Technical SEO archives

We’ve just released a major release of Yoast SEO, bringing it up to version 2.3. This new version of Yoast SEO helps you optimize your site and keep it optimized. It shows errors straight from Google’s Search Console, and points you at posts that need work. But first of all, we’ve changed the name! WordPress SEO …

Both WordPress SEO Premium and the free version of WordPress SEO have been updated to version 2.2. This new release brings quite a few changes and some nice new additions. We’ll explain the changes in this post. Security fixes This release contains a fix for a potential XSS issue in the admin, specifically the snippet preview. It was caused by issues …

A month ago Google introduced its Panda 4.0 update. Over the last few weeks we’ve been able to “fix” a couple of sites that got hit in it. These sites both lost more than 50% of their search traffic in that update. When they returned, their previous position in the search results came back. Sounds too good to be …

As I announced yesterday on the Dradcast, we released a new version of WordPress SEO premium. This is another feature packed update with a lot of things people had been asking us for. Let me go through the list of new features: Import redirects from your .htaccess file If you have a lot of redirects …

The plugin I have been talking about for far too long has finally been finished and released. The short version is, it’s for sale for $89, find out more about our Video SEO Plugin. Keep on reading for a bit of backstory. Video SEO is probably one of the most technically challenging aspects of SEO. …

Google is once again showing why standards compliant building might be very beneficial for SEO. They have started to use rel="next" and rel="prev", both part of HTML4 and HTML5, to recognize archives and paged articles. A few years back, I was having a discussion with Nathan Rice, one of the developers of Genesis over how one …

An HTML sitemap (as opposed to an XML sitemap) is often mentioned as being useful for SEO. They certainly are if you use them wisely (and especially Bing seems to like them at times), but I like them even more for the fact that users like them a lot. There’s plenty of plugins out there …

Every once in a while I get an email about W3C validation. The people emailing me either point me at the fact that my own site doesn’t validate correctly (thank Facebook for most of that), or they ask me whether I think W3C Validation is important. Most of them ask even more specifically: whether I …

Update: Curious how it all started? This is the launch post of yoast.com by Joost. One for the books ;-) After a couple of years on joostdevalk.nl, I’ve decided it was time to do a couple of things at the same time: redesign to a more professional look move to a .com domain and US …

A friend of mine was adding a shopping cart to his site, and wanted some advice on how to optimize his shopping cart. I thought: why not give the advice I gave to him to all my readers as well? So here we go, a complete article on shopping cart SEO. Step 1: Make sure …