SEO blog

Link building remains the SEO industry’s white elephant. Many proclaim that link building is spammy, dead, and even harmful to your SEO. But link building remains a primary part of an effective performance-based SEO strategy. And when executed properly contributes to higher organic search rankings. I recently gave a presentation at YoastCon 2019 outlining my …

Once upon a time, there was this woman – let’s call her Mia – and she wanted to write beautiful stories for her blog. Mia noticed she was not getting much traffic from Google, while other bloggers seemed to attract a lot of visitors. She wondered what she was doing wrong. One day, at a …

Once upon a time, there was a little robot who came to a website to try to figure out what it was all about. The robot read some words and followed some links and thought: “Well, there are a lot of mentions of this particular word, so the page must be about that!” She sent …

Structured data is incredibly important. Many of the current and future search enhancements are — or will be — powered by structured data. While search engines are good at reading content, structured data can help them to understand. Yoast SEO has supported some basic Schema markup for ages, but now we’re going much further. Yoast …

It can be hard to pick the right tags for a post. But they are important and that’s why we’ll explain how you can choose them. One of the most difficult things to do, as your site becomes bigger, is creating and maintaining a logical site structure. Tags and categories can help create that structure, …

When working with Google Analytics, you do not always want to stick with just a secondary dimension. Sometimes, you also want a third and fourth dimension. But in Google Analytics’s standard reports, that’s not possible. And the custom reports you can create in Google Analytics are very satisfying to look at. Maybe it’s my perfectionism …

Cornerstone articles should be the best and most complete articles on your website. That means that you should make an effort to make this article as awesome as possible. Raise your normal standards and write extraordinary cornerstones. To help you create excellent cornerstone articles, we developed a special cornerstone analysis. Why do you need a separate analysis? …

If you have a restaurant and a restaurant website to go with it, you might want to read this article. We have covered a lot of topics on this website already, but we’ve decided to focus a bit more on specific types of websites in a number of posts. In this post, we discuss what you need …

A while back we released Yoast SEO 9.0. This was a huge release for us, as we made our SEO analysis smarter. Thanks to something called stemming, i.e. breaking words down to their smallest form to do complex analysis on, we can now detect word forms. Since then, improving your content has become a much …

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 …