In the first post of our metadata series, I discussed the meta tags in the <head> of your site. But there’s more metadata in the <head> that can influence the SEO of your site. In this second post, we’ll dive into link rel metadata. You can use link rel metadata to instruct browsers and Google, for example to point them to the AMP version …
Read: "Metadata and SEO part 2: link rel metadata"
Once your website starts growing and you continue writing blog posts, you’ll eventually end up with archive pages. These archive pages can be based on taxonomies, categories, custom post types and even dates. WordPress has built-in support for these archive pages, however there are some small drawbacks. In this post, I’ll explain to you how …
Read: "WordPress archive pages: the tutorial"
Metadata is all the information about a page that you send to a search engine that isn’t visible to your visitors. There seems to be some misunderstanding about this, as most of the articles I read about SEO metadata seem to imply that it’s just the title, description, keywords and robots declaration in the <head> of …
Read: "Metadata and SEO part 1: the head section"
At Yoast, we sometimes receive the question how to remove www from your website’s URL – or add it. In this post, I’ll show you how you can enforce either a www or non-www URL by tweaking your .htaccess file (or nginx.conf if you’re running on an Nginx server). Does using one or the other …
Read: "How to remove www from your URL"
We used to consult for sites that monetize, in part, with affiliate links. We normally advised people to redirect affiliate links. In the past, we noticed that there wasn’t a proper script available online that could handle this for us, so we created one to tackle this problem. In this post, I explain how you can …
Read: "How to cloak your affiliate links"
HTTP status codes, like 404, 301 and 500, might not mean much to a regular visitor, but for SEO’s they are incredibly important. Not only that, search engine spiders, like Googlebot, use these to determine the health of a site. These status codes offer a way of seeing what happens between the browser and the server. …
Read: "HTTP status codes and what they mean for SEO"
Fact: if your website is set up the right way, you shouldn’t need an XML sitemap at all. You shouldn’t need to think about your category’s XML sitemaps or about including images in your post’s XML sitemap. But why do we keep talking about them like it’s the most important thing ever for SEO? It’s an almost daily …
Read: "The sense and nonsense of XML sitemaps"
Traditionally, you will use a robots.txt file on your server to manage what pages, folders, subdomains or other content search engines will be allowed to crawl. But did you know that there’s also such a thing as the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header? Here, we’ll discuss what the possibilities are and how this might be a better …
Read: "Playing with the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header"
In 2015, Google Search Console already started to actively warn webmasters not to block CSS and JS files. In 2014, we told you the same thing: don’t block CSS and JS files. We feel the need to repeat this message now. In this post, we’ll explain why you shouldn’t block these specific files from Googlebot. Why you …
Read: "Don’t block CSS and JS files"
A revolution is currently going on in the underpinnings of the web. HTTP, the protocol your browser uses to connect to your site, has a new version: HTTP/2. This is not something that should concern the average user, but for web developers, it changes how we do performance optimization entirely. In this short article, I want to …
Read: "Performance optimization in an HTTP/2 world"