SEO tasks: Creation and prioritization

It can be daunting to start in search engine optimization, I can imagine. There’s so much to do, ranging from the more technical SEO tasks to more general SEO tasks and content optimization. I can create a list for your website, or for your online shop, but you might find it hard to decide where to begin. In this post, I will share some approaches to creating and prioritizing your SEO task list.

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Info SEO tasks: What to address first

Most website owners want quick wins, but I’ll go into that later. First, we need to address some low hanging SEO fruit.

What to address first?

The first of your SEO tasks is to check if both Google and other search engines can reach all relevant pages. Is there a noindex blocking any of your valuable pages? Use, for instance, Screaming Frog (entire site) or Quix (on a page level).

How’s your speed?

Do a quick check in Google PageSpeed Insights or for instance WebPageTest.org and see if browser caching and compression are used the right way. Compression can really improve your speed. Keep in mind that the rules of this game change slightly if your site is on HTTP/2.

Are you focusing on the right keywords?

Check your internal search logs (more on internal search). If any keywords surface on a regular basis, create a page for these keywords.

That’s three checks for you that can easily be done and certainly impact your SEO. There’s obviously more. Let’s start with the basics.

Cover your basics: Tell the right story

It is absolutely fine to go all out and fix all things related to SEO at once, but as we’ll probably agree, that might not be the best experience for you. It might be better to install our plugin and take our Yoast SEO plugin training and focus on what you want to tell your audience first. Depending on the outcome of that process, you can decide on further optimization.

This means that you need to look at proper keyword research and a good site structure for your website. Plus, content SEO. I linked three very nice ultimate guides for you there :) Please go and read these. With the insights these guides will give you, you can quickly create some related SEO tasks and start working on these.

Any structured data needed?

If you have set up all the right content, you have probably noticed that some of that content is presented, or ordered, in the same way. As the list of schema.org data grows, you might have struck onto something you can serve to search engines in a more structured way as well.

Please read up on how structured data is done the right way, and adjust your templates accordingly. No time to read up? We have a course for that as well: our structured data course.

By the way: Yes, I am linking some products in that post. Our mission, SEO for Everyone, makes that we have a lot of products that help you optimize your website in the most convenient way possible. Just trying to give you shortcuts here.

Further SEO tasks and maintenance

Further (technical) optimization can contain optimizing speed even more, crawl optimization and might even include getting some high-quality backlinks for your site. This is probably where the hard work starts. SEO tasks will surface unstructured from now, and new developments in search engine algorithms might require you to change the way you prioritize your SEO tasks. That’s not always a bad thing, although it can be frustrating, right?

You can find a lot of information about this process on our SEO blog. We will keep you updated, and will give you handy tips and links to further optimize your website. Please feel free to comment below if you have any questions about your current SEO tasks, what to address first or where to start in any other process after dealing with the tasks mentioned above. We’re happy to help you.

Read more: ‘How to do an SEO audit: part 1’ »

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Blogging as a Business Asset

Thanks for being at my speech today!

I want to give you the notes from my speech, but I want to trade you for it.

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Using SERPED.net for Content Management

SERPED.net has become one of the most effective SEO tools in our toolbox, as it has a wide variety of features that makes it feel like you are using more than one tool. We have done reviews for SERPED itself, along with a guide on using it for keyword research, yet there are still some features that we can still cover. If you want to try it out for yourself, here is the link to their website.

This is indicative of how much of a quality tool that SERPED.net is, giving us the best value for our money. If SERPED.net can be used for keyword research, it also can be used for content management as well. Content management is usually the next step after searching the right keywords for your website, as it help prepare for the creation of blog posts and landing pages. With that in mind, here is a simple guide on using SERPED.net for your content management needs.

Looking for your content

Creating and managing content begins with keyword research. Looking for the right keywords is a challenge, as you would have to find the right balance between searchability and competitiveness. He have covered in detail how to use SERPED for your keyword research needs, and the features allow you to be able to look for the best keywords, and see how it stacks up from the competition.

Once you have found the keywords for your website, the next step is to find the best kind of content that would benefit your users. There are some questions that you would encounter when doing this, which includes the following:

• Where can I find possible sources for my topics?
• How can I track and manage my content in WordPress?
• Would I be able to restore lost content?
• Can I check the grammar and quality of my content?

All of these questions would be on people’s minds when thinking about content management. Thankfully, all of these questions can be answered using SERPED.net by using specific features.

Content Curation

Content generation can come off as a challenge at times, especially in blog posts and landing pages. SERPED.net aims to make content creation quicker and more efficient with their Content Curation tool, which automatically generates posts based on your keyword, along with images, videos, and related news.

As you can see in this example, I typed in “SEO” and instantly got a post about three types of SEO services, which is an informative article by itself. While having the ability to automatically create your own content seems like something great to have, it is still best to write your own content, and only take inspiration from the Content Curation tool.

Along with automatically generated posts, SERPED.net also provides you with image and video sources that you can use for your post. This makes looking for reference material much faster. You can also get news articles as well, although you might need a more specific search term to be able to find the right articles.

After editing the post and placing the image and video, you can conveniently post the article on your website. All you have to do is to fill up all the criteria needed before having it posted. This feature may not be as efficient and effective compared to writing a post, but this enables users to be able to smoothen their content writing process, and be able to instantly access a wide source base.

WordPress Manager

If you have an established website that contains a high amount of articles, it can be tasking to monitor and update these posts without the right tools. With that in mind, SERPED.net has a plugin tool called WordPress Manager, which helps you keep track of all of the posts in your website using a single interface. All you have to do is to download the plugin and install the plugin into your WordPress site. You would also be able to see all of your websites that have the plugin installed, which means that you can track all of the posts in a single place.

Grammar Checker

Grammar checking software is heavily used within our content management teams, and ensures that are articles are well written and edited during the whole process. Looking for quality grammar checking software might take time, and some ask users to pay premium rates for their services. Thankfully, SERPED.net has a Grammar Checker that enables you to edit your posts instantly.

Along with the regular grammar checker itself, you also can also have your article checked in Copyscape for plagiarism checking. After editing the article, all you have to do is to copy and paste it wherever you wish to do so. Most grammar checking software would simply give you corrections, SERPED.net meanwhile makes sure that your entries are authentic and sound enough to be published.

Site Restorer

When content in a website gets deleted, it can be a challenge to retrieve it without the right tools. Site Restorer is a feature that allows you to be able to retrieve different versions of your webpage, which allows you to pick which version would you like to restore. You can also use Wayback Machine to track down archived webpages, which is reliable when it comes to looking for older websites. Site Restorer is an effective and reliable tool that makes sure you would not have problems looking for previous versions of your website.

Key Takeaway

SERPED.net continues to be one of the best SEO tools available, as it offers the most variety at a solid price. With this guide, you would be able to utilize the tool for your content management needs, and be able to create high quality content that would generate high traffic.

If you have questions about SEO tools or SEO in general, leave a comment below and let’s talk.

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SEO basics: Elements of the Google Search Engine Results Page

Everybody knows what the Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP) looks like. We’ve all been there. We cross that page with every search we do. Still, the page can look rather different depending on what you’re searching for. And, which of those results are paid for and which are not – the organic ones? In this post, I’ll explain all the elements of the Google Search Engine Results Page. 

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Info It depends on what you’re searching for

What the result page looks like largely depends on what you are searching for. If your searching for a product you can buy, Google will show shop results on the SERP. Like in this example, when I was searching ballet shoes for a toddler.

This results page starts with shopping results, the ones with the images on top. To get there, you’ll have to pay Google – note the word ‘sponsored’ in the upper right corner. After those results, the first result is an Ad, another paid result. And then the organic results start.

However, if you’re searching for information about the planet Neptune – because your son is writing an essay about that – you’ll encounter a totally different looking SERP:

These search results do not show any paid or sponsored results. And on the right end, you’ll notice a knowledge graph with lots of information about the planet Neptune.

Read more: ‘What is search intent?’ »

Browsing through the result page

The default page of Google’s search result is a page on which different results appear. Google decides which results fit your search query best. That could be ‘normal’ results, but also news results, shopping results or images. If you’re searching for information, a knowledge graph could turn up. When you’re searching to buy something online, you’ll probably get lots of shopping results on the default result page.

If you want to, you can apply some filters on the search results yourself. You can, for instance, click on ‘images’ if you’re searching for an image. This allows you to browse through images only. You can also choose ‘shopping’, ‘videos’, ‘news’ and ‘more’.

Sponsored results and ads

Google shows both paid results and organic results. It can be pretty hard to notice the difference between the two. The ads usually appear on top of the search results. Sometimes it’s only one ad, but Google can show more ads as well. This depends on how many people search for a certain search term and who wants to pay for it.

You’ll recognize the paid result by the word Ad shown in front of the link to the website. The shopping results in Google are also paid results: a company pays Google to appear in the shopping results. If you want to advertise on Google you should check out Google Adwords.

Organic results

The organic results in Google are all of the results that are not paid for. The organic results that are shown first are the results that fit the search query of the user best, according to Google’s algorithm. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is aimed to improve the chances to rank in the organic search results. 

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Info Snippets

The search result page consists of a number of snippets. A snippet is a result Google shows to the user in the search results.  A ‘normal’ snippet usually looks like this:

Google shows the title in blue, the URL in green and a description of what the page is about. You’ll also encounter rich snippets on the SERP. A rich snippet shows extra information between the URL and the description. A rich snippet looks like this:

In this snippet, a picture of the ice cream is added, you can see the rating of the recipe, the time it takes to prepare this type of ice cream and the number of calories it contains. A rich snippet contains much more information than the normal snippet does.

Keep reading: ‘What are rich snippets?’ »

Other elements on the SERPs

Besides snippets, images, videos, news results, shopping results and maps, Google also shows some other elements on the SERPs.

Knowledge Graph box

The Knowledge Graph box appears on the right side of the search results. According to Google, this information is retrieved from many sources, including the CIA World Factbook and Wikipedia. Information from the Knowledge Graph is used to answer spoken questions in Google Assistant and Google Home voice queries.

Answer boxes

An answer box appears somewhere between the organic search results. It’ll give suggestions for questions that relate to the search query you typed in. If you’re searching for Yoast SEO you’ll encounter this answer box between the organic search results. Clicking on one of the suggestions will give a direct answer to the specific question.

Featured snippets

A featured snippet is a highlighted search box that answers the question you type in the Google search bar. This featured snippet box is situated above the regular organic search results. Featured snippets often appear as a paragraph or a bulleted list, accompanied by an image.

Read on: ‘How to get featured snippets’ »

Conclusion

Google’s SERPs can show various elements: the search results themselves (so called snippets), a knowledge graph, a featured snippet, an answer box, images, shopping results and more. Depending on the type of query and the data Google finds, some of these elements will show up. You can add data to your page, so Google can show a ‘rich’ snippet, providing more information about your product or recipe, for instance.

You can pay Google to make the snippet of your page end up high on the search results page as an ad. Or, you can optimize your pages for the search engines – and users! – so it will rank high organically. That’s SEO, and that’s what we write about!

Read more: ‘Yoast SEO: how to make your site stand out in the search results’ »

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Your Kids Want to Make Their Own Games

My son and I are learning a bit about coding. I’m downright not-smart at it. It doesn’t come naturally to me. My son? Well, he started learning on Scratch when he was five. So when I saw that Unity had released a game making software (aff) called Swords & Shovels, I was intrigued.

Making a Game is a Great Way to Learn to Code

The old version of game making used to be silly. You could make VERY rudimentary games. They taught you something, but no one wanted to actually play it. I can’t imagine how many parents had to endure “playing” those games.

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How to Give Searchers What They Need, Not Just Linkbait

So often we can get caught up in building out huge resources.

Top 200 Stores Offering Student Discounts or 38 Products With Lifetime Warranties can be eye catching and attract a few links, but do they actually answer how people are searching?…

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Ask Yoast: Order of categories and subcategories in URLs

It’s important to put some thought into your URL structure, particularly when you’re starting a new website. If you make sure your URL structure is clear and focused right from the beginning, you won’t have to face the huge task of changing and redirecting all your URLs later on. But, of course, sometimes you need to revise your site’s taxonomy, and changing things is inevitable.

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InfoYou’ll be faced with many choices when you’re revising your site, and you probably hope there’s one clear-cut way to approach things. Unfortunately, often that’s not the case. In our Ask Yoast inbox, we receive many questions that are so specific to a site’s situation, history and mission, that no one but the site owner can really answer them. But of course, we can try to help by clearing some things up. So let’s get to this week’s question!

Matt Markley emailed us this question:

We are revising our site’s taxonomy. Does the order of categories and subcategories in the URL have an impact on SEO? The category keyword is more important to rank than the subcategory keyword.

Watch the video or read the transcript further down the page for my answer!

The SEO impact of the order of categories and subcategories in URLs

“Well, yes it matters. Mostly because, if you’re going to change the order, the links matter. And if the links on your site change, so you need to redirect them, you might lose some rankings because of that.

Other than that, no they don’t really matter. The question is: do you truly need the category and the subcategory in your permalinks? Or could you actually go with shorter permalinks and would that be better? That’s something that you have to ask yourself, not a question I can answer for you. Good luck.”

Ask Yoast

In the series Ask Yoast, we answer SEO questions from our readers. Have an SEO-related question? Maybe we can 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.

Read more: ‘The perfect WordPress SEO permalink structure’ »

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Google Expands AMP into Emails and Ads

We have previously covered some of the latest Google updates this 2018, which includes removing the “View Images” button in Google Images, the upcoming Speed Update, and Google My Business preventing former employees to post negative reviews about their previous company. As usual, these updates aim to improve the user experience and optimize the content and performance of different websites.

Another update that Google aims to roll out this year is the planned expansion of Accelerated Mobile Pages into email, which is intended to make it more interactive than before. This is an attempt by Google to modernize email and make it more engaging and actionable. Like the Google Images update, this may come as divisive and controversial to many users, as a lot of people have been used to Gmail’s standard format. Let us look into the details of the update, along with how it further pushes the use of AMP in websites.

The Update in Detail

Based on the announcement from Google, they aim to create emails that offer more functionality that would increase engagement. Based on the demonstrations in their announcement, AMP emails will allow different tasks to be accomplished within the emails themselves. For example, if you want to confirm your account in a website, you can instantly access the confirmation page itself, instead of having to click on a link that would open a new tab on the browser.

From how it looks like, this is a feature that can save a few more clicks, and make different processes more efficient for users. This can help emails remain fresh and up-to-date, which means that you may no longer have to send those updated emails every now and then. This also eases up on the number of emails in general, as one of the most prominent problems of users is having a large backlog of unread emails that take time to navigate.

For developers who want to try and test out AMP-enhanced emails, Google is offering preview access by signing up to this site. Some websites like Pinterest and Booking.com have begun their development on implementing AMP into their emails to improve their service.

SEO Implications

With still an effective strategy to generate traffic and conversions, AMP-powered emails has the potential to increase click-through rates, and generate more interest compared to regular emails. One of the challenges of email marketers is to generate interest, and make users click. With AMP-powered emails, users would have a better time navigating through their emails, as it no longer clutters their browser by having to go to a new tab, which happens after clicking email links.

Content marketing would also benefit from the AMP expansion, as users would now be able to receive and access content, and view it on the email itself instantly. People prefer quick and efficient processes, and Implementing AMP to emails would enhance the experience, and make going through emails a more pleasant experience. The mobile experience would also be enhanced with AMP, as emails would become more accessible and viewable on different devices, which is one of the main aims of AMP.

With all these updates, one concern that may show up would be loading speeds. With a slew of new features present in email, this may affect the performance of Gmail, and affect loading times. While these issues may be ironed out eventually, this will definitely cause some early issues that have to be resolved as soon as they become present.

Key Takeaway

With Google rolling out new updates in the upcoming months, we should expect some changes in their other services, especially in Search. With AMP and mobile-first approach being one of the biggest priorities this 2018, expect to see its integration into more websites.

If you have any questions about AMP and SEO in general, leave a comment below and let’s talk.

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Mobile Advertising Trends: The Rise of Video

Over the last few years, everyone in advertising is talking about the rise of mobile and how desktop is becoming less and less dominant. That fact still holds true, but there is another piece. Video in particular is on the rise, specifically on mobile.…

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Help us test Yoast SEO 7.0

We have got something special for you, but before we release it for real, we need your help testing it: Yoast SEO 7.0. This is one of the biggest releases we have ever done, hence the jump from version 6.3 to 7.0. We’ve greatly simplified the interface, deprecated unused features and combined others into smarter features. By cleaning up our code, we have also drastically improved the performance of the plugin. Now, we need your help testing Yoast SEO 7.0 so we can fix every bug we can find before the final release two weeks from now.

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Info

• How to test Yoast SEO 7.0
• What’s changing in Yoast SEO 7.0?
  • We're asking you simple questions
  • A simpler menu
  • Titles & Metas becomes Search Appearance
  • Media (or: Attachment URLs)
  • Advanced features toggle
  • Under the hood
• But why now?
• One more thing: a new icon
• When will Yoast SEO 7.0 be ready?

How to test Yoast SEO 7.0

You can test the latest beta for Yoast SEO 7.0 by downloading it and installing it in your WordPress backend. We would advise you to install it on a test install or staging environment. Installing it on a live site is at your own risk. As always, make a backup before playing with beta software.

Download Yoast SEO 7.0 beta here »

Please report any issues you find in our Yoast SEO GitHub repository. You can find more information about the process on the Contributing to Yoast SEO page. Together, we can make this an incredible release.

What’s changing in Yoast SEO 7.0?

There’s going to be a lot of changes in Yoast SEO 7.0, both visible and invisible. See the changelog for the full list of changes. Here, I’ll go over some of the most obvious changes within your favorite SEO plugin. It all started with a quest to simplify things…

We’re asking you simple questions

The configuration pages will be different, simpler, more user-focussed.

Old situation with Meta Robots toggle

Compare this old situation with the new one below:

New situation with user-friendly question

The “Meta Robots” setting in the old version does exactly the same as the “Allow search engines” question in the new one but is understandable to people who have less experience with SEO.

A simpler menu

The menu looks drastically different too:

Left: the old menu. Right: the new menu

In the old situation, Yoast SEO had an XML sitemaps menu item. In it, you could exclude “post types” (like Posts and Pages) and “taxonomies” (Categories and Tags, for example) from appearing in the XML sitemap. The only reason you would want to exclude post types and taxonomies from the XML sitemap is when you don’t want them to appear in the search engines. So… If your answer to the question above was “No”, I don’t want <x> to appear in the search engines, we now also exclude them from the XML sitemap. This might seem like a simple change, but it took a large portion of our options away in one fell swoop.

You could also disable XML sitemaps entirely on this menu item. This is what we call a “feature toggle”. This toggle has been moved to the Features tab on the Dashboard.

Titles & Metas becomes Search Appearance

The Titles & Metas menu item has been renamed “Search Appearance”. There are a few more settings on this page now, but in a more logical arrangement:

Old titles & metas menu

New Search Appearance menu

General & Homepage have been combined. This tab also features the contents of the “Your Info” / “Company Info” tab we had on the Dashboard before. Media is new and is explained below. Breadcrumbs and RSS were moved here from the Advanced menu item, which is now completely gone.

Media (or: Attachment URLs)

When you upload an image or a video to WordPress, WordPress automatically creates an attachment URL for it, next to allowing you to link to the media item directly. This is much the same as a post URL, but it has no real SEO value. Most sites therefore never use these attachment URLs, but because WordPress sometimes links to them, they do start being indexed by search engines.

Yoast SEO long had a feature that allowed you to redirect attachment URLs for images to the post they were embedded in. This seems logical. But an image can be embedded in multiple posts, and as the Media part of WordPress gets better, this happens more often. At this point, where do you redirect an attachment URL to?

It also means that images that are not attached to a post could not be redirected. So we’ve changed that behavior: there’s now a toggle that will disable all attachment URLs. If you enable that (which will be the default for new sites), we redirect all attachment URLs to the media item itself. Clean, simple, much better SEO wise and much easier to understand.

Permalinks features

The Advanced menu item had three tabs: Breadcrumbs, Permalinks and RSS. Breadcrumbs and RSS have been moved to Search Appearance; Permalinks is gone. There were two features there that we kept around:

• The feature that allows removing /category/ from category URLs. This is useful in some cases, so we’ve moved it to the Taxonomies menu under Search Appearance.
• The feature that removed ?replytocom variables from URLs. This is a core “feature” that makes it possible to reply to other people’s comments when JavaScript is disabled in your browser. Every comment gets its own link because of this feature, so if you have 100 comments, you get 100 extra links to a post, and search engines have to index every one of these links. This is stupid. So: our feature to remove those is now on by default and doesn’t have a setting anymore. This falls in line with WordPress’ core philosophy: decisions, not options. There is a ticket open to change this behavior in WordPress core too.

Advanced features toggle

For a while, Yoast SEO had a toggle for advanced features. This felt like a good idea at the time, but instead of properly explaining features, we hid them. In Yoast SEO 7.0, we’ve improved all features that we’re hard to explain. Luckily there were only a few of those, and they were so old that I’ve had to delete code that I wrote myself ten years ago.

Under the hood

Under the hood, there have also been several performance optimizations. We’ve changed how we set and retrieve options. We’ve removed all functions that had been deprecated before 2017. This is old code that we no longer use but was kept around for backward compatibility. These changes lead to less memory usage and a faster plugin overall.

But why now?

Well, to be honest, I have to give credit to Yoast Academy for this one. I was recording screencasts of the backend and couldn’t stand some of the things I had to explain. So we decided to start fixing them. Our development team has worked very hard to keep up with all the ideas, and we’re very proud to show you what we’ve built.

One more thing: a new icon

Because 7.0 is a big thing, we thought we’d make it even bigger: Yoast SEO is getting a new icon. The traffic light we’ve used for so long has turned out not to be a good metaphor across all cultures. In fact, we’ve learned that traffic lights differ per country and green is sometimes on top, and sometimes on the bottom.

So, without further ado: this is the new icon for Yoast SEO:

Awesome, right?

When will Yoast SEO 7.0 be ready?

We’re planning to release the final version of Yoast SEO 7.0 on Tuesday, March 6th. Since this is such a big release, we’ve decided to extend the testing period by two weeks so we can get as many eyes as possible on this release before we push it to everyone. You can help us find and fix issues by installing the release candidate, as mentioned above and go on a bug hunting trip. Add any issue you find or feedback you have to GitHub.

Happy testing!

Read more: ‘Why every website needs Yoast SEO’ »

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