Data-driven attribution can have a BIG impact on your ad spend, strategy, and ROI.
However, even with an advanced analytics setup, companies are still coming face-to-face with the modern attribution dilemma. How? Well, take this example. Karen has browsed your website 4 times over the past 3 months looking for a new vacuum.…
http://ift.tt/2pUa0RQ Amazon Alexa and Google Home have the same problem: they can do some really clever things that make them feel “real” to us, but the illusion is easily shattered. You might think “So what? That’s Amazon’s and Google’s problem.” But the thing is you need this, too.
Smart Speakers Aren’t All That Smart
I can say, “Alexa, who am I?” She’ll say back, “You told me your name is Chris.” I can then say, “Alexa, my son’s name is Harold.” She will say: “Sorry. I can’t help you with that.” Meaning that the information really has nowhere to go. But this context is important. Let me explain out.
With the holiday season now mostly behind us, many owners of online shops are probably still recovering from this very busy time. Many businesses offer special, holiday-themed products and gifts during this season. But how to handle the product pages of holiday gift sets after the holidays are over?
Even if the gift set or product was a great success, and you want to offer it again next year, it’ll be a long while until the page is relevant again. So, what’s the best way to deal with these pages in the meantime? Let’s get into that in this Ask Yoast!
Marek emailed his question on this subject:
‘I want to offer special gift sets for different holidays. What to do with them after the special is over? Should I archive or redirect them?’
Watch the video or read the transcript further down the page for my answer!
Holiday gift sets after the holidays“Well, it really depends if you’re going to offer that special gift set again next year. And I’m guessing you’re going to if it worked out. In that case, I would probably keep the pages up. You might want to make them less visible to people just browsing your site. But having the page there, even when it’s not linked for a while, and then linking to it again, when you’re back in the season is better than deleting it and making a new one next year.
So, keep it up, and make sure that it has a slightly timeless content, so that if someone wants to order a Christmas box in March, they can… Why wouldn’t you allow that? So that’s how we would treat it. Good luck!”
In the series Ask Yoast we answer SEO questions from our readers. Have an SEO-related question? Let us help you out! Send an email to ask@yoast.com.
(Note: please check our blog and knowledge base first, the answer to your question may already be out there! For urgent questions, for example about our plugin not working properly, we’d like to refer you to our support page.)
http://ift.tt/2ls2LLkA year always seems like such a long time. But whenever we reach the end of one, we tend to say: where did it go? That’s definitely the case for developing and using software. We’re so invested in Yoast SEO that we sometimes forget when we added a feature because we use it so much. So, now’s the perfect time to give you a brief overview of the evolution of Yoast SEO in 2017. Enjoy!
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To celebrate, we’re having an end of the year sale. Get all our products at 10% off!
Yoast year in review2017 started off with a bang: we added a mobile version of the well-known snippet preview and full support for the German language. We all know mobile has only gained importance this past year and will continue to be essential. Just look at Google’s decision to switch to a mobile-first index sometime early next year.
A strong focus on site structureThe overarching theme of Yoast SEO in 2017 was site structure. We wanted to give you a set of tools to improve your site structure since site structure is one of the most overlooked, but critical parts of SEO. We wanted to build tools that are easy to use and extremely valuable. We’re happy to say we’ve succeeded! During the year, several improvements to current tools and new additions turned Yoast SEO into a fantastic tool to improve your site structure.
Vastly improved internal linking toolIt all started in Yoast SEO 4.0, in December of 2016, when we launched the initial version of the internal linking tool. So what does the internal linking tool do? While working on your post, our internal linking tool will give you suggestions on which posts you could consider linking to because they are about related topics. Linking to these posts will help you create a better site structure.
To quote our CEO Joost de Valk:
New languages“The internal linking tool is one of the most powerful tools we’ve ever built, and it keeps surprising me. I love it. In its current form, it’ll allow you to improve your site structure by the bucketload, just by suggesting posts to link to. I am very excited about where it will go from here!”
During the year we added several new languages to our roster. Besides English, we added full support for German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian and French in 2017. Yoast SEO has full knowledge of these languages so the internal linking tool and readability tools can give solid advice tailored to those languages. In 2018, more languages will follow. Our linguists are even looking into complicated languages like Japanese.
Text link counterAs we all know, links – both internal and external – play an important role in SEO. This year, Yoast SEO received several tools that help improve your linking strategy. Since 4.7, for instance, we check the text to see if you’ve added links. If not, the SEO content check will give you a red bullet. If all is well, Yoast SEO will suggest relevant links to other articles you’ve written, and you can just copy and past a new link in your article.
The text link counter, introduced in Yoast SEO 5.0, works in the post and pages section of your WordPress backend. In two columns, you’ll see how many incoming and outgoing internal links an article has. This functionality is very actionable. If you want to improve your site structure and your SEO, the text link counter will help you do that. You can go through your post with few links and improve your site’s structure step by step.
Orphaned content, you say? Yes, orphaned content is content on your site that doesn’t get any links from other parts of your site. Content that doesn’t get links will stay undiscovered by visitors and search engines. But if a certain article is important to you and you want it to rank for a specific keyword, you need to link it in your site structure. In Yoast SEO 5.6, we added a filter that finds these articles so that you can quickly remedy this situation and add these valuable articles to your site structure.
Checking and optimizing cornerstone contentWhile and finding and creating relevant links to your other content is crucial to building a solid site structure, there was another piece of the site structure missing: cornerstone content. Cornerstone content pieces are those articles on your website you’re most proud of. They reflect your business, communicate your mission, are thorough and extremely well written. These are the articles you would like to rank high in the search engines.
To help you determine what those articles are, we introduced several cornerstone content features. First, there’s the cornerstone content check in Yoast SEO 4.6. By marking an article as cornerstone content, this article receives priority over a regular article. These articles are analyzed more thoroughly to increase the chance of them popping up as must-link articles.
In Yoast SEO 4.8 we expanded that feature. Since then, we analyze your cornerstone content following a particular, stricter set of specifications. These checks will help you build killer cornerstone articles. Among other things, we now check if a cornerstone article has 900+ words and if the keyword is in at least two subheadings. All this will help you to improve your most important content.
This suite of site structure tools gives you everything you need to improve your site structure. Use them!
So what else was new?Besides helping you fix your site structure, we did loads of other cool stuff. Let’s go!
Redirect improvementsOur redirects manager is one of the most important tools in Yoast SEO. It helps you redirect anything you ever wanted. This year, we improved it drastically, with new filter options and a long-awaited import/export from/to CSV. You can analyze your redirects in a sheet, make edits and import it again.
SEO rolesYoast SEO was always an on/off affair. There was no way to give site editors, for instance, access to selected parts of the plugin they need to do their work. Since Yoast SEO 5.5, that is now possible! Expanded in 5.8, SEO roles and capabilities give site managers to chance to fine-tune who gets to access what in Yoast SEO.
Tune Yoast SEO to your likingGetting lost in all the Yoast SEO settings? Don’t need the readability analysis? Just want the basic settings? No problem, an ever-increasing number of features in Yoast SEO gets their own on/off toggle. Keep your workspace clean and focused.
At Yoast, we care about a lot of things, but two things in a very particular order: user happiness first, developer happiness second. A user is happy when he or she has a fast, easy to install, secure content management system like WordPress to build a site in. A developer is happy when he or she can use a modern language and modern tooling to build software with. That’s why we started the Whip project in March of 2017. The goal of this project is to steer users and web hosts away for unsupported PHP versions like 5.4 and move them towards the fast and secure PHP7.
Full support for ACF2017 was also the year of an awesome collaborative effort: The ACF Content Analysis for Yoast SEO plugin. The Advanced Custom Fields plugin makes it easier to add custom fields to any WordPress site. Custom fields are used to extend WordPress. People use them to build tailored solutions to, often, complex problems. The ACF Content Analysis for Yoast SEO plugin makes it possible for Yoast SEO to work inside custom fields. By using this plugin, you can use the SEO and readability analysis features of Yoast SEO to check your writing and SEO score, even if they live in a complex custom field.
Vastly improved code-baseThis year was not all about new features. We’ve been hard at work improving our code to make our plugins future-proof and easier to manage. One of the biggest project at Yoast right now is project Reactify. We are in the process of rebuilding several main parts of Yoast SEO in the JavaScript library React. This makes these easier to port to other platforms, for instance.
Yoast SEO for Magento 2 & TYPO3Yoast was built for an open source world, and we’re branching out to other open CMSes. This year, we introduced the Magento 2 and TYPO3 communities to the pleasures of working with Yoast SEO. Together with our development partner MaxServ, we built tailored plugins for these popular platforms. We’re already looking where to go next.
Ending 2017 with Yoast SEO 6.0In a year spanning more than 30 releases, the last one was maybe the most talked about. Not that we introduced a killer new feature or did something awkward. No, it was all about Google’s decision to move from 160 character meta descriptions to 320 character descriptions. This caused quite a stir and people were quickly asking whether Yoast SEO would follow suit and let people use all those characters. In Yoast SEO 6.0, we expanded the length of descriptions. We, however, are still researching what this decision means for the advice we give our users.
Thanks to you, our beloved community contributorsIn the end, we couldn’t have done it without you. We love getting input, feedback, bug reports and features requests. Almost every release featured a community contribution, either bug fixes or improving the flow of our plugin. We love getting these suggestions, and we love to see how much thought and care people put in their work. Collectively, we make Yoast SEO better and better!
And 2018?We’ve got loads of plans for the new year, but first, we’ve got to get a new speed bump out of the way. You know that word? It starts what a ‘G’ and ends with ‘utenberg’. Yeah, Gutenberg is going to take up a lot of our time. We’re pretty optimistic about the project, and we are doing our best to help improve where we can. We’re investing loads of time and manpower to get Gutenberg off the ground and make a killer integration for Yoast SEO. Stay tuned; you’re bound to hear a lot from us in 2018!
http://ift.tt/2liLViDWhat are some unconventional ways of creating data visualizations?
When Sayf (our director of Analytics) asked this question recently – I found myself instantly thinking of D3.js. D3 is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data.
Why use D3.js?… http://ift.tt/2E8gVtBUnderstanding where and why your users convert is important. Each and every user journeys through different channels and interacts with your brand both on- and offline before making a final decision. In this post, you’ll learn all about Google’s attribution models and how they can impact your marketing strategy.…
http://ift.tt/2pSfVXd Here are the notes from the Chris Brogan Media broadcast for 12/28/17. (You can watch this on my Facebook account).
The goal of these posts is that there are trends and ideas here that might impact your business now or soon. Think on the stories here and look for ways to adjust your business accordingly. If ever you’re stuck, get in touch with me and I can help.
Yoast Academy is our online SEO courses platform. We’ve been working on our online SEO courses for almost two and a half years now. In 2017, we’ve added some new courses to the curriculum and updated some of the older content. More importantly, we’ve made big plans for new courses and formats for the new year! In this post, I want to look back at Yoast Academy in 2017. But most of all: I want to look forward to what’s just around the corner!
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To celebrate, we’re having an end of the year sale. Get all our products at 10% off!
New courses this yearWe’ve created some great new courses last year. We’ve released two technical SEO courses. Our Technical SEO course teaches you all the basic technical stuff one needs to know in order to do SEO. And, our structured data course helps you get those rich snippets in order so you stand out from the other search results. The heartwarming response we get from people taking our courses inspires us, even more, to invest in Yoast Academy. So in 2017, a fresh start has been made by changing to a different learning management system.
The learning environment we use for Yoast Academy has gone through the most significant change this year. Course structures were simplified so that lessons are easier to find and distractions are kept to a minimum. We also introduced a brand new customer portal this year, called MyYoast. Courses can now be accessed with a MyYoast account, which means no separate login is needed anymore. MyYoast also makes it a lot easier to manage different courses you have purchased, for example when appointing courses to specific employees.
Another change we’re pretty fond of is the greater range of question types now available for the end-of-course quizzes. This makes for a more meaningful learning experience, as you’re not just asked to repeat information. Some of the new question types require you to show you actually understand what you’ve learned. All in all, we’re off to a great start in making Yoast Academy even more awesome!
This January might already mark the most significant change of the year when the Academy team doubles in size! Jesse and Martijn have been in charge of improving and creating SEO courses up till now and will be joined by two new members of Team Yoast: Maartje and Fleur. There is no shortage of ambition and inspiration for Yoast Academy in 2018! The changes made in 2017 enable us to achieve so much more in the future.
Our ambition is for Yoast Academy to be the go-to place for learning about SEO. Obviously, there’s a great deal you can learn from reading blog posts on SEO topics. We should know as we publish quite a lot of those! The online courses in Yoast Academy make you zoom in and focus on all aspects of a subject and help you understand them in a logical order. So, if you’re looking to learn the ins and outs of a specific SEO subject, Yoast Academy is your place to be.
With our team doubling in capacity and the preparations made in 2017, we’re ready to make some great changes to the Academy. We’re renewing parts of courses, adding new questions and of course: developing brand new courses. We can’t wait to show you and promise we’ve got news soon. See you in 2018!
http://ift.tt/2CderfnAs the year is about to end, all I can say is that 2017 is one of the most important years of SEO Hacker. As we are about to end our seventh year, we have had some posts that can be considered to be our most popular for the year. Each of these months have given us an article that SEO professional and beginners alike have found very informative and insightful.
With the new year about to arrive in a few days, let’s take a look back at some of the best articles for each month of 2017. Some of these include SEO tool reviews, Google tutorials, and even Google news and updates. This is also a great reading list before the year ends, and helps you prepare for 2018, which would be another big year for SEO.
January
Google’s Mobile Interstitials Penalty has Begun
Google’s emphasis on mobile website use and accessibility has been running during most of the year, with updates and announcements that ensure that mobile websites, function properly for the benefit of users. This article talks about how Google penalizes intersitials, which hamper the user experience, and make it difficult for a lot of people to access mobile home pages.
February
AMP Content Links Spread Outside of Search Results
Accelerated Mobile Pages have become the main platform for more websites, as it helps these websites load faster, and become more accessible on mobile devices. This article is about how AMP sites help create a better user experience, along with the use of Accelerated Mobile Links, which helps access other AMP sites better.
March
What We Think Link Building Will Be Like in 2018
Link building strategies have changed and evolved over the past few years, but it remains an essential element in the SEO process. This article look at how link building could possibly look like by the time 2018 rolls in.
April
How HTTPS Affects SEO and Why You Should Make the Move
HTTPS sites have been on the rise in the past year, and more sites have moved to it to improve their performance. This article proves that the number of search results from websites that use HTTPS have been increasing.
May
Advanced SEO Techniques to Improve Your Site Traffic
Increasing site traffic is one of the main goals in SEO, and there are many ways to accomplish this. This article is about the use of advanced SEO practices on how to improve your site traffic.
June
Bad SEO: Never Do This with Your Internal Link Structure
Bad SEO practices are often the ones that can get you penalized by Google, or the ones that would not be able to generate the results that you want. Here is an article about what are the things that you should not do with your internal link structure.
July
5 CRO Mistakes That Need to Be Fixed!
Conversion rate optimization is a key element in good SEO, as it helps a business generate possible sales. However, there are many mistakes and missteps that one can do when it comes to CRO, and here is the article that would help you know more about them.
August
Google Search Console Tutorial: Crawl
As a part of the Google Search Console tutorial series, this article talks about crawl, and how does it help make SEO work. Crawl rate is one of the things that help get your web pages more traction, and this tutorial shows you how to do it.
September
How to Determine Low-Quality Pages on Your Site
Good SEO means creating or optimizing webpages that are high quality, which helps generate more internet traffic and improves the user experience. This article shows you how to look out for low quality pages on your website, and how to improve them.
October
How to Prevent and Protect yourself from Negative SEO
Negative SEO is still one of the biggest industry concerns, as there are many websites that use negative SEO practices. This article will provide you some steps and procedures on how to prevent it, and protect your website.
November
Google Vince and Venice: How These Two Updates Changed the SEO Landscape
Google updates their search engine on a regular basis, some of which can be small fixes, while some bring about massive changes. These two updates have changed how SEO works for both local and corporate sectors.
December
Good Content Marketing Means Avoiding These Types of Content
Content marketing is an SEO essential, as website content is one way to generate more search and internet traffic. There are types of content that bring about the best results, and help your website get up in the search rankings. This article talks about what kind of content to avoid in order to create a better content marketing strategy.
http://ift.tt/2zHI2IBWith 2018 just around the corner, it’s time to look back at yet another amazing year at Yoast. We’ve made some excellent improvements to Yoast SEO and released a bunch of new awesome online SEO courses. Team Yoast has been to lots and lots of conferences. We’ll write separate blog posts to look back at all those things. But as a company, and an employer, Yoast has done a great many things in 2017 as well! Let’s take a look at everything that happened at the Yoast offices in 2017.
To celebrate, we’re having an end of the year sale. Get all our products at 10%% off!
We made a Yoast infographic!To give you an idea what Yoast looks like in numbers, we put a lot of them in an overview. The article continues below the infographic:
The biggest change in 2017 is the number of colleagues we have. At our office in Wijchen, we are now with 50 colleagues (and already doing interviews to hire more :-)). In 2017, we welcomed over twenty awesome new people at our Yoast office. On top of that, we hired six new support engineers from all over the planet! We also decided to sponsor two important WordPress icons –Alain Schlesser and Remkus de Vries-, to make sure they continue their awesome work for WordPress core and the WordPress community.
As our company is growing really fast, we organized lots of events to get to know each other. We have our famous ‘Know your colleague-quiz’, in which we ask all kinds of random questions (what’s your favorite color, what kind of sports did you play when you were a child) about all of the people at Yoast. The colleague that knew most answers (way to go, Ben!) won an amazing price. We also had BBQs, went cycling, bowling, celebrated birthdays, Sinterklaas and Christmas. And on December 27th, we’ll have our annual LEGO building day. We’re planning to build 100.000 bricks of LEGO in one day. That’s teambuilding at Yoast!
As Team Yoast continued to grow, our Wijchen office was getting too crowded. We decided to open a second office (building #2) in Wijchen, just around the corner from building #1. There was a big celebration when we opened our new office. We drank champagne, did a real skippy ball race and a had running contest. It took some getting used to, but we’re now all taking frequent walks between buildings #1 and #2 for meetings, coffee or lunch. And, if construction goes well, in spring 2018, building #3 will be opened. The city center of Wijchen has a lot of Yoasters walking around!
To many of the activities we undertake at Yoast, we let people bring their partners and children. Most of our colleagues do not have families of their own yet. Some of them even live with their parents. We therefore decided to organize an event, to which everyone could bring their parents: ‘bring your parents to work -day’.
We showed the parents around, told them what we’re working at and explained about our products and the growth of our company. It was great fun to meet everyone’s parents. Next year, we’ll definitely organize another ‘bring your parents to work-day’. We’ll do a bit rebranding and make it an even more inclusive event: the ‘bring your family to work-day’. Some of the little brothers felt left out ;-).
5 years since Yoast hired first employeesIn 2012 Yoast hired the first employees. Most of them still work with us today. That’s so very special to us! Of course Michiel started out as an employee in 2012, but quickly became one of the co-owners at Yoast. Mijke and Erwin were our 3th and 4th employee’s in 2012 and celebrated their 5th anniversary at Yoast this fall. We gave them special editions of Newton’s cradle to put on their desk. These cradles should remind everyone how much we love and value the people that work at Yoast. We hope they’ll all celebrate their 5th anniversary with us!
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http://ift.tt/2C42nOd2018 is approaching rapidly. Time to look back at yet another awesome year at Yoast. A year in which we attended quite the number of conferences. In this post, we’ll give you an impression of a few of the conferences we have been to, cities we’ve visited and friends we’ve made! So, without further ado, these are the events we attended in 2017. Bring on 2018!
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As always, the new year hasn’t really started until we had our infamous Yoast New Year party. Turning the office into a dance hall, we partied with our closest friends as only Yoasters can party!
There ain’t no party like a Yoast party!
As always, the first conference of the season was PHPBenelux in Antwerp. We’re regulars at this conference because it always offers excellent talks by renowned speakers, amazing socials, and a unique theme. This year our developers when into ‘space’ to learn all about PHP.
Just a week later and only 50 kilometers further south was FOSDEM. This huge free conference is drawing thousands of Open Source developers and enthusiasts to Brussels. It’s a great place to make and meet friends from a wide variety of communities, unlike most conference aimed at a particular audience. This year, we focussed on learning in the PHP and JavaScript tracks.
While we mostly go to WordCamps to share knowledge and to meet our old and future friends, customers and business partners, attending other conferences usually has a slightly different goal; to learn. That’s also why one of our developers and our linguist (this early in 2017 it was still singular) attended CLIN27/CCL25. This conference about Computational Linguistics brings the best speakers in the field on stage.
Have you ever heard of TYPO3 Camp? Neither had we until we joined our friends at MaxServ for a weekend at TYPO3 Camp in Venlo (NL). We learned that this developer-aimed conference offers great developer talks, even if you don’t do TYPO3!
Omar presenting at TYPO3Camp.
Time for a WordCamp! Four of my colleagues flew to London for WordCamp London. This two-day conference, preceded by a contributor day, usually draws attendees and speakers from all over the world. WordCamp London is easy to travel to (and from The Netherlands even fairly cheap). Live captioning, chill-out rooms, three tracks, and a legendary party, what else would one need?
Our next stop was Iceland. Joost went to the Reykjavik Internet Marketing Conference (RIMC), an annual conference on everything internet marketing where all the world-famous marketers go to. Joost went, spoke and aced his keynote.
Yep – we all have a deep appreciation for @jdevalk – he's done a lot to professionalise SEO and increase transparency #RIMC17 https://t.co/R1lQQkFNXb
— Nick Wilsdon (@nickwilsdon) March 31, 2017
On 7 and 8 April 2017, we attended the second WordCamp Torino. A year earlier, WordCamp Torino was the very first Italian WordCamp in a very long time. Its success motivated other Italian communities to organize other WordCamps, leading to an unprecedented growth of the Italian community. And that was obvious in 2017. WordCamp Torino completely sold out and had an extensive and very successful contributor day.
Contributor day at WordCamp Torino 2017
Choosing which events to attend can be a real challenge. Especially with the number of WordCamps, even close to home. This means that we sometimes have to disappoint conference organizers, who really personally invite us to attend, or even speak at, their event. And sometimes we just have multiple events in a single weekend. This happened on April 20th – April 23rd. First, we attended Meet TYPO3 Rotterdam in the Rotterdam Zoo, a TYPO3 conference aimed at marketers. The next day, we went to both WordCamp Vienna and ReactNL.
Oh by the way, did you know that we released the very first version of Yoast SEO for TYPO3 at Meet TYPO3 Rotterdam? We did! Joost de Valk (our CEO) and Richard Haeser (lead developer of Yoast SEO for TYPO3 at MaxServ) pressed the button in the Shark Room.
Events in Q2Meet TYPO3 in the Shark Room of Rotterdam Zoo.
Traditionally, Q2 of each year is very busy regarding conferences. With four conferences in April, three in May and a massive conference in June 2017 was no different. Moving more and more of Yoast SEO into JavaScript, it made sense to be at JS Conf EU in Berlin, so Omar, Anton, and Jimmy went and learned a ton. Not just about JavaScript, but also about the city. Useful knowledge, because less than two weeks later Andy and Michiel visited the city for WordCamp Berlin!
Meanwhile, we launched Yoast SEO for Magento 2 which is why we just had to attend Meet Magento. This one-day conference in Utrecht is a real multi-track conference. It gave us a nice insight into the Magento community, and we got to meet quite a few people we already knew from the PHP and WordPress communities. It seems we’re not the only company bridging communities, which is a good thing!
The final conference of the first half of 2017 is the biggest European WordCamp of the year; WordCamp Europe. 30+ speakers, 50 organizers, almost 200 volunteers, and close to 2000 attendees traveled to Paris for the WordPress Community Summit and WordCamp Europe. And you know what, WordCamp Europe was HOT. No really, it was literally hot. That’s why we’re happy we brought our Yoast fans to Paris. Within a day, we saw so many people use them like their lives depended on ’em. Even the men and women on the live captioning team were waving all the time…
@WCEurope most used freebie I picked up at #wceu, my lovely Yoast fan – it's come in very handy, thanks! @yoast
http://pic.twitter.com/5dNTRWsxbE
— Global RT Captioning (@GRTcaptioning) June 19, 2017
You know what else was awesome at WordCamp Europe in Paris? The themed afterparty. Of course, we took that as a challenge and dressed up our entire team. What do you think, did we win this?
Like this tweet if you think team Yoast won the best costumes at the #wceu afterparty, retweet if you think we didn't. http://pic.twitter.com/CuXfGrFnVc
— Michiel (@michielheijmans) June 17, 2017
After a nice and long vacation we kicked off our conference season with a WordCamp very close to home; the very first WordCamp Nijmegen! Yoast has been actively involved in this WordCamp. We provided an organizer, several volunteers, two (!!) speakers and a whole lot of attendees. Marieke shared her knowledge on writing, and Michelle helped the attendees prevent common SEO mistakes. Both talks were very well-received!
Despite Rule of the Internet #22 and #23, not everything on the internet is copy/pasted. Some of us are really into creating new content. That’s why Erwin and Tim went to Playgrounds 2017. They’re responsible for creating all the images you can find on yoast.com, in our products and in the presentations we give. There they were introduced to new techniques, tools and a LOT of new ideas!
A busy end of the yearNovember, nearing the end of the year and the holidays, so time to slow down. Hah! No way! At Yoast, we celebrated our most conference heavy month of 2017. With ten events in just 30 days, November rocked!
The first event of November doesn’t need a lot of introduction, as we assume you’ve all heard about YoastCon. Our very own one-day SEO conference featured top-notch speakers from the SEO world, and local talent hosting sold-out workshops. More than 350 attendees saw Joost’s keynote, followed by a blazing fast, insanely inspiring talk by the Belgian Karl Gillis. For the sad few who’d to miss YoastCon we published the videos. You can find them on our YouTube channel.
And in true Yoast style, we ended YoastCon with an epic afterparty. A party that everyone involved will remember forever. We’re not going to tell you too much, but let’s just say that you never want to miss a Yoast party.
Just a couple of days after YoastCon, Joost hopped on a plane to keynote at Pubcon in Las Vegas. Pubcon is one of the largest, if not the largest, SEO and online marketing conferences in the world. His key take-aways were shared on twitter a lot.
Spending time on accessibility and UX will save you money. @jdevalk #pubcon
— Katy Katz (@katykatztx) November 8, 2017
For the first time in a long time, Yoast attended a WordCamp in Asia. Our support engineers Michael and Jerlyn went to WordCamp Manila to meet the local community. And just a couple of weeks later, Jerlyn and Rumejan, also a Yoast support engineer, went to WordCamp Kuala Lumpur to promote our brand and have a good time with the local community.s
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Meanwhile in Europe, we attended WordCamp Cologne, WordCamp Milano and Conversion Hotel. And we have to tell you about Conversion Hotel as it’s special. Conversion Hotel is a 3-day conference organized on one of the Dutch islands. Nope, not Aruba. Not Sint Maarten. It takes place on the beautiful island Texel. The conference focusses on growth strategies, conversion (what’s in a name), copywriting and psychology. An original way to kickstart your conference? How about teaching all attendees a Haka?
Learning the haka at Conversion Hotel 2017
Our linguists, Manuel and Irene, went to the 16th Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop in November. This very technical conference focussed mainly on topics like information search and the automated generation of recommendations, from music to e-Commerce.
The 10th conference we attended in November was a special WordCamp. This first edition of WordCamp Utrecht was held in the venue where WordCamp The Netherlands had been for quite a few years (until 2015). It felt so familiar that people felt at home quickly. We attended and helped out as speakers, volunteers, sponsors, and attendees.
Finishing upAnd now it is December. When you’re active in WordPress, the one event you have to follow in December is WordCamp US. Not just because it’s one of the biggest WordCamps in the world, but also because it’s where the State of the Word is held. In this annual presentation, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg reflects on the past year and looks forward to what’s coming in WordPress.
Of course, this year’s State of the Word was all about Gutenberg. So if you haven’t seen it yet, watch it today!
And what’s a better way to end our conference year than by going to the eternal city? Jimmy, Patrick, and Andrea went to Rome’s first local WordCamp where they enjoyed a great event and, almost equally important, the local culture and cuisine.
When in Rome, pose with a Roman (Andrea) at the Coliseum.
Missed us in 2017? Don’t worry! If anything, our conference year will be even more busy in 2018! And if you want to know where to find us, regularly check our calendar.
See you in 2018!
http://ift.tt/2E0xp6YIn spirit of the wonderful holidays, SEO Hacker wishes you a Merry Christmas! The holidays are the best season to spend some quality time with your friends and family, and is also a great time to take a good break and enjoy some great food and presents. Along with the wonderful gifts and food, it is also a great time to look back at all of the work that you have done during the rest of the year and see how far you have come.
For us at SEO Hacker, 2017 was truly a year where we experienced a good amount of growth, along with some challenges that helped us reach heights that we have not experienced before. This helped set us up for a 2018 that will definitely big and eventful. While you’re taking a break and looking back at all of the SEO work that you have done, here is a holiday reading list of some of our most viewed posts.
SEO Holiday Checklist: Things You Need to do Before the Year Ends
Got your all of your SEO tasks ready for the holiday season? Here’s an article that will help you track down all of the things that you need to do to have your webpages prepared for the holiday season, along with other tasks that keep your SEO running until the end of the year.
Old Is Not Always Gold: Outdated SEO Strategies You Should No Longer Use
With 2018 rolling around a few days from now, expect some of the newest SEO strategies to arrive once more. While preparing for that, here are some old SEO strategies that you should no longer use moving forward. Also in this article are new strategies that you should be using for your SEO.
SEO Summit 2017: A Recap
The 2017 SEO Summit was perhaps the largest SEO Summit to date, with some of the best SEO professionals present, along with an eager anticipating crowd excited to know more about SEO strategies, tips, and insights from them. This article shows some of the highlights of the event, along with some of the most important topics that were discussed.
Why You Need SEO: Value, Growth, and Strategy
As SEO continues to grow during each passing year, more and more business and websites would be able to make use of it to improve their rankings and visibility on the internet. Here is an article about why you would need SEO for your website and business, and what advantages and benefits that you would be able to gain from doing so. If you know SEO and what it can do, this is one article that will convince you even further.
How to Determine Low-Quality Pages on Your Site
Google has set a standard in which all pages in the internet will be assessed, which determines the website’s ranking and relevance. This article shows how you can assess page quality, and see what to do and what not to do to make your SEO strategies work.
5 Pieces of SEO Advice You Should Ignore Immediately
SEO is diverse and has a lot of techniques and strategies that help make it work well. There are many pieces of advice that you can take to help bring you success when it comes to rankings, and this article is about advice that you should avoid in order to have good SEO.
Top 5 Strategies that Will Boost Your Website’s Conversion Rates
Conversion rate is one of the most important SEO metrics that would help you assess the success of your website. This article shows you the best strategies you can use to boost your conversion rates and have successful webpages.
These articles would definitely make you have a productive and enjoyable holiday while you assess all of the things you did for SEO.
http://ift.tt/2BQS2FoWe’re quickly nearing the end of 2017. These final days of the year are for contemplating, thankfulness and optimism about what’s ahead. While we’re looking back at this past year – which has been incredible for us -, we wanted to present for your reading pleasure: the twelve most read posts of 2017. A super powerful collection of SEO knowledge. Time to start the countdown. Happy reading!
Optimize your site for search & social media and keep it optimized with Yoast SEO Premium »
We often get questions about redirects and the redirects manager. Not many people know the difference between all these codes like a 301 or a 410, so we set out to remedy that. This post gives you an overview of what a redirect is and which one you should use when. We hope this makes it a bit clearer.
Which redirect should I use? »
11: How to use the content & SEO analysis of Yoast SEOThe content and SEO analysis is a core feature of Yoast SEO. Many users will spend most of their time in the post editor, fixing the readability and SEO-scores of their articles. Doing so improves the findability and readability of your articles. This article shows you how to use it to its full potential.
How to use the content & SEO analysis of Yoast SEO »
10: 5 tips to write readable blog postsWrite for your user and use language they can understand. It’s advice you hear all the time; but what does it mean and how do you incorporate it into your work? In this post, Marieke presents five great tips to improve that next blog post you are working on.
5 tips to write readable blog posts »
9: Image SEO: Optimizing images for search enginesPart one of our Image SEO series; part two is even higher on this year’s list. Over the years, we’ve seen how vital site speed has become. One of the first things you should do to make your site faster is to optimize your images. Seems like a no-brainer, but people still seem to forget. This post explains how you so go about that.
Image SEO: Optimizing images for search engines »
8: WordPress robots.txt example for great SEOMany WordPress users seem to struggle to make sense of the robots.txt file and how it influences SEO. Well, this post explains what the best practices are for your WordPress robots.txt. Also, Joost describes how the robots.txt file was used some years ago and how it works today. A must-read!
WordPress robots.txt example for great SEO »
7: rel=canonical: the ultimate guiderel=canonical is an important tool in your SEO toolkit. It helps you determine which version of identical or similar url’s Google should index. If you’re not using it, you might be confusing Google with duplicate content and ultimately, competing with yourself. In this ultimate guide, we’ll teach you everything about rel=canonical.
rel=canonical: the ultimate guide »
6: WordPress SEO: The Definitive GuideThis is the one that started it all. Joost’s original WordPress SEO article still draws lots of visitors and rightly so; it’s an impressive piece of work. In it, you’ll find loads of tips and tricks to make your WordPress site awesome, for both visitors and search engines. Haven’t read it yet? What’s stopping you? Read it!
WordPress SEO: The Definitive Guide »
5: Image SEO: alt tag and title tag optimizationImage SEO can have a significant effect, not only on your rankings but accessibility as well. By adding the correct tag content to images, you describe what’s in them so search engines and screen readers can identify it. Find out how you can improve your image SEO.
Image SEO: alt tag and title tag optimization »
4: How to create the right meta descriptionTogether with the page title and structured data, the meta description is one of the few tools you have to make your site stand out from your competitors in the search results. You have to write an enticing text that makes it impossible for potential visitors to resist your site. How? Well, you can read all about it in this article.
How to create the right meta description »
3: How to choose the perfect focus keywordIt’s quite hard to pick a great and fitting focus keyword. Finding the right keyword might be the missing link for your SEO efforts. Joost de Valk wrote an excellent post on how to find the perfect focus keyword. He even gives you tips on how to get a sense of the search volume you can expect for a particular keyword.
How to choose the perfect focus keyword »
2: Practical tips to set up a clear text structureYou guys love practical tips. Most of the posts in this top twelve set out to answer your questions. This post surely delivers those answers since it has been in our most-read lists for some time. In this article, Marieke shows you how to create a structure in your text that makes its message clear and easy to understand.
Learn how to structure your site well with our Site structure training! »
Practical tips to set up a clear text structure »
1: What is cornerstone content?In 2017, we added lots of site structure features to Yoast SEO. One of the focus points was cornerstone content, i.e., the most important content on your site. These articles define who you are and what you offer and should, therefore, receive special attention as these are the magnets that pull in traffic from search engines. This post explains everything about cornerstone content.
Our most-read post of 2017: What is cornerstone content? »
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