Monkey business for the geek in you!
On yoast.com, we talk a lot about writing and readability. We consider it a very important part of SEO. Your text needs to be easy to follow and it needs to satisfy your users’ needs. This, in turn, will help your rankings. However, we rarely talk about how Google and other search engines read and…
Social media are essential tools in every site owner’s marketing toolkit. It is, however, hard to control how your URLs are being shared on Facebook and Twitter. The Social Previews feature in Yoast SEO Premium helps you make the best social post out there, but what about all your taxonomies and custom post types? The…
This month, Google held their annual I/O conference, an event at which they announce new product releases and other interesting stuff. They introduced us to MUM, their new language model and the next step in understanding online content. But meeting (their) MUM wasn’t all. There was lots of SEO news in May 2021 and our…
Natural language understanding has been a tough nut to crack, but thanks to Google’s continued investment in AI, it has reached a whole new level. At I/O 2021, Google introduced MUM — Multitask United Model. According to Google, this new language model is 1000x powerful than BERT, released in 2019. MUM is coming to Google…
If you have a website for a business, it’s essential to maintain a good contact page so that (potential) customers can contact you or find your store. Not only is it detrimental to UX if your visitors end up struggling to contact you — you could lose out on sales, too. So it’s not good…
Writing seems simple enough, but writing a compelling text that keeps the attention is quite hard. Especially online. To keep people on your page, you need to write quality content that’s easy to read. Easier said than done? You’re absolutely right. That’s why we introduced a readability analysis in our Yoast SEO plugin five years…
These days, it seems as if everyone and their mother have an online store. Platforms such as WooCommerce and Shopify make it easy to start one, so why not? But, creating a shop doesn’t equal success. There are a lot of moving parts before you can celebrate sale after sale. One of those is writing…
Google is really smart, amazingly smart. The algorithm is very close to reading texts like human-beings. At the same time, parts of Google’s algorithm aren’t smart at all. Computers aren’t that good at understanding ‘what is what’ on a page. If you have a recipe site, you’ll need to tell Google what an ingredient is,…
To most social marketers, metrics like impressions, engagements, conversions and clicks need almost no explaining. These are the numbers you’re likely already tracking on a regular basis to help measure your social performance and identify areas for improvement. While these metrics may make complete sense to you and your team, things like follower count and…
Thinking about the keywords you want to rank for is really the first and foremost step you need to take for your SEO strategy. Still, keyword research can be quite daunting. So, which keyword research mistakes should you avoid at all times? In this post, I’ll take you through the most common keyword research mistakes…
When you roll out the red carpet on a new website, you might be expecting visitors to start coming eagerly. In reality, before people start visiting your site, search engines need to find, index and rank it. In this article, I share some tips that could help you get your site indexed faster. A quick note…
As part of the broader open source community, we believe in building products that people of diverse backgrounds, experiences, and abilities can use and enjoy. We strive to create software that works smoothly for English and non-English speakers alike, and today we’re happy to roll out native support for right-to-left languages in both the iOS…
Hi everyone! Check out some of the new updates, designs, and insights that helped make May a great month for the WordPress.com community. What’s new How a Detroit Hackathon Turned into WordPress.com’s First-Ever TV Spots A team of developers launched new sites for small businesses in Detroit during a 48-hour Hackathon in February, an event…
I like to think that designers solve problems, while artists ask questions. And when the two go hand-in-hand, real magic happens. Why? Because the right question gets answered with the right solution — art asks, and design responds. Here at Automattic we were extremely fortunate to recently get to partner with independent artist and designer…
Internationalization is very important to us, and we’re striving to make sites across WordPress.com accessible to all, such as your international followers and multilingual readers. Today, we’re thrilled to introduce the Google Translate Widget, which allows you and your site visitors to instantly translate your content into 103 languages currently supported by Google Translate. Languages…
As part of our effort to build a localized Spanish-speaking support team, the Happiness Hiring team at Automattic recently had the opportunity to connect with WordPress communities in Argentina and Spain. From speaking engagements to networking events, our trip was a great way to meet local communities that are passionate about WordPress and exemplary customer support. Last year at…
Every WordPress.com site displays a footer credit — a line of text at the bottom of the page — which links to our homepage and to the theme you’re currently using. These links help your visitors set up a WordPress site of their own, and highlight the reach and scope of our community. It’s a way to show the world the…
Karen Arnold, Deborah Beckett, Erica Varlese, and Pam Kocke work on the Happiness Hiring team at Automattic. They hire new Happiness Engineers who support users on WordPress.com and Automattic products. In May and June, they’ll visit WordPress and WooCommerce events in Argentina, Spain, and Austria to meet local WordPress enthusiasts and encourage people to apply…
Automatticians, the people who build WordPress.com, participate in events and projects around the world every day. Periodically, they report back on the exciting things they do in the community. This week, I share my experience at the Codex Hackathon. We’re big fans of publishing here at WordPress.com. From fantastic content created by our blogging community and news…
You may not bother with resolutions for the new year, but setting goals for your blog helps you to (re)focus and shape your online home. We asked a diverse mix of bloggers: What’s the most important goal you have for your site in 2016? Lisa Jakub Lisa Jakub, lisajakub.net Read moreHow To Create a Multilingual Online…