Michiel Heijmans | Urban Legend web design & development

Which pages to noindex or nofollow on your site?

Michiel HeijmansJune 30, 2020Yoast.com

Some of the pages of your site serve a purpose, but that purpose isn’t ranking in search engines or even getting traffic to your site. These pages need to be there, as glue for other pages or simply because regulations require them to be accessible on your website. If you regularly read our blog, you’ll know how noindex or nofollow can help you deal with these pages. However, if you are new to these terms, please read on and let me explain what they are, and what pages they might apply to!

What is noindex nofollow?

noindex means that a web page shouldn’t be indexed by search engines and therefore shouldn’t be shown on the search engine’s result pages. nofollow means that search engines spiders shouldn’t follow the links on that page. You can add these values to your robots meta tag. The robots meta tag is a piece of code in the head section of a web page. It tells search engines how to crawl and whether to index a page.

Our ultimate guide on the robots meta tag is a great read if you want to take a bit of a deeper dive into this subject.

In short:

The robots meta tag looks like this in most cases:
<meta name="robots" content="[VALUE1,VALUE2]">
VALUE1 and VALUE2 are set to index, follow by default, meaning the page at hand can be indexed by search engines and links on that page can be followed to crawl the pages they link to.
VALUE1 and VALUE2 can be set to noindex, nofollow or another combination like index, nofollow .

But don’t let this code scare you away. Yoast SEO helps you out! If you want to know how to noindex a post in WordPress, in a super-easy way, you should read this post: How to noindex a post in WordPress: the easy way.

But when should you use which value?

Pages to set to noindex

Author archives on a one-author blog

If you are the only one writing for your blog, your author pages are probably 90% the same as your blog homepage. That’s of no use to Google and can be considered duplicate content. To prevent this kind of duplicate content you can choose to disable the author archive entirely. Here’s how to enable or disable it easily with Yoast SEO. If, for some reason, you’d like to keep it on your site, but out of the search results, you can noindex it. Fortunately, with Yoast SEO, this is not very difficult either; just check how to noindex an author archive.

Certain (custom) post types

Sometimes a plugin or a web developer adds a custom post type that you don’t want to be indexed. At Yoast, for example, we use custom pages for our products, as we are not a typical online store selling physical products. So, we don’t need a product image, filters like dimensions and technical specifications on a tab next to the description. Therefore, we noindex the regular product pages WooCommerce outputs and are using our own pages. Indeed, we noindex the product post type.

Relatedly, we’ve seen eCommerce solutions that added specifications like dimensions and weight as a custom post type as well. These pages are considered to be low-quality content. You’ll understand that these pages have no use for a visitor or Google, so need to be kept out of the search result pages too.

Thank you pages

That page serves no other purpose than to thank your customer/newsletter subscriber/first-time commenter. These pages are usually thin content pages, with upsell and social share options, but no value for someone using Google to find useful information. Therefore, those pages shouldn’t be in the search results pages.

Admin and login pages

Most login pages shouldn’t be in Google. But these are. Keep yours out of the index by adding a noindex to it. Exceptions are the login pages that serve a community, like Dropbox or similar services. Just ask yourself if you would google one of your login pages if you were not in your company. If not, it’s probably safe to say that Google doesn’t need to index these login pages. Luckily, if you are running WordPress, you’re safe as the CMS noindexes your site’s login page automatically.

Internal search results

Internal search results are pretty much the last pages Google would want to send its visitors to. If you want to ruin a search experience, you link to other search pages, instead of an actual result. But the links on a search result page are still very valuable, you definitely want Google to follow them. So, all links should be followed, and the robots meta setting should be:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">

Yoast SEO makes sure your internal search pages are set to noindex by default. It’s one of Yoast SEO’s hidden features. This is not an editable setting, because it’s simply how it should be done according to the Google Guidelines, and we fully agree with them on this.

For developers only: If you do want to change this, this can be done by using one of our filters. An example can be found here.

Pages to set to nofollow

For all the examples mentioned above, there is no need to nofollow all the links on these pages. You don’t want to show them in the search results, but you do want Google to follow the links on the page. Now, when should you add a nofollow to your robots meta tag?

If you set a page to nofollow with a robots meta tag, none of the links on that page will be followed. Google came up with nofollow to be able to distinguish links to untrusted content (or, later on, paid for, like advertisements). On a regular website, there are probably very few pages you’d want Google not to follow any link.

An example: if you have a page that lists SEO books, with a surplus of Amazon affiliate links, these could be of value to your site for your users. But I’d nofollow that entire page if there’s nothing else that matters on the page. You might have it indexed, though. Just make sure you cloak your links the right way.

Nofollow single links

If you have a post or page with multiple links you might want to help search engines qualify them. Nowadays, you can nofollow a single link to, or even set it to sponsored or UGC. Adding the right rel attributes to your link allows you to do so. For instance, a link to an advertisement would look like this: <a href="https://www.example.com" rel="nofollow sponsored">example link</a>. With Yoast SEO adjusting these rel attributes is super easy, as you can see in this video:

Conclusion

As we have seen, whether or not to noindex a page or nofollow a link boils down to two questions: do you want this page to show up in the search results pages and should search engines follow the links on this page? For ‘thank you’ pages or login pages, for example, the answer to the first questions is “no”. For a page with loads of affiliate links, the answer to the second question is “no”. Keep the examples from this post in mind and you shouldn’t have any more trouble deciding the answers for your own site!

PS. Did you noindex a post or page while you didn’t mean to? No worries, as you can fix an accidental noindex easily!

3 SEO quick wins to implement right now

Michiel HeijmansMay 19, 2020Yoast.com

We all want to increase our sales, lift engagement, and get the best possible result out of our website. That’s why it only seems right to give you a three-step rocket of SEO quick wins to kick-start your website. In this post, I will show you three things you can do right now to improve your website for your visitors, and for Google in the process. Let’s dive right in with number one.

#1 Optimize speed

It doesn’t matter whether you want to improve your mobile website or your desktop website, speed is something you need to monitor and improve all the time. These are fast times, and speed is definitely what you want to optimize for.

In a simple breakdown of speed optimization, we have images, browser caching, and script optimization. Both PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom will tell you that. Another factor that plays a role in speed optimization is text compression with GZIP. But in my opinion, that should be enabled by default. Let’s have a look at the other three:

Image file size optimization

Optimizing your file size can increase the speed of your site and is also an important part of image SEO. So let’s start there. Here are a few steps you can take to optimize your file size:

Optimize the image file size in Photoshop (or any other image editing program you use). Usually, just exporting the image in a lower quality will do the trick. I usually check whether reducing the quality to around 80% of the original still gives me a crisp image.
Download an application like ImageOptim or use a web app such as Squoosh and further optimize your file size before uploading.
Last but not least, make sure that the image dimensions of your image fit the image ‘space’ that you reserved for it on the page. Don’t display a 1200×400 pixel photo as a 300×100 pixel image by adding CSS or whatever.

Browser caching

Browser caching is the way your browser stores files of a website, so it doesn’t have to load them from the internet every time you visit another page of a site. An example on our own site is the logo you see at the top of the site. Storing these files obviously saves time.

There are many ways to go about this, but if you have a WordPress site the easiest way is probably using a plugin. Most speed optimization plugins support browser caching and set them to the right time for you. Among some of my favorite speed plugins are WP SuperCache, which is free, and WP Rocket, which is a premium plugin and awesome.

Optimize script handling

You can load a gazillion JavaScript (JS) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) files to enhance your website, but in the end, all these extra files just slow your website down. Please ask yourself the following questions to optimize your script handling:

Are you sure you need that enhancement? JS and CSS usually target design and user experience. In some cases, you just don’t need that enhancement. Like JS and CSS loaded for sliders, for instance. There are alternatives to sliders that work better and don’t require extra files.
Is there a way to reduce the file size of your scripts/styles? We call this process ‘minifying’ and explain this further in an Ask Yoast video. Google has some great pointers on how to approach this. Simple scripts and handy websites can help you minify your files, for instance by stripping comments. Most platforms have plugins or extensions that help with this. To give an example, Magento has the Fooman Speedster (free and paid) for that.
Is it possible to combine a number of these scripts into one file? That way, there only has to be one call to the server to retrieve all the scripts. Again, there are plugins for that, but if you have small pieces of JS, you might as well combine these yourself. Of course, HTTP/2 changed some of these optimization practices. Make sure to test this!

#2 Mobile optimization

It’s quite tempting to copy our ultimate guide to mobile SEO here, but let’s focus on the quick wins. An important reason to focus on mobile SEO these days is Google’s mobile-first index. Since July 2019, Google determines rankings based on the quality of the mobile version of a site instead of your desktop version. So, let’s get that mobile version up and running, right?

Task-based design

Have a look at your mobile website. Imagine you are a fresh, new user of your website. What would that user want to do here and is your site ready for that? Focus on a task-based design. If someone visits a mobile website, they might need opening hours or an address. Just a while ago, I purchased tickets for the Nederlands Openluchtmuseum on my mobile phone. Saved a buck and didn’t have to get in line for tickets. I did this, walking from my car to the entrance. One needs to be able to complete these basic tasks without any problem. Ask yourself what the four, perhaps five, main goals of a visitor on your site are and make sure these can be achieved on your mobile website.

Performance-based design

Are you loading any huge images on your site? Do people have to scroll for ages to read what you have to offer them? On a mobile website, we want to find what we need and get out as fast as possible – unless it’s, for instance, a news website. Loading time is a factor on mobile sites, especially with mobile connections usually being slower than most desktop connections. Make sure your design and content don’t depend on large images too much. And yes, of course, there are exceptions to that rule. If I visit a photographer’s website, I can assume that I’m in for longer loading times. When visiting this type of website, I want crisp images and that’s the price I pay. So be sure to optimize to an acceptable level for your target audience.

Write great content

This goes for the mobile and desktop version of your site: they need great content. A quick win for mobile content is to add a to-the-point first paragraph on every page. If you tell your visitor what’s on your page, they can decide for themselves if they want to scroll down or not. This is easily done and definitely benefits the experience of your visitor.

And of course, the content that comes after this first paragraph needs to be awesome as well. To tackle that, you’ll need to do keyword research, set up a great site structure and decide on cornerstone content. But you can imagine that this is a slightly lengthier process, and we’re talking quick wins here :)

#3 Serve your content in the right format

There are so many ways to serve your content to Google, Facebook and your visitors. Your task is to investigate which formats you should invest in. Some take a bit more time to implement; others can be added to your website by the push of a button, like with a plugin. Let’s go over a few important ones.

Better social sharing: Open Graph

Forget about Twitter Cards for now, as Twitter has a fallback to Open Graph. So, add Open Graph to your website if you haven’t done this already. It’s like a social summary of your website. To give you an example, for our homepage it reads (among other things):

<meta property="og:locale" content="en_US" />
<meta property="og:type" content="website" />
<meta property="og:title" content="SEO for everyone &bull; Yoast" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Yoast helps you with your website optimization, whether it be through our widely used SEO software or our online SEO courses: we're here to help." />
<meta property="og:url" content="https://yoast.com/" />
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Yoast" />
<meta property="article:publisher" content="https://www.facebook.com/yoast" />
<meta property="article:author" content="https://www.facebook.com/jdevalk" />
<meta property="article:modified_time" content="2020-02-18T13:24:20+00:00" />
<meta property="og:image" content="https://yoast.com/app/uploads/2018/03/SEO_for_everyone_FI.png" />
<meta property="og:image:width" content="1200" />
<meta property="og:image:height" content="628" />
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image" />
<meta name="twitter:creator" content="@jdevalk" />
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@yoast" />

There’s a page/site title and a summary plus link, which tells Facebook, Pinterest or Twitter all it needs to know to create a great post on your visitor’s timeline. The og:image creates a richer experience. Be sure to add this. Again, use a plugin like Yoast SEO for TYPO3 to automate the process (and add these Twitter Cards along with Open Graph in no time).

Keep reading: Social media optimization with OpenGraph in Yoast SEO »

Quick reads on other platforms: AMP

Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP, aim to strip your website to the bare necessities to deliver your reader the best mobile experience they can get. If they want to read your article, AMP will give them just your article in basic design. If you want to check a certain product, AMP will strip much of the heavy loading stuff from the store to deliver something more focused. Is this a bad thing? I think not. Every way you can help your visitor get a better experience increases the chance of them coming back to your content and site. It might even increase sales because it’s so focused. I suggest reading up on AMP and getting your site ready — if you want. Again: plugins will help you out with this!

Tell Google what your page is about: Schema.org

I will end this list of quick SEO wins with something we’ve been telling you about for quite some time: add Schema.org to your website. Structured data, like Open Graph and Schema.org, create a convenient summary of your website for every other site or search engine that wants to use your content. Schema.org data is one of the main types of structured data. JSON-LD gives us a convenient way of adding it to our website.

Yoast SEO does a lot of work behind the scenes and automatically adds a broad spectrum of Schema.org structured data. In addition, the free structured data content blocks in Yoast SEO help you build FAQ pages and how-to articles with valid Schema.org structured data. Our Local SEO plugin adds the right Schema.org so that Google can add your company to Google Maps as well, for instance. Add Schema.org data to your website and see your company appear in the knowledge graph as well.

Serving your content in the right format is essential in delivering it to other ‘places’ on the website. Be sure to use it. And if you’re not sure what structured data you should use to optimize your pages, be sure to enroll in our structured data training which is part of our Technical SEO training.

Bonus tip! Don’t forget internal linking

I know I said 3 quick wins, but I have another bonus tip that I want to share with you. Internal linking makes your site easier to understand for users and search engines. That’s why the right internal linking strategy can boost your SEO. And an easy and quick way to improve your internal link structure is by using our internal linking suggestion tool, which gives you suggestions for related internal links on every page or post!

Recap: the 3 SEO quick wins

There’s a lot you can do that benefits SEO. And this article gets you started with a few quick wins to increase your chances of ranking high in Google. Let’s summarize what we discussed.

First of all, you can improve the speed of your site by optimizing your (image) file sizes, being smart about browser caching and optimizing script handling. Secondly, it’s important to focus on your mobile site by having a task-based and performance-based design and writing great content for your mobile version. Thirdly, make sure to serve your content in the right format by using Open Graph, making good use of AMP and adding Schema.org to your site. Lastly, a bonus tip is to get started with internal linking. That’s it, you’re all set. So let’s get optimizing, good luck!

Read on: Must-reads for higher rankings »

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Why we love WordPress: User-friendliness

Michiel HeijmansMay 8, 2020Yoast.com

At Yoast we love WordPress for multiple reasons. That’s why we decided to make a series of articles about the reasons we love WordPress, starting with an important one: user-friendliness. I’ve tried my share of closed and open-source content management systems. From simple text file based systems 20 years ago to in-house developed closed source solutions. But never before have I felt the ease of the five minute WordPress install. Let alone that a whole bunch of WordPress hosts now offer 1-click WordPress installs.

Regardless of how you feel about block editors, politics, and front-end editing, even you must admit that WordPress is very user-friendly. No matter what customers ask for, there is a solution to be found for it in the WordPress eco-system. Be it a template, a plugin, or a small piece of code.

Even for people that are not tech-savvy at all, installing and customizing a website is just not that hard. And to help you along the way you can find tips, tricks, and manuals on every WordPress related website.

Countless design options in WordPress

Currently, there are thousands and thousands of free designs (themes) available for your website. Convenient filters help you pick the right template. But that’s not all. These themes can easily be altered using a so-called Child theme. Even starting web developers can create tailor-made websites this way, while still benefiting from the updates that are available for the original theme they chose.

If you’re lazy, like me, tweaking a design using a plugin like Simple Custom CSS is even simpler. Provided that you know your way around CSS.

The option for anyone to create a fully tailored, awesome design is absolutely one of the features that make WordPress so user-friendly.

There’s a plugin for that

For me personally, plugins were the single reason to dive into WordPress back in 2011. Because I’m not a developer. HTML and CSS are my game, I can read and copy a bit of JS and PHP and that’s basically it. But WordPress and all its plugins made creating and selling full functional websites “easy” for me.

I worked from my attic and served a bunch of local and nationwide customers. A friend of mine, who had a morning show on a local radio station, asked me to create an answering machine for his website. A way for people to talk into their computer’s mic and send him an audio file per email. I was really lost, as I did not know how to code. But then I remembered the thousands of plugins. Could it be..? After a 5 minute setup, the answering machine button on his website was up and running.

That’s the usability of WordPress. It’s what we, the plugin developers, all make possible on that wonderful platform that WordPress is.

Creating and publishing content

All the links in this article show that help is always a click away. The reach and “size” of WordPress still baffles me. At this moment 34% of the top 1 million websites are built with WordPress. That literally means that thousands and thousands of people work with WordPress, contribute to WordPress, share knowledge about WordPress. Perhaps even on a daily basis. But let’s get back to creating and publishing that content.

After all the fun stuff of setting up your website, it needs content. Creating that content is probably the toughest job for every website owner. It’s writing that content in the amazing block editor, but also just coming up with ideas, collecting these in a content planning, writing the right way, and optimizing this content for SEO.

WordPress is used by websites great and small. No matter if you publish a blog post every day, or have a static website that needs updating every other year, WordPress is your go-to tool. Without any technical knowledge, WordPress allows you to do everything mentioned above, or just change that one line stating “copyright 2019” into “2020”.

In my years of working with WordPress, I think I was asked twice to explain how to write a page and publish it in WordPress. Both times, it took the customer less than 5 minutes to say “never mind, I get it”. It wasn’t WordPress that triggered that question, it was the fear of a new system. I think that the block editor makes getting to know a new system even more intuitive. And hey, you may have a different story. But this post is about why I believe WordPress is such a user-friendly platform ;-)

Shout-out to the WordPress Community

There is so much more friendliness in WordPress, and that’s why I want to do a special shout-out to the WordPress community. Besides talking about the user-friendliness of WordPress, it’s important to highlight the user-friendliness in WordPress.

WordPress has such an open and welcoming community. It’s a pleasure to meet friendly users during WordCamps and e-meet these people on Twitter and Slack whenever you feel like reaching out. At Yoast, we have an integrations channel where we collaborate with other plugins and even in this COVID19 time, we regularly reach out to other members in the WordPress space to talk about business, websites, software development, marketing opportunities, and our personal life. And that’s user-friendliness at it’s best.

Recap of WordPress user-friendliness

This article gives you an insight into why I believe WordPress is such a user-friendly platform. To summarize, WordPress makes installing and customizing a website possible for everyone. Not only can you customize your design by choosing your own theme, but there are also plugins for almost any website feature you can think of. Furthermore, WordPress makes it easy to publish content and provides plugins to help you optimize your content. Lastly, because WordPress is such a widely used platform, you can always find support and friendliness within its worldwide community of users. So if you’re new to the community, or thinking of joining, welcome! Perhaps I’ll talk to you soon on Slack or Twitter!

The post Why we love WordPress: User-friendliness appeared first on Yoast.

5 tips to switch from restaurant to food delivery

Michiel HeijmansApril 16, 2020Yoast.com

It’s a strange time for all of us. A time that calls for creative ideas on a personal and business-related level. That’s why a lot of restaurants are now delivering food or promoting takeout. In this article, we’ll give you a few tips to get the word out and optimize your website for local deliveries. And although we use restaurants as an example, you can also use these tips if you own a fashion store or any other type of local business. Let’s dive straight in!

1. Get the word out about your new food delivery service

After you’ve made the decision to start with food delivery, you need to notify as many people as possible. A good start is by posting the news on your own Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Now you might be thinking: “Facebook? Is that old thing still around?” It sure is! In fact, many people seem to have found their way back to Facebook. So don’t miss out and bring your old page back to life if you haven’t posted anything in a while. But don’t stop there! To really get the word out, try to think outside the box. What about partnering up with local influencers? That way, you’ll reach a whole new audience with the news that you’re delivering delicious food up to 6 feet or 1,5 meters from their doorstep. Finally, don’t forget to add your new service to your bio on Twitter and Instagram.

Additionally, remember to contact your local news agencies. Although the current situation rightfully dominates our news, local agencies are probably on the lookout for other (lighter) news as well. Create and share an awesome behind the scenes video for example. Your local news site will probably be happy with the new content provided and promote your restaurant’s deliveries for free in the process. Also consider contacting UberEats, Deliveroo, JustEat or other food delivery websites to get your restaurant online on these platforms. Yes, they charge some money for that, but it quickly expands your reach on a local level. Plus, you can include a business card with your order and ask people to order directly at your restaurant next time.

2. Make sure they remember you

If you’re not doing this yet, include a menu with every delivery for customers to put on their fridge. Make sure people are able to download and print that menu from your website as well. If you have a weekly menu, include the start and end date so your customers know until when they’re able to order from this menu. Also, add your preferred way to receive orders by stating your phone number and/or website.

Include branded napkins, coasters, or anything they can put in a kitchen drawer and see every time they take out cutlery. For example, our local pizza place includes small packages of tissues with a simple company sticker on it with every order. It works. We ordered twice already.

Mailchimp allows for easy ways to set up a newsletter. And if you use WordPress it’s quite easy to add a newsletter subscription form to your website. Why am I telling you this? Because with this form you can quickly create a possibility for customers to subscribe to your weekly menus. Easy to subscribe, easy to unsubscribe.

If you aren’t using WordPress, and you have some spare time now, switching to WordPress is a great way to utilize your time at home. Scary? Not after taking our WordPress for beginners course. Expensive? Not necessarily. If you have a smaller website, you can really do a lot yourself.

Reassure your customers by telling them what you’re doing to flatten the curve. A lot of restaurants are open about their COVID19 precautions and what social distancing looks like in their kitchen. Make sure that you are open about your precautions as well. That way, your customers will feel safe when you give them their delivery and wish them a great meal from an appropriate distance.

Another way to remind your audience of your new service is by reposting customer’s Instagram posts in your own Instagram stories. We see that a lot. I just love scanning Instagram stories for reposts from restaurants. It’s touching to see the enthusiasm of people who ordered from their favorite restaurant. And all the amazing food that’s delivered. One of our local bars is delivering beers and snacks and writes a personal “letter” on every paper bag. Instagram is showing me more and more of those bags every day. People really appreciate that!

Keep reading: Tips for your local SEO content strategy »

3. Vouchers FTW

Does your business have vouchers? Promote them! A sale is a sale. Just last week, I ordered food and bought three restaurant vouchers as well. As gift cards. I repacked these and sent them to local family members. And they ordered a restaurant delivery in return.

So make sure to promote these vouchers on your website. Don’t hide the fact that they are really helping you out in dire times with these things. And if you don’t have a digital version yet, definitely consider making one. That way you’re able to send your voucher or gift card to your customer’s email address!

4. Is pickup/takeout still possible?

Taking the right measures concerning social distancing, a lot of restaurants still offer takeout. If your restaurant also offers customers this possibility, then it’s important to promote this. Not only because you’re giving customers the option to save a few bucks on delivery costs, but it also saves you time! Read our post Easy curbside pickup with WooCommerce and Local SEO about the pickup option in our Local SEO for WordPress plugin. You can choose pickup/takeout as a delivery method during checkout.

5. Optimize for your food delivery area

Local optimization is actually pretty hard if you are servicing a broad local area. Local optimization tends to work best if you are able to optimize for a location, your physical address. The Local SEO plugin I mentioned earlier helps you optimize for that address or several addresses if you have them. But even if you are located in a certain town, you might want to deliver in other neighboring towns as well. Optimizing for towns and cities you’re not located in, is a different ball game.

A word of warning: there is no quick technical fix for ranking in more than one town from one physical address. There is a AreaServed property defined in schema.org markup, but that is not being taken into account by Google right now. So don’t invest a ton of money into getting that working for you. But don’t worry, that doesn’t mean you can’t do anything.

If you are serving more than one area, let your customers in those areas know. This probably means that you have to write a page about your deliveries for every town/city you want to serve. Because your delivery times might vary a bit depending on the area you’re writing for, you might have to take extra precautions to make sure the food stays warm. Write about that electrical car or bike that allows you to deliver in town x and use what you know about this town to really focus your page on this area. Town x might not have a Mexican restaurant, so you might be the perfect alternative for them to order Mexican takeout. I’m sure you can fill that page.

Read on: What is local SEO? »

That’s it, now go deliver!

We at Yoast #supportlocal. It’s all the small things that make local shops great. The examples of necessity-driven promotions we’ve seen so far are amazing and can teach us “experts” a thing or two about creative marketing ideas. So keep it up and think creative! These are strange times and we hope that the tips and tricks in this article help you optimize your food delivery to keep your business running and profitable.

We’ll make sure to visit our local restaurants when COVID-19 is under control again. For now, we’ll place frequent orders at our local restaurant and look forward to the amazing food you’ll deliver! And don’t forget to include that menu: There is still space left on my fridge.

Keep on reading: The ultimate guide to small business SEO »

The post 5 tips to switch from restaurant to food delivery appeared first on Yoast.

Oh yes, Cyber Monday deals at Yoast!

Michiel HeijmansDecember 2, 2019Yoast.com

Wow! You’ve probably been shopping since Friday and FedEx and UPS have been scheduling your deliveries all weekend. Busy times. But I’m sure you saved an additional 301 US dollars just in case. If you’d buy the Apple AirPods Pro for the regular $249, that would leave you enough bucks for a Yoast SEO Premium license today!

We’re going back to regular prices tomorrow, so this really is the last day to profit from our biggest discount in the history of Yoast. We’re not kidding. With 30% off all products, we’re inviting you to:

Get your SEO game to the next level
Try that plugin you always wanted
Ditch your SEO company by learning yourself
Rank better and pave the way for the future growth of your company

So what did others buy over the last couple of days?

During our Black Friday sale, we noticed you really, really liked a number of our products:

Yoast SEO for WordPress

Our flagship product will be installed on thousands of websites over the next weeks. It helps you to get more visitors from Google and Bing, attract more visitors from social media and it will guide you in writing better text and optimize internal linking!

Get Yoast SEO Premium today at 30% OFF!

All Yoast SEO plugins and courses at once!

If you are serious about SEO, you certainly want the whole Yoast package. The leading SEO plugin for WordPress, all addons for your specific websites like WooCommerce and Local SEO, and all the courses to keep learning about SEO. At a whopping 30% discount!

Yes, I definitely want that full SEO package NOW

Tomorrow, we’re back to business as usual, with normal prices and without all the annoying ads and newsletters. But for the next 24 hours, our biggest sale ever is still on!

Get these deals while they’re hot!

Happy Cyber Monday.

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Black Friday: Biggest discount ever!

Michiel HeijmansNovember 29, 2019Yoast.com

We’re not kidding. It’s time for Black Friday, the one time a year we clean up the attic at Yoast. With our whopping 30% discount on everything, we top every sale we ever had.

Get your SEO package TODAY

Yes, when we say everything, we mean everything. Our subscriptions are cheaper than ever. With 30% extra on our already low prices we live up to our mission SEO for everyone. This is your chance to get all Yoast products, plugins and courses, for under $35 (first month, annual plan). That’s basically below cost price. Period. So get your package now, because this just isn’t sustainable.

Yes, I want all Yoast products with an extra 30% off!

Don’t miss out: Yoast SEO Premium for just over $60 a year

You can get a year of our premium flagship product Yoast SEO Premium for only ~~89 US dollars~~ $62… That means you get all the great extra features:

Word forms, synonyms and related keywords
Redirect manager
Internal link optimization
Social previews and more

For less than you’d typically pay for a Shawn Mendes ticket, our plugin can help you rank better & get more traffic so you can go to as many concerts you’d like. A no-brainer? We think so.

Get your Yoast SEO Premium upgrade NOW

Raise your SEO game

Cover your own SEO bases today with our Yoast SEO academy courses. Don’t just use our plugin and write your content, but get a deeper understanding of why you should write that text for your audience and why & how you should use that feature in our plugin. Our recommendation: Don’t just focus on the content side of things, or frustrate over technical SEO, but get a better understanding of everything:

Get all our Premium Yoast SEO academy courses!

So yes, if you ever wondered if you should buy our products, or have been postponing real optimization and better rankings for your website, now would be the time to fire things up with our Black Friday deals!

Happy Black Friday.

The post Black Friday: Biggest discount ever! appeared first on Yoast.

Update or delete? Cleaning up old content on your site

Michiel HeijmansOctober 31, 2019Yoast.com

Sometimes, content on your website becomes irrelevant or out of date, and you need to decide whether to update it or delete it. It’s part of your regular content maintenance activities. There are several ways to go about this and this article helps you decide what’s the best solution for your old content!

Update old content that is still valid

Let’s start with an example: On our blog, we have an article on meta descriptions that needs constant updating to keep it relevant. We just have to make sure it stays up to date with all the changes Google keeps making to the way it handles meta descriptions. Sometimes it seems they can be a bit longer and sometimes they seem to go back to the old length again.

Our post helps writers and editors to write meta descriptions, even though the advice changes over time. Although the article itself might be what we call cornerstone content, its content must be updated to keep up with the latest standards – constantly.

You can easily create new, valuable content from your old posts if you update it and make it current again: old wine in new bottles, as the saying goes. You could, for example, replace older parts of that content with updates, or you could merge three old blog posts about the same subject into one new post. If you do this, please remember to redirect the old post URLs to the new post, using a 301 Redirect. More on that later.

Delete irrelevant posts or pages

It’s likely that you have old posts or pages on your site that you don’t need anymore. Think along the lines of a blog post about a product you stopped selling a while ago and have no intention of ever selling again, an announcement of an event that took place a long time ago or old pages with little or no content – so-called thin content pages.

These are just some examples, but I’m sure you know which posts and/or pages I’m talking about. This old content adds no value anymore, now or for the foreseeable future. In that case, you need to either tell Google to forget about these old posts or pages or give the URL another purpose.

When I talk about deleting old content, I don’t mean just pressing “delete” and then forgetting about it. If you do that, the content might show up in Google for weeks after deletion. The URL might actually have some link value as well, which would be a shame to waste.

So, what should you do? Here are two options:

“301 Redirect” the old post to a related one

When a URL still holds value because, say, you have a number of quality links pointing to that page, you want to leverage that value by redirecting the URL to a related one. With a 301 Redirect you’ll tell search engines and visitors there’s a better or newer version of this content elsewhere on your site. The 301 redirect automatically sends people and Google to this page.

Say you have an old post on a specific dog breed. You need to delete it, so the logical next step would be to redirect that post to a newer post about this dog breed. If you don’t have that post, choose a post about the closest breed possible. If that post isn’t available, you could redirect it to the category page for these posts (e.g. “dog breeds”) and if that is also not an option, redirect to the homepage. That last one might be about “pets”, for example. It’s a bit of a last resort though, there probably are better options on your site.

Creating a 301 Redirect (for instance in WordPress) isn’t hard, but doing it with Yoast SEO Premium is easy as pie. If you don’t have it yet, find out about all the extras that are in Yoast SEO Premium here.

Tell search engines the content is intentionally gone

If there isn’t a relevant page on your site you can redirect to, it’s wise to tell Google to forget about your old post entirely by serving a “410 Deleted” status to Google. This status code will tell Google and visitors the content didn’t just disappear; you’ve deleted it with a reason.

When Google can’t find a post, the server will usually return a “404 Not Found” status to the search engine’s bot. You’ll also find a 404 crawl error in your Google Search Console for that page. Eventually, Google will work it out and the URL will gradually vanish from the search result pages. But this takes time.

The 410 is more powerful in the sense that it tells Google that the page is gone forever, never to return. You deleted it on purpose, period. Google will act on that faster than with a 404. Read up about the server status codes if this is all gibberish to you.

Keep reading: How to properly delete a page from your site »

Do you have old content to deal with?

Cleaning up old content should be part of your content maintenance routine. If you don’t go through your old posts regularly, you’re bound to run into issues sooner or later. You might show incorrect information to visitors or hurt your own rankings by having too many pages about the same topic, increasing chances of keyword cannibalization, which is a lot of work to fix later on. Therefore, go through your old posts, and decide what to do: update, merge or delete!

Good luck cleaning up your site.

Read on: Should you keep old content? »

The post Update or delete? Cleaning up old content on your site appeared first on Yoast.

The beginner’s guide to Yoast SEO

Michiel HeijmansJuly 19, 2019October 5, 2019Yoast.com

Imagine you have a website but know nothing about SEO. But you’ve heard about Yoast SEO and people have told you it’s a great tool for effortlessly optimizing your site and its pages for Google, Bing, and Yandex. So you install the Yoast SEO plugin or the Yoast SEO extension and follow the instructions. What’s next? While it’s unlikely that your website will be right at the top of Google within a week, our plugin helps you to optimize for search engines, to improve your chances to rank. It does that well, but it still needs your input.

This beginner’s guide to Yoast SEO explains the basics of SEO as covered by our plugin. Let’s go through the steps every user should take when trying the Yoast plugin, and take the first steps in optimizing your site.

Do you need more guidance, to use all the great features of Yoast SEO to their full potential? Look no further and check out our free Yoast SEO for WordPress plugin training! It’ll teach you how to make optimum use of your Yoast SEO plugin, so you can take your SEO to the next level!

A beginner‘s guide to Yoast SEO

Before we start, take note that this isn’t a guide to every single detail of our plugin. In this post, we’ll show you some important things we think you should use or configure. Our plugin has quite a few settings, so it’s good to know which you should configure first. If you have a site-specific question about a particular setting in the plugin, you could also check out the Yoast Knowledge Base.

In this post, we’ll cover:

Configuring Yoast SEO: configuration wizard
- Other settings
Using the Yoast SEO metabox
A bit more advanced: Yoast Dashboard
- Search Appearance
Configuring Yoast SEO: configuration wizard

Our Yoast SEO configuration wizard is a great place to start configuring your plugin. You’ll find it at Yoast SEO > General > Dashboard:

The configuration wizard guides you through several steps that help you configure our plugin to suit the needs of your site. Even if your website has already been around for a while, you can still run the wizard every now and then. Just to make sure your settings are up to date. Each step of the wizard includes questions, the answers to which will determine particular settings.

Read more: The Yoast SEO configuration wizard and why you should use it »

Other settings

Of course, there are many aspects to SEO, and many more settings you could tweak in the plugin. But we set the configuration wizard in such a way that it already configures the plugin’s general settings correctly for your website. So you can focus on what’s most important – your content! Curious to find out what the plugin does for your site? Read up on Yoast SEO’s hidden features that secretly level up your SEO!

Using the Yoast SEO metabox

Of course, any Beginner’s guide to Yoast SEO should extensively cover the metabox. The Yoast SEO metabox will help you optimize your content as you’re writing it in the backend. If you’re using the Block Editor, you’ll find the it on the right side of the editor, as well as underneath the editor. Here, you’ll find a few tabs, two of which we’ll discuss here.
- A tab where you can insert the word or phrase you want to optimize the page for – the focus keyphrase. This tab also includes the SEO analysis.
- A tab for the readability analysis. The checks in this tab help you write the best copy you can, so you can serve your audience great content.
Let’s go through the checks in each tab, and explore which other things you can set in the metabox.

The readability analysis

The first step in optimizing your post or page is making sure it’s nice to read for your audience. Since SEO is one of those areas where content is indeed king, we provide a convenient readability analysis for you. That’s because we understand not everyone has the skills to easily create readable content. Use the readability analysis when you’re writing a new post, or directly after, depending on what works best for you.

Now let’s see what’s in our readability analysis:

As you can see, we analyse many different aspects of your text:

Why is readability important?

If you’re going to write website content, you need to understand that online and offline writing are two different things. While we take the time to sit down and read the great stories in books, or the articles in magazines, we tend to quickly scan, process and use the things we read online. This post isn’t a page in a book. It’s information for you to process, like most online pages are, and we wrote our readability analysis with that purpose in mind. Check out our post on ease of reading and SEO to find out more!

Government rulings and readability

As you may know, Yoast is based in the Netherlands, where the law requires that the copy on all government websites is B2: Upper intermediate level. It’s a rule that makes sure that every citizen, regardless of their level of education, can read and understand the information on these websites. We believe that every site should be understandable for everyone. Our readability analysis aims to help with that.
- Readability score: the Flesch Reading Ease test makes sure every reader can understand your writing. If you are writing for a more educated audience, a lower score is acceptable – it’s a guideline, you decide how strictly to follow it.
- Use of passive voice: passive voice distances you from the reader, while active voice is much more engaging. It’s almost impossible to write a ‘natural’ article without any passive voice at all, which is why we ‘allow’ 10% passive voice in our analysis.
- Consecutive sentences: if your text contains three or more sentences in a row all starting with the same word, it may become a bit repetitive. We encourage you to mix things up!
- Use of headings and subheadings: Headings help you group topics, which makes a text easier to process, which means that people can scan your pages faster.
- Paragraph length: long paragraphs in an online article are more difficult to understand as readers find themselves lost in all the words. Bite-sized chunks of text are easier to process.
- Sentence length: while in a book you can stretch a sentence over half a page, shorter sentences are much easier to read online. We use 20 words as a target length.
- Use of transition words to help improve the ‘flow’ of your page. They send a signal to your visitors that something is coming up and prepares them for the next sentence. You’ll find that the recommendation of using transition words in 30% of your sentences isn’t that hard to do.
If you want more insight into how we decided on all these criteria, see Content analysis: methodological choices explained. By the way, our readability analysis works for many languages, such as English, Spanish, Dutch, French, German, and Italian. Here’s an overview of which features are available per language.

Snippet preview

In addition to the checks in the metabox, we provide an editable snippet preview. In the Block Editor, you can find it near the top of the sidebar, or underneath the editor, under the ‘SEO’ tab. The snippet preview shows you how the Yoast plugin displays your page to Google and other search engines. In other words, it gives an idea of how your site would appear in the search results.

In the snippet preview, you can set a meta description. Make an effort and write a meta description that clearly reflect what your post or page is about. Let people know they’ll find what they’re looking for on your site and entice them to visit your site. There’s no guarantee that Google will display your meta description in the results pages. But if the meta description you add here is very good, you’ll increase the odds.

SEO Analysis

The next step is optimizing your content for your focus keyphrase to rank in the search engines. You can enter your keyphrase at the top of the sidebar in the block editor, or at the top of the ‘SEO’ tab.

Just so we’re clear: entering a keyphrase here doesn‘t guarantee that you’ll rank for that keyphrase. Unfortunately, we can’t make that happen for you. What we can do, is evaluate how well your content is optimized to rank for that specific keyphrase. Need more information on picking a focus keyphrase? Find out how to choose the perfect focus keyword.

Our SEO analysis currently includes the following checks:

In the image, you can see how we analyze different aspects of your text:
- Keyphrase in subheading: subheadings are a prominent part of your article. Add your focus keyphrase to a few of your subheadings, so its importance is clear.
- Keyphrase distribution: you need to mention your keyphrase often enough in your text, but good balance is key. That’s why we check if your keyphrase is evenly distributed throughout your text.
- Image alt attributes: add images to create a better experience for your users. Use the focus keyword in the ALT text so that Google can relate that image to the keyword.
- SEO title width: a short page title allows you to add a trigger for a visitor from Google to click to your website.
- Outbound links: we encourage sites to link to other websites as well, as this opens up the web. Link to other websites that back up the points in your blog posts, or provide further information. This will help Google work out which websites relate to each other on what subjects.
- Internal links: to set up a proper site structure, link to at least one other related page on your site. It keeps visitors on your site and shows them more (background) information.
- Keyphrase in introduction: you want to make clear right from the start what the page is about, so try to add the focus keyphrase from the start.
- Keyphrase length: If a keyword is too short, you’re probably targeting a super competitive keyword, whereas longer keyphrases make it harder to optimize your post. So, we recommend a maximum of four relevant keywords for your focus keyphrase.
- Keyphrase density: In the free version of Yoast SEO, you’ll get a green bullet if your keyphrase density lies between 0.5 and 3%. That’s to make sure you use your keyphrase enough, without over-optimizing.
- Keyphrase in meta description: add a meta description that includes the focus keyword. People searching for that term on Google may see this in search results, so make it enticing to click on.
- Meta description length: We advise to keep your meta description between 120 characters and 156 characters.
- Previously used keyphrase: you should optimize a page for a certain keyword – not an entire website. So don’t create pages that compete with each other! Yoast SEO will warn you if you write more than one post about the same keyword. A simple solution is to use a variation or a long tail keyword
- Text lenght: if you want your page to rank for a specific keyword, you need to write at least 300 words on the subject. Otherwise, search engines will have a hard time grasping your topic, and might even consider your page ‘thin content‘ – and you want to avoid that.
- Keyphrase in title: if you add your focus keyword at the beginning of your page title, it will have the most value. Also, it will immediately stand out when your post is shared
- Keyphrase in slug: repeat your focus keyword in your URL. This makes it clear – even out of context – what your page is about. And Google also likes seeing it in there.
For an overview of all checks in the Yoast plugin, check out the Yoast SEO assessment page.

If you have Yoast SEO Premium, the plugin will recognize word forms, and allows you to optimize for keyword synonyms as well. Our premium analysis is as smart as Google, why not give it a spin?

Does every light need to be green?

No, not every bullet in the SEO analysis has to be green for your post or page to rank. Similarly, getting your post ‘all-green’ in no way guarantees that it will rank. While it’s tempting to simply aim for all-green bullets on every post or page without working on other aspects of your SEO, that isn’t the best SEO strategy. Proper keyword research and site structure always come before getting green bullets. Read more about properly using the colored bullet system in Yoast SEO.

Next level: Cornerstone content

If your page is the main page for a particular topic or keyword in a group of pages you plan to write, you can mark it as cornerstone content. There’s a toggle for that in the Yoast SEO metabox, so Yoast SEO can help you you create your best cornerstone articles. But, how to implement a cornerstone content strategy on your site isn’t a subject for a beginner’s guide to Yoast SEO! It might be wise to take our Site structure course first :)

A bit more advanced: Yoast Dashboard

Of course, there is so much more you can do with Yoast SEO. You can access and change many settings of the plugin in the Yoast Dashboard. There’s usually no need to change anything. Especially if you’re an inexperienced user, it’s wise to stick to the settings you set in the configuration wizard. But let’s have a quick look around to give you an idea of what the options are.

Search Appearance

If you go to Yoast > Search Appearance, you can adjust how your site appears in search engines. Take the ‘Title Separator’, for instance. In the configuration wizard, you can choose whether you want a dash, asterisk, or something else. But, if you change your mind later, you can always change it here.

In ‘Search Appearance’, you can change, among other things, how our plugin sets up your titles and metas. Go to the tab ‘Content Types’, where you will find the default template we use for your post titles. It’s good to know it’s there and realize what you can configure.

This simply means we will use the title of your page or post as the page title, and add the page number if your post is divided over multiple pages. Then we add a title separator (which we discussed in the first paragraph on this section) and then the site name you have set when creating your site. So, following this setup, the title for this Beginner’s guide to Yoast SEO post looks like this:

Note that this example doesn’t include a page number after the page title, as this post is just one page.

This is the setup we recommend. It’s focused on the page title (“Beginner’s guide to Yoast SEO”) and has proper branding at the end (“Yoast”).

The reason why I’ve drawn your attention to this setting, is that you should know it’s there, so you don’t have to look for it in the future. This is why your titles are shown like this in Google searches.

Keep reading: Snippet variables in Yoast SEO »

Yoast SEO for beginners

That’s it for our beginner’s guide to Yoast SEO. With Yoast SEO properly installed, your website is ready for Google. You now can get on track adding and optimizing your content with the Yoast readability analysis and SEO analysis!

Here’s a few more reading recommendations, if you really want to become a pro user of the Yoast SEO plugin:
If you want all this information and more, neatly structured in one place, and with helpful videos, check out our Yoast SEO for WordPress plugin training, it’s free!

Read on: Why every website needs Yoast SEO »

The post The beginner’s guide to Yoast SEO appeared first on Yoast.

The Yoast SEO configuration wizard

Michiel HeijmansJuly 6, 2019Yoast.com

Have you ever done a fresh install of Yoast SEO for WordPress on your WordPress website? Or perhaps you haven’t installed Yoast SEO yet, and you’re wondering what to expect? Perhaps the better question would be: have you ever tried our Yoast SEO configuration wizard? Our wizard takes care of all the little things that you should configure in Yoast SEO. Things that you might forget in your eagerness to get started with your newly set up website. But how do you start the configuration wizard? And what exactly do we cover in each step? Let’s dive in!

Where can I find the Yoast SEO configuration wizard?

Of course, you want to jump right in and configure the plugin, using that Yoast SEO configuration wizard. Once you have installed the Yoast SEO plugin, you’ll see this notification in Yoast SEO > General > Dashboard:

The configuration wizard helps you to easily configure your site to have the optimal SEO settings.
We have detected that you have not finished this wizard yet, so we recommend you to start the configuration wizard to configure Yoast SEO.

There is a link in this message, which takes you to the Yoast SEO configuration wizard.

Configuration wizard notification in Yoast SEO dashboard

Note that if this isn’t the first time you’re using the configuration wizard, you’ll still find a link to run the wizard again, but the message will instead say:

Want to make sure your Yoast SEO settings are still OK? Open the configuration wizard again to validate them.

The wizard

Once you’ve opened the wizard, we’ll guide you through the steps via a few questions. If you answer these, we’ll implement the right settings for your website, based specifically on your answers.

Step 1: Is your site ready to be indexed?
Step 2: What kind of site do you have?
Step 3: Is it you or an organization?
Step 4: To show or not show posts and pages
Step 5: How many people are publishing content on your site?
Step 6: Optimizing your page title
Step 7: Awesome tips and new products in your inbox
Step 8: Upsell: you might like...
Step 9: Get started with the Yoast SEO and readability analysis

Step 1: Is your site ready to be indexed?

The first question determines whether you want your site to be indexed or not. The reason we ask, is that one of the most important checks in our plugin determines whether Google can index your site or not. Google needs to be able to reach your website and index it, unless you don’t want that. And there could be good reasons why you might not want that: perhaps you’re working on a development site, on a staging server or just don’t want the public to see your site yet. If that’s the case, no problem! Just set your preference in the first step of our wizard, then click ‘next’ to continue.

Step 2: What kind of site do you have?

In the next step, we will ask you about the type of site you have. It could be a blog or an online shop, but might as well be a news site or a portfolio.

One of the reasons we ask this question is because it’s essential for you to take a moment and think about this. What is your site about? Having a clear idea of this will help you focus on what’s important for you site.

Let’s take yoast.com, for example. We have two different sections on our website yoast.com:

Our blogs: an SEO blog and a dev blog. In these blogs, we share knowledge about both SEO and software development in all its facets.
Our online shop. We run an online shop and you’ll find our premium plugins and online courses in there.

Following our mission, “SEO for everyone”, both parts of our website are equally important. Sharing knowledge is our main goal. We use our products to provide even more insights and tools, or to deliver our knowledge to you in a structured package.

So, decide for yourself what your answer to this question should be. That’ll make it easier to configure several features of our plugin and, in fact, of your website later on. For us, as plugin developers, the information we get from this question is also useful for future improvements. For instance, it can help us to prioritize future additions to our plugin for specific types of sites.

Step 3: Is it you or an organization?

For the right metadata, we ask you to choose between organization and person here. Is your website about you, or an organization you represent? If you are a person, we would like to include your name. If you are a company, you can add the name and logo.

This information will be included in the metadata of your website, with the goal to provide Google with the right information for their Knowledge Graph. The Knowledge Graph is the block of information you see on the right-hand side of the search results, for instance when you do a company search for Sony or Apple.

In addition to your name or company name, we also ask you to let us know which social profiles you have. Again, so we can provide Google with the right information for their Knowledge Graph. Google seems keen on delivering answers to their visitors right away, so you’d better make sure your information is on Google.

With social being a part of the Knowledge Graph, and your website being linked on all your social profile pages, be sure to fill this out as completely as possible.

Step 4: To show or not show posts and pages

The description in the image below is pretty clear: this is where you can set posts and pages to hidden or visible for the search engines. If you already know that you don’t want posts on your site to show up in the search results, you can set this to ‘no’. Not sure? Read more about indexing in Yoast SEO.

Step 5: How many people are publishing content on your site?

We want to know if your website has multiple authors. There’s a reason for that: when your site only has one author, WordPress will still generate author pages. And if you write all the content on your blog yourself, your blog page will show the exact same collection of posts as your author page. Which, indeed, is duplicate content.

We call something duplicate content when the majority of a page is the same as the content on another page. Google will get confused, won’t know what page to rank first, and might decide to rank both a bit less. You obviously want to prevent that. As we can guide you in this case, we added this check to our Yoast SEO configuration wizard.

Step 6: Optimizing your page title

This step in the wizard asks you to think about your branding. The website name you enter here is the name that our default page title template will put at the end of each page title. The default page title template looks like this:
title - page - sep - sitename

The last part of that template is sitename, and that’s what you fill out here. Be sure to add it, but keep it short, so the focus will be on the page or post title. It’s nice to have some of your branding in here so people will recognize your pages in the search result pages. If they already know you and your site, they’re more likely to click on one of your links.

The third part of the page template is sep, which stands for separator. A page title that follows our template could be “Some title of a post – Yoast”. The hyphen in there is the separator you set at this step in the Yoast SEO configuration wizard. Using an uncommon separator might make you stand out from your competitors in the search result pages. You could also choose to pick the smallest separator, to squeeze in another character or two.

Step 7: Awesome tips and new products in your inbox

As SEO is an ongoing process, our goal is to keep you up-to-date on any changes in Google’s search result pages or Google’s algorithm. We do that by posting on our SEO blog, but also with our newsletter. In the newsletter, we highlight new developments in search, in WordPress, and in our company – if relevant. Simply insert your email address, and we’ll keep you in the loop on all things SEO!

Step 8: Upsell: you might like…

Call it whatever you want (upsell, spam, useful information), but we have to tell you about our premium plugin in our configuration. Because we deliver incredibly useful SEO extras with that premium plugin, for a reasonable price. To name but a few:

Better keyword optimization, because you can optimize not only for your focus keyword, but also for synonyms, and taking word forms into account.
What about a redirect manager? We’ll not only show you your 404s, but will also make it very easy to redirect, and thereby fix them.
Social previews, so you’ll know exactly what your website will show on Facebook and Twitter, and the option to tweak that.
A year of updates for all premium features, so your entire plugin will always be 100% up-to-date.
Email support for as long as you have Premium. This means you can email our 24/7 support team with any questions you have about the plugin.

In addition, we offer some hands-on online courses to improve your SEO game even more. Be sure to check them out; you can always decide later which SEO aspects you want more guidance on.

Step 9: Get started with the Yoast SEO and readability analysis

All the steps above have one goal: prepare you and your website for SEO. But while this wizard will help you get the general settings of your plugin right, your job optimizing your content is far from done.

If you have used our plugin before, you’ll know it also analyses your content in real time, while you write your posts or pages. On the page/post edit screen, where you write your content, you’ll find this analysis in the sidebar and the so-called meta box. For more insights into how to use the SEO and readability analysis, we finish our Yoast SEO configuration wizard with a helpful video. It tells you more about that specific part of the plugin, so you don’t just set it and forget it. Be sure to watch that video!

The configuration wizard makes things easier for everyone

Now you know why you should give our Yoast SEO configuration wizard a spin, and why it asks certain questions. The wizard’s got you covered by setting things correctly under the hood of your website, so you can focus your efforts on optimizing your content.

Ready for the next step in using Yoast SEO? Check out our beginner’s guide to Yoast SEO. And, if you want to learn all the ins and outs of our plugin, get the Yoast SEO for WordPress training!

The post The Yoast SEO configuration wizard appeared first on Yoast.

How to keep your page out of the search results

Michiel HeijmansFebruary 26, 2019Yoast.com

If you want to keep your page out of the search results, there are a number of things you can do. Most of ’em are not hard and you can implement these without a ton of technical knowledge. If you can check a box, your content management system will probably have an option for that. Or allows nifty plugins like our own Yoast SEO to help you prevent the page from showing up in search results. In this post, I won’t give you difficult options to go about this. I will simply tell you what steps to take and things to consider.

Why do you want to keep your page out of the search results?

It sounds like a simple question, but it’s not, really. Why do you want to keep your page out of the search results in the first place? If you don’t want that page indexed, perhaps you shouldn’t publish it? There are obvious reasons to keep for instance your internal search result pages out of Google’s search result pages or a “Thank you”-page after an order or newsletter subscription that is of no use for other visitors. But when it comes to your actual, informative pages, there really should be a good reason to block these. Feel free to drop yours in the comments below this post.

If you don’t have a good reason, simply don’t write that page.

Private pages

If your website contains a section that is targeted at, for instance, an internal audience or a, so-called, extranet, you should consider offering that information password-protected. A section of your site that can only be reached after filling out login details won’t be indexed. Search engines simply have no way to log in and visit these pages.

How to keep your page out of the search results

If you are using WordPress, and are planning a section like this on your site, please read Chris Lema’s article about the membership plugins he compared.

Noindex your page

Like that aforementioned “Thank you”-page, there might be more pages like that which you want to block. And you might even have pages left after looking critically if some pages should be on your site anyway. The right way to keep a page out of the search results is to add a robots meta tag. We have written a lengthy article about that robots meta tag before, be sure to read that.

Adding it to your page is simple: you need to add that tag to the <head> section of your page, in the source code. You’ll find examples from the major search engines linked in the robots meta article as well.

Are you using WordPress, TYPO3 or Magento? Things are even easier. Please read on.

Noindex your page with Yoast SEO

The above mentioned content management systems have the option to install our Yoast SEO plugin/extension. In that plugin or extension, you have the option to noindex a page right from your editor.

In this example, I’ll use screenshots from the meta box in Yoast SEO for WordPress. You’ll find it in the post or page editor, below the copy you’ve written. In Magento and TYPO3 you can find it in similar locations.

How to keep your site out of the search results using Yoast SEO

Click the Advanced tab in our Yoast SEO meta box. It’s the cog symbol on the left.
Use the selector at “Allow search engines to show this post/page in search results”, simply set that to “No” and you are done.

The second option in the screenshot is about following the links on that page. That allows you to keep your page out of the search results, but follow links on that page as these (internal) links matter for the other pages (again, read the robots meta article for more information). The third option: leave that as is, this is what you have set for the site-wide robots meta settings.

It’s really that simple: select the right value and your page will tell search engines to either keep the page in or out of the search results.

The last thing I want to mention here is: use with care. This robots meta setting will truly prevent a page from being indexed, unlike a robots.txt suggestion to leave a page out of the search result pages. Google might ignore the latter, triggered by a lot of inbound links to the page.

If you want to read up on how to keep your site from being indexed, please read Preventing your site from being indexed, the right way. Good luck optimizing!

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