SEO Basics archives - Page 2 of 6

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. …

Not sure why you’re not ranking #1 for your focus keywords in Google? You might just be making one of the mistakes a lot of site owners make. Here at Yoast we’ve seen and reviewed a great deal of websites. Many sites, from the small local businesses to the big corporate ones, are making similar …

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, …

Users expect websites to be fast. As the world becomes increasingly mobile, and as consumers expect services to be on-demand and seamlessly delivered, having a poor site speed can seriously impact your SEO. Google understands that the time it takes for a page to load is a key part of the overall user experience. Waiting for …

Site structure is a vital aspect of your SEO strategy. The structure of your website shows Google which pages of your site are most important. This means you can influence which articles will rank highest in the search engines with your site’s structure. So, better get it right! It’s also a very actionable part of …

The snippet is a single search result in a set of search results and generally consists of a title, a URL and a description of the page. The content of a snippet matches parts of the search query and you’ll see your keyword highlighted in the snippet description. Search engines often use pieces of your …

As a website gets bigger, it’s often hard to prevent pages from becoming duplicates or near-duplicates of each other. This can cause duplicate content issues. If you have two similar pages, and they are both eligible to rank for a certain keyphrase, the search engine simply doesn’t know which of the two URLs it should …

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 …

Once you finish a Yoast Academy SEO training course, you get a shiny certificate of completion and a badge you can embed on your site or share on social media. In this way, you can let everyone know about your newly acquired SEO expertise. Awesome! But how useful is SEO training certification, really? Does it …

In SEO, we often talk about creating the right slug for a page. But what is this really? And why should you optimize it? In this post, we’ll explain all you need to know about it. What is a slug? A slug is the part of a URL which identifies a particular page on a …