Ask Yoast: should I never buy links?

We understand that, at times, you might be tempted to buy links. Who doesn’t want to start ranking quickly? And, would it really harm your site, even if it’s from a “trustworthy” link selling site?

Watch this video and know why you should never buy links!

Why you should never buy links

Can’t watch the video? Here’s a transcript!

“Well, first of all, because buying links is cheating and we don’t cheat!

Second of all, you might think a site looks trustworthy, but if you can buy links from them, who else can buy links from them? And, who else will they be selling links to, so that your link might not really be that worthwhile anymore? So, how do you know who they’ve already sold links to, and how that knowledge might get to Google?

If you’re buying links, then at some point, you’re going to get caught! If that happens you’re going to lose everything you have. Just because you thought you could speed up yourself to the top of the rankings. It doesn’t work, I’ve seen it a thousand times, it’s not worth it. Don’t buy links!

In the series Ask Yoast we answer your question, on video! So send your SEO question to ask@yoast.com and finally get that answer!

Ask Yoast: page tabs and SEO

Welcome to another Ask Yoast! This time we’ll take a question from Gary Cannon (Home España). He asks:

“What’s your opinion on SEO and using page tabs? Should each tab have an SEO text or just the first tab?”

Should you really use tabs? Check out our video or read the answer below!

Ask Yoast transcript

Well, in fairness, Google says, and testing shows, that Google really only counts the bit that a user can see. So if the first tab is the one that’s active, then the text on that is the text that Google counts in the ranking and everything else is basically a moot point.

That’s why a lot of people switch to a vertical page design now. Where you don’t have tabs as much anymore, but really make people scroll down the page for all the different bit and pieces. This is what we prefer too. I hope this gives you some insight. Good luck!

Take this opportunity to ask Yoast your question. We try to answer all questions and you might even get a personal answer on video!

Read more: ‘How to optimize your real estate site’ »

Yoast SEO plugin tutorials

Do you encounter any difficulties configuring your Yoast SEO plugin? Want to know more about all features and settings of the Yoast SEO plugin? We have great news for you! Joost has made a series of Yoast SEO plugin tutorials for every tab on every page of the Yoast SEO configuration pages. A playlist of a total of 33 screencasts is available for free for all of our users!

In these video tutorials, Joost de Valk will explain all the settings of the Yoast SEO plugin in detail. He’ll talk you through all the possibilities the plugin has and explain why you should configure your plugin in a certain way. With every update of Yoast SEO, new screencasts will be released. Check out our extensive playlist! And, don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel so you won’t miss any updates!

Yoast SEO plugin training for WordPress

Yoast SEO for WordPress training

For those of you who want to dive in all the possibilities our plugin has, we have developed a Yoast SEO plugin training. This training will be released on Wednesday the 30th of March. This training consists of these same 33 Yoast SEO plugin tutorials and of 8 in-depth instruction videos in which Joost de Valk gives extra information about all the settings. On top of that, the course comes with a lot of challenging questions, to test whether or not you truly understand the Yoast SEO plugin.

Once you have completed the Yoast SEO plugin training, you’ll receive a badge and a certificate to put on your site. The badge and certificate are a Yoast seal of approval. If you have completed our course, you’re qualified and able to set up and properly configure our plugin.

Want to become a Yoast SEO plugin expert? The plugin training will be available next week! The Yoast SEO for WordPress training will cost $129 for the first year and $69 in the following years. The first week you can even get it for $99! The videos and the questions will be updated after every major release of Yoast SEO, making sure you’ll remain a real Yoast SEO plugin Expert!

Read more: ‘Next week: Yoast SEO for WordPress training’ »

 

 

Ask Yoast: Google PageSpeed score

In Ask Yoast we handle your SEO question! This time we received a question from Stefan Wohlert from Venlo, just around the corner here in the Netherlands. He asks:

“How important is the Google PageSpeed score for SEO?”

In this video we explain what this score means for your site’s SEO:

Focus on a fast website

Can’t watch the video? Here’s the transcript:

The Google PageSpeed score itself is not important for SEO at all, because Google doesn’t – as far as we know – factor that score into the ranking. What they check is how fast your website loads for people across the planet. They just look how fast your website loads for users, so you don’t have to obsess over that specific score. You have to make sure your website is as fast as you can get it. So, if the difference in speed, between doing the fix to get the perfect score or not, is negligible, by all means don’t do it!

What you have to focus on is making the fastest website possible. Not only for Google, but just because every other metric on your site will do better when your site is fast as well. So don’t obsess over getting 99% or 100% in Google PageSpeed, but obsess over making your website as fast as you can. And if the changes you have to do just for the Google PageSpeed score are too hard, don’t do them, focus on something else. Good luck!

Read more: ‘Site speed: tools and suggestions’ »

Let us help you out with your SEO question! In the series Ask Yoast we take questions from YOU! So don’t hesitate and send your question to ask@yoast.com.

How to optimize your real estate site

There is a significant difference between a real estate site and a ‘regular’ website. Real estate sites have temporary content: when an estate is up for sale, there is a page for it online. But when it’s sold, it tends to leave the internet. In this post, I’ll tell you how to deal with that.

how to optimize your real estate site

First things first

Next to the ever changing real estate pages, your website needs more static content as well.

About

Even though you’re basically selling bricks, your bricks are quite expensive. It helps when you make your website a bit more personal. Add your team and images of your team. Add a short story about how selling real estate became a passion of yours. A bit of history. All these things together make your website a lot more personal. A real estate agency that understands how to do this is Gottesman Residential.

Area

We have seen our share of real estate sites in our website audits. And I have to say that especially US based real estate agencies know how to promote their specific area. Try to create levels in this. First address your entire service area. If you’re serving the entire state, add content about what’s great about that state. Why should people move there? Why is buying a house there so very interesting for your visitor? Second, see if you can find districts of that main area, like Central Texas and Northeast Texas. Find the metropolitan areas and create pages for specific cities. Obviously, the number of levels will vary per agency.

Update this area based page regularly, for instance with an event calendar and things like that. Your real estate site should become the Wikipedia of local things. RealtyAustin doesn’t only tell you why Austin is nice, it also provides things like a list of schools, a relocation guide, and neighborhood videos.

Contact and location

Personal contact is important for a lot of real estate buyers and sellers. That means that you’ll have to list your contact details in a prominent spot on your website. Make sure your telephone number is listed in a sidebar or header and add a contact page with contact details, a contact form and a map with the location of your office. Our Local SEO plugin will help you a lot in optimizing these details by adding schema.org markup to your address details. It also provides an easy option to add that map and even an option for directions.

One more thing about contact forms: if you’re looking at a certain house, and like what you see, you simply want to contact the realtor. If the website has a contact form in the sidebar next to the estate details, that will make things easier.

IDX and MLS

IDX and MLS are ways of integrating estates, from yourself or other brokers, in your own website. WordPress offers plugins for that. An Internet Data Exchange (IDX) listing tends to be less detailed compared to a realtors Multiple Listing Service (MLS) listing. Both are based upon the same principle: add your listing to a central website and allow other realtors to share your listings via their websites. Both buyers and realtors benefit: every house that’s on sale is served to the potential buyer and the potential buyer will be able to make a better selection before contacting the real estate agent.

I have seen a lot of real estate sites adding an iframe with IDX listings to their website. Let me emphasize again that content in an iframe isn’t on your website and won’t help your website rank as such. If you’re using IDX/MLS, please make sure to import the content to your own website, and serve the listings in your own design. But this does mean duplicate content, as the listing are available on multiple websites. The best SEO practice for your real estate site is to create unique listings for your own website. Note that this might interfere with creating the largest reach for the property you’re selling if your website doesn’t have that many visitors (yet). A way to use both could be to serve unique content on your site and link ‘similar properties’ via IDX/MLS services below that.

The ever changing content of your real estate site

All real estate sites have one thing in common: your real estate listings come and go. Of course, you’ve added a great description to your unique listing of the property. This description, your images and the address of your property will help you rank. If your listing appears in the search result pages, it should feel like a waste to delete it from your website right after the sale. So simply don’t.

First of all, if your real estate is sold, it will pay off to keep that listing online for say three months. Clearly list that the property is sold (perhaps even add ‘within 16 days’ to show your agency gets the job done for sellers as well). Clearly list similar properties on that page to redirect people that searched for a property in that street or district.

Step two is an actual redirect. To optimize this properly, we first need to divide the location into a number of levels. In almost every case, it will pay off to create a hierarchical custom taxonomy for that location, going from state > city > district and as many more levels as your service area has. Doing so will make sure you’ll always have some kind of category to link to.

301 or 302 Redirect

If you redirect a listing and are confident that you can reuse the URL soon, you might consider using a 302 Redirect. That is a temporary redirect. If you are pretty sure the redirect is permanent, a 301 Redirect is the one to pick. That will also tell Google not to expect that page to return at all.

If after three months that property is still sold, redirect the page to a collection of properties in the same district. Preferably, you’d want these properties to have some similarities to the real estate you’ve just sold, like the same number of rooms, located near schools; you probably know what the majority of your customers values most. The page you are redirecting to could be a taxonomy page or even the search result page for properties in that district. If you can optimize that search page with a proper title and description, that would work perfectly well as a substitute for a category page.
Now if no such page for the same district is available, go up one level and redirect the page to a similar page with results from within the same city. Broaden your location bit by bit. Doing so will keep the temporary URL of the initial property valuable for your website for a longer period of time.

If the property is up for sale again within a few months (which sometimes happens), remove the redirect and reuse the initial URL. After six months to a year, feel free to remove the initial redirect, as Google will understand by now that the property is gone from your catalog.

Should I add my listings to sites like Zillow or Realestate.com.au?

I would add your listings to the larger real estate search platforms as well. Most of the searches for real estate are probably not done on broker’s sites but on sites like Zillow. These sites provide demographics on the neighborhood you want to move to and even things like crime rate. They probably have a larger team than you working on these facts and figures, their information might be a bit more accurate. All of this makes these sites very attractive for people that are looking for a new house. If you’re not on these websites and haven’t added a similar great description and the same number of images to your listing on these websites, you’re missing out on a lot of potential buyers.

Real estate sites like Zillow and Realestate.com.au should be considered an essential part of your marketing mix, like social media marketing most probably already is. Use them to show off all the great real estate you’re selling to a larger audience.

I trust this article has given you something to think about. If you have something to add to it or want to share your experience (or real estate website), feel free to leave a comment below!

Read more: ‘Local SEO: setting up landing pages’ »

Optimize your (WordPress) gallery

Optimizing your images is one thing, but optimizing a page filled with images really is another. Of course, there is a certain overlap in how to optimize a single image and a gallery. In this post, I will go over the things you need to take into account when using photo galleries on your website.

Optimize your WordPress gallery

Social sharing of galleries

I have been testing social sharing of galleries on Twitter and Facebook but found that all the good stuff like Twitter Gallery Cards have disappeared.

Twitter and multiple images

The ‘Summary Card with Large Image’ replaces the deprecated Gallery Card, which allowed you to share photo galleries via Twitter as well. Currently, this isn’t possible. If you want to show multiple images in a Tweet (or Facebook post for that matter), you’ll have to upload these manually.

My recommendation when sharing a page that contains a photo gallery as the primary content of that page, is to upload three or four images from that gallery to Twitter, which will result in a tweet like this:

The fact that you have to upload these images to Twitter seems to fit the ‘all your content belongs to us’ trend in social media ;)

Facebook photo albums

Facebook allows you to add photo albums. As Google and Facebook have little overlap, you might want to consider creating a Facebook album for your photo gallery as well. Promote it separately. I totally understand that you primarily want your photo gallery on your website and your website only. From my personal experience, I can tell you that a proper Facebook album also works well. Be sure to add the right title and description. Your Facebook page might have a different audience than your website. Be sure to test this for your own content.

The title of your photo gallery

The one thing everyone can control is the title of your gallery. It’s the title of the page. And it’s the title that will most probably show up in Google’s search result pages as well. In our WordPress SEO article, we already mentioned that you should make sure the title is topical, and contains the keyword you want to optimize that gallery for.

In the article, and in our plugin’s content analysis, we recommend adding that keyword early in the title, which Google seems to like. Besides that, scanning the search result becomes easier with the desired keyword as one of the early words.

Introductory content for your gallery

Every time we discuss taxonomies, categories or things like that, we mention introductory content. Like your category pages, a photo gallery is a collection of things. It doesn’t matter if these collections contain posts or images, you want to tell your visitor (and Google) what the common ground for your collection is.

Explain why you set up the gallery:

  • Are these photos from a certain event?
  • Are these photos of a certain product?

My gut feeling tells me these are the two main reasons to set up a photo gallery (feel free to add yours). Describe the event or product and by all means link to other pages that contain more in-depth information about the topic. Your introductory content should be the glue that connects all the separate items together, but shouldn’t have to be the main content you want to rank with for a certain topic. If it is, your gallery is probably illustrative and not the main part of your page’s content.

The obvious: alt tags, captions, and file names

There are similarities in optimizing images and photo galleries. You have to make sure your alt tags are descriptive. For better scanning and a text to accompany the images in your gallery, you want to add captions. For more information on how to do this, I’d like to point you to my article on image SEO.

If you want to go all the way, every single image in your photo gallery needs to have a unique, descriptive file name. In practice, this will probably almost never be the case. It’s a lot of work and depending on the subject of your gallery, there will be matching subjects. Most galleries will have filenames like garden-flowers-01.jpg to garden-flowers-10.jpg, where dandelions.jpg to sunflowers.jpg will work better in the end. In reality, you’ll understand that this might be a bit too much hassle to be workable.

AMP and its carousel markup for galleries

We have been talking about AMP a lot lately. AMP has a way to deal with galleries as well. I have been testing this with a default WordPress gallery and the AMP plugin by Automattic. It creates a carousel of your gallery, which actually works pretty nice. This is done by adding the amp-carousel tag, which helps “displaying multiple similar pieces of content along a horizontal axis; meant to be highly flexible and performant.” Examples can be found here.

The code for that would look something like this:

<amp-carousel width=300 height=400>
  <amp-img src="my-img1.png" width=300 height=400></amp-img>
  <amp-img src="my-img2.png" width=300 height=400></amp-img>
  <amp-img src="my-img3.png" width=300 height=400></amp-img>
</amp-carousel>

Example taken from the ampproject.org website, by the way. The WordPress plugin creates just that for you.

The only thing that seems to fail sometimes is scaling. This is not an odd issue I think, as AMP prefers set dimensions. I’m sure this will be fixed over time. Overall this is a really nice solution for displaying galleries in accelerated mobile pages.

When I was looking into similar plugins for Joomla! and Drupal, I found this piece of information telling me it’s coming to Lullabot’s Drupal AMP module later on. Weeblr released a Joomla! plugin called WbAMP, but I can’t locate any information on how it deals with images or, more specific, photo gallery handling there. Anyone tried this one already?

Wrapping things up

I understand that there are things in this post you can’t ‘just’ implement like that. Changing every single file name to match the subject of the image is a lot of work. I would recommend against doing that for your existing photo galleries, but it might be something to test in future ones. Always add introductions to your galleries, and make sure your captions and alt texts are correct. Just remember that it’s the entire page you want to rank, not just that single image!

Read more: ‘Optimizing images for SEO’ »

WordPress & AMP: part II

My previous post about AMP lead to a ton of questions and rightfully so. We’ve been testing, developing and working hard in general on understanding what needs to be done to get AMP working without too many errors. This post is an update on where we stand right now, introduces an updated Yoast SEO AMP Glue plugin with new features and gives some more background on the why and what of it all.

The need for multiple plugins

The base AMP functionality is provided by the WordPress AMP plugin. In my previous post I recommended Pagefrog to add styling and tracking to your AMP pages. While it is a nice plugin, it caused more issues for us than it solved. The plugin adds a preview on every post edit screen. This preview is unneeded and there is no way to disable it, and it literally caused browser crashes in our backend.

The issues we had with Pagefrog made me decide to put in some time and created a set of design settings in our Yoast SEO AMP Glue plugin. When you update to version 0.3 of that plugin, you can safely disable Pagefrog and configure the styling on the SEO → AMP design settings tab:

Extra styling options

The Yoast SEO AMP Glue plugin also lets you put in manual CSS and some extra tags in the head section. This allows us, for instance, to have our preferred weight of our Open Sans font available and make the styling fit our brand a bit more.

You can also enable AMP for custom post types on the post types tab. The only post type that doesn’t work yet is pages, as support for that is being added to the main AMP plugin.

WordPress AMP design settings

Errors & testing AMP

We were getting quite a few errors in our Google Search Console AMP report for yoast.com. You can see our indexation and error graph here:

google-search-console-amp-errors

AMP debug mode

You can put any AMP URL into “debug mode” by adding #development=1 to the end of the AMP URL. If you then look in your browsers console – you might have to reload the page – you’ll see the AMP validation warnings. These are the exact same warnings that Google shows in Google Search Console. There are quite a few different types of errors and the Google search console report groups them for you.

I realize the error line in the graph above is not exactly convincing of our quality yet. The drop in errors we saw made clear that we were doing some things right. Now we have about a thousand posts on this blog, and almost a hundred on our development blog. So it’s clear that not all of our content is indexed as AMP yet, and not all of our AMP content is working nicely.

Missing featured images

The biggest source of our issues were Schema.org article errors. This was caused by one simple issue: a lot of our posts, especially the older ones, didn’t have a featured image. The WordPress AMP plugin then simply outputs schema.org JSON+LD tags without that image, causing those errors. The fix is simple: we now have a “default image” field in the design tab of our Yoast SEO AMP Glue plugins settings. It’s used when a post has no featured image. This solved half of our errors.

Testing Schema.org errors

To test whether you will be getting Schema.org errors, run your AMP URLs through the Google Structured Data Testing Tool. The output from that tool tells you which data is missing.

Missing site logo

The JSON+LD output also requires a site logo. While this is not an error we ourselves had, many reported this issue. The AMP plugin uses the logo set as your site icon in the Customizer, and omits it if you don’t have one set. We now let you upload a logo on the design tab of the Yoast SEO AMP Glue plugin too, if you want to use a different one.

Retrofitting AMP onto existing content

Part of what we’re doing with the AMP WordPress plugin and the Yoast SEO AMP glue plugin is “fixing” content that exists in your database to work with AMP. The posts on your site are stored as HTML in your database. The HTML of those posts does not necessarily to conform to what AMP HTML requires. For this purpose, the AMP plugin has a set of so called “sanitizers”. These are filters, run over your content, that remove tags and attributes on tags that aren’t allowed. They even remove some attributes when their values aren’t allowed.

We’ve added an extra sanitizer class in our own plugin to remove some more invalid attributes. Once we’re certain that these work, we’ll actually contribute these changes “upstream” to the AMP plugin. These changes have fixed the remainder of the issues we had.

Analytics integration

The only thing we lacked after Pagefrog was removed is tracking. Pagefrog took care of Google Analytics tracking for us. Luckily, adding tracking to AMP pages isn’t hard, so we coded a simple connection to our Google Analytics by Yoast plugin. If you have that enabled and configured, the plugin will automatically grab the account code from it and enable tracking for your AMP pages. You can, however, also choose to use a custom tracking code. If you do this, the plugin no longer integrates with Google Analytics by Yoast.

Facebook Instant Articles

Another thing Pagefrog takes care of is Facebook Instant Articles. There’s now a plugin from Automattic for that purpose, which we’re working on integrating Yoast SEO with. So you won’t need Pagefrog for Facebook Instant Articles either.

Conclusion

With all these changes, getting AMP to work on a WordPress site running Yoast SEO has become slightly easier and lots less error prone. We’ve updated our Setting up WordPress for AMP post with these changes. Good luck and do let us know of errors in the comments!

Yoast SEO 3.1: Improved snippet editor and primary category

Today we’re releasing Yoast SEO 3.1. It’s a release we’re truly very proud of in terms of functionality but also in the process we’ve gone through. Yoast SEO 3.0 was arguably our biggest release ever, with a lot of changes that needed to happen but it also lead to issues. Yoast SEO 3.1 aims to keep the good things of 3.0 while fixing the things that most people didn’t like.

Let me explain to you in the video below or keep reading below:

Snippet editor interface

The snippet interface has been changed to bring back the normal input fields, while keeping the real time feedback that we brought in 3.0. Of course, we still have more ideas on how to improve it, but we think this is a huge step forward:

snippet-editor-new

Primary category

When you select multiple categories for a post, you could never determine which category was the most important. Which also meant you could never determine which category would show in the breadcrumb. Now you can:

primary-category

Admin overhaul

In the admin pages we had checkboxes that disabled functionality and checkboxes that enabled functionality. Yeah that was almost as painful as that sentence. We now have toggles, instead of checkboxes, which should reduce the ambiguity:

admin-toggles

Improved redirects feature

In our Premium plugin, the redirects feature got a lot of love. It’s now easier to serve 410 content deleted headers and you can serve 451 headers as discussed in a previous post. We’ve also made editing redirects a much nicer experience:

redirect

If you don’t have Premium yet, go get it. It rocks :)

Integrations

Several page builder plugin authors have worked with us to make sure Yoast SEO works with all the content on a page. Notable here are both Divi and Visual Composer. We also would like to thank Marcus Forsberg for working with us on making a well working ACF integration. We’ve just released that as a separate “glue” plugin on WordPress.org to allow for faster iterations. You can find that here.

Coming to you from my living room!

In a weird turn of events, we didn’t have electricity in our office this morning, so we released Yoast SEO 3.1 from my and Marieke’s living room:

12784635_10153944172889061_1109171013_n

Let us know what you think!

Now, if you’re interested, go read the full changelog, then go update & go play. Please let us know what you think in the comments, we’d love to hear your feedback! I think 3.1 proves that we’re listening :)

Ask Yoast: how to become an outstanding SEO

It’s time for another Ask Yoast! We’ve received the following question from Francisco Acuña (Nuevo Léon, Mexico) at ask@yoast.com:

“Can you give 1 or 2 quick tips you think are key to become an outstanding SEO?”

Watch the video to learn the tricks of the trade!

Unable to watch the answer?

We’ve made a transcript for you:

The honest answer is: I can give you one or two quick tips, but it is going to be a whole lot of work. The basics are: you basically need to become a good developer, in terms of knowing how the web works, how HTTP works, how the technical side of SEO works. Ánd you also need to become a good marketer, in terms of understanding what the message is that you want to send to your visitors and how you best bring that message in such a way that the search engines also understand it. A good SEO is a hybrid of both a developer and a marketer and that combination is hard to get right. That’s why there are so few really, really good SEO’s out there. I hope this works for you! Good luck!

Ask Yoast is there for you! We love to help our followers with their topical SEO questions. Don’t hesitate and send your question to ask@yoast.com.

Weekly SEO recap: speed it up!

This week we’ve got to catch up a bit, as I was away on holiday for a while. Luckily Google took it slow in the last few weeks, basically doing nothing really interesting. They did put out a lot of stuff, it just wasn’t all that interesting. Let’s go over the bits that are interesting.

Joost's weekly SEO Recap

AMP it up

At conferences, with demo sites, in forums, in blog posts and even in Google Search Console, Google is working hard to get people to adopt AMP. We’ve written about AMP before and I still don’t like it. It’s very much WAP all over again, it feels like going backwards. At the same time I do see the need to make the web faster for people in low bandwidth countries. We don’t feel that need as much where we are. The office I’m writing this from will soon have 3 separate 500mb (down and up) fiber connections. That’s more bandwidth than most countries in the world have per 1 million inhabitants, according to this list.

So in the next few weeks we’ll be implementing AMP here on Yoast. We’ve already seen that the go to AMP plugin for WordPress works but we need to fix some interaction issues between it and our Yoast SEO plugin.

Read more: ‘Weekly SEO recap: AMPlified spam’ »

Instant Articles for Facebook

In the same trend as AMP for Google, Facebook’s Instant Articles will soon (as in, in April) be available to all. There’s a WordPress plugin for that too, which I’m also looking at to make sure it sends the right data when Yoast SEO is installed.

Amit Singhal leaves Google

In the beginning of this month possibly the most shocking news of all came out. Amit Singhal is about to leave the company (end of next week actually). He was their head of search and very important in recent years in terms of choosing how search works and how rankings works.

Singhal’s replacement will be John Giannandrea, who is one of the most important artificial intelligence engineers in the company. If that doesn’t tell you where Google is going…

That’s it, see you next week!

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