Internal search

Internal search is the search that is on your website itself. It’s the search widget in WordPress and the product search in WooCommerce. Make no mistake: if your website has over twenty pages, your website should most definitely have that internal search option.

There are a number of do’s and dont’s for that internal search option, and I’d like to go over these in this post.

Internal search for informational websites

It doesn’t matter if your website is the wikipedia of golden retrievers, or you simply have a blog about your three-year-old. If your website is packed with content, you really want to add that internal search option. The thing is that when someone lands on your website from Google, they are looking for a specific piece of information about a certain subject. When they can’t find it immediately after clicking that link in Google, there are only a few options to prevent that user from clicking back to Google immediately. This would result in a bouncer, telling Google that the specific subject isn’t something it has to rank your website for. Ok, I’m exaggerating, but if this happens again and again, that will be the result.

If your website provides an easy way to find that desired information with just a tiny bit of extra effort, you are immediately raising the chances of people staying on your website. An internal search option is a great way to accomplish this.

Characteristics of a good internal search option

Try to think about that internal search option as a user, not as a website owner or developer. What would you say is required for that search option to work for you? I think there are a few characteristics that work for any visitor:

• It should be visible. If you want people to use that search option, don’t hide it in your website’s footer. Adding it to either the top of your sidebar, or in your header, would be a much better option.
• It should be clear that it’s a search option. Very important. If it’s just an input field without heading, submit button or watermark explaining that it’s a search option, it simply won’t work for the majority of your visitors.

We will emphasize that internal search option even more in our upcoming redesign, by just a subtle emphasize on the magnifier icon:

That already makes a huge difference. But besides that, we have also lifted the internal search option from our sidebar, right in the right side of the menu. The search option is equally important for us as our shopping cart and all main menu items.

Internal search result pages for informational websites

The internal search field is only step one of an internal search option. Step two is the search result page itself. In our reviews, we check a number of characteristics of a search result page:

• The search keyword is highlighted in the search result pages
  If you want to decide on what result to click, you’d like to scan the results and quickly click one. Internal search result pages are a means to an end, a tool, not a destination itself. Highlighting the keyword used in search (like Google does), improves scanning these results a lot.
• The search result pages contain text snippets with the keyword
  It’s really hard to decide on a result with just the title shown on an internal search result page. There is a reason Google sometimes forgets your suggested meta description and shows a text snippet of your page containing the keyword. It helps your visitor. That goes for internal search results as well.
• Search results are ranked by relevancy
  To all you WordPress users out there: WordPress now orders search results by relevance (since 3.7). Make sure to update. That being said, plugins like SearchWP can still help you improve your internal search results a lot, and make you manage that relevance. In the old days, WordPress results where ordered by date (newest content first), which made absolutely no sense. Serve the best result first.
• Internal search results are not indexed by Google
  Imagine being a search engine, having the wish to serve your visitors the desired information as soon as possible. Google Knowledge Graph inserts the answer right in your search result pages. Do you think that search engines likes linking to other search result pages? No. Of course not. Next to that Google considers these internal search results lower quality pages than your actual informational pages, it also makes absolutely no sense that your search result pages rank above your category pages on the same subject. These are the pages that matter, these are the pages that should be indexed. Noindex,follow these internal search result pages.

Valuable data for optimizing your website

There is another major benefit of a good internal search option. It can actually help your keyword research. In Google Analytics, at Behavior › Site Search › Search Terms, you will find all keywords people have used in the internal search option on your website.

Please check your website’s pages for these keywords. Does the right page come up first? A quick check is simply comparing the internal search results to a site search in Google, like:

http://ift.tt/vgrAeusite:yoast.com+meta+description

That’s a match, and the right page to rank for “meta description” on our website. If another page would have come up first, we should have created a new, cornerstone-like page for that keyword. Use this to your advantage; it’s your visitors telling you what kind of content they expect on your website.

Internal Search for Webshops

This is the first one of two posts on internal search. As I mentioned in the introduction of this post, internal search is obviously important for webshops as well. In the second post, I’ll discuss the search option for webshops and add my thoughts on how to improve that internal search option.

Your call

Are you leveraging your internal search option? How have you improved your internal search result pages? I’d love to hear your experiences and additional tips in the comments.

This post first appeared as Internal search on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!

by Michiel Heijmans via Yoast

Weekly SEO Recap: Newsflash!

I’m a bit feisty this week. I apologize upfront. We’ve been doing tons of website reviews after last month’s sale and it had me quite busy. But there’s good news this week if you’re looking for a job as an SEO: here’s your chance! Google is hiring one. SEO’s all over the web had fun with that this week, but it shouldn’t be much of a surprise. The only thing Google just did is acknowledge that SEO is worth doing. So much that they hire people to be in charge of it. Luckily, there was more!

Twitter blocking robots? Guess not.

There was quite a bit of fuzz on Twitter the last few days about Twitter blocking robots.txt and how bad this was:

Please note that Twitter has blocked ALL ROBOTS ACCESS TO TWITTER. https://t.co/Cv98odmk21 This means wayback will lose it.

— Jason Scott (@textfiles) July 16, 2015

Luckily my buddy Martin MacDonald looked for two more seconds and discovered this wasn’t exactly the case. Why Twitter doesn’t just 301 redirect www.twitter.com to twitter.com is completely beyond me. That would be the only real SEO solution in my (not so) humble opinion.

Penguin is months away

In not so surprising news (as it’s bloody hot here and penguins aren’t known for their love of heat), Google’s Penguin update apparently is months away as they are “working on making it real time”. We’ll see.

Google sends notifications, then wonders why

In another not so surprising move, Google is starting to realize that some messages are not making much sense to each site owner. They send out a ton of hreflang messages this week, only to realize not everyone might be interested. So now they’re asking for your feedback on how you like the messaging coming out of Google Search Console.

Lots of us would probably rather have them fix issues like the current issue with index numbers. And maybe help their colleagues on fixing the referral spam in Google Analytics.

Flash is dead, bye bye!

Firefox is now blocking Flash by default. Flash was always a stupid idea, but in the off chance that you’re still using it on your site, you probably should stop for real now. I mean, we have animated GIFs for annoying content!

XML Sitemaps are hard

Gary Ilyes from Google tweeted about how to properly format the last modified time in XML sitemaps:

How to properly format last modified (lastmod) time for xml sitemaps http://t.co/7wQ3g7799E

— Gary Illyes (@methode) July 13, 2015

His answer also states “in most of the cases it’s ignored by search engines”. We knew that, but it doesn’t hurt repeating it. The same is true for the priority field, which is the reasons our Yoast SEO plugin doesn’t have a ton of interface to change them. They simply don’t matter that much.

That’s it, see you next week!

This post first appeared as Weekly SEO Recap: Newsflash! on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!

by Joost de Valk via Yoast

Preparing your blog post

Writing a good blog post all starts with thinking. You should think about what you want to say and to whom you want to say it. It is important to realise, that proper writing takes some time. In order to write a good, readable piece, you will have to follow three steps:

All writing begins with preparation. I will take you through this first phase in this blog post. If you want to read more about how to write an awesome blog post, make sure to buy our content SEO book this week, as it’s still summer sale (have you seen my dress?? ;-))

In the first step of your writing process you will have to answer a number of questions. The answers to these questions will be the preparation of your blog post or article.

1. What is the purpose of your piece? Why are you writing? What do you want to achieve?
2. What will be the main message of your post? What is the central question you want to answer?
3. Who are your readers?
4. What information do you need to write your piece?
5. In what order will you present your information? What will be the structure of your article?

I will elaborate on these questions in this blog post.

1. What is the purpose?

When you start to write content, you should first take some time to think about the purpose of your writing. Articles can have different purposes. You can write because you want to persuade people: you want them to adopt your political ideas or you want to convince them to buy your product. The aim of your article could also be entertaining. The purpose of your text would then be to amuse people. A column is a good example of an entertaining text. Your blog or article could also be informative. Different articles on your website could have different purposes. Also, many articles have multiple purposes. A blog could very well be informative as well as entertaining.

The purpose of your article will give you some rules or guidelines to follow. An article in which you want to persuade people should have some other features than an article with a sole informative or amusing function. I actually wrote another blog post about the differences between amusing text, an informative text and a persuading text.

2. What is the message?

Before you start writing, take some time to think about what you want your readers to know or do after they’ve read your text. We refer to this as the message of your text.

In order to come up with your message, you could try to phrase a question which your text should resolve. We refer to such a question as the central question of a text. The text you will write will be the answer to your central question.

Make sure that your central question is clear. Try to come up with a summarized answer to your central question in one or two sentences. We refer to this answer as the message of your article. Perhaps you will not be able to phrase the message of your article until you have done some research. You should then attend to your research first (see question 4!).

Example 1

If you would write a post about the importance of well-structured texts, the central question of this post could be: ‘Why is it important to write well-structured blog posts?’

We usually put the message in the introduction of the post (telling people what the post will be about) as well as in the conclusion of the piece. Making your message really explicit is in our opinion especially important in web texts. It helps your readers to instantly grasp the message of your article and increases the likelihood people will keep on reading.

Example 2

The message of a post about the importance of well-structured texts could be: ‘It is important to write a well-structured text because it will allow people to understand your text better, it will lead to higher conversions and to higher ranking.’

3. Who are your readers?

Before writing your text, you should take some time to think about the people you are writing for. Make sure you adapt your text to their level. You should adjust the difficulty of the information in your piece as well as the difficulty of your style (use of jargon, long sentences etc) to your audience.

In many cases, it is really hard to find out who your readers are. And if your audience is a very heterogeneous group (consisting of very different people), it can be quite hard to decide upon the difficulty of your topic and your text. It could be very helpful to do research concerning your audience on a regular basis. If you would like to read more about analyzing your audience you can read my posts about Analyzing your audience and Yoast Research: get to know your audience.

4. What information do you need?

In some cases, all the information you need to write your text is already in your head. If Joost de Valk writes an introductory piece about SEO, he doesn’t need to open any books. In many other cases, you will need some sources (the internet, books, newspapers) to provide the information you need for your text. You should take the central question of your piece and come up with a number of sub-questions.

Example 3

For the central question: ‘Why is it important to write well-structured blog posts?’ one could pose the following subquestions:

• What does text structure have to do with SEO?
• What is the influence of text structure on conversion rates?
• What is the influence of text structure on bounce rates?

Find answers to all your sub-questions in your sources (books, internet, scientific articles etc.). You can write these answers down. You will then already have the basis of your post or article.

After this phase, the (central) message of your article should be entirely clear. Take some time to phrase or rephrase your message (the summarized answer to your central question) in one or two sentences.

5. What will be the structure?

The final step in the preparation process is the most important one. You have to give some kind of structure to the information you want to communicate to your readers. In another post, I gave practical tips on how to create a decent structure.

Conclusion: Take some time to prepare your post!

Writing a blog post all start with some thinking and preparing. Take time to do that. Ask yourself the 5 questions of this blog post and the most important phase in your writing is covered! If you would like to get the full information, you should definitely read our Content SEO eBook!

This post first appeared as Preparing your blog post on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!

by Marieke van de Rakt via Yoast

Google Analytics 5.4.3: Remarketing tag

We just released Google Analytics by Yoast 5.4.3. This is not a big release, but we do want to highlight one of the changes you’ll see in there.

Remarketing tag

Our Google Analytics plugin has had the remarketing tag incorporated for quite some time, but it was kind of hidden, so not many people were able to actually find this feature. So now we’ve made it a lot clearer in the settings of our plugin:

All you have to do to add the remarketing tag is check the box that is highlighted.

Targeting your website’s audience

For those of you who don’t know or are unsure of what the remarketing does, let me briefly explain. Remarketing allows you to target your website’s visitors on other sites than your own. So if a person has visited your site, and you have the remarketing tag incorporated in your site, you’re able to serve him or her your AdSense ads, even when they’re not on your site.

Cookie laws

Note that there are privacy and cookie laws active worldwide. These differ from one area to the next, so be sure you’re in compliance with the cookie laws applicable to your target audience.

This post first appeared as Google Analytics 5.4.3: Remarketing tag on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!

by Thijs de Valk via Yoast

Consistent branding increases click through rate in Google

Last week, Thijs wrote a post on headings and taglines. Following that post, I’d like to elaborate a bit on focus, but now related to your branding. In this post, I’ll tell you my point of view on how to incorporate consistent branding in your website and how this can contribute to improving your click through rate from Google.

What is this branding you are talking about?

Branding is the way you promote your brand or sometimes simply your website name (the brand of your website) to your visitors. Branding is the new link building.

Branding is the promotion of a particular product or company by means of advertising and distinctive design (Google)

A while ago, Joost wrote a post on branding and homepages as an addition to my statement that a homepage shouldn’t be used to rank a keyword. I still kinda feel that way. I do think your homepage should, without the requirement of optimization, rank for your brand. This is quite often (among others) the result of links to your website using your brand as the anchor text for that link.

Incorporate branding in your website

Our new website, coming to you this fall, is an excellent example of how consistent branding will guide you through a website and will never make you feel lost. You will always, on any page and in every section of that page, know that you are visiting yoast.com. Without the use of a surplus of avatars, this time.

In the new design, consistent branding is achieved by a combination of the obvious logo on every page, but also by designing every element on the website to align with that logo. There is a style guide for headings, blockquotes, lines, widgets and boxes that goes above and beyond our already pretty consistent current site design.

Consistent branding in design

We have the luxury of Erwin and Mijke being our ‘brand managers’ at Yoast for years, knowing the brand from head to tail. And being able to translate that brand to a design and illustrations. You might not have that luxury. In our reviews, we often find websites that are set up and maintained by the website owner himself. The ease of using content management systems like Drupal, WordPress and Joomla! are ‘to blame’ for this. That website owner might be a carpenter or dentist during daytime, and a self-proclaimed web designer by night. Apart from the question if that is the way to go (I don’t think so, every man to his own trade), consistent branding is quite often lost in the process. A general theme is used, a logo might be added – very frequently plain text is used – but that is about it.

Just adding a logo is like branding a horses behind and figuring out what stable he belongs to by looking at his head. It just isn’t enough. Think about the use of colors, for instance. Make sure headings and background colors are in line with the logo colors. Make it consistent. If your logo is about curves and circles, for instance use round borders for your widgets, or a curvy heading font. Make sure it all adds up.

Consistent branding in text

We have recently added ‘by Yoast’ to a number of our plugin names, like Google Analytics by Yoast. Fun fact is that our WordPress SEO plugin is named “Yoast SEO” on a regular basis. Branding helps us rank for that term without any effort from our side. The community made that happen, by using “Yoast SEO” on support forums, on social media like Twitter, and in blog posts about the plugin. Thank you for that, by the way. It shows that consistent use of a term in text, including links to your website, will help you promote your brand in words that your users use. In fact, we have found that Yoast SEO has become synonymous to WordPress SEO for Google:

Google bolds “WordPress SEO” as the keyword used in search when you do a search for “Yoast SEO”. It’s one of the reasons we’ll actually be rebranding the plugin to “Yoast SEO” in the near future. More on that in posts to come!

Our real time content analysis will help you to add that branding to your homepage, if you’d like some assistance in that. Yes, I know. That is in a way optimizing your homepage for a keyword. Bottom line is that you need to be consistent in this. If your product is branded like Google Analytics by Yoast, use that name everywhere. It’s like writing WordPress with a lowercase P. People might take you less serious when you are not consistent in this. It will also help Google identify your branding, of course. One of the things we often tell people to do is add the brand name at the end of the page title as well. For WordPress users, adding that branding to your titles in the Titles & Metas section of our plugin is easy as pie.

How does consistent branding help click through rate!?

By now, you must have been going over your own website yourself and you have probably identified sections that need improvement. You need to make consistent branding a priority, which is usually the hardest part. The reason you need to make consistent branding a priority, is that when branding is consistent in page titles, in texts and in meta descriptions, all the elements of your website that are shown in Google, this will (in the not so long run), trigger recognition when a Google user searches for a specific keyword. If someone searches for WordPress SEO and ‘Yoast’ pops up every time, there must be a relation between the two, right? It will link your brand to the keyword. It will increase trust and make it easier or even more ‘natural’ for that user to click the link to your website. You will become a known source for that visitor.

And that is how consistent branding will help your click through rate in Google.

Optimizing keywords for branding

Recently, we have added an extra section to our intake form for our site reviews: keywords you want to rank for. We’ll allow you to add a limited set of keywords, so we can check your website for these. The one thing that stands out, is that these keywords almost never include a brand name. It’s always about the product, without the branding. That isn’t consistent at all. If you have a unique product, it should be branded. And you should optimize for a combination of [product name] and [branding], like “Yoast SEO”. Keep that in mind when choosing your keywords. And feel free to order that site review now.

This post first appeared as Consistent branding increases click through rate in Google on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!

by Michiel Heijmans via Yoast

Weekly SEO Recap:

It’s all about Google today, sorry, so let’s be quick about it. Luckily, we’re allowed to forget about Yandex now, sorry, bad pun, I know.

Let’s get on with it:

Is Google’s webmaster communications failing?

We’ve “lost” Matt Cutts as a spoke person to the SEO community about a year ago. Some other Googlers have stepped in and apparently not everybody is as happy with them as they were with Matt, judging by this article. I have to admit that Matt definitely had more “klout” within Google, but I don’t really know whether that was always a good thing. I find it’s easier to reach a Googler now than it was a couple of years ago, and it’s also less limited to a specific group of high level SEO’s.

Google indexing Twitter more

Earlier this year, Google gained access to Twitters “firehose”, the feed with all tweets sent out. It turns out that since that time, Google has started indexing more and more tweets, now indexing 5x as much as before. 96% of tweets still go unindexed, but let’s be fair, most of them probably are a waste of indexation space and time anyway.

Should you ask for links?

Well, of course you should. You should ask because the stuff you write is awesome and very interesting for other people’s readers, right? If you’re asking purely for the SEO value, you might be in trouble. But none of you do that, ever, right? Oh and in case you wondered, yes even that link from that German SEO friend on his German blog is worth while.

Speaking about links, Sophos uncovered a massive case of link spam. Might not change anything for you but it’s interesting to see the scale at which SEO poisoning takes place.

Google testing giant ad / knowledge panel

If you wondered where Google was going to take those knowledge panels, here’s your answer. This is one direction I’ve fully expected to see happen, an integration of ads and content that makes it incredibly hard to figure out what’s paid for and what’s not. This cannot be a good thing if you ask me, but for Google it probably means mo’ money.

That’s it, see you next week!

This post first appeared as Weekly SEO Recap: on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!

by Joost de Valk via Yoast

About headlines and taglines

At Yoast we see a lot of websites on a daily basis. One thing we notice when looking at these websites is how poorly the website’s or page’s goal is communicated a lot of the time. A really good and fast way to convey your goal is by using headlines and taglines.

In this post I’ll tell you how to use your headlines and taglines to your advantage by having them communicate a clear message that people will understand. Because you want people to understand what your website or page is about, right?

What are headlines and taglines?

Before jumping into this post, it might be useful to explain what headlines and taglines actually are. Wikipedia explains a headline in the following way:

The headline is the text indicating the nature of the article below it.

So the headline is basically a page’s or post’s title. And as Wikipedia so eloquently states it; that title should indicate what that page or post is about.

And Wikipedia explains the tagline as follows:

In entertainment, a tagline (or tag line) is a small amount of text which serves to clarify a thought for, or designed with a form of, dramatic effect.

I don’t completely agree with a tagline being for dramatic effect, but I do agree with the fact that a tagline serves to clarify a thought. Usually, it serves to clarify or specify the headline. A tagline is also something that’s not as mandatory as the headline. A page has to have a headline, but it doesn’t have to have a tagline. Especially not if the headline is clear enough in itself.

Why use headlines and taglines?

As I mentioned above, headlines and taglines are a good and fast way to tell people what your website is about. And this matters, because people want to understand what your website is about, so they know if you have what they want. People don’t want to spend 30 minutes (or 5, for that matter) searching your website to see if you do. They’ll just go to a website with a clearer message.

Additionally, having to think about a decent headlines and/or tagline for your website and its pages, actually forces you to think about your core business. What is it that you’re trying to convey? If a page’s headline is getting too complicated, it might be a good idea to think about making multiple pages for what you’re trying to do, for instance.

Don’t assume people know you

When you’ve figured out what your core business or purpose for a page is, it can actually be quite hard to write this down in such a way that it’s understandable for everyone. As Michiel said in his post about clarity and focus:

We want clarity. It’s the experience we get when visiting that website for the very first time: do we get the website? Is it clear what the benefits are for us visitors? And where or how can I get these benefits?

Don’t think that people will understand what you’re talking about, just because they’re on your site. Try to put yourself in the shoes of a person visiting your website for the first time. Is it clear what you’re offering by just reading the headline and/or tagline? For this post the headline is “About headlines and taglines”. That’s simple, short and clear. People will know just by reading that headline what the post will be about.

Of course, for a single post it’s much easier to write what it’s about than for your entire website or business. So you should take some time in formulating your core business and goals. If you think you found a decent headline, it might be a good idea to have someone outside of your business to check it out and let them tell you if they understand. And keep doing that until they understand.

Headlines that work

There are quite a few ways you can make sure people will understand your headline and even fulfill the goal of your page. I’ll give you a few tips here:

Action oriented headlines

If possible, try to write your headlines in an action oriented way. You can do this by using verbs and sentences that imply an action for the visitor. For instance, we could have a headline saying: “Keep your site optimized with the WordPress SEO Premium plugin!”. This shows people one of the core values of the plugin, and making it active will motivate a lot more people to actually try it.

Combine your headline with a tagline

Combining your headline with a tagline will give people a very concise and clear explanation of your headline. Not all headlines need one per se, but usually the effect of having a tagline (or sub headline, whatever you want to call it) is a positive one. The tagline is another chance to make sure people will be intrigued and to clarify for your visitors.

Have a clear headline

This is probably the hardest to do, because how do you know what is clear to people? This is something you should definitely test. But in any case, you need to make sure it’s as specific and concrete as possible. Again, it all comes down to clarity.

Be clear!

By now you must get my main point: you have to be clear! If people can’t understand your website or what you’re selling/offering, they won’t stick around to figure it out. Especially when people are looking for something, they won’t do anything else than just scan the page they land on. So be sure that what they’re scanning is as clear and concise as possible.

What do you think? Have you tried some nice headline variations that worked out really well for you? Or have anything else to mention? Let me know in the comments!

This post first appeared as About headlines and taglines on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!

by Thijs de Valk via Yoast

Flesch reading ease score: Use it!

If you use our Content Analysis Tool in the Yoast SEO plugin, you must have encountered the Flesch reading ease score. Our Content Analysis tool checks — using this Flesch reading ease score —  whether or not your text is not too hard to read.

How do we measure this Flesch Reading Ease score? And why is this score important for SEO? In this post I would like to explain the importance of readability for SEO. Next to that, I want to explain some more about the Flesch Reading Ease score.

Why is readability important for SEO?

It is unclear whether readability is used as a organic ranking factor explicitly. We thus do not know whether or not Google uses something like the Flesch score (or a variation for that matter) as a ranking factor in its algorithm. Either way, from a holistic SEO perspective readability is very important.

If the difficulty level of your text is too high, the text is too hard to read for your audience. Your audience then will not stay on your website and search for information elsewhere. A difficult text will result in a high bounce rate and this will lead to lower ranking in the long run. So, you should definitely make sure your texts are well written and not too difficult.

How is the Flesch reading ease score calculated?

Flesch reading ease measures textual difficulty of a reading passage in English (note: in languages other than English, Flesch is seriously unreliable). The lower the score, the more difficult the text is. The Flesch readability score uses the sentence length (number of words per sentence) and the number of syllables per word in an equation to calculate the reading ease. Texts with a very high Flesch reading Ease score (about 100) are very easy to read, have short sentences and no words of more than two syllables. Usually, a reading ease of 60-70 is believed to be acceptable/ normal for web texts.

source: Wikipedia.com

Score	Notes
90 – 100	easily understood by an average 11-year old student
60 – 70	easily understood by 13-15 year old students
0 – 30	best understood by university graduates

Upcoming changes in the Yoast SEO Content Analysis

Last week, we announced some major changes in the Content Analysis Tool. In one of  the next updates the Content Analysis will be live: while you type your text, the analysis is done. The bullets of your content analysis can turn green (or red) while you are writing, giving you instant feedback. This will allow you to monitor your writing process in much detail.

Updating our Content Analysis allowed us to really look critically at our own work and made us aware of the need for some changes regarding the Flesch reading ease. Most important reason for this is that a text that  is written at too low a level will just as well lead to a high bounce rate as texts which are too difficult.  If your audience feels that the text is beneath their level, they will quickly leave your page after scanning the text. The level of your texts thus should not be to easy. That’s why we will warn our users if their Flesch Reading ease score will rise above the 90 from now on.

Upcoming changes in Yoast SEO Premium

For some websites, a higher Flesch reading ease score is more desirable than for others. If you are aiming your website on children, your reading ease score should of course be very high. However, if your website focusses on post-graduates, you should definitely aim for a lower reading ease.

Applying a holistic SEO strategy would mean that you should adept the readability of your text to your audience. In one of the next updates of WP SEO Premium we will offer you the possibility to fill in your desired reading ease score. Our plugin will than check whether or not your text is written according that reading ease score. And… we are also working on some other text analysis checks for our Content Analysis Tool. So, keep posted!

The Flesch Reading Ease Score of this blogpost was: 70.8.

This post first appeared as Flesch reading ease score: Use it! on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!

by Marieke van de Rakt via Yoast

Weekly SEO Recap: Search landscape changes

This weeks news has some drastic changes to the search landscape that could mean… Well, anything really. There’s also some smaller news about Google which is worth mentioning, so let’s dive in:

Microsoft Bing to power AOL Search

AOL Search, while relatively small, is still a thing. Microsoft just signed a deal to power it for the next 10 years, while giving a big part of their ads business to AOL. What’s more surprising to me is this news that came out on the side: Bing is now sustainable in itself. Microsoft has been pouring money into it for quite a while, as far as “we” knew, but now apparently “It’s a multibillion dollar business, and it does pay for itself”. Good news as that means they’ll keep on competing with Google!

Yahoo! testing Google

Yahoo! is testing Google as a provider for it’s search results, instead of Bing. First noticed by Aaron Wall at SEOBook, this could have quite some impact. SEOs should really watch what happens here mostly because it impacts how much traffic a good ranking in Google will give you. The reasoning is probably simple: Google ads are worth much more than Bing ads, so this would increase Google’s revenue. The fact that Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer is an ex-Googler probably doesn’t hurt in this deal either.

DuckDuckGo expanding

To show that search is alive and vibrant even outside these three historical enemies, DuckDuckGo is expanding their “suggest” feature to 34 new regions. They’re not exactly a big traffic driver yet, but I’m very happy to see other options grow slowly too.

Google becoming smart about Search Console

Google has put out some questions that are interesting as they show what they’re thinking about. This post has details, but this sentence specifically made me happy “To view a combined Search Analytics report that includes different URL versions of your site (http and https).” Yes. Please. www and non-www too and we’re about done if we can also verify them all at once.

The Panda is a “couple of weeks” away, we think

Nothing more fun than guessing when a new update is going to hit. People at Google estimating when it might happen are usually wrong, but the latest is “a couple of weeks“. We’ll see. Just know that it’s coming. Just like Winter.

Google in other languages

If you think about how Google’s algorithm works a lot, you’re bound to think “but how does that work in language X”. Welcome to the world of a polyglot. This post has some interesting insights.

SEO at Pinterest

I’ve been meaning to share this article (which was written in January) for a while, and keep forgetting. It details how Pinterest experiments with SEO. Fun read, might give you some ideas for testing.

 

That’s it, see you next week!

This post first appeared as Weekly SEO Recap: Search landscape changes on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!

by Joost de Valk via Yoast

Real-time content analysis for better SEO

The best way to improve someone’s SEO content writing, is to let him do it, and then give real-time feedback. Ever since its first release in 2011, the page analysis functionality in WordPress SEO has always worked when you saved the post. We’re about to change that, and make it real-time. We’ll give you a preview of what that’s like in this post and explain the other benefits.

Online content analysis tool

Because of how it works technically now, we can easily provide our real-time content analysis as a tool online. If you want to see what it looks like, go to our new online content analysis tool. You’ll get live feedback about both SEO aspects of your site as well as stuff like the Flesch reading ease score.

The online content analysis tool is very similar to how it will work in WordPress SEO when we release this, which will probably happen mid-July. Give it a try! We’d love to hear in the comments what you think and what problems you ran into. We’ve already found a few bugs ourselves, that’s exactly why we’re doing this. We want you to try it and tell us what’s broken!

As you can see, we’ve been working on the snippet preview too. No longer will you have an input field for the meta description or the SEO title: you can edit them straight in the snippet preview. This should make it both more intuitive and make it require less screen real-estate. Here’s a quick GIF of it in action:

Premium SEO benefits

One of the other benefits of this change is that we’ll be able to do something that has often been requested: do content analysis for multiple keywords. This is a feature that’ll be available to WordPress SEO Premium customers soon after the release of the real-time content analysis.

We’re also working on more checks to help you improve your writing, in line with the writing tips we’ve been giving in our Content SEO eBook (which, btw, is on sale this week for just $15!). These will gradually be released as we develop them.

Technical background of the real-time analysis

To be able to do real-time content analysis, the entire functionality has been rewritten in JavaScript (mostly by our awesome new developer Danny Terwindt. There’s actually a GitHub repository for this specific bit of code. The developers among you will wonder why it’s a separate repository. Simple: this rewrite allows us to expand to more platforms.

We’d love your input!

As I said above: this is a relatively early “release” of this code. We’d love for you to use it and tell us what problems you run into in the comments!

This post first appeared as Real-time content analysis for better SEO on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!

by Joost de Valk via Yoast

Weekly SEO Recap: Google tests & oDesk becomes Upwork

Coming to you from warm & very sunny Seville, where I’m currently attending WordCamp Europe along with some colleagues, this is another weeks SEO recap! There was some nice news about Google tests that came out this week that I’d love to share with you. Also, a case study on a project I was actually involved in myself.

Google tests. A lot.

Last week, while writing the SEO recap, I tweeted a screenshot showing that I was part of a Google experiment: Google was changing the red line in search results to blue. It was picked up by Barry Schwartz and turned into a headline on his blog and later on SearchEngineLand. Google also is testing a slightly different green for URLs… Another one: Google removed emoji’s from the search result pages this week too. And a final one: Google testing a new mobile interface. I think these articles show two things: we as an SEO community pay a ton of attention to even the tiniest details and Google test a LOT.

oDesk becomes Upwork

oDesk recently rebranded to Upwork, moving their domain from odesk.com to upwork.com. I myself was part of a team of SEOs working on this migration, which I think we can say is a success. Andrew Shotland wrote about it on SearchEngineLand, and Lisa Oda, the head of content marketing at Upwork, wrote about it too.

Having now done several of these migrations I can honestly say they’re not for the faint of heart, but it’s slowly getting easier to get them right. Don’t change your domain name on a whim though, Andrew’s post linked above actually some very good pointers.

That’s it! Nothing “pressing” left, although I do expect updates to happen soon, maybe next week!

 

This post first appeared as Weekly SEO Recap: Google tests & oDesk becomes Upwork on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!

by Joost de Valk via Yoast

Optimizing your mobile content

Facebook author tags & Yoast SEO

How to incorporate cornerstone content

Two weeks ago, I wrote a post focussing on the question of the type of content of cornerstone articles. I concluded with the notion that  cornerstone content should be informative, fun to read and extremely well written. Cornerstone articles should reflect your business or the mission of your business.

Once you have written such awesome content, you would like search engines to notice these pages. You should thus make sure your internal linking structure shows Google that your cornerstone page is most important. But how do you do that? How do you make sure your cornerstone pages actually rank?

Incorporating cornerstone content in your website

In this post, I will focus on the question how to incorporate your cornerstone pages in your site structure. I will first describe the most ideal position of your cornerstone content in the structure of your website.  I truly understand that for most of you, this will mean a drastic change in the structure of your current website. That’s why I will also give some tips (quick wins) to optimize your site structure quickly.

High in your pyramid!

Cornerstone articles should appear very high in your site’s pyramid. Ideally, one would be able to instantly click from your homepage to your cornerstone contentpage. Ideally you would write an awesome cornerstone article and link all your other pages about similar topics to that article. You should make sure that every one of those articles contains beautifully written prose nicely focussing on different aspects of the same keyword you are aiming to rank for with your cornerstone article. Subsequently, you will write a million new blogposts focussing on new angles of the topic of your cornerstone article. From every single one of these million blogposts, you link to your original cornerstone article. Such an internal linking structure will help your cornerstone content article to rank in Google.

If you sell ballet shoes and your cornerstone content article is about the importance of well-fitted ballet shoes, you could write blogposts about ballet injuries, different brands of ballet shoes and how to determine the correct size of ballet shoes. Make sure to link from every single one of these blogposts to your original cornerstone article.

Quick wins!

In real life, perhaps you do not have the time to develop such an elaborate structure. Still, writing an article about a specific topic often leads to inspiration to write an article about a similar topic. You should then try to optimize this second post for a slightly different focus keyword and link these posts internally.

Every time you write a post, you should think about similar posts you have written and link to these. Do you already have an important article about this, even though it is not entirely awesome yet? Make sure you set up the right linking structure. This does not take a lot of your time and could really help to rank your most important article. Take a look at all the posts about the topic you have already written and add links to your most important article from all of your (less awesome) posts about that specific topic.

Structure shows importance!

Your cornerstone content pages should be overarching great articles about topics that are really important for your company. Other pages or blogposts should focus on different aspects of the same topic and should all link to the cornerstone content page. This structure will show the search engines which article is the most important on your website. This will eventually lead to the ranking of your cornerstone article in the search engines.

Want to know more?

Would you like to read more about content writing and site structure, you should definitely read our eBook about Content SEO. In this eBook, we explain step by step how to set up a nice site structure and how to write awesome content. If you want more tailor made advice, our review team is more than willing to make an in-depth analysis of your website!

 

This post first appeared as How to incorporate cornerstone content on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!

by Marieke van de Rakt via Yoast

Weekly SEO Recap: Google & HTTPS, Bing no longer nice

An interesting week this one, including an update that seems to have quite a bit of impact. There are also some nice new features in Google Trends, possible labels for slow loading sites and some more annoying news about Bing and keywords.

A Google update

It wasn’t Panda, it wasn’t Penguin, though both are still “to come”, but this week we had an update that gave several people in the SEO industry a shudder. Mozcast, which measures changes in the search results for a fixed set of keywords and calculates a “temperature” based on that, had one of its “warmest” days ever.

Dr Pete over at Moz wrote a post, thinking this change could be related to the HTTPS changes Google did earlier. This was quickly refuted by Googler Gary Illyes on Twitter. And of course, most SEO bloggers stopped thinking at that point and just wrote down that it wasn’t HTTPS related. I disagree with that. I think Googlers don’t necessarily always know anymore what causes something to happen.

Google’s algorithms are, in part, self-learning. They automatically determine factors that cause a site to be trusted. This week, Wikipedia started moving to HTTPS entirely. If more and more sites that Google trusts, like Wikipedia, the FBI and now also Reddit, all are on HTTPS, that factor might automatically become more important, simply because of that machine learning. So while Googlers might say they haven’t changed the algorithm, the algorithm might have changed itself. Note that Gary’s tweet said “AFAIK”. They do that more and more when talking about the algorithm. Simply because they don’t always know.

Of course, this is just a theory, and it would not explain all of the changes, but nothing ever does. My own thoughts on HTTPS haven’t changed much since January last year.

More Google news

Google did more this week. Google Trends got a nice update, including both real time data and data for YouTube. You should definitely just have a play with that for a bit. This Wired piece on it is good. Another interesting bit was that Google UK confirmed that more than half of their searches and YouTube views now happen on mobile. Have I reminded you to get your site ready for mobile enough now?

There was some fuzz the last few weeks about a Google backed company getting a penalty and then being reinstated in the search results within a week. Apparently John Mueller of Google said that everyone could get back this quickly. All you have to do is do a “fantastic job of cleaning these things up” and send in a “great” reconsideration request. I’ve spoken to a few SEO’s who do cleanups for sites that got penalized the same way this company did. No one had ever seen it happen, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

Google is once again testing a “Slow to load” label in the search results. It’s hard to reproduce tests like that, probably in part because where I spend most of my time online, at work and at home, I have either 4G Internet or a 200 mbit fiber connection. Doesn’t really make sense for Google to show that label on those connections.

Another update from Gary Illyes making me kinda scared was this one. He said this:

Please be mindful with noindex directives and remember that most search engines will honour it, even if it’s in the BODY element.

Which brings back all sorts of bad thoughts in me, wanting to leave meta robots noindex elements in comments on posts. It’s a good reminder nonetheless. Another tweet from Gary pointed to new breadcrumbs documentation, unfortunately it doesn’t answer some of the questions I had from the old documentation so I’ve send another email to Google.

Bing stops being nice

I’ve always had a soft spot for Bing, in part because they employ Duane Forrester, who is a great guy doing Webmaster outreach there. I have to admit they’ve made me lose some of those warm feelings this week when they announced they were no longer going to pass on search queries (part of them also moving to HTTPS completely). In their words:

to further protect our users’ privacy, we will not include the used query terms.

I think that’s nonsense, because just like Google, they will give them to advertisers. I wrote a scathing piece about that on SEObook when Google announced that in 2011. This is no different. Of course Bing doesn’t really send most sites that much traffic anyway, so most of you won’t (and/or shouldn’t) care.

That’s it for this week!

We still have an action on our site reviews, for a little while longer you can get $100 off. See you next week!

This post first appeared as Weekly SEO Recap: Google & HTTPS, Bing no longer nice on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!

by Joost de Valk via Yoast

Focus on Clarity First

With the current trend of larger and larger header images being used on homepages, there is one thing that seems to be forgotten a lot: the purpose of a website. How often have you found yourself browsing a website, to find out only after a couple of minutes what it is the website owner wants you to do? Or what he is offering you as a product or service?

I imagine a web developer telling his unknowing customer that he needs his website to “sell an online experience”, or “set a distinguishing mood”. Sales talks like that lead to a more challenging project (for the web developer), and more hours to bill (for the developer). Plus ongoing business (for the developer) when the website doesn’t perform like expected and needs to be changed. For the customer, that means rethinking his business just for the website, more costs and probably more headaches.

In this post I will try to explain why you should always focus on clarity first, even when using larger header images.

So, what do you do?

Especially when your product isn’t clear, be sure to focus on the benefits of hiring specifically you or buying your specific product. These should of course be the benefits for the customer. Looking at for instance business consulting, I found this website in the paid Google results:

This is exactly what I mean. This website allows you to find the right business consultant for your specific issue. Is that clear? I don’t think so. The *cough* slider *cough* on this website rotates a random list of empty phrases. After that, the mission is displayed and below that unfolds a one-page website ending in a contact form. Especially when you want to convince me in a one-page website, make sure that you are clear from the start. Explain why I should use you, your website or your products to reach my ultimate goal: finding the right business consultant for my problem.

Define your USP or UBR and communicate that to your new customer immediately. ConsultingQuest seems to be a relatively young business, I think this advice will surely help them improve their website.

What’s the next step?

In my own interpretation of Getting Things Done, I have a rotating wallpaper on my MacBook, asking me now and then that very question: what’s the next step? When someone lands on your website, what’s the next step? When someone clicks your call-to-action, what’s the next step? When someone buys your product, what’s the next step?

I like this setup. There is one clear call-to-action, that isn’t too aggressive. Although I would perhaps have chosen a slightly larger, orange button. On the other hand, most visitors of that page probably don’t need to be persuaded anymore. What I like most is that although you can assume that the visitor knows what Google Drive is, Google explains pretty clear what the benefits are: “All your work, secure, available everywhere and easy to share – $10/user/month includes unlimited storage”. What’s the next step? Get started. Not persuaded yet? Contact sales.

Now think about the screenshot for ConsultingQuest above. There is no next step presented without scrolling all the way down. Clarity isn’t just about what you do, it’s also about what you want your visitor to do.

Clarity is a combination of things

The first thing we do when reviewing a website, isn’t to check for meta descriptions or branded page titles. It’s way more personal, but still a mutual feeling we all share. We don’t want to be lost. We want clarity. It’s the experience we get when visiting that website for the very first time: do we get the website? Is it clear what the benefits are for us visitors? And where or how can I get these benefits?

The two examples above show that there are some considerations to be made when adding a huge image to your website. It can be done and might be effective, when done right. Last week, I was talking to a friend of mine about the same subject: larger images and how that might impact your conversion. Our new design has a larger header image. But that one won’t bug you on all of our pages. And holds our menu, as well as your cart. It contains a clear tagline, containing a reference to the upcoming Yoast Academy. But perhaps even more important, the header isn’t so high that it will leave you in the dark about what we offer. Right below the header, all our main products and services are mentioned with clear links to the appropriate sections on our site.

Conclusion

Be as clear as possible. And keep in mind that clarity is a combination of things. It’s not just about what you want to tell the customer, it’s about what you can do for the customer and why the customer should pick you before any of your competitors. Clarity is also being clear about the next action. It will for sure improve the user experience of your website.

This post first appeared as Focus on Clarity First on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!

by Michiel Heijmans via Yoast

What our Website Reviews can do for you

“Can you make us rank #1 for our keyword?” “How much more traffic can you promise us?” “Can you make us rank higher, and if so, what spot?” These are just a few examples of questions I’ve gotten from people interested in our Website Reviews in the last 2 weeks. Unfortunately, SEO doesn’t work this way, at all. We can’t guarantee a #1 position, or more traffic, or higher rankings. We can give you the tools to make it a lot more likely that you will rank higher. And oftentimes, this really helps customers with their rankings and their website in general.

Today I’m going to show you an example of one of our review customers and what our website reviews did for her. The customer I’m referring to is Lisa League, who’s running the website of Qpractice.

Ranking and traffic results

We delivered Lisa’s Gold Review in september of 2014. Since then she’s been really hard at work at improving as much as she could of what we mentioned in the review. Before we get to the results of this, we need to explain that Qpractice’s business is very cyclical. This means that during January through April it has high peaks of traffic (and sales) and then drops down until July through October, after which it drops down again. And so on. So the drop you see right after our review is a natural one.

Here’s what Lisa’s optimization based on our website review did for her traffic:

As you can see, her traffic’s increased quite a lot. In fact, her traffic increased over 85% compared to the year before. And that’s not all that changed:

So not only has she had more sessions to her site, but also did the amount of pageviews and pageviews per visit increase. The average session duration increased and the bounce rate decreased (quite dramatically, even).

Lisa had this to say about her rankings:

“My rankings have been good, I’m regularly in the top 3 for my head keywords, and regularly 1 or 2 for some important ones.”

Lisa League – Owner of Qpractice

Sale results

So that ranking and traffic are looking pretty good, right? However, traffic usually doesn’t pay the bills, especially when that traffic doesn’t convert. So that’s why I was thrilled to get this quote from Lisa:

“January – April this year I did more business than I did in all of 2014. This is 126% more business in 4 months than the entire year before. All the business originated from organic traffic and email campaigns, so no ads were involved.”

As you can imagine, Lisa was very happy with the results. It does have to be said though, none of these results would’ve happened if Lisa wasn’t so tenacious in implementing the changes we recommended. And that’ll be true for you as well: the reviews won’t do anything if you don’t put in the time to walk through them. So start optimizing your site!

Summer Sale!

As it just so happens, we currently have a Summer Sale on our Website Reviews, which means you get $100 off all of our reviews! Why would you need a review? Well, here’s what Lisa had to say:

“The review was very helpful as it pointed out easy fixes that I’d missed, and while I still have more to do, I feel like I’m on the right track.”

This post first appeared as What our Website Reviews can do for you on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!

by Thijs de Valk via Yoast

Introducing Yoast Comment Hacks

Comments are awesome, but the WordPress comments system is sometimes slightly lacking. Several large sites have, in the first few months of this year, announced they were no longer allowing comments. We, at Yoast, don’t understand that. We’ve found that there’s huge value in discussing our posts with our community. Over the years, we’ve made several plugins that all make the comments system slightly better. Today we’re announcing a new plugin that bundles some of that functionality into one simple to install plugin: Yoast Comment Hacks.

This plugin has 5 modules, all of which were previously separate plugins, some feature highlights:

Minimum comment length

By default, a comment of even 1 character is long enough to be saved. We think that’s weird. If someone wants to leave a comment, we’d prefer it if they have something real to say. This module allows you to set a minimum length and prevent people from leaving a comment if they’re under that.

Comment redirect

One of our “old time classics”, this module allows you to redirect first time commenters to a thank you page. You can use this page to inform them about other nice things on your site, stuff they should really read, etc. Want to see how that works? Well. Leave a comment on this post and you’ll see!

Clean notification emails

This was actually not a plugin of ours. The original plugin which inspired us for this was built and released by Mike Davidson in 2008. Mike is now the head of design at Twitter and obviously has better things to do, so we emailed him a while back asking if it was ok for us to update his old plugin. He gave his OK so we went to work on his old code and brought it into this decennium. The code does one “simple” thing: make comment emails look better! See this example:

There’s more

Check out the Yoast comment hacks plugin page for the other 2 modules and more screenshot examples. You can also check the code on GitHub, or file an issue there if you find a bug or have a great new feature idea. The plugin is of course also available on WordPress.org.

It doesn’t stop here!

We’ll probably add more small comment hacks to this plugin as we go along and find more small ways to make the WordPress comments system easier to use. Do tell us what you’d like to see in the comments below!

 

This post first appeared as Introducing Yoast Comment Hacks on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!

by Joost de Valk via Yoast

Weekly SEO Recap: Apple & Mobilegeddon

News comes in weird bumps sometimes. While last week was filled to the brim with search news, this week it’s incredibly slow. There was a lot of news out of Apple though, and some of it touches on search and online enough that it warrants discussing it here.

Apple news

Ad blocking

In iOS9, Apple will let you block ads. Yes you read that right. You can block ads on your mobile phone. From a user experience point of view that’s a very smart move. Google and other ad providers have their mouth full about caring about the user experience. Their ads though are often the thing slowing down the page load the most. It’s also worrisome because so many news outlets and other publishers rely on ads for their business model.

Apple Search – Spotlight

This article on Medium talks about how Apple is slowly adding more and more features to Spotlight. Spotlight is its search functionality baked into iOS and Mac OS. If you read that you might think “but it’s not web search”. To that I say: well… Not yet. If you read this, you’ll realize it might become a search engine. If it does, Google would finally get the formidable competitor I think it needs for the market to become healthy again.

SEO News

The biggest true SEO news is a Google test, and one that’s not going to have much impact by my estimation at that. I did want to do a small dive into something that has happened in the last months and see if we know a bit more now: Mobilegeddon.

Who truly got hit by Mobilegeddon?

In one of the earliest posts about the impact of Mobilegeddon, Reddit got pointed to as one of the biggest losers. When I check their mobile visibility now, I can see they’ve completely recovered.

NBC Sports is a better example. Their mobile visibility took a dive and hasn’t recovered (note that the left axis doesn’t go to 0 so it’s not quite as dramatic as it looks):

NBC Sports does just about everything wrong. Let’s say you’re a normal user and want to go to their site on your mobile phone. First, you get an interstitial for their mobile app. You’re on the go so you click that away, you don’t want to install an app while you’re traveling. You just want your sports news! Then… They give you the normal site. Saying it’s not optimized for mobile is an understatement:

Another site that got hit quite hard is FT.com. It didn’t recover either:

The following screenshot was taken with my iPhone 6:

It’s horrible. The peculiar thing is: it does have a mobile site. It even gives you a popup for it:

This leaves me with so many questions… First of all: why? Why not just redirect me if you see I’m on a mobile device? Why not tell Google that you have a mobile friendly version too (using rel=alternate)? And lastly: why a separate mobile site? Why not go fully responsive?

Responsive designs are the future for many reasons. It might seem like more work, in the long run, it’s much less work. Maintaining a separate mobile site is going to be much more costly. FT needs a good SEO and it could do much better with just a few relatively simple fixes. If you’re working on your site though, you’d be much better off just making your site responsive and not having to make changes like that, ever.

It’s clear: the time you could get away with nonsense like this is over. So get your site ready for mobile. If you need pointers, consider one of our site reviews, we’ve got a nice discount at the moment on them too! See you next week!

 

This post first appeared as Weekly SEO Recap: Apple & Mobilegeddon on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!

by Joost de Valk via Yoast

What type of content should a cornerstone article be?