Optimize
your
WordPress site
Joost de Valk,
Annelieke van den Berg, Michiel Heijmans, Marieke van de Rakt, Thijs de Valk
Colophon © 2014 Yoast
ISBN/EAN 978-90-822653-1-6 NUR 988
Publisher: Yoast
Authors: Joost de Valk, Michiel Heijmans, Marieke van de Rakt, Thijs de Valk, Annelieke van den Berg,
Editor: Marieke van de Rakt Design: Mijke Peters Illustrations: Erwin Brouwer
Table of Contents
Introduction
5About this book 6
WordPress 8
Search Engine Optimization
13Introduction to Search Engine Optimization 15
Keyword research 20 Site Structure 29 Technical SEO 38 SEO copywriting 45 Link building 50 Further reading 54
Navigation
55 Introduction to navigation 57Top menu navigation: coming in from the North 60
Navigation in main content: the Wild West 65
Sidebar: in the East 72
Footer: in the South 75
Mobile website 78
Sales
82Making money with your website 84
The checkout process 91
Further reading 94
Analytics
95What is Google Analytics? 97
Improving your website with Google Analytics 106
Further reading 112
Conversion Research
113 A / B Tests 115 Survey research 121 Further reading 127Social Media
128Why use social media? 130
How to use social media? 134
Further reading 141
Speed
142Checking your site speed 144
Increasing your site speed 146
Section
Introduction
Chapter 1
About this book
Introduction
Building a WordPress website isn’t that hard. WordPress was developed in order to make blogging easy and accessible for a very large audience. You can figure out WordPress yourself, or use one of the numerous manuals that will help you set up your site. Subsequently, you can up - grade your site with many plugins, for instance allowing your website to become a shop.
And then what? How do you make sure your site stands out from all of the other ones on the internet? How do you make sure people find your website? What do you have to do to make people buy your stuff?
Installing your WordPress site is only the beginning. In order to have a website which keeps appealing to your audience, you will have an endless job in keeping your content and design up to date. You will have to do continuous Search Engine Optimization in order to make sure that people find your website on Google and other search engines. You should make sure users of your website can find the information you want them to find. And if you have a shop, you should make sure that people can find and (want to) buy your products.
Content of this book
This book will help you to optimize your WordPress site. The book consists of multiple sections, which can be read in any order you like. Each section will teach you the basics of one aspect of website optimization. We’ll teach you the basics of Search Engine Optimization and explain the importance of user interface and good navigation. Furthermore, we will give the most important insights on improving your sales and conversions. The sections are written by experts in the field of SEO, Navigation, Conversion and Analytics.
Search engine - terminology
In this book, we will write Google when we refer to a search engine. Of course, there are many other search engines, like Bing and Yahoo. But since Google pretty much dominates the search engine market, we will only refer to Google in our texts.
Chapter 2
WordPress
What is WordPress?
WordPress is an open source Content Management System (CMS) you can use for your blog or your webshop. It was first released in 2003, by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. Nowadays, it powers up to 20% of the websites on the web. WordPress started as just a blogging system, but is since then evolved to be used as a full Content Management System for your website.
Of course, at Yoast, we are WordPress-fans. And with good reason! Word-Press is free and open source. It is easy to use and allows for great flexibility. WordPress has a plugin architecture which allows users to extend the functionality of the website beyond the core installation. Plugins are pieces of code which extend the functionality. WordPress ensures simplicity for users, while allows for complexity for developers.
Why use WordPress?
Let’s take a look at the advantages of using WordPress over other Content Management Systems! You can read much more about the features and requirements and find testimonials on WordPress.org.
It’s very easy!
Making content in WordPress is very easy. It’s just as easy as making a document in Microsoft Word. You don’t even have to be able to read or write code in order to create a post in WordPress. Everybody with a little computer skills is able to maintain his or her own blog using WordPress.
It’s very flexible!
You can create a personal website, a photoblog or a business website. You can make it any way you like. You can easily change appearances by adding a different theme and give your website an entirely different look. WordPress comes with a few default themes, but you can choose from thousands of themes to give your website the look you want. Numerous sites offer free and premium themes. Uploading a new theme is really easy and can give your website a complete new look in a matter of seconds.
WordPress core already comes with features for every user, but you can upgrade your functionality with plugins. There are literally tens of thousands of plugins (free and paid) which allow for social media widgets, spam protection and so much more.
Yoast Tip At Yoast, we offer several themes and numerous free and premium
plugins to optimize your website.
It’s very free!
You do not have to pay any kind of license fee to WordPress. It’s free! And it’s open source. So you are free to use WordPress in any way you choose: you can install it, use it, change it, distribute it. As the most popular CMS on the web, WordPress has a large and supportive community. A lot of very skilled developers work together to make WordPress even better. You can ask questions on support forums and get help from volunteers. WordPress is licensed under a GPL open source license, which is a pretty complex bit of text, but it means that:
• You can charge for distributing, supporting, or documenting the soft-ware, but you cannot sell the software itself.
• If you create derivative works that use pieces of code that are licensed under the GPL, those derivative works should also be licensed under the GPL.
That last bit is very important, it basically prevents the software from ever becoming a proprietary piece of software.
Where to start
To run WordPress your host just needs a couple of things:
• PHP version 5.2.4 or higher;
• MySQL version 5.0 or higher.
You can download and install a software script from WordPress.org and then you should be able to get started. Most hosts actually have a Word-Press installer in their backends, allowing you to install WordWord-Press by the click of a button.
There is a lively support community in the WordPress forums that is eager to help you if you have questions, the WordPress codex and a site like WPBeginner are also great places to start working with WordPress.
Yoast and WordPress
At Yoast we make money using WordPress. This might seem counterin-tuitive. Should all the software we develop be free just because we develop for WordPress? We offer and will continue to offer free plugins. In order for Yoast to continue to develop our products and to give support, we have to sell stuff. We sell consultancy and we sell (support and updates to our) plugins and themes.
For the free plugins, there are volunteers on the WordPress forums, but we don’t often dive in. With millions of users and only 12 of us, we simply cannot answer all the questions of individual users ourselves.
That being said, we want to stress that all of our products are open source and we are big believers in the power of open source. In our opinion: making money in an open source community is beneficial for the open source community as long as you continue to invest in the open source community. If you want to read more about our view, you can read our post Victory of the Commons.
Section
Search Engine Optimization
About this section
In this section, we will teach you the basics of SEO. We will tell you what Google does and what SEO exactly is. In the following chapters we will teach you how to do a keyword research and to set up the structure and the internal linking structure of the website. We will give the basics of
technical SEO, tell you some things about SEO copywriting. In the last
chapter (8) of this section we will give some information about link building.
Chapter 3
Introduction to Search Engine
Optimization
What does Google do?
How does Google find your site?
Search engines like Google follow links. It follows links from one webpage to another webpage. A search engine like Google consists of a crawler, an index and an algorithm. A crawler follow the links on the web. It goes around the internet 24-7 and saves the HTML-version of a page in a gigantic database, the index. This index is updated if Google has come around your website and finds a new or revised version. Depending on the traffic on your site and the amount of changes you make on your website, Google comes around more or less often. For Google to know of the exis-tence of your website, there first has to be a link from another site to your site. Following that link will lead to the first crawler-session and the first save in the index.
Google’s secret algorithm
After indexing your website, Google can show your website in the search results.
Google has a specific algorithm that decides which pages in which order are shown. How this algorithm works is a secret, nobody knows exactly which factors decide the ordering of the search results. Moreover, factors
and their importance change very often. Testing and experimenting gives us a relatively good feel for the important factors and the changes in these factors.
Google’s results page
Google’s result page shows 7 or 10 links to sites which fit best to your keyword. We refer to these results as the organic search results. If you click to the second page, more results are shown. Above these 10 blue links, often are two or three paid links. These links are ads, people have paid Google to put these links at the top of the site when people search for a specific term. Prices for these ads greatly vary, depending on the competitiveness of the search term. In the column on the right of the Google-screen, ads often appear as well.
The value of links for search engines
It’s very important to have a basic understanding of how Google (and most search engines) use links: they use the number of links pointing to a page to determine how important that page is. Both internal (links from the own website) as well as external links could help in the ranking of your website in Google. Some links are more important than others: links from websites who have a lot of links themselves are generally more important than links from small websites.
Universal search
Next to the organic and the paid results, Google also embeds news items, pictures and videos in its search results. This embedment is called universal
What is Search Engine Optimization?
High ranking in organic search results
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the profession that attempts to opti-mize sites to make them appear in a high position in the organic search results. In order to do so, SEO tries to fit ones website to Google’s algorithm. Although Google’s algorithm remains secret, almost a decade of experience in SEO has resulted in a pretty good idea about the import-ant factors. In our view, the factors in Google’s algorithm can be divided in two categories:
1 There are on-page factors which decide the ranking of your website. These factors include technical issues (e.g. the quality of your code) and more textual issues (e.g. structure of your site and text, use of words).
2 There are the off-page factors. These factors include the links to your site. The more other (relevant) sites link to your website, the higher your ranking in Google will be.
In the following chapters, we thoroughly discuss on-page factors. The off-page factors are much harder to influence. In chapter 8, we discuss link building as one technique to influence your ranking via off-page factors.
Make an awesome website!
In the following chapters, we will teach you the basics of SEO. At Yoast, we give SEO-advice to (small) website owners and large consultancy clients (the Guardian, Facebook). Joost de Valk began his SEO-career over 8 years ago. And although Google has changed its algorithm quite a few times, most of the advice we give at Yoast has remained the same over the years. And this advice is very simple: you just have to make sure your site is damn good. Do not use any ‘tricks’, because they usually don’t work in the long run, and might even backfire. Google’s mission is to build the perfect search engine that helps people find what they are looking for. Making your website and your marketing strategy fit for this goal is always the way to go.
WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast
Yoast is most famous for our WordPress SEO plugin (WP SEO). Most of the technical aspects of SEO you should do actually are covered by our free WordPress SEO plugin. Installing the plugin and using the default settings already improves quite a lot. It even fixes some minor issues WordPress has. WP SEO also helps in writing SEO-friendly content (see
chapter 7). Our advice is to download and install the WP SEO plugin by Yoast on your website. Of course, there are other SEO plugins, but our
free plugin, we also offer a premium WP SEO plugin. In the premium plugin extra functionality is added and customers of this premium plugin can ask our team for support.
Chapter 4
Keyword research
Introduction
The first step in optimizing any website for a search engine is to start think-ing about the searchthink-ing strategies of your audience. What search strategies do they have? Which search terms will they use? These questions are the beginning of your keyword research. In this chapter, we will give practical tips how to conduct your own keyword research. Keyword research is actually the basis of all search marketing. You have to know which search terms people use when looking for your website or product.
Step 1: write down your mission
What do you do?
What makes your website unique? What idea or product do you ‘sell’ ? And why should people buy this from you? Make sure your mission is clear in your mind as well as on your website.You want to be found on the terms that fit your site. You want to be found by your (potential) customers. Ranking on terms that don’t fit your site, will result in a high bounce rate (visitors immediately leave your site, because your site is not what they expect it to be). A high bounce rate indeed indicates that your website does not fit the search needs of customers and Google could well adjust the ranking after high bounce rates. A high bounce rate could eventually lead to a lower ranking in Google.
Competitiveness of the market
Whether or not you will be able to rank on the terms you choose, largely depends on the market you are in. Some markets are highly competitive, with large companies dominating the search results. These companies have a very large budget to spend on marketing in general and SEO specifically. Ranking in these markets is hard. Find out what differentiates your company from these big boys and adjust your search terms to your niche. For instance, if you sell holidays to the carribean you will have a hard time ranking on holiday caribbean. Perhaps your focus is on travels specifically for the elderly or for newlyweds. Ranking on holiday caribbean
elderly or holiday caribbean newlyweds would be much easier and could be
a better strategy.
Step 2: on what search terms do you want
to be found?
Making a list
Make a list of all the search terms you want to be found on. This phase is hard (as well as crucial). What terms will people use? You really have to get inside the heads of your audience. How do people search? And what is the ‘problem’ your website (or product) resolves? Which question does your website answer?
A few years ago, doing your keyword research was easier. You could simply check Google Analytics to see on which terms people found your website. That is no longer possible. So you are pretty much left in the dark about the terms people use in search engine to end up at your website. If
you have visitors who come to your website using Bing, you should be able to view their search terms.
Tools you could use
You may want to use some tools in order to get started:
• Google Adwords Keyword Planner
This can be a very useful tool, with the slight caveat that the search volume data in the planner is really only useful for keywords that you’re actually spending money to advertise on. Use the tool to find new and related keywords, but neglect the search volume data!
• yoast.com/suggest/
This tool uses the Google Suggest functionality you know from search-ing in Google. It finds the keyword expansions Google gives and then requests more of them. So if you type ‘example‘, it’ll also give you the expansions for ‘example a…’ till ‘example z…’ etc. It’s a great way to quickly find more niche keywords you can focus on. A similar tool is
Übersuggest.
• Google Trends
While you can’t reliably get traffic information for keywords, Google Trends does allow you to relatively compare the traffic for sets of keywords. Check this query for instance, comparing the relative growth of several WordPress SEO terms and our brand Yoast. You can even see the difference for numerous geographical regions.
It’s very important to check Google Trends if you expect that some of your keywords are seasonal, for instance due to regulations, holiday seasons etc.
• Your internal search engine
What are people looking for on your site? A category we always find particularly interesting is the set of keywords that didn’t get any results: this was stuff people were expecting but didn’t find, it’s very possible for you to give those products a different name. You can do this with our Google Analytics for WordPress plugin.
Long-tail keywords
The tools may help you to make an extensive list of search terms people use to end up on your site. Do also think about combinations of terms. Make sure you don’t just pick terms that consist of one word only. The longer (and more specific) search terms are, the easier it will be to rank on the term. These longer terms are called long-tail keywords.
Long-tail keywords are more specific and less common, and will probably be used by potential visitors that already know what they want to find or buy. The long-tail user will search for ‘compare prices macbook air desktop
stand‘ instead of doing a search for a so-called head keyword like ‘macbook air stand‘. Siri and Google Now encourage searches like: “Where can I find the best coffee in Seattle?”
One of the main benefits of using long-tail keywords is that, although these keywords may be used less in search, the visitor that finds your website using them is more likely to buy your stuff. He or she has already thought things over, has possibly compared products or types and there-fore does a more specific search.
Yoast Tip
When you do a search in Google, be sure to scroll to the bottom of the first search result page to find a list of possible long-tail keywords for your term in the ‘Searches related to [ keyword ]’ section.
Step 3: create landing pages
Use the list of keywords you have made and put it in a table. A table (use for instance Excel or Google Docs / Sheets to set one up) forces you to a structure and to make a landing page for all the search terms you came up with. Put the search terms in the first column and add columns in which you put the different levels of your site’s structure. In chapter 5 you can read more about site structure.
Search terms level 1: homepage level 2: / subpages level 3: / sub / subpages level 4: sub / sub /subpages term 1 term 2 term 3 term 4
Figure1: search terms
The more specific your search term is, the further down into your site structure you put your landing page of this term. Make sure that you make a landing page for every search term you come up with.
Example keyword research
The theory of keyword research can be a bit dry. We will spice things up! We’ll give you an example of step 1 to 3. Let’s say that I have a blog about children. I write about children’s clothes, children’s room and children’s toys. I blog about new products, about things that I have bought and like and about new trends.
Step 1: mission
My mission is to describe the latest trends about clothing, decoration and toys for children.
Step 2: keywords
children’s clothes children’s clothes trends children’s room children’s room accessories children’s room furniture children’s room accessories trends children’s decorations children’s decorations trends children’s toys children’s toys trends
Step 3: pages
Search terms level 1: homepage.com level 2: / subpages level 3: / sub / subpages level 4: sub / sub /subpages Children’sclothes com / clothinghomepage. Children’s
clothes trends / clothing / trends
Children’s
room homepage.com / room
Children’s
room accessoires accessoires/ room /
Children’s room
accessoires trends / room /acces-soires /trends
Figure 2: pages
As you can see from this Google Trends chart, kids clothes, for instance, is actually far more sought after. Which means we could go after the probably less competitive, children’s clothes etc anyway, or go for kids clothes. There are no rights or wrongs in this regard, you just have to be aware that you’re making this decision.
Cornerstone articles
Important content
Really important content deserves a page within your site’s structure, not a news item / post. It should be easily navigated to within a few clicks. We refer to these important pages as cornerstone articles. So, you go ahead and create these cornerstone pages within your site. Take some time for it, this is going to be the content that’s going to make you rank. Real people will read it and you need to convince those people. So think about search engines all you want, but think even more about the visitor that will end up on that page and give him / her something worthwhile. This also means you’re not going to create other pages within your site that target the exact same keyword, but if you discuss the keyword, you link to this page! Read more about site structure in chapter 5.
Yoast Tip
Make sure that these cornerstone articles, the articles on which people enter your site, have a clear call-to-action. This means that it will be clear at the end of the page (and preferably on the top as well) what you want people to do. Do you want them to keep on reading: lead them to other, preferably related articles. Do you want them to buy your stuff: lead them to your shop. Do you want them to subscribe to your newsletter: offer them a form to sign up.
Chapter 5
Site Structure
Introduction
The way your site is structured will give Google important clues about where to find the most important content. A good site structure could thus lead to a higher ranking in Google. Your site’s structure determines whether a search engine understands what your site is about, and how easily it will find and index content relevant to your site’s purpose and intent. In this chapter, we will explain the importance of site structure and give practical tips which will help you set up or upgrade the structure of your own website. This chapter is a revision of a previous article written in 2011 and published on yoast.com.
Creating a pyramid
By creating a good structure, you can use the content you’ve written that has attracted links from others. Your site’s structure can help to spread some of that link juice to the other pages on your site. On a commercial site, that means that you can use the quality content you’ve written to boost the search engine rankings of your sales pages too.
When developing a new site, or restructuring an existing one, it helps to draw out your site’s structure in something like Visio (or even putting it in Excel). In chapter 3 we help you to create such a structure. What you’ll want to do is put all the pages and sections of your website in a structure
as a tree. After drawing your site’s structure, you can analyze the faults in the structure of your website.
Based on a yoast.com structure from many years ago, you would
draw something like figure 3:
Sub-page 1 Sub-page 3 Sub-page 1 Sub-page 3 Sub-page 2 Sub-page 4 Sub-page 2 Sub-page 4
Sub-page page Sub-WordPress Articles Tool 1
Blog Tool 2 Code Etc. Project 1 Project 2 Etc. Site 1 Site 2 Etc. About Home
Projects Sites Contact
Figure 3: a typical site sketch
Analyzing your pyramid
A balanced pyramid
An ideal site structure should look somewhat like a pyramid from ancient Egypt. When working on your site structure, you thus should try to realise a reasonably balanced pyramid for your site structure. On the top of the pyramid is your homepage, with buttons allowing people to go down to the second level. From the pages on the second levels, people are able to navigate to pages on the third level (and so on). As you go down in levels in your website, the number of pages will go up.
We would advise you to have something between 2 and 7 main sections, depending on how content heavy your site is.
Equally large sections
You can make subsections beneath your main sections. Make sure that sections are about equally large. If sections are too large, you should divide them into two main sections. A good rule of thumb for the size of sections is to make sure that no section is more than twice as large as any other section. Large section should have a prominent place on your home-page. Indeed, if a section is relatively large, this is apparently something you write much content about. Dividing such a section in two separate ones, would then result in a more accurate reflection of the content on your website.
Looking at figure 3 clearly shows that the old yoast.com structure
was unbalenced. As you can see, the Code section constituted more than half of the entire site. So our sections were not at all equally large. Sub-page 1 Sub-page 3 Sub-page 1 Sub-page 3 Sub-page 2 Sub-page 4 Sub-page 2 Sub-page 4
Sub-page page Sub-WordPress Articles Tool 1
Blog Tool 2 Code Etc. Project 1 Project 2 Etc. Site 1 Site 2 Etc. About Home
Structure should reflect content
In making your site structure, make sure that the structure reflects the content. Similar things should be grouped together, while things that are in fact different should be put in another section.
The structure of the old yoast.com was unbalanced did not reflect
the content. There were three pages that were basically about Joost de Valk: About, Projects and Websites. These three pages were not very different in content, but were treated differently in structure. Sub-page 1 Sub-page 3 Sub-page 1 Sub-page 3 Sub-page 2 Sub-page 4 Sub-page 2 Sub-page 4
Sub-page page Sub-WordPress Articles Tool 1
Blog Tool 2 Code Etc. Project 1 Project 2 Etc. Site 1 Site 2 Etc. About Home
Projects Sites Contact
Traffic
Pages that generate a lot of traffic should have a prominent place on your website. Check your site statistics to see which pages are very popular. Try to put these pages relatively high in your site structure. These pages apparently attract a lot of traffic and need a high place on your pyramid.
In our example, we found out that the WordPress pages were
responsible for about 30% of the site traffic, but were down on the third and fourth level.
Designing a new site structure
After you have analyzed the faults in your site structure you can rear-range sections and make up a new and improved site structure. Make sure you draw a balanced pyramid, giving more popular pages a higher place in the pyramid.
At yoast.com, we did exactly that. In figure 4 you can see our new
solution.
Subpage 1
Subpage 2 Subpage 2 Tool 2 Projects Subpage 3 Subpage 3 Etc.
Subpage 4 Subpage 4
Subpage 1 Tool 1 Websites
WordPress Articles Code About Contact
Home / Blog
Figure 4: a more refined section structure.
As you can see we decided to move some pages up the tree, and
also removed some pages. When you’re rethinking your site structure you’ll often find that some pages are not really beneficial to your users. Deleting them is the best thing you can do if that’s the case.
Another choice we made was to move the blog to the home page. The homepage was utter nonsense, and basically yet another
About Joost de Valk page. And though Joost likes himself, that’s
not what we were hoping people came to our site for.
Naming your sections
Once you’re satisfied with your site structure, have a look at the names you have come up with for your sections. If you have enough content about a subject for it to be able to have it’s own section, you can bet people are searching for it as well. That’s why it’s very wise to make sure your section names use the keywords people are searching for! Pick the right names for your sections and subsections, and you’re halfway there. Now use the same techniques to pick the titles for your pages, and make sure to keep them short and clean.
For example, if you’re like us and you’ve written WordPress
plugins and created a section for them, you should not call that section WordPress. What would people search for? If they want a new plugin for WordPress, they would probably use WordPress plugins for a search term. That would also be the term for that section. Our sections had names as shown in figure 5.
WordPress
Plugins ToolsSEO SnippetsCode Joost de ValkAbout Contact SEO Blog
Figure 5: sensible section names1
Internal link structure
If you did it all right with your new site structure, it should look like a pyra-mid. Now you should consider how you’re going to connect the sections of this pyramid together. Look at those sections as small pyramids inside your larger pyramid. Each page in the top of that pyramid should link to all its subpages, and the other way around. So, al the subpages within a pyramid should link to the page at the top of the pyramid.
Because you’re linking from pages that are closely related to each other content-wise, you’re increasing your site’s possibility to rank. Doing it like this, will help the search engine out by showing it what’s related and what isn’t.
1 we already updated our site structure again (and again), but this remains the most vivid example.
Take figure 6 as an example: WordPress Plugins SEO Blog Plugin 3 Plugin 4 Plugin 1 Plugin 2 Subpage 3 Subpage 4 Subpage 1 Subpage 2
Figure 6: you also need to consider how the pages link to each other within each section.
You should make sure you keep your links between each page
relevant to those pages. For example, if you linked from subpage 3 to plugin 2 all the time, the search engine might think that subpage 3 was related to plugin 2, whereas it’s only related to plugin 4.
From your new site structure to URLs
Once you’ve created your new site structure, you can go forth and create the URLs for this structure. Each page’s URL should describe the content of that page, yet be as short as possible. If you have determined what keywords you want to rank for, you might include the most important
Keep in mind the following things while implementing your
new URLs
If you’re using multiple words, separate them with hyphens.
• Mixed case URLs are an absolute no-go, as Unix and Linux servers are case sensitive. Having mixed case URLs drastically increases the possibility of typos - have you ever tried remember a URL that /LoOks/ LiKe/ThiS/ ?
• Numbers might be easy for your CMS, but not for your users. Remem-bering a URL with a number in it is hard, so the chance people will remember it and link to it is smaller – don’t use numbers in URLs.
• Make URLs guessable if you can. If people can remember your URLs they can also talk about it with their friends more easily.
• Make sure you redirect all your old pages to their new equivalents using 301 redirects. A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect, and this way search engines will move all the link value from the old URL to the new one. For example, make sure http://example.com 301 redirects to http://www.example.com, or the other way around, so people always link to the same “version” of your site.
• Make sure content is available under one URL and one URL only, for example by implementing print stylesheets on your pages. There’s no valid reason anymore to have a different page for printing purposes because all major browsers support print stylesheets.
Chapter 6
Technical SEO
Introduction
In chapter 4 we have learned how to do a proper keyword research. You now know what terms people use when searching for your site. In
chapter 5 we came up with a site structure and an internal linking struc-ture. The next step is making sure that Google can index our website properly and rank our site when people use these search terms. In this SEO chapter we will give the very basics of the technical aspects of SEO. If you have a WordPress website, making your website SEO friendly is not that hard. WordPress itself is reasonably search engine friendly, as it supports search engine friendly URLs and its default themes output proper HTML. Our WP SEO plugin takes care of the rest. Still, there are some major conditions your site requires to meet. Not meeting these conditions would make ranking in Google impossible. In this chapter, we will discuss those requirements. On yoast.com you will find numerous articles which dive much deeper into technical SEO as we do in this chapter. This chapter is the most ‘nerdy’ chapter in this book. It could be a bit too hard if your development skills are limited. We tried to explain everything as comprehensible as possible and give lots of tips for further reading.
Three stages in SEO
At Yoast, we distinguish several stages in technical SEO. First of all, you have to make sure that Google is able to index your site (we refer to this as crawlability). There should be no boundaries that prevent Google and other search engines from finding your content or circumstances that block Google from spidering your content. The second step you have to take is to investigate whether Google knows which content there is and that Google can it reach it. We refer to this as findability. Only the last step is the actual optimization: what does Google see, how does it rank that and what can we do about improving how Google ranks it. This last step will be discussed in more detail in chapter 7.
Crawlability
A condition for your website to rank in Google is that Google can crawl through your site. No crawling, means no saving of your site in the index (see chapter 3) and thus no ranking. A quick way of checking whether a page on your site can be spidered is by doing a quix SEO check. Simply go to the quix SEO check page, enter the URL and check the results. If it’s not green, you’ve got stuff to fix!
Having a site which Google does not crawl (sufficiently) could have several causes. You could be:
1 blocking the specific URL with your robots.txt;
2 blocking Google through noindex tags;
3 blocking Google because the canonical is wrong. The quix SEO check will check all these three causes.
1 Robots.txt
Every website should have the file robots.txt. If you do not created such a file yourself, WordPress will generate one for you. Robots.txt is a very powerful file, which indicates which sections of your site are blocked from robots including Google. It’s not uncommon at all that if a developer moves your new site from a development server to yours, copying the robots.txt along, that he / she forgets to update it, leaving your site blocked from crawling.
Testing a change to your robots.txt is easy: in Google Webmaster Tools
under Crawl » Blocked URLs there are two textarea’s. The first contains your robots.txt, you can just edit it to test your change. In the textarea below that you can specify URLs that should be tested. Hit Test below that and you should get the all clear.
Yoast Tip
If not, modify and test again. If you don’t know how to use Google Webmaster Tools, start reading here.
2 Noindex tags
Sometimes people want some pages not to be indexed by Google. Maybe you do not want your personal blog in the search results, but you do want to show it on your website. You can use a noindex tag in the HTML in order to keep Google from indexing your site. However, sometimes these tags are written in pages where they should not have been.
Perhaps a noindex tag was added by a developer while working on your site and was forgotten afterwards. The tag looks like this:
<meta name=”robots” value=”noindex,follow” />
A noindex tag on a page results to no saving of this page in Google’s index. This page will not rank in Google on any search terms. You want that meta robots tag to read:
<meta name=”robots” value=”index,follow” />
The follow part in the tag tells a search engine that all links on your page should be followed by the search engine for further indexing of your website. If you don’t specify any meta robots tags (most pages on the web don’t), the default is for that page to allow both indexation and following, so the default is “index,follow”.
3 Wrong canonical
If you have two pages holding the same content, that’s problematic for your rankings. To fix this problem, Google introduced the canonical link. Matt Cutts explains this in this video. The basics are that a canonical link is used to indicate to Google which page you would like Google to display in the search results.
A canonical link should thus be used when two pages have the same content. For instance, if you have two URLs that have the same (or 95% the same) content, it would be beneficial to use a canonical link from the duplicate page to the main page (you can do this with WordPress SEO). If you don’t know which one is the ‘canonical’ one: pick one. Not doing anything is more hurtful than just picking one.
The problem comes when you’re setting the canonical wrong. This could occur for instance by inserting a link to a 404 page or simply a non-existing URL in that canonical link. Also, if your canonical link refers to a page which is actually very different from the original page, Google will get confused and your ranking may reduce as well. So make sure you use the correct canonical links. It’s a powerful tool, use it wisely.
Findability
Now that we’ve made sure Google can index your site, it’s time to tell Google where the content is. To do that, we rely on two things: links to each page on our website, which have been taken care of by the internal link structure we made in chapter 5. Your site’s structure determines whether a search engine understands what your site is about, and how easily it will find and index content relevant for your site. Findability can be increased by other technical aspects as well. We will discuss the most important ones: XML sitemaps, HTML sitemaps, related links & breadcrumbs.
XML sitemaps
XML sitemap contains a list of all the URL’s of your website and keeps track of it’s latest updates. The XML sitemap thus gives Google a kind of table of content of your website. The XML sitemap are strictly meant for search engines. They adhere to a standard created by the 3 big search engines Yahoo!, Google and Bing, which you can find on sitemaps.org if you want to see it. The good news is, if you’re using WordPress, all you have to do is install our WordPress SEO plugin and make sure XML sitemaps are enabled within it. Our plugin will take care of the rest.
Whenever you publish a new or update an existing post or page, the XML sitemap is then automatically updated and the search engines are notified of this change in the XML sitemap. They will then fetch the XML sitemap, see what changed and fetch the changed pages. This means indexation of your content is sped up incredibly.
Do realize that for pages to rank, they need links. At a minimum, they need internal links from your site, but if a page is important, it should probably get high quality external links as well (see chapter 8 about link building).
HTML sitemaps
Even if you’ve done the best possible job of creating a good internal link structure, it can still be helpful to create an HTML sitemap that allows visitors to get an overview of all the content on your site. If your site is very big, you might need to split this up into several sitemaps to make it ‘workable’.
The benefit to the search engines is that this page will make sure that no page on your site is ‘orphaned’. every page has at least one link to it, allowing search engines to rank it.
Related links
Another proven method of making sure search engines can find links to the content on your site is by adding related links to posts and pages. Most web hosts don’t really like the related links plugins available for Word-Press because they’re rather resource intensive for the server to run.
Yoast Tip
We recommend to use Post Connector (by former Yoast developer Barry Kooij) to solve this problem.
Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs show the path people take when they click through your site. They are often visualised on the top of a page so visitors can see how they navigated. A breadcrumbs path could be Home » Clothes » Dresses. Using breadcrumbs will allow Google to easily grasp the structure of your site and this could well result in higher ranking.
Content optimization
The third and final stage in SEO is optimization. Now we’re sure that search engines can find our content, it’s time to write copy. In writing and structuring your text, you can actually help with indexing your page even further. Good web copy makes sure that it is both readable and useful to visitors as well as easy to rank for search engines. So you need all the knowledge you’ve gathered about keyword research and then apply that to your text. In the next chapter we will give you some tips on how to do just that.
Chapter 7
SEO copywriting
Introduction
The text on your website is a very important factor in Google’s algorithm. Google spiders your text and indexes the relevant words. Your text should thus be written in such a way that your keywords and search terms have a prominent place. However, using your keywords too often severely damages the readability of your text. In this chapter, we will give some practical tips and teach you the basics of SEO copywriting.
Yoast Tip
If you want to read more about SEO copywriting, CopyBlogger is the go to source.
Writing your text
Think before you write
Copywriting is a true profession. It can be quite hard. And copywriting in order to optimize your website for search engines makes the job even harder. Make sure the mission of your product (see chapter 4) is crystal clear. Write it down. Think hard about the message of your text. What do you want to tell your readers? And what is the purpose of your text? What do you want you readers to do at the end of the page? Write down the answers to these questions before you begin writing.
Use your keywords wisely
Of course, the keywords and search terms you want to be found on will have a prominent place in your text. But make sure that you don’t use these search terms too often. If you want to rank for a certain term - say children’s clothes - and you write a text which has the words children’s clothes in every sentence, chances are big that your audience will be pretty annoyed. Your text just isn’t readable anymore. Keep in mind that Google wants to facilitate its users. Users want texts that are understand-able, well structured and easy to read.
As a general rule of thumb: try to put down your search terms in about 1 to 2 percent of your text. Make sure your articles have a minimum of 300 words. So in an article of 300 words, you should mention your search terms 3 to 6 times. The minimum of 300 words isn’t an exact science, of course, nor is the amount of keyword mentions, but 300 is a decent minimum number of words for an article that needs to show authority.
Use of subheadings
If you write longer texts and want people to find their way in your articles, you should use subheadings. Headings help Google to grasp the main topics of a long post and thus can help in your ranking. Use of subhead-ings will probably let you get away with using the keyword less. Subheadsubhead-ings will lead people, help them scan your page, and make the structure of your articles that much clearer. Make sure that your keywords are used in the subheadings, but do not put your keyword in every subheading (as it will make the text unreadable). You can read more about headings in one
Yoast Tip
Make sure you add pictures or illustrations to your text which fit the content of your story. When you put a picture in your article, always try to add an alt tag (containing your keyword) that is still descriptive of the image.
Beware of over-optimization
Over-optimization in your copywriting can result in Google thinking you’re trying too hard. Google will then push your website down in the search results. Always keep your audience in mind and write texts that are aimed at your audience and easy to read.
Content writing with the WP SEO plugin
Our WP SEO plugin actually helps you to write a SEO-friendly text. If you want the help of our plugin you should start by choosing your focus keyword and entering it in the appropriate box. This is the most important search term you want people to find this particular page for. Our plugin actually measures many aspects of the text you are writing and helps with making your text SEO-friendly. We will describe the most important ones:
1 The plugin allows you to formulate a meta-description. This description has to be a short text which indicates the main topic of the page. If the meta-description contains the search term people use, the exact text will be shown by Google underneath your URL in the search results.
2 The plugin analyzes the text you write. It calculates a Flesch reading ease score, which indicates the readability of your article. The Flesch reading ease score for example takes into account the length of sentences.
3 The plugin does a pretty big number of checks. It checks whether or not you used your keyword in 5 important locations: the article-heading, the title of the page, the URL of the page, the content of the article and the meta-description. The plugin also checks the presence of links in your article and the presence of images in the article. It calculates the number of words and the density of usage of the focus keyword in the article. Above that, the plugin also checks whether or not other pages on your website use the same focus keyword, to prevent you from competing with yourself.
If you write a text which is relatively SEO friendly (based on the aspects mentioned before) the plugin will indicate this with a green bullet. Writing pages with green bullets will help you improve the ranking of the pages on your website.
Keeping your site up to date
There are many myths around having to keep your site updated for Google. It thus is not entirely clear whether regularly updating your website leads to a higher ranking in Google. But our advice is simple: make sure that you regularly work on your website.
website will give Google the idea that your website is alive. If it is not an active website, Google will crawl it less often and it might become less appealing to Google to include the page in the search results. Next to that, make sure you keep your cornerstone content up to date (see
Chapter 8
Link building
Introduction
Competitiveness of niche
In chapter 3 we divided the factors influencing Google’s algorithm in two categories. First, we distinguished on-page factors, which included, among others, content and internal linking structure. And second, we distin-guished off-page factors. Off-page factors are very hard to influence. The niche of your business is an off-page factor. If your company operates in the travel-industry, the competition to rank in Google is high. Other niches are much less competitive, making ranking of your website that much easier.
Links from other website
The most important off-page factor that helps with your ranking are links from other websites. We know that your website will rank better if you have more links. So, to optimize your website for search engines, it would be very wise to collect as many high quality links to your site as possible.
How does a link help the ranking your site?
A link to your site helps in the ranking in four ways:
• It adds value to the receiving page, allowing it to improve its visibility in the search engines.
• It adds value to the entire receiving domain, allowing each page on that domain to improve its rank ever so slightly.
• The text of the link is an indication to the search engine of the topic of the website and more specifically the receiving page.
• People click on links, resulting in so called direct traffic.
The value of a link for the receiving page is determined in part by the topic of the page the link is on. A link from a page that has the same topic as the receiving page is of far more value than a link from a page about an entirely different topic. On top of that, a link from within an article is worth way more than a link from a sidebar or a footer. Furthermore the more links there are on a page, the less each individual link is worth. Read more about how link building works in Joost’s link building article.
Bad reputation
In recent years link building has gotten a somewhat nasty reputation. Once people noticed that links from other sites resulted in higher rankings, they began to abuse this. They got links from sites that did not have any relation with their own site. In other cases, people bought links from other sites. Buying links polluted the search engine. Not the best information, but the people who buy most links would rank high in Google if buying links would be allowed. That is why Google gives penalties to companies who buy links or (mis)use links from non-related companies. If you get a penalty from Google, your site will disappear from the search results. The bad reputation of link building comes from companies who were a bit too enthusiastic in link building and got penalties from Google. Does this mean that you shouldn’t do any link building at all? Of course not!
Link building the right way
Don’ts
When you decide to improve your ranking by doing some link building, make sure you never pay for links. Never use services of companies that tell you they can get you some links. If the links your website gets are from sites that are unreliable (e.g. if there are only advertisements on the site), you should get rid of them.
It’s very important to keep in mind that if a link will never get natural clicks, from people reading an article and clicking through, it’s not going to be a very valuable link. Search engines are getting better and better at under-standing which links truly connect the web and which are just there to fool the search engine.
Outreaching PR-activity
Link building is an outreaching PR-activity. Link building should generate visitors to your site that actually fit your site. As long as you are doing nothing more than asking people to write about your awesome product, it is perfectly OK. This could really increase your rankings. Link building should feel like a normal marketing activity and not like a trick. But be aware that link building this way takes a lot of time and it will continue to take time. It does not have to be a hard or awkward activity. If your product is good, there will be more than enough people who would like to blog about it. Most bloggers need content, thus presenting your product to them will make them happy!
Guest Blogging
Activities like guest blogging are nice link building activities as well. Guest blogging has gotten quite some negative press in 2014. A large guest blog- ging network was penalized by Google and the general SEO tendency seemed to be to advise against guest blogging. This blogging network, in the eyes of Google, abused guest blogging to create links.
The bottom line is that guest blogging as such can be good for your rankings, if you do this occasionally and select the right websites for it. It shouldn’t be a blog post ‘just to be linked on that website’. If your posts actually fits the guest blog and contributes to the website than it’s perfectly OK. If you’re going to do it at scale and reproduce the same content all the time: that won’t work.
Yoast Tip
Paddy Moogan has written an e-book about link building that we find is one of the most comprehensive on the topic. Get it here.
Search Engine Optimization
Further reading
In this section, we have taught you the basics of Search Engine Optimi-zation. If you want to know more about SEO we recommend you to read our WordPress SEO article: The definitive guide to higher rankings for WordPress sites. On yoast.com we post blogs on a regular basis with information and tips on SEO. Read our posts on SEO!Section
Navigation
About this section
In this section, we will teach you the basics of a good navigation. Navigation is everything that has to do with guiding your visitors through your website. You should help your visitors to find what they look for at your site. In the previous section, we have told you the basics of attracting people to your website. In this section, we will teach you how to help people find what they look for once they are actually on your website! This section contains a number of chapters in which we go over your website from top to bottom. In this journey we’ll stop at every navigational elements we encounter and share our thoughts on this option. Sometimes we will include insight from SEO, or effects on user experience, for using that option. Finally, we have also included a few remarks on navigation on your mobile website.
Chapter 9
Introduction to navigation
Why do we need navigation?
Imagine yourself being lost. Being lost without knowing how far you have to travel. Without any sense of where you are and especially no sense of where you need to go. That’s probably how your visitor will feel when your website would lack any navigational features.
Many navigational elements
Luckily every website seems to have some kind of navigation. Navigational features are not limited to your menu and submenu. There are many ways of navigating through your website, although we do not label these as such. In fact, we recommend making your menu as short as possible, and trust the visitor will find the other ways to navigate your website. Under-stand that every internal link on your website helps the visitor navigate. That could be a single link in your text, your breadcrumbs or a footer link. But it could also be a list of categories in your sidebar.
A top-down approach of your navigation
In this section we will analyze your navigational features, based upon an imaginary map of your web page. This map is based upon the default layout of a website, using a header, content area, right sidebar and a footer. We will refer to those as respectively North, West, East and South.
Figure 7: imaginary map of your web page.
Travelling your website
In Jonathan Swift’s well-known novel Gulliver’s Travels (1726), we find a man that is lost at sea after shipwrecking. That totally resembles Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), with one major difference: Robinson had nowhere to go but the Island of Despair, while Gulliver travels on to end up on four different locations before finally heading home. Fun fact is that Gulliver visited the island with Yahoos last, where everybody is using Google now.
get to the next island, right? There are a lot of ways to give that visitor directions to navigate your website, and while we discuss a lot of these in this section we’re sure you’ll be able to come up with more. The following chapters are meant to make you recognise and use the navigational options your site has, to improve your user experience, usability and SEO along the way.
Chapter 10
Top menu navigation: coming in from
the North
Now let’s imagine a visitor travelling over your web page, entering from the upper left – the North - of your browser.
The Back button
One of the most clicked features in a browser is probably the Back button of the browser itself. If we end up on a page where we can’t find what we are looking for, a simple click will bring us back to a page we already know. It’s as simple as that. The quickest escape from an un wanted situation.
Unfortunately, the Back button is not something we can control. The use of it however clearly tells us that we need clear crossroads in our website. We need to have pages that redirect us to other sections of the website. A page is never a dead end, there should always be a way back.
Yoast Tip
Make sure your visitors can’t get lost. Make sure that every page has a clear escape to get back to the previous page and to the homepage.
Top navigation
We refer to the navigation options entirely on top of your website (above your main menu) as top navigation. The top navigation is often over-looked, but provides valuable background information for your website. Some websites include home and contact links in the top navigation. These are actually often a bit too important to put in your top navigation. You would want a more prominent place for these.
When dividing your website in topics, you will find yourself left with a number of menu items that do not fit the main menu (more on that later) in any way. Let’s mention a few to make this more clear:
Support Documentation How-to Register RSS Feedback Contact Terms Sitemap Search Login
All these links are candidates for your top navigation. These are the links we need, not the links we need to focus on.
Logo
Most websites give a prominent place to their logo somewhere in the north. This is your unique feature, your lighthouse. There is no page on your website that is not branded with your logo, if you’ve set up your web pages the right way.
Logo links to homepage
It would be a wasted navigational option not to link that logo. Even on your sales pages, where you may have reduced all noise by getting rid of your main menu, the logo lighthouse will provide a nice, warm link back to your homepage. Every ship lost at sea will then find its way back to that safe harbor.
Trinity
Sometimes people make the mistake to link the logo to another page than the homepage. Do not make that mistake! The logo should always link to your homepage. It is part of a trinity; the first item in the main menu, the first item in breadcrumbs and the logo. All these three should always link to your homepage. It will be the lifeline for the drowning visitor. Grab on to one of these and find yourself back on the homepage.
Main menu
At this point we are crossing a border from our most northern territory to the main section of our web page. That border, the main navigation,
is also called your global navigation. It’s not always a horizontal naviga-tion and it’s not always global, but that is just one of the terms introduced to indicate the main menu on your website. Other names are top-level, persistent or primary navigation. But in the end it’s your main menu, right?
The main menu indicates the various sections of your website in a clear and informative way. That global navigation should consist of a number (not too much) main menu items that tell the visitor which corner of your website should be visited for what information. In chapter 5 we already gave practical insights in structuring your website. Your main menu should reflect the structure of your website. Do not flood the menu with unrelated items but think about which categories make sense to your visitors.
Submenu
The submenu should contain details of the main menu item. When the main item is Apple, the submenu should read something like iPhone, iPad, Mac, iTunes. Note that these submenu items should also be present on the Apple page.
There are many ways to add a submenu, the most common is where the submenu drops down below the main menu item when hovering your mouse over that item.
Figure 8: a submenu which drops down when hovering your mouse over the main menu item. The downwards pointing arrow shows a submenu exist.
Yoast Tip
Add an indication (like a downwards pointing arrow) in your main menu item to show that it contains a submenu. Otherwise, visitors will not know that a submenu exists!
Chapter 11
Navigation in main content:
the Wild West
Main content
When we travel down from the North, going counterclockwise, we enter the Wild West. This is where the magic happens, some will say. In a default website layout, this is indeed your main content area. This is where your company information is, or where we will find your blog posts.
The main content (or the wild west) might just be the most overlooked part of your website when it comes to links and naviga-tional options for your website. Yet there are many ways to offer navigation here. The navigational options are not always prominent or obvious, but without even knowing it yourself, this is where you can most easily guide your visitor.
As the visitor has already decided on reading that specific page, what would be more easy than offer related content in that main part of your website as well? In this chapter, we will give you some navigational options to use in the main content part of your site.
Breadcrumbs
You’ll want to add breadcrumbs to your single posts and pages. Bread-crumbs are the links, usually above the title post, that look like: Home »
WordPress » WordPress Plugins. They are good for two things. First of all,
they allow your users to easily navigate through your site. And secondly, they allow search engines to determine the structure of your site more easily.
These breadcrumbs should link back to the homepage, and the category the post is in. If the post is in multiple categories it should pick one.
Yoast Tip
The Yoast WordPress SEO plugin actually helps you to create bread-crumbs fairly easy.
Make sure your website has a nice internal structure, like discussed in
chapter 5. We often hear people say things like: “My website only has two
layers: home and the page at hand. So breadcrumbs are useless.” Our
ques-tion in this case would immediately be: “Why haven’t you structured your
content a bit better?” Breadcrumbs make valuable internal links, and
provide a simple, structural navigation. If your website has multiple levels of content, you want breadcrumbs.
Yoast Tip
Breadcrumbs improve the navigation of your site, but are valuable for SEO as well.
On-page navigation
At Yoast, we don’t mind scrolling. We love long, textual content. If you want to be the authority on a subject, you should be able to write a whole lot about it. That’s also how Google will see this. If you want a page to rank with three lines of text, even Google will smile and give you lower rankings for the page or not rank you at all (see also chapter 7 on SEO copy writing).
Now with long pages, there is a simple way to improve usability of that page: by adding on-page navigation. Just create links that refer to a place in the article below. At yoast.com, we use this for instance for our main SEO for WordPress article. There is actually quite a lengthy index on that page. An added benefit is that the anchors on the page itself allow us to link directly to a chapter on that page.
Teaser blocks/Call-to-action blocks
When making a list of navigational options, we almost forgot teaser blocks. Teaser blocks are not the first things that come to mind when listing navigational options. We’re not even sure that is the right terminology for these blocks, but calling them teasers seems to cover their purpose.
These blocks populate your homepage or sidebar and have a distinct navigational use. As secondary calls-to-action, for instance, they guide the visitor to the green meadows of your website: your main or money pages. Teaser blocks actually work very well. We sometimes wonder why web- sites that sell a product or service are using Google Adsense to make an extra buck instead of creating nice, appealing product banners that ‘lure’ the visitor to the right sales page. Why use valuable space on your website for another product than your own?
Yoast Tip
New templates, such as templates from StudioPress or Woo -Themes, and our own WordPress Themes, reserve space for these teasers. Where old themes were mainly about sliders and widgets, new themes seem to take calls-to-action and textual teasers in account. When wireframing your new design, add these teaser-blocks.
Pagination
People do not want to click through an endless collection of posts. Suppose your blog has 1,000 articles and you’re listing 10 articles per page, that would give you a hundred archive pages. If you would link these pages just by adding an Older (Previous) posts link and a Newer (Next) posts link, that would mean you would have to click 99 times to get to the last page. There is no need to make it that hard.
