are the primary way to communicate about said product. Whether your product is in stock, on backorder, or unavailable, you should always manage the user’s expectations. If you can get them to buy by making the process as quick and painless as possible, great. But if your products are — temporarily — unavailable, you still need to try and keep the visitor. Turn them into returning customers.

You can manage expectations by showing when an out-of-stock product will return in stock. Offer ways to keep a potential customer in the loop with an email me when the product is back in stock feature. Or make a wishlist feature in your online store where customers can save their favorite product and keep updated on the availability — or sales offers. Plus, you can add a list of products that other people find interesting to see if they might buy a different item.

Dwindling stock for a product can also trigger people to buy it now rather than later. Urgency is real! But keep it accurate and don’t make up stock shortages — people will see through that.

Influence internal search and category listings

You can also influence your internal search engine and filter options to keep these from giving out-of-stock products as an option to buy for customers. It’s better to have these products at the bottom of the results pages than at the top. You could also visually style or display out-of-stock products differently on category or listing pages. For instance, you could grey out the image or place a banner over it. This way, it’s immediately clear that you usually offer the product in your store but just right now.

Also worth noting that those categories, tags and the like might need some love and attention if most or all of the products are permanently out of stock. At some point, it might be worth merging, redirecting, and deleting at a category level.

What happens next to the product?

Most decisions you make around handling product statuses can be answered by thinking about what happens next to the product. Is it out of stock forever? Will it return? Is it unsure when? Does your product content have relevance even if the product itself doesn’t appear to come back anytime soon? Answering these will help you take the right action for ecommerce SEO and Shopify SEO.

The product is sold out, but it will be back in a new version

When the product is sold out, with no chance of returning, you have to check if there is a relevant substitution. It might be that the manufacturer launched a slightly updated version of the product with a new barcode. This, of course, will live on a unique URL, which means you need to fix all the old links to the previous version of the product and delete them from the XML sitemap. With a 301 redirect, you can send visitors from the old product page to the new one. Also, don’t forget to delete the products from the product feed not to confuse Google Shopping and the like.

The product is temporarily unavailable and will return

A temporarily unavailable product should live on like it was, except you should manage the user experience. You want to keep them in your store, buying your product.

Of course, it’s hard to compete with stores that do have the products in stock, but still. If there are broad stock shortages like we are experiencing now, you want to tell your customer when they can expect it. Offer a way to keep them up to date! Or show other products that other people have bought after searching for this specific product.

The product is unavailable but will return (seasonal and sale products)

There’s a variation on the previous theme, especially for seasonal products and products you offer as part of a special sale. Here, again, it’s all about managing the user experience. If you offer the same products later in the year, keep the page up and provide customers with a good ‘coming soon’ experience. Don’t promote the page on your site just yet and remove internal links to it, but keep it up and hope customers will return to buy your seasonal stuff in the future.

The product is sold out and will never return

If an out-of-stock product is sold out and never to return, you have to see how much value the product page itself has. Sometimes, product pages also rank for specific terms around a product, and you want to keep those rankings. Also, it could be that the product page has a ton of valuable links pointing to it. You can check all of this with your SEO tool of choice.

If your page has a lot of value, redirect it with a 301 to the most relevant product category page. Here, you should also notify the customer that the specific product they are looking for no longer exists. If the page doesn’t have any SEO value, you can delete it and have it serve a 410. Don’t forget to clean up the internal links pointing to this product, update the sitemap and fix the product feed.

Product structured data is essential

We’ve mentioned it countless times, but Schema structured data is essential in this day and age. For ecommerce sites, that might be even more important than that. With product Schema, you can directly communicate with search engines to describe your products in detail — including various statuses on the availability.

When managing stock availability, it’s essential to keep the structured data up to date. Please use the various product Schema options to keep Google and other search engines in the loop about the status of a product. There are several options to describe the availability of your product by adding ItemAvailability. You can use the following values to describe the status of your products:

• BackOrder: Tells search engines you have the product on backorder with the manufacturer.
• Discontinued: Tells search engines the product has been discontinued.
• InStock: This tells search engines you have the product in stock.
• InStoreOnly: Tells search engines you only offer the product for sale in-store.
• LimitedAvailability: Tells search engines that you have a limited number available of the product.
• OnlineOnly: It tells search engines that the product is only available online, not in store.
• OutOfStock: Tells search engines the product is out of stock at the moment.
• PreOrder: Tells search engines this product is now available for pre-order.
• PreSale: This tells search engines this product is available in a special pre-sale happening before the product goes on sale for the general audience.
• SoldOut: Tells search engines that the product is sold out.

Our ecommerce SEO solutions for WooCommerce and Shopify handle the most important ones for you. Whenever you set a product to out of stock, it adds the OutOfStock value to your product Schema. If a product is on backorder, we’ll let search engines know that the product still is available for PreOrder. Our Schema solution is extendable, so if you need to scale your wishes, you can easily use our Schema API to extend it to your needs.

What to do with out-of-stock products for SEO

In this post, we’ve explained a bit more about how to work with out-of-stock products to make sure that it won’t hurt your SEO. However, many of the options you can use depend on your specific situation, what your goals are and how your product pages are currently ranking. Of course, it also depends on the products themselves. It’s annoying, but in this case, no one solution answers all questions!

The post How to handle out-of-stock products for ecommerce SEO appeared first on Yoast.