SEO basics archives

Recent SEO basics articles


What is the difference between tags and categories?

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 …

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What is the difference between tags and categories?

What is thin content?

1 March 2018 | 31 Comments Marieke van de Rakt

At Yoast, we like to say ‘Content is king.’ By this, we mean that you cannot rank for any keyword if you don’t write meaningful and original content about it. In this SEO basics post, I’ll explain why you absolutely need content to make your site attractive for your visitors. Also, I’ll clarify why Google …

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What is thin content?

Elements of the Google Search Engine Results Page

26 February 2018 | 20 Comments Marieke van de Rakt

Everybody knows what the Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP) looks like. We’ve all been there. We cross that page with every search we do. Still, the page can look rather different depending on what you’re searching for. And, which of those results are paid for and which are not – the organic ones? In …

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Elements of the Google Search Engine Results Page

What is off-page SEO?

25 January 2018 | 29 Comments Edwin Toonen

Off-page SEO is about everything that doesn’t happen directly on your website. Optimizing your website is called on-page SEO and includes things like site structure, content and speed optimizations. Off-page SEO is about, among other things, link building, social media, and local SEO. Or in other words, generating traffic to your site and making your …

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What is off-page SEO?


What is Googlebot?

21 November 2017 Edwin Toonen

Whenever we think of Googlebot, we see a cute, intelligent Wall-E-like robot speeding off on a quest to find and index knowledge in all corners of yet unknown worlds. It’s always slightly disappointing to be reminded that Googlebot is ‘only’ a computer program written by Google that crawls the web and adds pages to its …

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What is Googlebot?



What are ranking signals?

4 September 2017 | 5 Comments Marieke van de Rakt

Ranking signals or ranking factors are characteristics of a website that determine the position in the search engines. All ranking signals combined form the algorithm of a search engine. How this algorithm works is a secret. Nobody knows exactly which factors decide the order of the search results. Google’s algorithm isn’t static. It changes regularly. The …

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What are ranking signals?