A common practice for many blogs is to use date-based archives for their archive pages. These long lists of links, sorted by month and year, group posts that were made during that period. Although this initially might make sense, it can have an adverse impact on your archive pages’ SEO. Your archives could be an …
Read: "Archive SEO: archive by topic, not by date"
When we say “related posts for WordPress“, we say “bad performance”. Without using an external service like ElasticSearch, it’s practically impossible to have related posts work fast in WordPress. That’s why we’ve always stayed away from including any related posts plugin on our site. It’s also the reason we haven’t tried to come up with a solution ourselves before. In the …
Read: "We’ve created the fastest related posts ever"
Links are valuable for search engines. Therefore, it’s important to understand how Google and other search engines use links. They use the number of links pointing to a webpage to determine how important that page is. Not only external links could help in the ranking of a page in Google, but the internal links could help …
Read: "Ask Yoast: How many (internal) links on a page?"Related posts are a way to keep a visitor on your website. People use related posts to reduce the number of visitors that leave your website after reading an article. A related posts section is the glue that binds posts together. Does that mean you have to install a plugin that takes care of this for …
Read: "Related posts need to make sense, not just be there"
Your tag and category pages could be very important pages on your site. If you use these pages right, they can boost your site’s SEO. They can make great landing pages that could also prevent your individual pages from competing. You may wonder if you should also include these taxonomy pages in your XML sitemap. In this Ask …
Read: "Ask Yoast: Include taxonomies in XML sitemap?"Tags for a post can be hard to choose: in this post I’ll explain why they’re important and how to choose them. One of the hardest things as your site becomes bigger is creating and maintaining a site structure that actually makes sense. Tags and categories can help create that structure, allowing people to easily …
Read: "Tagging posts properly for users and SEO"
The one page that often seems to be forgotten in the optimization of eCommerce sites is the shop category page. We see this very often: category pages just don’t get the love they deserve. In this article, I’d like to break down the elements of a perfect category page. The shop category page: just a …
Read: "Crafting the perfect shop category page"
Without doubt the most common question we are asked is: “how do I make my site rank for keyword X?”. What most people don’t realize is that they’re asking the wrong question. You see, sites don’t rank: pages rank. If you want to rank for a particular keyword, you’ll need to determine which page you want …
Read: "Using cornerstone content to make your site rank"
It is never easy to set up a new blog. It can take quite some time to get picked up by the search engines. Nevertheless, as your blog starts to grow, you’ll probably face new SEO problems. In the upcoming weeks, I’ll discuss some of the difficulties you might encounter as your blog really starts to grow. …
Read: "The site structure of a growing blog"
If you write an amazing blog post, you’d like it to help in the ranking of your site, right? If you create awesome content, you’d like people to read it now and be able to find it and read it later. Also, you want new visitors on your site to read some of your older blog …
Read: "Blog SEO: add categories to your blog!"