Performance enhancements

We’ve upgraded the processing of user metadata in this release, leading to improved performance, especially in generating author sitemaps. Specifically, we now prevent storing non-integral user metadata, making your database leaner and smaller, especially for websites with many backend users. This also means faster, more efficient sitemap output, making your content quicker to index by search engines. It’s a behind-the-scenes enhancement with front-line benefits: better SEO visibility and quicker content discovery for all your author pages.

A better understanding of Arabic and Hebrew

Detecting your keyphrases intelligently in your content is essential to how Yoast SEO functions. We’re always looking for ways to enhance this critical process. 

In Yoast SEO 22.6, we’ve improved the keyphrase detection in SEO titles for Arabic and Hebrew. For example, when the keyphrase is باندا حمراء and the SEO title starts with الباندا الحمراء, we now recognize this as an exact match and give a good result for the keyphrase in SEO title assessment. This will make it easier for you to write better content in those languages. 

Update your PHP versions!

WordPress is changing the minimum requirements for PHP, and Yoast SEO is following suit. To remind users still working with soon-to-be outdated versions of PHP, we’ll notify them in the dashboard. Upgrading your PHP versions comes with many benefits — not to mention a safer, modern environment. We are dropping support for PHP < 7.4 starting November 1st, 2024, so you have time to update in your own time. 

Update to Yoast SEO 22.6

That’s Yoast SEO 22.6 for you. It’s a small but able update that will make the plugin perform better and bring more stability. Don’t forget to update. And don’t forget to upgrade your PHP versions while doing it. See you at the next update!

The post Yoast SEO 22.6 brings more enhancements appeared first on Yoast.

Google updates are nothing new

Algorithm updates are not new. Updates are part of Google’s ongoing efforts to improve users’ experience. Google tries to find new ways of promoting high-quality, relevant, and trustworthy content. However, the March 2024 Google core update stands out. This is because it directly addresses the wave of AI content hitting the search engine. 

Generative AI is now widely accessible. As a result, the web has seen an influx of content lacking the depth and accuracy of content written by real people. While Google is clear that using AI to generate content is not prohibited, it does value and reward true quality.

Understanding Google algorithm updates

Google’s algorithm is a list of rules for ranking sites in search results. As with most things, these rules aren’t static. The rules change often to adapt to new technologies and user behaviors. Today, one of those changes is the tidal wave of new content. This prompts Google to update its algorithm. As a result, it should help users find the most relevant, high-quality content.

Why do algorithm updates happen?

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. For this, Google must continuously adjust its algorithms to understand and categorize content. Updates can target specific issues, like reducing spam. Others aim to prioritize expert content in medical searches. For instance, the 2018 “Medic” update focused on health and medical sites. Its goal was to uncover more authoritative content in areas where it matters most.

Content quality and user experience

Over the years, Google has increasingly prioritized content quality and user experience. Google algorithm updates such as “Panda” (2011) and “Penguin” (2012) were early examples, penalizing poor-quality content and manipulative link practices. Today, we see updates focusing on page experience (Core Web Vitals) and the helpfulness of content (Helpful Content Update). All of this shows Google is moving towards user-centric metrics.

It can be very insightful to learn about Google’s algorithm updates. The insights help you align your content strategy. It’s about understanding the need for content quality and user satisfaction. To survive, you must create highly relevant content that serves the user’s intent. Only then will your site remain a valuable resource for your audience.

Why the March 2024 Google Core Update?

We all notice the surge in content powered by generative AI. This technological leap has made it easy to produce content at scale. However, not all content meets the quality standards that Google seeks. The March 2024 core update is Google’s move to address this challenge. It hopes that users will once again find valuable and trustworthy content.

With this update, Google aims to reduce spammy content in search drastically by over 40%:

“We believe these updates will reduce the amount of low-quality content on Search and send more traffic to helpful and high-quality sites. Based on our evaluations, we expect that the combination of this update and our previous efforts will collectively reduce low-quality, unoriginal content in search results by 40%.”

The challenge of low-quality content

The core issue with AI-generated content isn’t the use of AI but the quality of that content. Pre-March 2024, search results started showing content that offered little value to users seeking information or solutions. This is a bad user experience and makes it harder for high-quality, human-crafted content to get the visibility it deserves.

This goes specifically for what Google calls scaled content abuse:

“Scaled content abuse is when many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users. This abusive practice is typically focused on creating large amounts of unoriginal content that provides little to no value to users, no matter how it’s created.”

Content quality and relevance

With the March 2024 core update, Google wants to highlight high-quality content. Of course, the update doesn’t penalize the use of AI in content creation. However, it aims to ensure that content meets the same standards as real authors. This means AI-generated content should be informative, accurate, and engaging. Also, it should offer unique perspectives or insights that benefit the user.

Google even said as much:

“There’s nothing new or special that creators need to do for this update as long as they’ve been making satisfying content meant for people. For those that might not be ranking as well, we strongly encourage reading our creating helpful, reliable, people-first content help page.”

The March 2024 Google core update is very interesting for content creators. We should use it as a call to action to raise our content standards. As a result, we’d publish unique content that truly enriches users’ online experiences. This update gives you the chance to review your content strategies. Try to embrace AI’s potential but prioritize the quality and authenticity only people provide. It’s all about balance! Together, we’ll ensure the web is informative, trustworthy, and user-friendly.

Hit by the March 2024 Google core update?

Identifying the impact of a Google core algorithm update is the first step toward recovery. The March 2024 Google core update might lead to changes in your site performance. However, you should distinguish this from online traffic’s usual ebb and flow. This requires carefully analyzing your site’s metrics.

Monitoring traffic and rankings

First things first: don’t panic. A sudden drop in traffic or a decline in rankings can be alarming. These things happen, so you must try to remain calm. As you know, these shifts can signal that an update has affected your site. Use analytics tools to monitor your site’s traffic patterns. Look for abrupt changes that coincide with the timing of Google’s announced updates.

Analyzing different traffic sources

It’s crucial to differentiate between organic search, referral, and direct traffic. A decline in organic search traffic suggests your site’s visibility in SERPs might be waning. This could be due to the latest algorithm update. Conversely, changes in referral or direct traffic might indicate other factors at play that are unrelated to an update.

Use Google Search Console

Use Search Console to understand your site’s performance in Google’s SERPs. After an update, check for any notifications or warnings that could indicate specific issues Google has identified with your site. 

In GSC, look for sudden and unexpected losses. Losses in impressions and click-throughs would be the main things to check. If there are losses in impressions, try to identify the specific pages and queries that were hit. Was everything hit? Just certain queries? Certain pages? Confirm that the dates of the drops match the dates of the updates. This data can help pinpoint which aspects of your site were most affected.

Investigating the impact of a core update

Once you’ve identified potential clues, the next step involves digging deeper. This phase is about pinpointing the impacted elements and understanding why.

Aligning traffic changes with update timelines

Start by aligning the observed traffic and ranking changes with the update’s rollout dates. Google’s Search Central Blog and X account are reliable sources for announcements and timelines. Plotting your traffic data against these dates helps confirm if the changes correlate with the updates.

Also, ensure that nothing else might have happened on your website that could have caused the traffic loss. Eliminate the other possibilities to make sure you’re solving the right riddle. It’s important to attribute shifts in performance to the update rather than other variables like seasonal trends or external site changes.

Dive into Google Search Console data

Google Search Console offers a wealth of data for your work. Pay special attention to the Performance report. This report provides insights into impressions, CTR, and rankings for your pages and queries. A drop in impressions might mean your pages appear less frequently in search results, possibly due to the update. Google has a helpful guide on debugging drops in search traffic that helps you get started.

Identifying content and technical shortfalls

After pinpointing the issues, assess whether these are related to content quality and relevance, technical SEO, or both. For content, consider factors like originality, depth, and user engagement. Does the content provide unique value beyond what’s already out there? 

Review your site holistically. Check the site structure, internal linking, mobile performance, page speed, and the Core Web Vitals for technical aspects. Google’s PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse are helpful tools for this analysis.

Recovering from the Google’s March 2024 core update

After identifying how the update affected your site, the focus shifts to recovery. Recovering involves addressing content quality and technical SEO aspects, depending on where the issues lie. Here’s how to approach recovery, ensuring your site aligns more closely with Google’s standards.

Enhancing content quality

If the traffic loss results from rankings drop for queries you used to rank well for, that is probably an issue with your content. Start by looking at the content ranking for those terms now. Look for clues as to why that content might be preferable over yours, and adjust your content accordingly. Try to make your content more relevant to the user.

Helpful content questions

Google developed a set of guidelines to help you assess your content’s relevance and quality:

1. Does the content provide original information, reporting, research, or analysis? Assess whether your content offers new insights, unique viewpoints, or comprehensive research that adds value beyond what’s already available online.
2. Does the content provide a substantial, complete, or comprehensive topic description? Evaluate if your content thoroughly covers the topic, comprehensively addressing the audience’s questions, concerns, and related interests.
3. Is the content written by an expert or enthusiast who demonstrably knows the topic well? Consider whether the author has the necessary expertise, experience, or passion for the subject matter, evident in the content’s depth and accuracy.
4. Does the content have a clear purpose or goal that it successfully fulfills? Identify the primary objective of your content (to inform, entertain, persuade, etc.) and assess if it effectively achieves this goal.
5. Would someone reading your content leave feeling they’ve learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal? Reflect on whether the reader would come away with actionable knowledge, solutions, or a deeper understanding of the subject.
6. Does the content present information that makes you trust it, such as clear sourcing, evidence of the author’s expertise, and a lack of factual errors? Verify the reliability and credibility of your content through accurate sourcing, showcasing the author’s qualifications, and ensuring factual correctness.
7. Is the content free from spelling or stylistic issues? Ensure your content is professionally presented, with attention to grammar, spelling, and style, making it accessible and enjoyable to read. 
8. Would you feel comfortable trusting this content for issues relating to YMYL? For content that impacts significant decisions (health, finance, etc.), consider if it meets the highest standards of accuracy and trustworthiness.
9. Is the content designed to meet the needs of a human audience rather than search engines? Create content that serves your audience’s interests and queries instead of search engines.
10. Does your site have a primary purpose or focus, and does your content support that purpose? Ensure your content aligns with and supports your website’s overarching theme or mission, providing a cohesive user experience.

Addressing technical issues

How you recover depends on the problem; the issues are usually related to your content. If you have a technical problem severe enough to cause a sudden loss in traffic, it probably was not caused by the core update. However, if you find a technical issue, you should fix it. Consider this: If your check engine light is on, washing your car and hanging a new air freshener isn’t helping the long-term outlook for the car’s driveability. 

Some areas to focus on:

• Fix the performance of your mobile site: Having a well-performing mobile site is non-negotiable. Use Google’s Lighthouse to identify and rectify any usability issues. Keep ads at bay.
• Page speed and Core Web Vitals: Fast-loading pages create a positive user experience. Use PageSpeed Insights to identify and fix issues impacting load times, such as large image files or slow server response times.  
• Site structure and navigation: A well-organized site helps users and search engines find content efficiently. Review your site’s structure for logical hierarchy and navigation ease.

Best practices for future updates

Usually, Google algorithm updates don’t hit sites that follow the rules and play nice. Still, the last core update reminds us to work hard to improve our sites where possible. Looking ahead, there are several best practices you can adopt to stay ahead of the impact of future updates.

Stay informed about SEO news and updates

Keep track of SEO news and updates. Sometimes, Google offers insights into what site owners can do to prepare for updates. Follow reputable SEO blogs like ours — and the SEO update by Yoast — , forums, and other channels, like the Google Search Central Blog and the @searchliaison X account.

Continuously review and improve content

The quality of your content is never done. Regularly review your site’s content. It should always remain relevant, accurate, and valuable to your audience. Keep working on it by updating statistics, refreshing outdated references, and adding new insights to keep content engaging. Consider user feedback as an opportunity to enhance your content’s scope and depth.

Diversify your traffic sources

Try to prevent relying solely on organic search traffic. Explore other opportunities by diversifying your traffic sources with social media and email marketing. This makes your traffic more stable and allows you to reach new audiences.

All about the Google core update of March 2024

Adaptability, quality, and user focus are what you need to succeed. It’s hard work to recover if an algorithm update has hit you. The whole process offers valuable lessons to improve your site. In addition, you might find new growth opportunities.

Google’s algorithms will continue to evolve. The March 2024 core update aims to combat low-quality content. It underscores a shift towards a future that hopefully values genuine, insightful, and user-centric content.

The post Surviving the March 2024 Google core update appeared first on Yoast.

Understand TikTok as a platform

It’s good to understand TikTok as a platform before you start using it for your business. Why? Because you need to understand what appeals to people and what type of content is popular if you want more engagement.

TikTok is typically used for short-form videos that range between 5 seconds and 3 minutes long. The app has a huge music library and in-app editing features, which means it’s easy to create your own content. 

The TikTok algorithm

Another reason why TikTok has grown so popular is because it has a very clever algorithm. Their For You page seems to effortlessly and endlessly share content that you like. And it only gets better! Which makes it hard for people to leave the app, since it keeps showing them great content. Before they know it, just one more video has turned into twenty videos! 

Should you get a TikTok business account?

TikTok offers businesses this neat thing called a business account. It’s not hard to set up, and gives your brand the credibility of being a verified business. It also allows you to set up a TikTok shop and use a link in your profile. Plus, you can download all the analytics, which makes it easier to use the data in reports.

The only downside? You won’t get access to all the commercial sounds. But there are still lots of good sounds that you can use, so a TikTok business account is worth it in our opinion.  

5 tips on how to use TikTok for your business

1. Showcase the value of your product within 3 seconds

Users want to quickly see the value of your video. So, try to show your USP (unique selling point) at the very start. Ideally, in the first three seconds of your video. Otherwise, people will just scroll away. 

For example, let’s say you sell ultra-strong iPhone cases. You could film a scene where you drop the phone from the second floor, then show your viewers that it didn’t get scratched. Of course, there are tons of ways to showcase the unique value of your business. It all depends on your product. Just remember to keep it to the point!

2. Try not to sell 

Unlike other platforms, you should build a connection with your audience on TikTok before you try to sell them anything. In fact, it’s better not to be sales-y at all! That type of content typically doesn’t do well. 

Instead, treat TikTok as a way to be authentic with your audience. For example, you could share your journey as a small business owner or showcase your products in fun ways. It will take time to build an audience, but it will be worth it once you’ve found your target audience!

3. Be vulnerable

TikTok users appreciate authenticity and “realness”. That’s why videos where people share their struggles with their small business tend to get a lot of engagement, since people find those stories relatable. 

Some ideas: 

• A “story time” video about how you started your business. A popular trend that fits this topic would be: how it started vs. how it’s going 
• Things you learned during your small business journey
• A mistake you made and what you learned from it

4. Engage with trends

If you want to take TikTok seriously, you shouldn’t post just once a week. Instead, try to post everyday. This will allow you to keep up with TikTok’s algorithm. 

Of course, creating and editing new videos everyday sounds daunting! But there’s tons of ways to create new content. For example, you can hop on trends, make videos of your products, or relate your business to a trending sound. The key is not to take things too seriously. Just have fun! 

Note: Of course, you shouldn’t just be posting trends. Try to have a good balance between planned videos and trendy/fun videos.

5. Utilize UGC for your TikTok ads

If you’re a small business, TikTok ads are a great way to get your name out there. Still, it’s good not to be too sales-y. A great way to avoid this is by boosting videos made by users, otherwise known as user generated content (UGC). These videos will come across as more genuine and authentic than a polished video ad.

Just make sure you ask the creator’s permission before you use their video! 

Why social media is important for your SEO

Whether it’s TikTok or Instagram or another social media platform, it’s good for your SEO to be active on social media. After all, SEO is all about being found. When people search for you, it’s nice if they’re be able to find you on multiple platforms. In fact, with social media being so popular as it is, your audience probably expects you to be on social media!

Plus, Google now shows TikTok videos in the search results too. So if your videos show up there, you will get a nice bit of extra visibility.

Find what works for you

Since TikTok is all about authenticity, you should only create content that you feel comfortable with. Don’t try to shape yourself and your business into something it’s not. People will notice. Instead, find a video style and posting schedule that works for you, and have fun!

The post 5 tips on how to use TikTok for your business appeared first on Yoast.

It might sound like writing for SEO and writing to attract and engage your audience are two conflicting goals. But that’s actually not true. Sure, if you want to write an SEO-friendly post, you should feature the words you want to be found in a prominent place. But over-using keywords severely damages the readability of your text. In fact, a high keyphrase density can even be a signal to Google that you might be stuffing keywords in your text, which can negatively affect your rankings.

This post provides tips on writing blog posts that are SEO-friendly and readable. These two goals should always go hand in hand. Because we believe that writing in understandable language gets you more visitors and keeps them on your site!

Master SEO copywriting and other vital SEO skills by getting Yoast SEO academy Premium. This gives you access to all our courses and the Yoast SEO Premium plugin!

Before you start: do keyword research

Before you start writing, you have to do keyword research. If you want to dominate the search results, you’ll have to figure out which words your audience actually searches for. These are the topics you should write about and the keywords you should use in your text.

When you’ve done your keyword research and have a list of focus keywords to write about, it’s time to get on with writing. Here are 10 tips to help you end up with an awesome blog post!

Writing tips for SEO-friendly blog posts

Above all, your blog post has to be a good piece of writing. When starting a new post, many bloggers just start writing. While this may work for some people, others need more guidance. Personally, I always follow these ‘rules’ when I write a new blog.

1. Think before you write!

Before you start, think carefully about the message of your piece. It helps to answer the following questions:

• What do you want to tell your readers, or which central question do you want to answer?
• What’s the purpose of your article?
• What do you want your readers to do at the end of the page?

It’s also good to think about the search intent someone may have. An easy way to get an insight into this is by looking at the search results for the search term you want to rank with.

2. Devise a structure for your post

To write a readable and SEO-friendly blog post, you need to create a clear structure. This means that every post should have:

• some sort of introduction (in which you introduce your topic).
• a body (in which the main message is written).
• a conclusion (in which you summarize the main ideas or draw a conclusion).

In a few sentences, write down what you want to say in all three sections. You’ve now created a summary of your post. This will help you create a structured and readable blog post. Now the real writing can begin.

3. Use paragraphs and headings

Everybody uses paragraphs, but not everybody uses them well. For example, it might be tempting to start each new sentence on a new line because it looks nice. But you shouldn’t do that! You also shouldn’t make your paragraphs too lengthy, as each paragraph should have its own idea or subject. So, ask yourself what the main idea of each paragraph is. You should be able to summarize that main idea in one sentence. If that’s not possible and you need more sentences to explain the main idea, you simply need to use more paragraphs.

Proper headings also help your readers understand what a specific part of your text is about. If you want people to find their way through your articles, use subheadings to lead them. Subheadings help readers scan your page, and clarify the structure of your articles. They’re not just important for readability, but for SEO as well. That’s why we also advise to use your keyword in some of your subheadings. Don’t use your keyword in every heading! It will make your text read clunky and unnatural. Plus, it will put people off from reading further.

4. Use transition words

Transition words help people scan through your text and understand the relationship between sentences and paragraphs. For example, let’s say there are three reasons for people to buy your product. You should use signal words like: ‘first of all’; ‘secondly’ and ‘finally’. Also, words like ‘however’, ‘similarly’ and ‘for example’ give a clear signal to your readers. Readers will instantly get that a conclusion will follow after words like ‘to sum up’ or ‘in short’. Transition words are therefore very important to add structure to your text.

5. Use related keywords

Stuffing your article with your focus keyword makes it less attractive to read, and it can hurt your rankings. Google is getting smarter, after all. It wants you to write content that users will love. It doesn’t want you to use your focus keyword in every other sentence, because Google now has other ways to analyze what your text is about. For example, one of the ways Google understands the topic of your text is by recognizing synonyms and other keywords that are related to your focus keyphrase. That’s why you should use synonyms and related keywords throughout your copy.

Synonyms are relatively easy to think of, but finding the right related keywords is a bit more challenging. That’s why the Yoast SEO plugin comes with a feature that helps you find related keyphrases right away. Based on your focus keyword, our plugin can generate a number of related keyphrases with the click of a button! Along with how many times that keyword is searched for and what the search trend looks like. This feature is powered by SEMrush and can be used in both our free and Premium plugins. So use this related keyphrase feature!

6. Optimize the length of your article

Make sure your blog posts have a minimum of 300 words but keep the length of your article balanced. Google likes long articles. However, if your article is too long, you might scare users away. So, what should you do? Our advice is to write short to medium-length articles. When you know you’re a skilled writer, you can also try your hand at longer articles. Check out this article if you’re not quite sure how long a blog post should be.

And remember to keep using your focus keyphrase throughout your text to make sure you end up with an SEO-friendly blog post!

7. Link to existing content

If you’ve already written content on the same topic as your current post, don’t forget to link to and from these posts. We call this internal linking. Both your readers and Google will thank you for it, because it helps them manage your content and understand relationships between different content on your site. So, take some time to link to and from your previous content. Our internal linking tool can help you by suggesting relevant pages and posts on your site that you can link to.

To summarize, internal linking is useful because:

• Your link structure is also important for your rankings in Google.
• Linking to other content about a subject is great for your readers, as they may be interested in reading these related posts too. It helps them navigate your site!
• It will make your new blog post (and the existing posts) stronger, because you show your authority on the subject.

8. Let other people read your post

Before publishing your post, make sure to let someone else read it first. Ask them whether they understand the main concept of your post, and invite them to correct any typos and grammatical errors. They can help you by providing an objective view of the readability and attractiveness of your text. If you have someone in your team who happens to be an expert on the topic you’re writing about, make sure to run your post past them. That way, they can check whether you’re covering everything you need to and give suggestions to make your post even better.

9. Add content regularly

Regularly adding new blog posts to your website tells Google that your website is alive. This is important! Because if your site isn’t active, Google will crawl it less often and this might negatively affect your rankings. But don’t just post for the sake of posting. Make sure that everything you post is high-quality content: informative, well-written articles that entertain readers and fit their search intent.

If you have difficulty posting on a regular basis, it might be a great idea to create an editorial calendar for your blog. This allows you to structure the process in a way that fits you and your team. It’s also a good idea to update your old blog posts once in a while to avoid them getting stale.

10. Use our Yoast SEO plugin

The analysis tool in our Yoast SEO plugin helps you write readable and SEO-friendly blog posts. Start by choosing the most important search term you want people to find this particular page for. This will be your focus keyphrase. After you fill this in, our plugin runs all kinds of checks to see whether your post is optimized or still needs improving. Such as:

• Our plugin checks your post to see whether you’ve used the keyphrase in the right places, like your copy, SEO title, meta description, alt text and URL. Yoast SEO Premium also recognizes different word forms of your keyphrase.
• It gives you suggestions for related keyphrases that you can add to boost the quality and relevance of your content.
• It checks the readability of your text: Are your sentences or paragraphs too long? Do you use transition words?
• It checks the internal and external links in your article. Yoast SEO Premium even provides suggestions for links to related articles on your site.
• It calculates how often you use your keyphrase throughout your text: not enough or too often? When you have Premium it also checks if you’ve distributed your keyphrase evenly throughout your post.
• It checks if you’ve used potentially non-inclusive words or phrases, so you can make your content relatable for everyone.
• It also checks if other pages on your website use the same focus keyword, to prevent you from competing with yourself.

If you write a relatively SEO-friendly blog post (based on the aspects discussed above) the plugin will indicate this with a green light. Posts and pages with green lights will help you improve the ranking of the pages on your website.

An example

It’s good to remember that not every light has to be green for your overall SEO score to be good. For example, these are the results of this blog post. As you can see, it does have an overall green light for the focus keyphrase “SEO-friendly blog post”:

Kind of a cool way to get feedback on your content, right? When you use the Yoast SEO plugin you’ll find this feedback in the Yoast SEO sidebar next to your post and in the Yoast meta box under your post (while editing). If you’re interested in learning more about all the aspects this analysis tool looks at, read our article on how to use the Yoast SEO content analysis tool.

Conclusion

The days when a few SEO tricks were enough to get your website to rank well in Google are long gone. Nowadays, quality content is king. And good content also leads to more links, shares, tweets and returning visitors to your website. Of course, there are always other things you can do to maximize the SEO friendliness of your post, but the most important thing is to just write very, very good posts! Still not sure if your blog post is ready to publish? Take a look at this checklist for your blog post to make sure you’re good to go!

Read more: SEO copywriting: the ultimate guide »

The post 10 tips for an awesome and SEO-friendly blog post appeared first on Yoast.

Fine-tuning for taxonomy pages

Taxonomy pages, including categories and tags, are crucial in structuring website content, especially for e-commerce platforms. These pages help users navigate your site and allow search engines to understand the relationship between different pieces of content. However, there has been an ongoing debate about the optimal content for these pages.

Historically, the consensus leaned towards long-form content to provide comprehensive insights and improve SEO rankings. However, based on recent research from our teams, we’ve taken a step back to reevaluate this approach.

Insights from our research

While content is crucial, we found no one-size-fits-all answer to how much content category pages should have. The emphasis was clear: it’s not about the quantity but the quality and relevance of the content that truly matters.

In our in-depth analysis and research, we discovered that excessively long content on taxonomy pages might not always contribute positively to SEO performance. It can sometimes detract from the user experience and dilute the page’s focus.

What’s changing?

For this reason, we have updated the in-plugin guidance for taxonomies to provide better guidance when updating them. This is the perfect opportunity to give these pages a bit of love on your website. If you missed our Yoast SEO Premium 22.3 update, our Premium customers can now use AI to write SEO titles and meta descriptions for taxonomies.

TOC block fixes in Yoast SEO Premium 22.5

We’ve also fine-tuned our blocks for a better editing experience. Sometimes, the Yoast SEO Table of Content block would show an error when changing the heading level of the block’s title. This error popped up when re-opening the post after saving, but we’ve fixed it in this release — making the process error-free again.

In case you missed it, we released a new Yoast Academy course!

Last week, we released our new AI for SEO course. This course is designed for busy small business owners who want to integrate the power of AI into their workflow. The course reveals how AI works and how it will impact SEO best practices. It also discusses the types of AI that are useful when crafting content strategies. All of this can then be transformed into actionable insights.

Update now to Yoast SEO 22.5

Even these smaller updates are pivotal in helping you optimize your website for more traffic. To make the most of the updates available in Yoast SEO 22.5, update to the latest version now!

The post Yoast SEO 22.5 delivers improvements and fixes appeared first on Yoast.

When is a site mobile-friendly?

A site is mobile-friendly when it:

• helps users get their tasks done quickly and joyfully.
• loads correctly on a mobile device like a smartphone or tablet.
• loads lightning-fast.
• presents content in a readable fashion, without users having to pinch and zoom.
• offers enough space to navigate by touch.
• offers added value for mobile users.
• is instantly understandable for search engines.

Why is mobile SEO important?

Mobile SEO makes sure your mobile site offers the best possible presentation of your content to a mobile device user. Since our world is increasingly mobile-oriented, it’s important that your site is mobile-friendly. If your site isn’t (properly) available for mobile users, you’ll miss out on a decent ranking in the search engines, and thus miss the income. Therefore, you should do everything in your power to optimize the mobile view of your site and make it as good as possible. In fact, it should be excellent!

Important to Google

Since 2016, Google uses the mobile version of a site to determine the site’s rankings. So if your site isn’t up to scratch or shows less content on your mobile site, you’ll find it difficult to get good rankings. That’s why it’s so important to create a fully functioning and responsive design for your (mobile) site.

Luckily, Google has a great getting started guide to help you improve your mobile site. Plus, they’ve also set up a Page Experience initiative that gives you metrics — the so-called Core Web Vitals — on how humans and machines perceive your site’s performance. So, use these metrics to help you figure out what to focus on while improving your mobile site.

Treat it as one website

Don’t forget to see your site as being a single thing. You shouldn’t have a ‘mobile site’ that’s distinct from your ‘desktop site.’ You should have one site that adapts to whatever screen it’s being viewed on. That also means that the content of the different views should be the same.

How to improve your mobile website

To improve your mobile SEO, you need to focus on a couple of things:

• Make a joyful user experience.
• Make sure your site is responsive.
• Improve your site speed.
• Use structured data.
• Don’t block JavaScript, HTML and CSS code.
• Don’t use too many redirects.
• Choose the correct viewport.
• Don’t use interstitials or pop-ups.
• Verify mobile-friendliness.
• Tell Google about your site.

Let’s go over these topics in more detail.

Focus on making your site easy and joyful to use with mobile SEO

Offer a great user experience to your users, and you’ll notice that Google will enjoy it too. So, how do you do that? First, figure out what you want users to do on your site. Then, make sure that it’s easy for people to do. Do you want people to call you? Make sure you put your phone number front and center, so it’s easy to find. Want to enhance conversions? Make that buy button stand out and function properly! In other words: bring focus to your site, and helpfully guide your visitors through the steps you want them to take.

But don’t just focus on your intent. Look at your users too! Figure out why they visit and which tasks they mostly do on your site. Then make sure it’s easy for them. Because If something frustrates your user, it hurts you and your results. That’s why you should test, improve, and fully optimize your mobile site.

Responsive design

There are multiple ways to improve your site so it’s available for mobile users. The most important one is to create a responsive design. This is also the the technology that Google advocates. With a responsive design, your site lives on one URL, which makes it easier for Google to understand and index it.

If you use WordPress, chances are your theme is already responsive and can adapt to all screens. Still, it’s good to check how your site scales in Google Chrome’s Developer Tools. Because if it doesn’t scale correctly, you should talk to your web developer about fixing it – or choose a different theme.

Improve your site speed

One of the most important things you can do to improve your site’s mobile SEO is to improve the site’s loading speed. Time after time, studies have shown that people leave sites that load slowly, and probably never return. That’s why site speed has been a ranking factor for years, and why Google is increasingly focusing on fixing this common issue. See the Page Experience update and the Core Web Vitals metrics’ introduction for more proof.

If you need more tips, we have a post on how to improve your site speed and which tools that might help you.

Get better web hosting for your site

The number one tip to optimize the speed of your mobile site is to invest in better web hosting. Many sites run on budget hosts that share a lot of the server space with other websites, which can cause their sites to slow down. That’s why it really is essential to stay away from cheap hosting and get a good plan at a renowned host — it truly pays for itself!

Don’t know where to start? We have a page with WordPress web hosting companies that we vouch for, as we vetted them personally.

Optimize images

If there is one quick win to improve your site speed, it’s this: optimize your images. Don’t load those 3000 x 2000 pixel HD images on your site. Scale them to the correct size, then make them smaller with tools like ImageOptim, Squoosh, or WordPress plugins like WP Smush. You can also look into serving those images in next-gen image formats like WebP.

Minify code

Every request your site has to make has an impact on your site speed. That’s why you have to work on reducing these requests to improve your mobile site. One way to do this is by minifying code.

Minifying code means that you group and link together assets like JavaScript and CSS. As a result, the browser has to load fewer files, which leads to a faster site. This sounds hard to implement, but a plugin like WP Rocket can take care of all your caching needs. Or you can use Cloudflare’s Automatic Platform Optimization for WordPress to get a load of enhancements in one go.

Browser caching

By using browser caching, you’re telling the browser that page elements that don’t change often can be saved inside its cache. This way, the browser only has to download new and dynamic content whenever it visits again. Again, this is something that a plugin like WP Rocket can help you with. Or you can also do it yourself if you like.

Reduce redirects

A redirect leads a visitor from one requested page to another, because the requested page was moved or deleted. While this leads to a good user experience if done well, the more redirects you use, the slower your site will be. Don’t make endless redirects. Also, try not to keep links around that point to deleted posts redirected to new ones. Always make direct links.

Use structured data to improve your mobile site

Structured data is essential for every site. With structured data, you can describe your content in a way that search engines can understand. It gives you a direct line of communication with search engines, so to say. In return, search engines might reward you with awesome rich results.

Your mobile site needs to have the same structured data as your desktop variant — otherwise, Google might get confused. Yoast SEO automatically adds structured data for the most important parts of your site, which you can fine-tune it to your liking.

Don’t block assets like JavaScript, HTML and CSS

We’ve said it before, and we’re going to keep saying it: Don’t block assets like JavaScript, HTML and CSS. Doing so makes it harder for Google to access your site and that could lead to bad rankings. Check your Google Search Console to see if you’re blocking resources. If so, we advise that you take away all blockades if you want to truly optimize your mobile site.

Improve legibility

Make sure that your mobile site is readable on mobile devices. Use different devices to check if your typography is in order and make changes when necessary. Typography can make or break the user experience of your site.

Improve tap target sizes

People hate it when their fingers can’t hit a button, link, or menu item without fault. They can feel frustrated when navigation is hard or unnatural. Please fix it to improve your mobile site.

Choose the correct viewport

The viewport determines the width of the page for the device used to view it. By specifying a correct viewport, you make sure that visitors with specific devices get the right version of your site. Fail to do this, and you might show your desktop site to a small-screen smartphone user — a big no-no.

Don’t use interstitials or pop-ups

Google will penalize sites that use large pop-ups or interstitials to promote newsletters, sign-up forms, or ads. These often get in the way of the user quickly accessing the content they requested. Don’t use these. If you must though, make sure you abide by Google’s rules.

Test your site and tell Google about it

Before you start working on your mobile SEO, you should run a mobile usability test on Google to see where you should start. As you work, you should keep testing to see if you’re making progress. If your mobile site is optimized, you need to tell Google so your site will be checked and indexed. Use Search Console to stay on top of the performance of your site.

Investigate other technologies

There are other ways to improve the performance of your mobile site. One of these technologies is the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) framework. This is an initiative by Google and others to get web pages to load super fast on mobile devices. By wrapping your content in special HTML code, you can optimize the pages in a way that Google can use to improve the performance. Keep in mind that AMP is not without its drawbacks, and not every project will benefit from it.

AMP is not the only technology that helps you optimize your mobile site. Other companies offer similar solutions, like Cloudflare’s various optimized delivery technologies. There are so many options these days!

Conclusion

Mobile is the new baseline, the new default. Do everything you can to fix your mobile site and make it perfect, not just in Google’s eyes, but, more importantly, your visitors. Mobile SEO is not just about great content and a flawless technical presentation. It’s more about creating an excellent user experience. Once you’ve achieved that, you’re on your way to the top!

Read on: Mobile SEO: the ultimate guide »

The post How do you improve your mobile site? appeared first on Yoast.

Did you get a red or orange traffic light because your word count isn’t high enough? Read about the text length check here, or jump to the paragraph on how to write high-quality lengthy posts or informative taxonomy archive pages.

Why does word count matter?

Defining word count is easy: it’s how many words are used in a specific text, on a page or in another place. It’s an easy way to measure text length. But why does it matter you ask? Well, making sure that your text is long enough helps Google better understand what your text is about. We’ve experienced this ourselves; we have written quite some articles that are over 2500 words, such as our SEO essentials. They are cornerstone content, and they help our organic traffic grow. Here’s how longer articles contribute to SEO:

When your text is longer, Google has more indicators to determine what it is about. The longer your text, the more often your focus keyphrase will probably appear. This is no excuse for keyphrase stuffing, though! If you optimize your copy naturally, your focus keyphrase will pop up here and there throughout your text. You can also fit in more synonyms and related keyphrases. What’s more, in a longer post, you can add more headings, links, and images, where you will mention the keyphrase or related phrases. So more content gives you more room to provide users with high-quality and nuanced information.

A longer text can also help you rank for multiple long-tail variants of the keyphrase you’ve optimized your text for. That’s because you have more opportunities to address various topics in a lengthy text. Your article, or your other posts that take a deep dive into the subtopic, will have a chance to turn up in search results for the long-tail variants of your keyphrase. If you do some well-thought-out internal linking you can even boost the traffic to the extensive post you’ve written. This helps you drive more organic traffic to your site.

Avoid having thin content

Also, if a page doesn’t have a lot of text (a low word count), Google is more likely to think of it as thin content. All search engines want to provide the best answers to online searches people do. Thin content is less likely to offer a complete answer and satisfy the needs of the public. Consequently, it will probably not rank very high.

The same goes for product pages and descriptions in your online store. While these don’t have to be as long as blog posts, it is a good idea to make sure the text is long enough. Don’t underestimate the importance of having the proper information on your products. This can make the difference between making a purchase or not, as more text helps them make an informed decision and helps them trust your website.

What does Yoast SEO check?

The text length check in Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO helps you by checking the length of your texts. This check is part of the SEO analysis, and you will find it in the SEO tab of the Yoast SEO meta box or in the Yoast SEO sidebar. It calculates how many words you’ve added to a page and whether that’s enough to help you rank. This check is also available in our Yoast SEO for Shopify app.

• Text length in WordPress
• Text length in Shopify

Every page on your site needs to contain a certain number of words to be helpful for your site visitors and Google. How long your text should minimally be, depends on the type of page. Taxonomy pages (or Collections if you use Shopify) require less content than blog posts, whereas cornerstone content is often your most important content and therefore needs to contain a significant number of words.

In the table below, you can see how we assess the different pages. If you have less than the minimum number of words on a page, you’ll get a red traffic light in the Yoast SEO analysis. Where you get a green traffic light when you’ve hit the minimum word count we advise.

Not enough content

Yoast SEO will also give you a red or orange traffic light if your post or page consists of less than 50 characters in the readability analysis. To properly evaluate the readability of your content, the Yoast SEO plugin needs a minimum number of characters. If your post or page contains less than 50 characters, the plugin’s readability checks won’t give you the best results. And, in most cases, you can’t provide the best answer to your audience in such a short span of words.

Word count in the Yoast SEO insights tab

You can also find the exact word count of your content in the Yoast SEO Insights tab in the sidebar. The Insights tab also contains other useful features, like the Flesch reading ease, estimated reading time, and prominent words.

How to write a high-quality lengthy post

So, longer articles might have some advantages over short posts. But while you’re writing posts with a high word count, it is important to keep the quality of the text at a high level. Good quality texts are readable, well structured, and always contain original content. 

Writing high-quality content for your site or online store is hard. Especially when your goal is to write articles with a high word count to grow your organic traffic. When you’re writing, and especially elaborating on what you already have, make sure you keep the following aspects in mind:

Write readable texts

The most important thing when writing long (or any kind of) posts is to write for your audience. That may sound obvious, but it is surprisingly easy to get distracted and start adding irrelevant information. Start by thinking about questions a reader could have about the topic you’re covering. Then, provide clear answers to those questions. Of course, the answers should be well-written and readable.

What can you do to make your text readable? Your text needs to follow a logical line of thought. To accomplish that, we advise you to start every paragraph with a topic sentence, i.e., a sentence that explains the main idea of that paragraph. Use the rest of the paragraph to elaborate on that sentence. Be sure to keep your sentences and paragraphs short and snappy. If you find any unnecessary words or sentences – delete them. Minimize your use of passive voice. But do connect your paragraphs to make the text easy to read, a good way to do this is by using transition words.

Use headings

One way of structuring your text is by using headings. Headings within a text serve two purposes. First: they show a top-down hierarchy. You immediately see that a subject has, for instance, three subheadings that elaborate on it further. Another function is for scanning. You can let your readers know what a paragraph is about by using headings. It also makes your text pleasant to read, as a heading tells you what the next piece of text is about.

Write original content

This is the hardest one. It is not easy being original with so much content out there. But, it might help if you reflect on what makes you unique. Think about how what you offer is different and better than what your competitors offer. Then do some keyword research to see what your audience searches for online. Preparing with research can give you plenty of ideas on what to write about and how to make yourself stand out from the crowd. In case you get stuck, we have a whole blog post on how to find inspiration.

Want to learn more on how to write high-quality posts that users and search engines will love? Our SEO Copywriting course and other SEO courses can help you with that. You can get access to these courses with Yoast SEO Premium or Yoast SEO for Shopify, which also gives you access to extra features in the Yoast SEO plugin.

Go Premium and get free access to our SEO courses!

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

Get Yoast SEO Premium »Only €99 EUR / year (ex VAT)

How to create high-quality archive pages 

Let’s start by explaining what archive pages are. WordPress uses so-called taxonomies to group content. The word ‘taxonomy’ is a fancy term for a group of things (website pages, in this case) that have something in common. WordPress has two default taxonomies: categories and tags. The difference between a category and a tag mostly has to do with structure. Categories are hierarchical: you can have subcategories and even sub-subcategories. Tags, however, don’t have that hierarchy.

WordPress automatically generates a page for each category or tag you create. So, do be mindful of them, and don’t create new tags for each post you write! We call these pages archive pages because that’s what they do: they archive posts (or products) that have something in common. Besides categories and tags, there are also other types of archive pages. You can even create a custom taxonomy or use a plugin that creates one.

Why are archive pages important for your SEO?

Taxonomy archive pages are very valuable when it comes to structuring your site. A clear site structure helps both Google and your visitors to understand and navigate your site and help you rank higher. To get the best out of your taxonomy archive pages, you will need to work on them. The pages that WordPress automatically generates tend to only consist of a list of posts without any further introduction. So, if visitors land on one of your archive pages, they don’t get much information. This increases the chance that they won’t find what they’re looking and leave the page.

How to optimize taxonomy archive pages

To make your taxonomy archives awesome, you often don’t even have to do that much. Start by adding a clear heading and an introduction, where you highlight the content on that archive page. In addition, you can add some links to that introductory content pointing to the best posts or pages on that archive page. This will go a long way in making sure that the users understand what the page is about.

For descriptions on archive pages, we recommend a minimum of 250 words. That’s less than what we recommend for blog posts, but that’s because the description of an archive page has a different purpose than a blog post. Rather than exploring a topic, these descriptions serve as an introduction to the rest of the content on that page. These texts don’t have to be lengthy. You want to rank with these pages though, and that means category and tag pages need content.

How to write high-quality product descriptions

A lot of online stores use the default text that the manufacturer provides when it comes to the products they sell. This is not something we would recommend (at all). Not only will this show Google that there are already five other websites out there that are providing the same content as you are (which hurts your rankings), but it also shows users that you don’t take the time to properly optimize your product pages. This hurts your credibility. Of course, if you have an online store with lots of products we understand that this isn’t done in a few minutes. In that case, we recommend starting with your most important products or best-sellers.

Make sure your product descriptions contain the information people will want about these products. Make this information easy to read and to the point. As you probably saw in the table, these pages often ask for less content than blog posts or other pages. But do make sure that all the information that someone would want about that product, is on the product page. As I mentioned before, a great product description can be the difference between making a sale or not.

Conclusion on word count and SEO

This post taught you that the word count of your posts and pages can influence your rankings. However, and this is very important, you should not compromise the quality of your text for the sake of writing longer pieces. So, always use your common sense and write readable, and well-structured texts that are helpful for your site visitors. Eventually, this is what Google wants as well and therefore will get you higher up the rankings!

Read more: SEO copywriting and writing for sales »

The post Word count and SEO: how long should a post or page be? appeared first on Yoast.

AI is becoming more important every day

People have adopted AI eagerly, generating content in increasing numbers. Whether its automating processes, curating preferences or simply providing texts and images, AI is everywhere and it’s here to stay. Every day, new apps, models and updates are announced! But because it is so popular, it can be difficult to know where you should start and what you should focus on for the best results.

In our new AI for SEO training course, you’ll discover not only how to use AI, but also when to use it. By understanding both the possibilities and the limits of AI, you can use it more effectively for your site. Combining AI with your own expertise, experience and skills will allow you to rank above your competition. And with the help of our AI for SEO training course, you’ll optimize your processes much quicker!

What will you learn in the AI for SEO course?

This new online training course on AI for SEO will teach you the basics of AI and generative AI, as well as their impact on SEO and the web. In addition, you will receive practical information about incorporating AI in your SEO, from keyword strategy to publishing content.

Module 1: What is AI

First, you’ll learn about AI and generative AI. It can be a huge topic (and we could build a separate academy full of lessons for it!) so we’ll stick to the basics. You’ll discover the technology that powers AI, so that you understand how it works. in addition, we’ll explain how generative AI is able to generate content, giving you a better idea of how you can start using it!

Module 2: The impact of AI

After you understand what AI is, we’ll explore what that means for you and your experience online. Now that search engines are trying to keep up with the latest developments, SEO practices have to change as well. And what happens to the web if AI changes how users interact with your content?

We also discuss the ethical challenges of using AI. After all, you still want to be unique and stay loyal to your site mission and vision, and ensure that everyone can access your content. Let’s be prepared to use AI responsibly!

Module 3: Using AI tools

The final module is all about getting practical – and adding tools and skills to your AI knowledge. You’ll get useful tips to choose the right tools for you before diving into the SEO process.

You can use AI to optimize your keyword research and finetune your strategy. But AI is especially useful in generating content. We’ll tell you about more than just having a first draft: you’ll also receive information on how to turn your AI-generated text into excellent content. And we’ll show you how to use the Yoast SEO AI features in more detail.

How is the course set up?

This AI for SEO training course takes you by the hand and guides you through the possibilities of AI, with videos, reading materials, and quizzes. You can choose what lessons you want to take, watch videos or read the transcripts instead: you can pick your own learning path.

Once you’ve finished the entire course and passed the quizzes, you’ll receive a Yoast certificate and a badge that you can display on your website.

How do I access the AI for SEO course?

The AI for SEO training course is an online and on-demand course, like every other Yoast SEO academy training course. So, you can learn about AI whenever and wherever you want.

Want to get started right now? If you have Yoast SEO Premium, Yoast SEO for Shopify or any other paid Yoast SEO product, you’ll find the new course in your Yoast SEO academy courses overview!

The post Out now: AI for SEO training course! appeared first on Yoast.

Improvements for Yoast SEO 22.4

Across the plugin, customers can expect to see improved performance as a whole. We’ve removed unnecessary queries and fixed bugs, enhancing the user experience. In essence, we have been doing some spring cleaning.

Slug override fix for the Elementor community

One particularly noticeable fix is personalized for the vast Elementor community within our user base. You might have noticed that when saving a post with Elementor for the first time, the slug would stubbornly add on the word ‘elementor’ at the start. Well, no more! We’ve put an end to that annoyance. Say goodbye to those unnecessary redirects when you update to Yoast SEO 22.4!

Schema updates for product variants

In February 2024, Google updated its guidelines on structured data specifically for product variants, a complex issue for many ecommerce sites. They aim to match customer intent to results online more effectively. If you’ve ever searched for a t-shirt in a specific color and had a different colored t-shirt pop up in the search results, you can relate to the shopper’s experience.

We’ve updated our product schema in Yoast WooCommerce SEO 16.2 to align with best practices to communicate your product attributes to search engines more effectively. This will ensure your products match potential shoppers’ search criteria as closely as possible. So, now is a great time to ensure that all your site’s product variant data is correct on your website. Check our configuration guide for Yoast WooCommerce SEO for more guidance on how to do this.

Yoast SEO workouts to guide you through optimizing your website

In the spirit of seasonal change, now is the perfect time to complete spring cleaning on your site by completing one or more SEO workouts. For Yoast SEO Premium customers, consider these workouts your personal trainers, guiding you through optimizations in just three simple steps each, ensuring your favorite content gets seen by your customers.

Update now to Yoast SEO 22.4

We’re here to empower your digital journey with bug fixes, enhancements, and tailored solutions like our exclusive SEO workouts. Happy optimizing with Yoast SEO 22.4! 

The post Yoast SEO 22.4: Better performance and product schema update appeared first on Yoast.

Introducing the Font Library

The WordPress 6.5 release includes a new Font Library for the block editor. This library gives you more control over the typography you use throughout your pages. What’s cool about it is that it allows you to install and activate local fonts and Google Fonts on your website. By allowing us to add the fonts of our choice, regardless of the chosen theme, this library gives you more freedom when it comes to design. So try it now so you can manage the fonts you use.

New features in the block editor

There are loads of tweaks made to the block editor, so we’ll highlight a few cool ones here. First, WordPress 6.5 will make renaming your blocks in the list view possible. This is already possible for your group blocks, but the new release also allows you to rename individual blocks. Especially with longer pages or pages that consist of lots of different types of blocks, this can be very helpful in keeping an overview while you’re working on that page.

The release also brings us a few new design options. The drop shadow effect is available for more blocks, such as the image block and columns. This helps you give more depth to your pages, make elements stand out, and play with the design of your pages. Another design feature is getting more control over the look of your cover blocks. You will be able to set aspect ratios and add color overlays that are based on colors in your chosen image. This helps you customize these cover blocks to fit into your website’s overall look and feel.

Renewed overview of style revisions

WordPress 6.5 has an improved style revision that shows you more information about the changes made during each revision. Go to the editor and click Styles, where you’ll see an option to view past revisions. These are also accessible while you’re working on the design of your templates. The fun thing about this overview of revisions is that it’s much more visual than the revision overview you get when editing a page or post.

This overview is shown next to the page and allows you to view past designs and apply them again. Overall it feels easier to use and more efficient as it shows you the effect on the page right away. It’s good to know that this is only available for themes that use the block editor.

The Interactivity API

This release also comes with something called the Interactivity API. This feature provides developers with a framework to build interactive front-end experiences while using blocks. The idea is that interacting with these elements doesn’t come with a new page load, making them more interactive than regular pages. This framework is intended to simplify the process without using external tools. To give you an idea of what the Interactivity API can be used for, the WordPress team created a WP Movies demo website you can visit.

Improvements in performance and accessibility

The WordPress 6.5 release includes loads of performance updates. One of the main things that comes out of this is a huge speed improvement when using the Block Editor and Site Editor. In addition, translated websites will see a much quicker load time due to a new, lightweight library.

This new version of WordPress also comes with many accessibility improvements (more than 65, to be exact). To name a few changes, there have been fixes to contrast settings, positioning of elements, and cursor focus. Staying true to the WordPress promise of working towards an accessible platform for everyone. If you want to dive into the features of WordPress 6.5 a bit more, we recommend going through their Field Guide to read up on all the changes in this release.

Read on: WordPress 6.4: A more intuitive building experience »

The post WordPress 6.5: The features you want to know about appeared first on Yoast.

What is holistic SEO?

To keep it short: if you fulfill your users’ needs on every level, you’re practicing holistic SEO. This means your site is easy and safe to use, and provides the right information at the right time.

Holistic SEO is not just doing keyword research and writing content that people are looking for. It’s also user experience, technical SEO, and making sure your website is secure. 

What is trending content?

When a topic or joke is trending, it has high visibility on social media platforms. This means people are talking and making content about this topic. And they’re also searching for it!

Depending on the topic that’s trending, people might search for more information on social media platforms or search engines. Sometimes even both! Which is why it can be useful for your business’s visibility to also create content about a trending topic. 

Trending content might be necessary

How people search online is changing. In fact, many SEO experts predict that we’ll get less traffic from search engines. So, where will traffic come from? A large part will probably come from social media like TikTok, X (formerly known as Twitter), and Instagram – especially now that more people use them as search engines.

And how do you become more visible on social media? By posting trending content.

Trending or quality content?

As we just discussed, a large part of holistic SEO is writing quality content. But how can you create quality content when you only have a day or two before the world moves on to the next trend? 

Take TikTok, for example. Generally, by the time you notice something is a trend, you’re already too late. The ship has sailed, and people are moving on to the next thing. With this in mind, it can feel like you have to choose between staying relevant or creating quality content.

What does your audience appreciate? 

It’s good to know that the answer to how much trending content you should create also largely depends on your audience. If your audience consists of older people, then chances are you don’t need to follow social media trends as vigorously. On the contrary, you might even scare them away! 

If your audience is younger, however, you might need to come up with a certified ‘trend strategy’. Because you can’t join them all. And if you try to stay relevant by jumping on every trend, you’ll look like you’re trying too hard. Plus, you’ll probably have to compromise on quality.

A trend strategy

As we said, you shouldn’t want to join in on every trend. So what should you do instead? We suggest you create your own ‘trend strategy’. Here’s a few things you should consider:

• Which trends are you going to engage with?
  • Will you only engage with trends within your area of expertise, or will you branch out? 
  • Will you only join in on funny trends, or will you create content for more serious trends too?
  • Will you only join trends that your audience is interested in? Or will you introduce your audience to new trends that could be interesting to them as well?
• Will you drop everything to create content related to a new trend?
• Does it need to be a blog post, or is a social media post better? Or both?
• How often will you post ‘trendy’ content? Keep in mind that if you join in often, your brand image will change. Your business will probably feel younger, which might alienate part of your audience.

You’re still working on your holistic SEO

With a trend strategy, you should be able to make better decisions about when to post trendy content. Which will hopefully help you to keep creating quality content – one of the pillars of holistic SEO. 

What’s more, if you follow trends that your audience likes, you’ll be adhering to another holistic SEO pillar: creating content for your audience! After all, they’re the ones reading (and hopefully engaging with) your content. 

Keep an eye on brand image

Just don’t forget that your brand image could change, depending on the type of trending content you post online. If you engage with and participate in a lot of meme-y  content and trends (a meme can be a funny video, image, or piece of text that’s rapidly copied and spread online – usually, with slight variations), your brand might come across as more playful and less serious. 

However, never posting meme-y content also sends a clear message. Your business will come across as serious, and perhaps a little impersonal. It’s fine if that’s what you’re going for, but it’s also good to keep in mind that authentic content (so more personal content) does really well online. 

Conclusion

There’s no telling what the future will bring, but it’s clear that trends won’t go away. Plus, they’re constantly changing! That’s why it might be helpful to create a trend strategy, so you can provide your audience with content they’re currently interested in. Without having to skimp on quality and your holistic SEO strategy. Good luck! 

Read more: Is conversational commerce really the future? »

The post Can holistic SEO and trending content coexist? appeared first on Yoast.

Essence of Interaction to Next Paint (INP)

Interaction to Next Paint measures the responsiveness of a web page to user inputs, such as clicks, taps, and keypresses. It represents the time from when a user interacts with your page to when they see a response on the screen. Unlike its predecessor, First Input Delay, which only accounted for the first input, INP provides a broader view by capturing the responsiveness throughout the life of the page.

Google is very dedicated to enhance the user experiences offered by sites. To validate these, it introduces a more nuanced and comprehensive metrics. It now introduces Interaction to Next Paint into the Core Web Vitals. INP measures a critical aspect of the user’s experience — the responsiveness of a page to user interaction.

By integrating INP into Core Web Vitals, Google aims to provide developers with a complete picture of their page’s performance. In addition, it encourages improvements that genuinely enhance the user experience.

Why INP matters

A seamless user experience is the cornerstone of successful SEO. Interaction to Next Paint directly influences how users perceive the efficiency and usability of a webpage. Pages that respond swiftly to user interactions are more likely to engage visitors. Better performance can reduce bounce rates, and, ultimately, higher rankings in search results.

As the transition from FID to INP unfolds, webmasters and SEO experts must embrace this broader metric. Understanding and optimizing for INP will be crucial for maintaining and improving search rankings.

Real-world improvements for yoast.com

Despite the challenges in optimizing for INP, our team at Yoast has remarkably improved responsiveness. By focusing on efficient code execution and minimizing render-blocking resources, we have significantly enhanced our site’s performance.

Google Search Console already provides INP reports, splitting into mobile and desktop issues. At Yoast, we’ve used these to guide our optimizations. In addition, Screaming Frog now includes INP pass/fail within their crawl reports, which helps as well.

Below shows how the work we did in December and January has reduced the number of issues dramatically:

But remember, while it’s always great to have zero errors, don’t obsess about cutting off milliseconds to get there. If there are significant performance issues, then solve these as soon as you can. Always keep in mind, though, don’t spend dollars to save pennies! Focus on the general page experience; things will naturally progress from there.

Improving Interaction to Next Paint

The shift to INP necessitates a fresh approach to measuring and enhancing web performance. Tools like Google’s Lighthouse, PageSpeed Insights, and the Chrome User Experience Report offer valuable insights into INP scores and opportunities for optimization.

Practical strategies to enhance your INP score

Improving your Interaction to Next Paint INP score benefits your site’s user experience. It’s an important part of staying competitive in SEO. Here are actionable tips to help you enhance your INP score:

1. Optimize event callbacks

Event callbacks are at the heart of user interactions. Reducing the time these callbacks take to process can significantly improve your INP score. Assess the complexity of your event handlers and streamline their code to ensure quick execution.

2. Avoid blocking the main thread

The main thread is where the browser processes user events, executes JavaScript, and renders updates to the screen. Keeping it unblocked ensures that the page can respond to user inputs promptly. Avoid heavy computations or long-running tasks on the main thread to prevent delays in responsiveness.

3. Break up long tasks

Tasks taking more than 50 milliseconds can interfere with the page’s ability to respond to user inputs effectively. Breaking these long tasks into smaller chunks allows the browser to intersperse input handling between these tasks, improving the overall responsiveness.

4. Optimize JavaScript execution

JavaScript can significantly impact your page’s responsiveness. Optimizing how JavaScript is loaded and executed on your page can improve INP scores. Techniques include deferring non-critical JavaScript, using async scripts, and removing unused code.

5. Minimize unnecessary tasks

Evaluate the tasks on your page and identify any that are not essential to the immediate user experience. Postponing or eliminating unnecessary tasks can free up resources, allowing the browser to prioritize user interactions.

6. Prioritize important actions

Not all tasks are created equal. By prioritizing important actions — such as those directly related to user interactions — you ensure that these tasks are executed first, leading to a smoother and more responsive experience.

7. Leverage requestIdleCallback

The requestIdleCallback API allows you to schedule background tasks to run when the browser is idle. This is particularly useful for tasks not critical to the immediate user experience. By using requestIdleCallback, you ensure these tasks do not interfere with the page’s responsiveness to user inputs.

Continuous improvements

Implementing these strategies requires a thoughtful approach to web development and an understanding of how user interactions are processed. Tools like Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights can provide insights into your Interaction to Next Paint score. In addition, these can identify specific areas for improvement.

You can significantly enhance your site’s responsiveness by optimizing event callbacks, minimizing main thread blockage, breaking up long tasks, and prioritizing user-centric actions. This leads to a better user experience. It also aligns with Google’s emphasis on page responsiveness as a critical SEO component in the Core Web Vitals era.

Improving INP is a continuous process that can lead to substantial gains in user satisfaction and engagement. As you implement these changes, monitor your site’s performance. Check the impact on your INP scores and refine your strategies for even better results.

Looking ahead

The introduction of INP signals Google’s ongoing commitment to refining its page experience signals. Staying informed and proactive in optimizing for INP and other Core Web Vitals is imperative for you to excel in SEO.

Interaction to Next Paint is a pivotal metric for assessing and enhancing web page responsiveness. Understand its nuances, embrace the available tools, and implement data-driven optimization strategies. Esure that your website meets the ever-changing standards of user experience and SEO.

Let’s continue the conversation in the comments below. Share your experiences, challenges, and successes in working to improve INP. Together, let’s prepare those sites for lift-off!

The post All about Core Web Vitals: INP (Interaction to Next Paint) appeared first on Yoast.

Modify breadcrumb output

A popular front-end output is the breadcrumb trail that themes can use at the top of content items, like posts and pages. Yoast SEO includes common path options, but customization can benefit some content types. The code snippet below adds a custom link between the Home and Post Name that appears by default. Thus, Home » Hello world! becomes Home » Blog » Hello world!. You can find more examples here.

add_filter( 'wpseo_breadcrumb_links', 'yoast_seo_breadcrumb_append_link' );

function yoast_seo_breadcrumb_append_link( $links ) {
    global $post;
    $post_id_to_change = 1;
    $url_to_add = site_url( '/blog/' );
    $anchor_text_for_url_to_add = 'Blog';

    if ( is_single ( $post_id_to_change ) ) {
        $breadcrumb[] = array(
            'url' => $url_to_add,
            'text' => $anchor_text_for_url_to_add,
        );

        array_splice( $links, 1, -2, $breadcrumb );
    }

    return $links;
}

Update image URLs for CDN

Some sites use a CDN to help images load faster by serving them from many servers worldwide. A CDN provides you with a different domain for images.

To ensure social media platforms use the CDN permalink for social media images, you need to add this small Yoast SEO code snippet after replacing current_example.com and new_example.com with your WordPress and CDN domains, respectively. Thus, https://current_example.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/image.png becomes https://new_example.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/image.png. You can find more examples here.

add_filter( 'wpseo_opengraph_image', 'change_opengraph_image_url' );

function change_opengraph_image_url( $url ) {
    return str_replace('current_example.com', 'new_example.com', $url);
}

To update the sitemap image URLs, the following code will replace https://www.example.com with https://cdn.example.com.

add_filter( 'wpseo_xml_sitemap_img_src', 'wpseo_cdn_filter' );

function wpseo_cdn_filter( $uri ) {
  return str_replace( 'https://www.example.com', 'https://cdn.example.com', $uri );
}

Add custom template variables

Yoast SEO includes a variety of variables to build dynamic titles and descriptions. However, these may not provide the exact information you want to include in the title or description. The following snippet creates a custom variable %%myname%% that outputs a sentence My name is Moses in the front-end output.

add_action('wpseo_register_extra_replacements', 'register_custom_yoast_variables');

function get_myname() {
    return 'My name is Moses';
}

function register_custom_yoast_variables() {
    wpseo_register_var_replacement( '%%myname%%', 'get_myname', 'advanced', 'some help text' );
}

Alter the number of sitemap entries

Yoast SEO sitemaps include up to 1000 entries the individual sitemaps. The limit is acceptable for most server configurations, but your server may have more or less resources available. The filter helps you be in control of your server resources.

add_filter( 'wpseo_sitemap_entries_per_page', 'max_entries_per_sitemap' );

function max_entries_per_sitemap() {
    return 100;
}

Conclusion

While Yoast SEO does a lot of the heavy lifting, sometimes you may need to tweak something. Perhaps a different breadcrumb output would fit better with your brand. Luckily, Yoast SEO offers a range of filters so that you can fine-tune our plugin. In this post, we’ve looked at a few, but there are many more filters in our developer portal that you can try! Good luck!

The post Yoast SEO snippets to customize your site appeared first on Yoast.

Generated titles and descriptions for taxonomies for Yoast SEO Premium

Building on the enthusiastic reception of AI generated titles and meta descriptions for our customers’ content and product pages over the last year, we are taking it one step further. Yoast SEO 22.3 introduces AI-generated titles and descriptions tailored for your category and tag pages! 

Just input your chosen keyphrase and you will receive SEO-optimized suggestions for you to choose from. As with our other generative AI features, you stay in control of what the end result looks like as it is easy to tweak the results to fit your requirements or generate five more at the click of a button, as shown below. 

Why it matters:

At Yoast, we recognize that content creators often overlook category and tag pages amidst the hustle of new content creation and site optimization. Many times, creators build these pages and then neglect to revisit them as frequently as necessary. After all, although establishing the right site structure and taxonomy system is crucial, it may not offer the most enjoyable aspect of content creation. Now, with our AI-generated titles and descriptions, you can effortlessly enhance these pages without sacrificing your precious time and resources.

Benefits:

Save time and resources:

• Cover SEO fundamentals as part of your workflow, without adding the extra effort or time.
• Focus on creating new content while our AI makes the optimization of your category and tag pages a breeze.
• Worry-free title and descriptions. Our suggestions will be there to guide you, even when you are tired or lacking inspiration.

Boost search engine ranking:

• Seamlessly complete another task which contributes to improving your site’s SEO performance.
• Stay ahead in search results by effortlessly fine-tuning your taxonomies.

Other refinements and fixes

Yoast SEO 22.3 introduces additional refinements and fixes, enhancing the user experience for all our customers. We’ve also configured the social profile settings to enable x.com websites to be added. We’ve streamlined processes and eliminated unnecessary queries, ensuring a smoother overall interaction with the plugin. 

Update now to Yoast SEO 22.3 

Upgrade to Yoast SEO 22.3 now to enhance your workflow and productivity. We’re eager to learn how this update contributes to your online success, and your valuable feedback could inspire future features like the one introduced today. Your journey to improved SEO starts with this update!

The post Yoast SEO 22.3: Introducing AI for category and tag pages appeared first on Yoast.

What is a crawl budget?

Crawl budget is the number of pages Google will crawl on your site on any given day. This number varies slightly daily, but overall, it’s relatively stable. Google might crawl six pages on your site each day; it might crawl 5,000 pages; it might even crawl 4,000,000 pages every single day. The number of pages Google crawls, your ‘budget,’ is generally determined by the size of your site, the ‘health’ of your site (how many errors Google encounters), and the number of links to your site. Some of these factors are things you can influence; we’ll get to that in a bit.

How does a crawler work?

A crawler like Googlebot gets a list of URLs to crawl on a site. It goes through that list systematically. It grabs your robots.txt file occasionally to ensure it’s still allowed to crawl each URL and then crawls the URLs individually. Once a spider has crawled a URL and parsed the contents, it adds new URLs found on that page that it has to crawl back on the to-do list.

Several events can make Google feel a URL has to be crawled. It might have found new links pointing at content, or someone has tweeted it, or it might have been updated in the XML sitemap, etc., etc… There’s no way to make a list of all the reasons why Google would crawl a URL, but when it determines it has to, it adds it to the to-do list.

Read on: Bot traffic: What it is and why you should care about it »

When is crawl budget an issue?

Crawl budget is not a problem if Google has to crawl many URLs on your site and has allotted a lot of crawls. But, say your site has 250,000 pages, and Google crawls 2,500 pages on this particular site each day. It will crawl some (like the homepage) more than others. It could take up to 200 days before Google notices particular changes to your pages if you don’t act. Crawl budget is an issue now. On the other hand, if it crawls 50,000 a day, there’s no issue at all.

Follow the steps below to determine whether your site has a crawl budget issue. This does assume your site has a relatively small number of URLs that Google crawls but doesn’t index (for instance, because you added meta noindex).

1. Determine how many pages your site has; the number of URLs in your XML sitemaps might be a good start.
2. Go into Google Search Console.
3. Go to “Settings” -> “Crawl stats” and calculate the average pages crawled per day.
4. Divide the number of pages by the “Average crawled per day” number.
5. You should probably optimize your crawl budget if you end up with a number higher than ~10 (so you have 10x more pages than what Google crawls daily). You can read something else if you end up with a number lower than 3.

What URLs is Google crawling?

You really should know which URLs Google is crawling on your site. Your site’s server logs are the only ‘real’ way of knowing. For larger sites, you can use something like Logstash + Kibana. For smaller sites, the guys at Screaming Frog have released an SEO Log File Analyser tool.

Get your server logs and look at them

Depending on your type of hosting, you might not always be able to grab your log files. However, if you even think you need to work on crawl budget optimization because your site is big, you should get them. If your host doesn’t allow you to get them, it’s time to change hosts.

Fixing your site’s crawl budget is a lot like fixing a car. You can’t fix it by looking at the outside; you’ll have to open that engine. Looking at logs is going to be scary at first. You’ll quickly find that there is a lot of noise in logs. You’ll find many commonly occurring 404s that you think are nonsense. But you have to fix them. You must wade through the noise and ensure your site is not drowned in tons of old 404s.

Keep on reading: Website maintenance: Check and fix 404 error pages »

Increase your crawl budget

Let’s look at the things that improve how many pages Google can crawl on your site.

Website maintenance: reduce errors

Step one in getting more pages crawled is making sure that the pages that are crawled return one of two possible return codes: 200 (for “OK”) or 301 (for “Go here instead”). All other return codes are not OK. To figure this out, look at your site’s server logs. Google Analytics and most other analytics packages will only track pages that served a 200. So you won’t find many errors on your site in there.

Once you’ve got your server logs, find and fix common errors. The most straightforward way is by grabbing all the URLs that didn’t return 200 or 301 and then ordering by how often they were accessed. Fixing an error might mean that you have to fix code. Or you might have to redirect a URL elsewhere. If you know what caused the error, you can also try to fix the source.

Another good source for finding errors is Google Search Console. Read our Search Console guide for more info on that. If you’ve got Yoast SEO Premium, you can easily redirect them away using the redirects manager.

Block parts of your site

If you have sections of your site that don’t need to be in Google, block them using robots.txt. Only do this if you know what you’re doing, of course. One of the common problems we see on larger eCommerce sites is when they have a gazillion ways to filter products. Every filter might add new URLs for Google. In cases like these, you want to ensure that you’re letting Google spider only one or two of those filters and not all of them.

Reduce redirect chains

When you 301 redirect a URL, something weird happens. Google will see that new URL and add that URL to the to-do list. It doesn’t always follow it immediately; it adds it to its to-do list and goes on. When you chain redirects, for instance, when you redirect non-www to www, then http to https, you have two redirects everywhere, so everything takes longer to crawl.

Get more links

This is easy to say but hard to do. Getting more links is not just a matter of being awesome but also of making sure others know you’re awesome. It’s a matter of good PR and good engagement on social media. We’ve written extensively about link building; we’d suggest reading these three posts:

1. Link building from a holistic SEO perspective
2. Link building: what not to do?
3. 6 steps to a successful link building strategy

When you have an acute indexing problem, you should first look at your crawl errors, block parts of your site, and fix redirect chains. Link building is a very slow method to increase your crawl budget. On the other hand, link building must be part of your process if you intend to build a large site.

TL;DR: crawl budget optimization is hard

Crawl budget optimization is not for the faint of heart. If you’re doing your site’s maintenance well, or your site is relatively small, it’s probably not needed. If your site is medium-sized and well-maintained, it’s fairly easy to do based on the above tricks.

Assess your technical SEO fitness

Optimizing your crawl budget is part of your technical SEO. Are you curious how your site’s overall technical SEO fits? We’ve created a technical SEO fitness quiz that helps you figure out what you need to work on!

Read more: Robots.txt: the ultimate guide »

The post How to optimize your crawl budget appeared first on Yoast.

How the Yoast SEO traffic lights work

In Yoast SEO, traffic lights act as your digital traffic controllers, signaling the SEO health of your content. Picture them as your navigational aids: green for smooth sailing, orange for a cautious approach, and red for areas requiring immediate attention. These traffic lights provide a quick snapshot of how well your content aligns with SEO best practices and search engine requirements.

The philosophy of the traffic lights

While not all traffic lights have to be green, the goal is to ensure that the overall balance of green lights reflects a well-optimized piece of content. Embrace the feedback each traffic light color provides to enhance your content’s quality, relevance, and SEO-friendliness.

Green traffic light

A green traffic light signifies that your content meets the SEO criteria set by Yoast. It indicates that your content is well-optimized and has a higher chance of ranking well in search results. However, achieving a green light is not the only goal; the quality and relevance of your content are even more critical.

Orange traffic light

An orange traffic light is a warning sign, suggesting areas where your content can be further optimized. It prompts you to review and improve specific aspects of your content, such as keyword usage, readability, or meta information. While an orange light doesn’t indicate critical issues, addressing these areas can enhance your content’s SEO performance.

Red traffic light

A red traffic light demands immediate attention as it highlights critical issues that must be addressed. Ignoring red lights can negatively impact your content’s visibility and ranking potential. It signals areas of concern, such as missing meta tags, keyword stuffing, or other SEO issues that can prevent your content from performing well.

Inclusive language analysis traffic light

A recent addition to Yoast SEO is the inclusive language analysis traffic light. This focuses on using inclusive language in your content. This traffic light evaluates your content for inclusivity, sensitivity, and diversity in language use. A green light indicates that your content is inclusive and respectful. An orange or red light suggests areas for improvement in promoting diversity and inclusivity.

Understanding the nuances of Yoast SEO traffic lights helps you optimize more effectively. The feedback lets you make informed decisions to improve your content so it will reach its goals.

Responding to Yoast SEO traffic light feedback

To effectively respond to the feedback provided by Yoast SEO traffic lights, consider the following strategies:

Green traffic light feedback:

• Analyze how you earned your green lights and replicate those practices in future content.
• Optimize future and existing content based on the successful tactics identified through green lights.

Orange traffic light feedback:

• Prioritize areas flagged by the orange lights that significantly impact how well your content performs.
• Implement the recommended improvements provided by Yoast SEO to address the identified issues and enhance your content.

Red traffic light feedback

• Address critical issues identified by red lights promptly to prevent SEO mistakes and improve your content’s visibility.
• Follow the actionable advice given by Yoast SEO to fix the issues causing the red lights. This helps ensure that you follow SEO best practices.

Implement the strategies and respond to the feedback provided by the Yoast SEO traffic lights. Optimizing your content means improving its SEO-friendliness and boosting its visibility in search results.

Don’t go chasing green traffic lights

While achieving green lights in Yoast SEO is desirable, balancing getting those lights with a holistic SEO strategy is essential. Focusing solely on obtaining green lights may lead to overlooking critical SEO elements. In addition, you might be compromising the overall quality of your content.

There are multiple pitfalls when you chase green lights:

1. Tunnel vision: Fixating on green lights may distract you from the broader SEO strategy and content quality.
2. Over-optimization: Striving for all green lights can result in keyword stuffing or unnatural content, harming your results.
3. Lack of user focus: Prioritizing green lights over quality and relevance can lead to content that fails to engage and convert visitors.

Getting those green lights comes with many benefits:

1. SEO-friendly content: Green lights indicate that your content aligns with SEO best practices, increasing its visibility and ranking potential.
2. User-friendly content: Well-optimized content with green lights tends to be more user-friendly and engaging, enhancing the overall user experience.
3. Search engine visibility: Content with green lights might have a bigger chance of being indexed. Search engines can rank it favorably, driving organic traffic to your site.

Now you understand the allure, pitfalls, and benefits of green lights in Yoast SEO. Use these insights to balance optimization and content quality. Your goal is to publish the best content out there — with some help from Yoast SEO!

Mastering the traffic lights in Yoast SEO

Interpreting and responding to Yoast SEO traffic lights is a fundamental step in your SEO journey. Use the feedback provided to improve your content’s visibility. Working with Yoast SEO gives your content a better chance of standing out from your competitors!

The post Understanding the Yoast SEO traffic lights appeared first on Yoast.

The origin of this reputation

A lifetime ago, when Google’s algorithm wasn’t that good, you could trick your way into the search results. Putting down keywords in white (so nobody would see, but Google would crawl it) was an effective strategy back then. As was buying bulks of links from questionable sites. As Google evolved, these kinds of dirty SEO tricks started to backfire. 

If you’re wondering whether certain tactics of old school or blackhat SEO still pay off, just think: does it give the user a better experience on your site? Does your website become a better result? If you can answer these questions with yes, then it’s probably a good SEO strategy. Anything that feels like a trick though, probably won’t be a good SEO strategy in the long run. So, let’s look at some SEO statements and find out if they’re fact or fiction!

SEO fact or fiction?

Fact or fiction 1: Content is king

Content is a very important aspect of any SEO strategy. After all, Google crawls texts and determines the ranking of your site on the quality of your texts. High-quality content also leads to lower bounce rates and more social media attention.

SEO fact: Content is king

Fact or fiction 2: Get as many links as possible

While backlinks are definitely important for your SEO strategy, you should be rather selective in which kinds of backlinks you’d want to attract to your website. To start, you shouldn’t buy large amounts of links. (Nor should you exchange links.) Secondly, don’t use any automated programs to get links. Moreover, don’t do guest blogging with very thin content and don’t go for links that are unrelated to the topic of your website. You shouldn’t have links from spammy sites whose only purpose is to advertise for gambling, viagra and porn (unless your website is about gambling, viagra and porn). Lastly, make sure there is real content behind the links you use. In a nutshell: you should never pay for links.

If you choose to go overboard on link building, you’ll risk a penguin penalty and lose your rankings in Google. If you want to learn more about link building strategies and other essential SEO skills, you should check out our All-around SEO training! 

SEO fiction: Get as many links as possible

Fact or fiction 3: Keyword density should be sky high

Some people claim you should put as many keywords in your texts as possible. They hope that Google will notice the amount of keywords they’re using and therefore will rank the text highest in the search results. However, their text will become unreadable. So they shouldn’t do that! It’ll definitely backfire. Never write content that’s created for the search engines. Always write content with a real audience in mind. Invest in high-quality content that’ll generate long-term stable traffic to your website.

SEO fiction: keyword density should be sky high

Fact or fiction 4: You don’t need high-end technical skills to do SEO

Technical SEO is definitely an important element of an SEO strategy. And it doesn’t hurt to learn a bit of code (it could even be great fun). However, if you’re using WordPress and our Yoast SEO plugin, your technical SEO is pretty much covered. Our plugin is designed to take care of all the technical aspects of your SEO strategy.

SEO fact: You don’t need high-end technical skills to do SEO

Fact or fiction 5: Meta descriptions don’t matter

Google rewrites 70% of manually added meta descriptions. That means there’s a high chance that a meta description you added manually will be rewritten by Google. However, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t pay attention to the content of your meta description. Meta descriptions provide critical information to both search engines and users. Moreover, it’s based on the SEO title and meta description that the user decides whether to visit your page. Neglecting them would be missing an opportunity to get more traffic to your website.

SEO fiction: Meta descriptions don’t matter

Fact or fiction 6: Social media can improve your rankings

Google doesn’t look at your website’s social media performance (like followers or shares) when ranking your content. However, a good social media strategy helps your rankings by boosting your traffic. A lot of traffic makes search engines deem your content as relevant. Furthermore, the difference between search engines and social media has been blurring. For example, both Google and Instagram can be used to find an answer to a question. 

SEO fact: Social media can improve your rankings

Fact or fiction 7: Google will be replaced by AI

While using AI platforms as search engines might be relatively new, AI has been shaping the search engine experience for quite some time. For example, AI is what helps Google provide voice search and image search. And not only are some search engines introducing their own AI language models (like Gemini), they are also integrating AI models into the search engine results.

So while we don’t know exactly what the future holds, it’s clear that Google and AI found a way to work together instead of replacing each other.

SEO fiction: Google will be replaced by AI

Fact or fiction 8: SEO is all tricks

At Yoast, we propose an SEO strategy we refer to as holistic SEO. Holistic SEO means you focus on developing a long-term SEO strategy that focuses on all aspects of website optimization, in order to be the best result. Part of this strategy is to write awesome content, do great PR and social, make sure your website is properly secured and create a superb User Experience. And of course, your website should have technical excellence and an awesome site structure. That’s no trick. That’s just a whole lot of hard work.

SEO fiction: SEO is all tricks

Conclusion

The final SEO fiction actually says it all: SEO is not all tricks. Yoast believes that SEO is a long-term strategy that focuses on creating quality content for your audience and becoming the best result. It is a lot of work, but it will definitely pay off in the long run!

Read more: Holistic SEO »

The post SEO basics: SEO fact or fiction? appeared first on Yoast.

Enhanced inclusive language analysis

Our commitment to inclusivity takes center stage in our Yoast SEO 22.2 update with enhancements to our inclusive language analysis feature. We understand the importance of language sensitivity in today’s diverse online landscape. So, we’ve been fine-tuning our inclusive language analysis in Yoast SEO for WordPress and Yoast SEO for Shopify to further empower our customers to navigate these challenges seamlessly. When a phrase or word is identified as potentially non-inclusive, our feature steps in with constructive suggestions, offering you the opportunity to adjust your content for a wider audience. Another benefit of improved inclusivity is that it can contribute to a positive user experience, which is becoming more important to ranking highly in the SERPS.

More accurate keyphrase recognition

In Yoast SEO 22.2, we’ve focused on upgrading our keyphrase recognition prompts, resulting in a better-refined and more accurate tool for optimizing your content’s keyphrase density. You can now benefit from more contextual keyphrase matching when a phrase contains special characters such as hyphens. For instance, let’s say your keyphrase is ‘tips for training dogs,’ and your content mentions ‘dog-training tips’. We now highight the entire relevant phrase for you. This means that you can effortlessly spot and assess the full context in which you use your keyphrases. This helps you improve the overall effectiveness of your keyword strategy.

Enhancements and refinements in Yoast News SEO

This release also introduces new translation enhancements for Yoast News SEO, personalized to each user’s setup. These smaller plugin updates result in faster downloads for our users and are optimized for reduced file size, making them more server-friendly for our customers.

User experience improvements in Yoast SEO Premium

We’ve also been busy in the background focusing on our customers’ user experience. We’ve made it even easier for you to access and locate our features within the Yoast SEO Premium plugin. 

Update now to Yoast SEO 22.2

Make the most of our improved inclusive language analysis and keyphrase recognition configurations by updating to Yoast SEO 22.2. 

The post Yoast SEO 22.2: Fine-tune your content for maximum impact appeared first on Yoast.

What is conversational commerce?

Before we dive deeper into the topic, let’s cover the basics. Conversational commerce is when your customers can contact you through a messenger channel of their choice, and finish their purchase within the same channel. 

In other words: if you start a conversation with a business via Facebook Messenger, then purchase the product via the chat, you’ve engaged in conversational commerce. 

That sounds useful!

It is. You’ll have 24/7 customer support. Not to mention, customers will get an answer within seconds. That’s important, because 73% of people consider good customer experience an important part of their buying decision. And 65% of customers say a positive experience is more influential than advertising. 

So, it’s clear that customer service is an important part of the customer journey. Then why are you leaving it up to bots? Because of the 24/7 availability? That’s valid. But if you’re doing it because it’s cheap and easy, you might need to reconsider. Think about it: if all your competitors are doing the same thing, then your human-driven customer service will stand out in the bot crowd.

Remember work-life balance?

As we said before, the current expectation is that businesses always need to be available. There’s no denying that. However, we can question if that’s a healthy mindset. And before you scoff and say that ‘lazy gen-zers just don’t want to work’, studies have shown that work has actually become more intense over the years. Which has a huge negative impact on our mental health. 

Perhaps this is part of the reason why 52% of American millennials (and 48% of German millennials) would rather earn 20% less money than have a shitty work-life balance. So, it’s clear that people nowadays don’t want to work, work, work. So why is this expected of businesses?

How can small businesses keep up?

This 24/7 expectation isn’t just bad for our mental health. It also makes it tough for small businesses to keep up.  Think about an illustrator selling their own art, or two friends selling handmade clothes. They probably can’t afford the shiny CRM tools or AI chatbots. And with 24/7 customer service being so important, these small businesses should be dying out. 

#support small businesses

But they’re not. In fact, while 20% of businesses fail in the first year, that means a whopping 80% survives. Which makes sense when you consider that 91% of consumers prefer to support small businesses when convenient, and 74% will even actively seek them out!

Interestingly enough, 71% of consumers also expect better support from small businesses. So, why do they have this expectation? It might be because small businesses have humans doing their customer service, since they (usually) don’t have enough money for conversational commerce tools. Which begs the question: Do people prefer talking to other people? 

Humans prefer humans

The answer is yes. People seem to generally prefer talking to other humans. But why? A study found that users believe that “chatbots are incapable of providing high-quality communication”, which can lead to people no longer being as loyal to platforms after chatting with a chatbot. In some cases, it even led to a staggering 79.7% reduction of sales. 

Is conversational commerce useless then?

It’s not. You can still set up live chats with real people, or allow people to send a message via WhatsApp. Depending on your business’s budget, you’ll be able to provide 24/7 service. But judging by people’s unwavering support for small businesses, it doesn’t seem to matter as much if you can’t. 

Disclaimer: of course, it’s still important for small businesses to reply quickly to their consumers. While consumers might not expect an immediate response, they also don’t want to wait for weeks.

Best of both worlds

However, we can’t ignore the current situation. If lots of businesses offer 24/7 service, you’ll feel pressure to do the same. Besides, it would be silly to completely ignore all the amazing technology that’s available. You don’t want to make your life harder than it needs to be. So, what should you do? 

Well, why not use both? Implement technology strategically. For example, by using AI in the background to help your customer service employees quickly find information. You’ll honor people’s preference for human interaction, while also empowering your employees with AI tools. You’ll have the best of both worlds.

Keep reading: The future of blogging in a video-obsessed world »

The post Is conversational commerce really the future? appeared first on Yoast.

Tip 1: Crafting the perfect SEO-driven prompt

Define your content goal: is it to inform, persuade, sell, or explain? Understand your audience’s needs and search habits to tailor your prompt effectively.

Choose a primary keyword that encapsulates your content’s essence and guides its direction. Then, break down the keyword to address search intent. List subtopics that delve into different aspects of your main theme, incorporating related secondary keywords.

Combine all these elements into a concise prompt. For example: “Create a detailed guide on primary keyword, covering subtopics, for target audience, integrating secondary keywords. Ensure the tone is desired tone, suitable for content type.”

Ensure clarity in your prompt to effectively align AI-generated content with your SEO objectives. This transforms your prompt into a strategic blueprint for SEO-optimized content tailored to your goals and audience.

Example prompt:

"Generate a detailed guide focused on 'Maximizing Small Kitchen Spaces.' Incorporate primary keyword 'small kitchen organization' within the introduction, headings, and conclusion. Cover subtopics including 'Creative Storage Solutions,' 'Decluttering Strategies,' and 'Multipurpose Furniture Ideas,' integrating secondary keywords 'space-saving kitchen gadgets,' 'decluttering tips for kitchens,' and 'multipurpose furniture for small spaces.' Target audience: urban apartment dwellers. Tone: Informative yet engaging."

Did you know?

Learn about generative AI and SEO at Yoast SEO academy

Want to learn how to adapt SEO content strategies for AI? Looking to gain a competitive advantage by integrating AI tools? Check out our training course on AI for SEO!

Tip 2: Keyword optimization beyond the basics

Specify keyword placement for the AI, requesting inclusion in the introduction, subheadings, and conclusion to kickstart SEO-friendly content creation. Emphasize the natural integration of primary and secondary keywords throughout the text to maintain flow and enhance readability.

Encourage the use of keyword variations to broaden content appeal and reach. For instance, suggest including variations like “how to garden organically” alongside the primary keyword “organic gardening tips.”

Highlight the importance of contextual keyword usage to enhance content value and user experience. Doing so helps align with search engines’ preference for contextually rich content. Instruct the AI to incorporate secondary keywords in subheadings to improve the content structure for readers. This also enhances search engine visibility by signaling covered topics within the article.

Example prompt

"Create an article on 'The Benefits of Yoga for Stress Relief,' ensuring the primary keyword 'yoga for stress relief' is naturally integrated throughout the content, especially in the introduction, subheadings, and conclusion. Include secondary keywords 'stress-relieving yoga poses,' 'beginner yoga routines,' and 'yoga mindfulness practices' within specific sections. Focus on providing valuable information and insights on how yoga can help with stress relief, and use variations of the primary keyword to enhance readability."

Tip 3: Request structured content

Outline the content structure for the AI. Say you need an introduction, a set number of sections or headings, and a conclusion to provide a clear framework. Briefly describe the focus of each section or heading to ensure all content segments contribute cohesively to the main topic.

Request the use of bullet points to enhance information digestibility. Prompt the AI to present key points or lists in a bullet format for improved readability where needed.

Conclude by asking for a summary highlighting the main points and including a call to action (CTA) to engage readers. Encourage actions like commenting, sharing the content, or exploring related topics on your website.

Example prompt:

"Draft an informative post titled 'The Ultimate Guide to Eco-Friendly Living.' Structure the content with an introduction that highlights the importance of sustainability. Include sections on 'Reducing Plastic Use,' 'Sustainable Eating Habits,' 'Eco-Friendly Transportation Options,' and 'Green Home Improvements,' each with relevant bullet points and examples. Conclude with a compelling call to action encouraging readers to adopt at least one eco-friendly practice."

Tip 4: Instruct AI for intent match

Understand why users search for your keyword: to learn (informational), find a site (navigational), make a purchase (transactional), or compare options (commercial investigation). Tailor your prompt to match the identified intent explicitly. For informational searches, request a comprehensive guide or tips; for transactional intent, focus on product details, benefits, and purchasing guidance.

Clearly outline the desired reader response in your prompt—what they should feel, know, or do by the article’s end. This guides the AI to create content that aligns closely with the user intent and desired outcome.

For content addressing common questions, direct the AI to structure part of the content in a Q&A format. Provide audience queries for the AI to address within the content. For prompts targeting commercial investigation or transactional intents, instruct the AI to incorporate comparisons, case studies, or scenarios. This assists readers in decision-making and directly addresses their underlying intent.

Example prompt:

"Write a comprehensive comparison article on 'Electric Cars vs. Gasoline Cars: Which is Better for the Environment?' Target user intent by providing detailed analysis and evidence on environmental impact, long-term costs, and performance differences. Include FAQs to answer common queries directly. Conclude with a recommendation section tailored to environmentally conscious drivers considering their next vehicle purchase."

Tip 5: Creating engaging titles with AI

Ensure your primary keyword features in the title to enhance SEO and indicate content relevance. For instance, if the keyword is “vegan baking recipes,” integrate this phrase naturally into the title. Instruct the AI to craft titles that inform about the content while intriguing readers to click, balancing clarity with curiosity or value. For example, consider a title like “10 Vegan Baking Recipes That Will Revolutionize Your Dessert Game.”

Ask the AI to provide multiple title options to explore different framing possibilities based on your keyword and content focus. This helps spark creativity and aid title refinement.

Titles with numbers and power words often perform well. Guide the AI to include these elements in some title options, such as “5 Mouth-Watering Vegan Baking Recipes for Every Sweet Craving.” Encourage title specificity by including details like the target audience, problem solved, or unique content. For example, “Vegan Baking for Beginners: Master Dairy-Free Desserts Step by Step.”

Opt for titles in the active voice for dynamism and engagement. Active voice titles are direct and compelling, such as “Uncover the Best 10 Vegan Baking Recipes Loved by All.”

Example prompt:

"Generate five engaging titles for an article about 'Indoor Herb Gardening for Beginners,' incorporating the primary keyword. Each title should invoke curiosity and offer value, possibly including numbers or power words. Examples of structure could include 'How To Start Your Indoor Herb Garden: 5 Easy Steps' or 'Transform Your Kitchen with These 7 Easy-to-Grow Herbs.'"

Yoast SEO Premium has an excellent AI title generator

Yoast SEO Premium features an AI-powered tool designed to generate SEO-optimized titles and meta descriptions for your content effortlessly. It swiftly analyzes your articles to produce compelling, search-engine-friendly headings and summaries, improving click-through rates and saving valuable time. This intuitive feature streamlines content creation, ensuring your articles are primed for maximum visibility and engagement.

Tip 6: Directing AI for meta description magic

Ensure your primary keyword is prominent in the meta description to convey relevance to search engines and potential readers. If, for instance, your keyword is “indoor gardening tips,” feature it at the beginning or early on in the meta description.

Instruct the AI — or have Yoast SEO Premium do it for you! — to encapsulate your content’s primary benefit or value proposition in the meta description. Focus not just on what the content is about but why it holds significance. For example, “Transform your living space into a verdant oasis with these indoor gardening tips.”

Given the character limit for meta descriptions, emphasize crafting concise and compelling descriptions that prompt users to click through. Be succinct, engaging, and direct to entice readers effectively. Also, end the meta description with a call to action (CTA) to prompt reader engagement. Request the AI to include a subtle yet persuasive CTA, like “Start your indoor garden transformation today with our expert tips!”

Example prompt:

"Produce a concise answer section for 'What Are the Best Practices for Password Management?' Structure the content to answer the question directly within 50 words, suitable for a featured snippet. Follow with a bulleted list of top practices and a brief explanation of why each is important for securing online accounts."

Tip 7: Better AI prompts for featured snippets

Identify common questions related to your content’s topic to align with your audience’s needs. Direct the AI to structure content segments that directly answer these queries. For instance, for “vegan baking,” address questions like “What is vegan baking?” or “How to substitute eggs in vegan baking.”

Featured snippets favor clear, concise answers. Instruct the AI to provide direct responses, ideally within 40-60 words for paragraph snippets. This increases the likelihood of your content being featured.

Google often showcases lists and tables for how-to guides and rankings. Ask the AI to incorporate bulleted lists for steps, ingredients, tips, and tables for comparative data or statistics. Utilize headers (H2 or H3 tags) that align with identified questions to aid search engines in understanding your content’s structure. This alignment increases your chances of selecting your article for a featured snippet.

Example prompt:

"Write an article on 'The Importance of Hydration for Athletes,' suggesting points for internal linking to our previous content. Include placeholders like '[Link to "Best Rehydration Drinks"]' where relevant. Ensure each suggested link provides additional value and context related to hydration tips, benefits, and strategies."

Tip 8: Using AI for internal linking suggestions

Begin by comprehensively understanding your website’s existing content to guide the AI in suggesting relevant internal linking opportunities. This step ensures that the AI’s recommendations align effectively with your site’s content structure.

In your instructions, specify that you want the AI to pinpoint potential internal linking chances within the content. For instance, if discussing “Vegan Baking,” highlight related articles like “Vegan Ingredients” or “Eco-Friendly Cooking Utensils” as potential anchor points for internal links.

Direct the AI to propose specific phrases or keywords within the content that can serve as anchor text for internal links. Ensure the anchor text is contextually relevant to the linked article’s content. Things like this help the user experience and can make it easier for search engines to understand content relationships.

Emphasize the importance of seamlessly integrating internal links within the content’s context to the AI. Each suggested link should provide value to the reader. Links should offer additional information or related topics that enrich their engagement with the content.

Write better prompts by instructing the AI to create calls to action (CTAs) with internal links. For instance, “Explore our comprehensive guide to Vegan Ingredients for more insights on vegan baking.” This approach encourages readers to delve into related content, enhancing site navigation and user engagement.

Example prompt

"Write an article on 'The Importance of Hydration for Athletes,' suggesting points for internal linking to our previous content. Include placeholders like '[Link to "Best Rehydration Drinks"]' where relevant. Ensure each suggested link provides additional value and context related to hydration tips, benefits, and strategies."

Tip 9: Improve content depth

Begin by mapping out a range of subtopics that cover your main topic from various angles. This ensures your content addresses the breadth and depth of the subject. For instance, if your main topic is “Sustainable Gardening,” potential subtopics might include water conservation techniques, organic pest control, and sustainable garden design.

Direct the AI to dive deep into each subtopic, providing detailed explanations, step-by-step guides, benefits, challenges, and solutions. This level of detail enriches the content and positions it as a valuable resource for readers seeking thorough information.

Enhance the depth of your content by asking the AI to include relevant examples and case studies within the subtopics. These real-life illustrations add credibility and interest, making complex information more accessible and engaging to your audience.

Direct the AI to cover each subtopic comprehensively, addressing common questions, misconceptions, and practical advice. This not only aids in SEO by covering a range of related keywords but also provides value to the reader.

While instructing the AI to cover subtopics thoroughly emphasizes the need for clear, accessible language. Complex topics should be broken down into digestible sections. Use headings, subheadings, bullet points, and images to enhance readability and engagement.

Ensure that each subtopic includes actionable advice or takeaways. This transforms the content from purely informational to practical. You should give readers clear steps or strategies they can implement in their context.

Example prompt:

"Develop an in-depth feature on 'Sustainable Travel Destinations Around the World.' For each destination, provide detailed insights into how it promotes sustainability, including conservation efforts, eco-friendly accommodations, and green activities. Incorporate real-life examples, hypothetical expert quotes, and recent studies supporting the benefits of sustainable tourism."

Tip 10: Enhance SEO-friendliness

Start by creating a broad content draft using the AI based on your initial prompt, covering all subtopics and including primary and secondary keywords. Treat this draft as the foundation for further refinement.

Review the draft thoroughly to enhance engagement, add detail, and improve flow. Focus on significant enhancements aligning the content with your goals.

Use specific prompts to refine content sections. For instance, if a section like “water conservation techniques” needs improvement, prompt for enhancements like including current technologies and efficiency practices. This targeted approach allows for precise improvements.

After enhancing content quality, shift focus to keyword optimization. Integrate primary and secondary keywords naturally throughout the text to add value and maintain readability.

Example prompt:

"Create an initial draft for 'Top Digital Marketing Trends in 2023.' After review, refine the content with a follow-up prompt focusing on enhancing sections that discuss AI in marketing and the rise of voice search, adding current statistics, expert opinions, and practical tips for marketers to adapt these trends."

High-quality example prompts

Here are three AI prompts to try that should give you good results to build upon:

Example prompt 1: Crafting SEO-driven content

"Create a detailed, SEO-optimized guide titled 'The Ultimate Guide to Organic Gardening in Small Spaces.' Start with an engaging introduction with the primary keyword 'organic gardening in small spaces.' Break down the guide into the following sections: Choosing Your Space, Essential Tools for Small Space Gardening, Selecting Plants, Organic Pest Control Methods, and Maximizing Your Yield. Each section should integrate secondary keywords: 'urban organic gardening,' 'small garden tools,' 'best plants for small gardens,' 'natural pest control,' and 'increasing garden yield,' respectively. Conclude with a summary and a CTA encouraging readers to share their small space gardening tips."

Example prompt 2: Keyword optimization

"Write an informative article on 'Top SEO Strategies for 2024,’ ensuring the primary keyword 'SEO strategies 2024’ appears in the introduction, at least three subheadings, and the conclusion. Use secondary keywords 'keyword research,' 'mobile optimization,' 'voice search SEO,' and 'content marketing trends' in different sections to structure the article. Each section should provide detailed insights and practical tips while not using the main keyword too much. Include bullet points for key tips and end with a compelling CTA to subscribe for more SEO insights."

Example prompt 3: Requesting structured content

"Produce a comprehensive post on 'How to Create Engaging Content for Social Media.' The content should start with an introduction emphasizing the importance of engagement on social media platforms. The body should be divided into sections covering 'Understanding Your Audience,' 'Crafting Captivating Headlines,' 'Using Visuals to Enhance Posts,' 'Incorporating Hashtags Effectively,' and 'Engaging with Your Community.' Each section should start with a subheading and include bullet points for the main tips. Conclude with a summary reiterating the value of engagement and a CTA encouraging readers to implement these strategies in their next social media post."

Conclusion

Careful prompt crafting enables the AI to generate high-quality, SEO-optimized content, paving the way for improved visibility and reader engagement. Use this guide as your roadmap to SEO content writing excellence, harnessing AI tools as valuable assets in your digital marketing endeavors.

The post Perfect prompts: 10 tips for AI-driven SEO content creation appeared first on Yoast.