In honor of the new Yoast Google+ page, I’ve taken questions there which I’ll answer here, so everyone can benefit. Do you think the increased number of metatags released by Google are good for webmasters and the web, or just making things more complicated for the amateur so only those that can afford SEO consultancy…
SEO Ranking Data: Tracking Passively and Actively
People ask me at times whether I talk about SEO ranking data with my clients and/or monitor it for them. In almost all cases I do monitor it, in some cases, we talk about them, in a lot of cases we don’t, as it’s just not that reliable of a metric. On the other hand, with…
Questions and Answers
Last sunday evening I started taking questions on my Facebook page, and I promised to answer them in a blog post here, so here we go: If I have just made changes to my WP site, does it help to toggle the cache plugin? Absolutely. My SEO plugin force refreshes the cache because otherwise people…
Google & Privacy…
Google announced some changes today, in that they’ll enable SSL for all logged in users because of “privacy concerns”. I think that reason is bull, and wrote a guest post about it on SEObook.
rel=”next” & rel=”prev” for paginated archives
Google is once again showing why standards compliant building might be very beneficial for SEO. They have started to use rel=”next” and rel=”prev”, both part of HTML4 and HTML5, to recognize archives and paged articles. Just yesterday I was having a discussion with Nathan Rice, on of the developers of Genesis over how one should deal…
rel=”author” and rel=”me” in WP and other platforms
The recent changes from Google and my post about it regarding the highlighting of authors in search caused quite a few questions. People have been asking me how to do specific things and how to make certain elements contain rel=”author” or rel=”me”. Instead of replying to each of those emails and comments I decided to write one…
Link Building Tips that Work
You might recall that I’ve written a Link Building 101 article not so long ago. Since then, I’ve had quite a few people asking me for link building tips, advice, tricks, etc. I’ll tell you now: I’m not the one to ask. I have ideas about it, of course, but my methods don’t work for…
XML Sitemap PHP script
Recently, while working on the site for my father in law (in Dutch), I wanted to create an XML sitemap for the many publications on his site, that are downloadable PDF’s. I regularly add PDF’s to his site too, and since I’m a tad bit lazy I don’t want to keep updating the XML sitemap. So…
Meta Keywords: why I don’t use them
There is one question about SEO which seems to be coming up time and time again, so let me answer it now and be done with it. Meta Keywords are useless. No search engine uses them for any real rankings. That is why by default, there is no meta keywords input field in my WordPress…
Archive SEO: archive by topic, not by date
It seems I run into a (WordPress) blog every day that has a full date archive. You’ll know what I mean, a list of links, with one link for every month in the last 3, 4, X years that they published a post in. My buddy Avinash has one (sorry Avinash for using you as…
