Here's everything you need to know about XML sitemaps: Why you should have one, what to include and how Yoast SEO helps you generate one!
If your site has a great structure, you wouldn't need an XML sitemap. It does help Google though, to find all URLs listed on a page!
An XML sitemap helps crawlers index your content. Yoast SEO helps you determine what to show with one question: show x in search results?
An SEO Basics post about technical SEO might seem like a contradiction in terms. Nevertheless, some basic knowledge about the more technical side of SEO can mean the difference between a high ranking site and a site that doesn’t rank at all. Technical SEO isn’t easy, but here we’ll explain – in layman’s language – …
Read: "What’s technical SEO? 8 technical aspects everyone should know"
Say hi to Yoast SEO 14.7, chock-full of enhancements to help you with your site’s SEO. Have you heard about the addition of XML sitemaps in WordPress 5.5? The Yoast SEO plugin is completely prepared for this. We also have some great news for users of the Web Stories plugin. But most importantly, we’re releasing …
Read: "Yoast SEO 14.7: Smarter and faster internal linking suggestions in Premium"
Before a search engine can rank a page or a post, it needs to index it. A crawler must discover a piece of content before it can evaluate if it is a valuable addition to its index. One of the ways crawlers discover pages, is by crawling XML sitemaps. After a page has been indexed, …
Read: "Indexing in Yoast SEO: Show x in search results?"
When you roll out the red carpet on a new website, you might be expecting visitors to start coming eagerly. In reality, before people start visiting your site, search engines need to find, index and rank it. In this article, I share some tips that could help you get your site indexed faster. A quick note …
Read: "How to get your new WordPress site indexed"
It can happen to anyone: You’re working on your site, fiddling on some posts here and there, and hit update when you’re done. After a while, you check back on how a post is doing and, to your dismay, it disappeared completely from the search engines! It turns out you’ve accidentally set a post or …
Read: "Help, I’ve accidentally noindexed a post. What to do?"
A good XML sitemap acts as a roadmap of your website that leads Google to all your important pages. XML sitemaps can be good for SEO, as they allow Google to quickly find your essential website pages, even if your internal linking isn’t perfect. This post explains what they are and how they help you …
Read: "What is an XML sitemap and why should you have one?"
On March 6, we released a major update of our Yoast SEO plugin. This update was aimed at making SEO easier and more understandable for our users. We removed quite a few settings and options. In other cases, we changed the names of settings making them easier to understand for non-technical users. All in all, …
Read: "Why we changed so many things in the 7.0 update"
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"
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: "Include taxonomies in XML sitemap?"This week we had a few interesting things happening, from a potential update to some new features and an important change in Google Suggest. Let’s dive in! Google adds disambiguation to Suggest In a very interesting move this week, Google added disambiguation results to their suggest box, basically forcing you to choose for a specific topic …
Read: "Let’s disambiguate!"