SEO basics archives

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 …

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 …

A content delivery network (CDN) is a network of servers in different geographic locations working together to get content to load faster by serving it from a location near the visitor. Here, I’ll explain what this all means and what a CDN can do for you and your SEO. What does a CDN do? A …

We’ve added a free course to our curriculum of online SEO courses. It is an SEO course for beginners. If you’re an SEO-newbie or your SEO skills have become a bit rusty, then this is the course for you! Our free online SEO course offers lots and lots of training videos, reading material and challenging …

HTTP/2 is a newish protocol for transporting data that will drastically speed up the web and can help your SEO. The ‘old’ HTTP1.1 protocol only allows web servers to send files down a single line one at a time, and that line has to open and close after each file has been sent – a …

Crawl errors occur when a search engine tries to reach a page on your website but fails. Let’s shed some more light on crawling first. Crawling is the process where a search engine tries to visit every page of your website via a bot. A search engine bot finds a link to your website and starts to find …

Tags and categories help us structure our content. You can often find these in the visual metadata at for instance blog posts, or in a list of clickable links in the sidebar of a website. Tags are sometimes represented as a tag cloud, although most websites refrain from using that element these days. There is …