Web Development

The canonical URL allows you to tell search engines that certain similar URLs are actually one and the same. Learn how to use rel=canonical!

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Some posts and pages should not show up in search results. To make sure they don’t show up, you should tell search engines to exclude them. You do this with a meta robots noindex tag. Setting a page to noindex makes sure search engines never show it in their results. Here, we’ll explain how easy it […]

The post Noindex a post or page in WordPress, the easy way! appeared first on Yoast.

“I came for the software and stayed for the community.” In this episode of our series Why we love WordPress, I’ll show you what’s behind the software we love. Software isn’t writing itself (yet), and behind WordPress is a great number of volunteer teams working on the software and everything around it. These people are […]

The post The welcoming community of WordPress appeared first on Yoast.

Half of the buttons that are used as the main call-to-action on a web page don’t invite me to click. You could and should test button design but, sometimes, it just starts with common sense. Button UX design has changed a lot over the past decade. A long-standing trend seems to be to blend a […]

The post Button UX: designing a clear call-to-action appeared first on Yoast.

Today, we’re very proud to announce that Yoast has acquired the Duplicate Post plugin. This plugin, with well over 3 million users, is one of the most popular WordPress plugins right now. The reason for that is clear: it does one task simple and well. Also, its original developer, Enrico Battocchi, will join Yoast as […]

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The Site Health tool was introduced in WordPress 5.2. It’s designed to give you, the site owner, some valuable information about your site and server performance. It’s also useful in the event you have to contact the support team for your theme or a plugin you’re using.

In this post we’ll have a quick look at this tool and highlight the most important recommendations.

Before a search engine can rank a page or a post, it needs to index it. A crawler must discover a piece of content before it can evaluate if it is a valuable addition to its index. One of the ways crawlers discover pages, is by crawling XML sitemaps. After a page has been indexed, […]

The post Indexing in Yoast SEO: Show x in search results? appeared first on Yoast.

Two words you often hear together are mobile and site speed. And that’s not without reason because these two go hand in hand. Mobile-friendliness and site speed are some of the most pressing matters we have to deal with. Measuring page speed has always been something of a dark art. The site speed tools we […]

The post Checking mobile site speed and SEO with Google Lighthouse appeared first on Yoast.

Writing a successful blog post all comes down to the proper preparations. It starts before you even begin writing: what do you want to say and to whom do you want to say it? You might want to get going right away but remember: writing takes some time. And once you’ve written an awesome blog […]

The post How to write a blog post: A step-by-step guide from preparation to publication appeared first on Yoast.

Landing pages are a very important part of your website. And if you optimize your landing pages, you can increase both your traffic and your conversion rate. Obviously, you should tailor this page to your preferred audience, but there are a number of things that go for all landing pages. In this post, we’ll go […]

The post How to optimize your landing pages for users appeared first on Yoast.

A couple of weeks ago, Google announced Web Vitals — a new set of metrics to measure the speed and user experience of websites. Last week, Google announced that these metrics will make its way into a core algorithm update as new ways of judging and ranking sites based on the page experience they offer. […]

The post Page experience: a new Google ranking factor appeared first on Yoast.

If you own a local business, you want to dominate the local search results of your niche. Nowadays, that might be even more important. But how do you write content that’ll pop up in those local search results? On what aspects should you focus? In this post, I’ll give tips you can use in order […]

The post Tips for your local SEO content strategy appeared first on Yoast.

When users search on your website and find no results, that’s usually a bad experience. But if you track these “zero result searches”, you might find yourself with data that can help you identify new content and service opportunities. It might also tell you a lot about the difference between how you see your website […]

The post Searching without result: Insights from zero result searches appeared first on Yoast.

Google can read and analyze texts very well. It understands that walk, walks and walking all boil down to the same thing. Also, Google knows that baby is basically the same as babies. How? By using something called keyword stemming. This gives you the freedom to alternate between different word forms while writing your text. […]

The post What is keyword stemming? appeared first on Yoast.