SEO basics archives

The permalink is the full URL you see – and use – for any given post, page or other pieces of content on your site. It’s a permanent link, hence the name permalink. It could include your domain name (www.yoast.com) plus what’s called a slug, the piece of the URL that comes after the domain …

You’ve probably heard that keyword research is an essential first step in optimizing your website. But what exactly is a keyword? And what is the difference between a keyword and a keyphrase? In this SEO basics post, we’ll explain the difference between the two. What is a keyword? A (focus) keyword is a word that …

Google Search Console (or ‘GSC’ for short) lets webmasters monitor and manage their websites through an official portal, which is full of useful statistics. To have access to tools and data provided directly by the search engines can make optimizing your website much easier! But what is it, exactly? It’s a communication channel Search Console accounts …

“If you want your posts to rank, you should write about long-tail keywords”. You’ve probably seen this common SEO advice before. But what do we mean by long-tail keywords? And why should you write about them? Here, we’ll explain what long-tail keywords are and how they can help you rank. Including examples! What are long-tail keywords? …

Before Google can rank your content, it needs to discover it, be permitted and able to evaluate it, and index it. If any of these processes go wrong, you might find that your pages don’t show up in the search results. Most of the time, you can rely on Google to correctly index your content, all by itself. …

You likely type dozens of queries into your favorite search engine every day. But have you ever realized the significance of all these searches? Figuring out what people are looking for on the internet is one of the key points of SEO. So, what should you know about the starting point of each online search, …

Every page on the web has an address, a URL, which stands for ‘Uniform Resource Locator’. Sometimes, content moves from one URL to another URL. That’s when you need a redirect. A redirect automatically makes a browser go from one URL to another URL. A redirect can point to any other URL: it doesn’t need …

You’ve probably come across the term duplicate content quite a lot, but what is it? Duplicate content is content that lives in several locations — i.e., URLs. It can harm your rankings and many people say that copious amounts of it can even lead to a penalty by Google. That’s not true, though. There is …

WordPress is a CMS, which stands for Content Management System. Starting out as a blog platform, it’s now widely used to build websites of all sorts and types. The platform’s popularity is mostly attributed to the fact that it’s free, but certainly also to its ease of use, ease of extension and search engine friendly …

Yesterday, Yoast Academy released a new and improved Basic SEO course. But wait, didn’t Yoast release a free SEO for beginners course just a couple of months ago? Yes, we did. So what’s the difference? Doesn’t the SEO for beginners training also cover the basics? Why should you pay for access to the Basic SEO …