SEO for

WordPress
Marieke van de Rakt,
Joost de Valk
Colophon
© 2016 Yoast
ISBN/EAN 978-94-92320-09-4
NUR 988
Publisher: Yoast
Authors: Marieke van de Rakt, Joost de Valk
Editor: Mijke Peters, Marieke van de Rakt
Design: Mijke Peters
Illustrations: Tim Hengeveld, Erwin Brouwer
Photography (blog examples): unsplash.com, pixabay.com
Edition: 1
Table of Contents
Where to start? 7

Formulate a mission 9
Ways to make your mission clear to your audience 12

Technical SEO 17

The very basics of SEO 19

WordPress & Yoast SEO 24
Security 28
Speed 37
Mobile 41

What to write about? 50

Keyword research 53
How to come up with ideas for your blog? 65
Content managing of a blog 71
How to handle comments on a blog 74

Site structure 80

The importance of site structure 82

How to set up a site structure 85
Practical tips to improve your site structure 92
Managing a growing site 94
Cornerstone articles 99

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UX 102

Call-to-action 104
Menus 109
Readability 114

SEO copywriting 122

Why is quality content important? 124

The process of good writing 128
Structure 136
Style 145
Writing with the Yoast SEO plugin 151
Writing with multiple authors 160
Images for your posts 163

Marketing 169

Getting to know your current audience 173

Growth towards new audiences 179
Social media 184
Email marketing 193
Link building 199

Monetizing your site 206

How to make money with your site 208

Creating a shop (in WordPress) 214
Conversion rate optimization 218

Epilogue 223

About the authors 224

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About this book

Your website can be a way to express your thoughts about the world.
Blogging, for instance, could be a way for you to share your knowledge
and to help people in a certain community. It could also be a strategy
to attract readers and customers to your website. But in any of these
cases, a site owner would like to attract an audience. Ranking high in
the search engines like Google is one of the most important ways to
drive traffic to your site.

Ranking well in search engines does however demand an SEO strategy.

And SEO is so much more than just a trick. A long-term SEO strategy
should focus on every aspect of your website. The technical stuff, the
content on your website and the user experience of your website should
all be awesome. To keep ranking well in Google, you should develop –
what we call – a holistic SEO approach.

In this eBook, we will take you through every aspect of Search Engine
Optimization that is important for people maintaining a site. In the
first section, we will challenge you to really think about the mission
and the purpose of your site. In the following sections, we will teach
you about all other aspects that are important in optimizing your site.
We will focus on technical aspects, on site structure, on copywriting
and on User eXperience. But also, we will help you to find topics to
blog about, give tips on marketing and finally on monetizing your site.

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Blog examples

In every section of this eBook we use another example blog. At the

beginning of a section, the example blog is introduced and the very
same example is used throughout the entire section. Amongst others,
we will use a mom blog, a tech blog, a lifestyle blog and our very own
blog yoast.com as an example.

The example blogs are all entirely made up and not based on ‘real blogs’
(with the exception of yoast.com, which genuinely exists ). We used
our experience with blogs and transformed this experience into
fictional blogs. The kind of blogs we use as an example are in fact
fairly common. Sometimes, in order to make the example more real,
we had to really dive into the specific topic of that blog. Please
remember that all the information of these blogs is purely fictional and
should be seen solely as illustrational and not functional (so please do
not take our advice on running a marathon in section 3). Whenever we
use an example you will see this icon:

Search engine - terminology

In this book, we will often 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.

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 Section 1

Where to start?

In this section, we will help you to start optimizing your site. The
most important thing for every site is to have a clear mission. Sites
need to have purpose and focus in order to appeal to people. Any
improvements on your site should start by (re)formulating the
mission of your site. In the first chapter of this section, we will help
you do that. In chapter 2 we will help you communicate your mission
adequately towards your audience.

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My awesome crazy life ~ Michael is a student who just likes to
write. Lots of friends like his columns and short stories and one
day he decides to write down the things that happen to him.
That’s the way his blog ‘my awesome crazy life’ had started. He
writes about his classes, about his girlfriend and about the parties
he visits.

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 Chapter 1

Formulate a mission

The most important thing you need to do (before you do anything

else) is to really get a clear mission for your site. The mission of your
website should consist of the ideas you have about your blog, your
website or your company.

An idea or a subject for a site

If you decide to start a website, you will most definitely have some
idea what your site will be about. Perhaps it will be a very personal
diary-like blog in which you offer your audience an in-depth view of
your exciting personal life. It could also be a site about a hobby or
about your profession.

And then you starting writing. Every site is born with that very first
post. Every blogger starts by writing and while you keep going, your blog

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will gain identity. Somewhere along that way, you should really take
some time to think about what you want with your site. In order to really
make something of your blog, you should turn your idea into a mission.

Formulating a mission

Before starting with optimizing your site, you will have to think about
your mission. Do not think too lightly about this. It is really hard to
have (and keep) clearly in mind what it is you want to write about. To
show you, we’ve made a list of questions you should be able to answer
after you’ve thought it all through. A lot of people can’t answer these
questions effectively at first. So take your time:
• Who are you and what is your site about?
• What makes your site special?
• In what way will your site help, entertain or inform your readers?
• What does your site add to sites that already exist? In what way is
your site better or different than others?
• What is the reason your website exists, besides making money?

Businesses are born of ideas, some of which are great, some are not.
But they’re all born out of the idea that what you have to offer is
special, and adds something to the market. The same goes for
successful blogs. Make sure that you have a clear vision of what it is
that you are offering to your readers. That benefit, that advantage,
that promise, should be clearly reflected on your website.

So the first step in starting a successful site is thus to write down your
mission. But, also if you already maintain a site, writing down your

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mission will be the first step in improving that site. You just have to
figure out what makes you stand out from the rest. Take the time and
literally write down your mission on a piece of paper. Of course a
computer or an iPad will do as well. You have to come up with one
mission, one message to send to your audience.

Formulating your mission is the starting point of many aspects of

holistic SEO. You will need your mission in doing keyword research
and setting up the structure of your blog. You will need it when
improving on User eXperience (UX) and to come up with ideas to
write about. You will most definitely need it when thinking about
marketing and monetizing your site.

My awesome crazy life ~ Michael did not put a lot of effort in

thinking about the mission of his blog before he started writing.
However, as the blogging continued and his audience was grow-
ing, he felt that his blog needed more focus. He sat down and tried
to answer the questions formulated in this chapter. Michael’s
blog is about life as a student. His blog is special and stands out
from other blogs because of the funny, column-like posts he
writes. Also, his posts form a continuous series and allow readers
a personal view in the lives of him and his friends. He covers his
ups and downs, love stories and how he struggles with tests and
finals. Michael tries to write down his stories in a way that people
really get to know him and his friends, as though they are part of
his awesome, crazy life. After some hard thinking about his blog,
this is actually the mission Michael comes up with: letting people
be part of his awesome, crazy life as a student.

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 Chapter 2

Ways to make your mission clear

to your audience

Once your mission is clear, you should make sure that your mission
is clearly reflected on your site. Your mission should be clear and
obvious when visitors enter your website. That way, your site will be
able to attract new visitors. Be aware you have literally just seconds
to get your most important point across. People’s attention span is
really short. So you have to make sure you tell all the important stuff
first, and tell it quickly.

There are a few ways to make sure your mission is instantly clear to
your audience. You should pick or design a theme that fits your site,
come up with clear headlines and taglines, write decent introductory
content and insert nice, suitable pictures.

1 Pick a theme

We do not have specific advice on picking or designing a theme. Read

the section about UX for some specific tips on usability of your site.
The only thing that’s really important about a theme is that it should
be a theme that fits your site. So, no pink and flowers for a business
site and nothing too corporate for a mom blog.

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2 Name and taglines
An important way to communicate your mission to your audience is
to make good use of your blogs name and tagline. The name is (or,
should be) in the title of every page. A tagline is a small amount of
text which serves to clarify a thought. It could be the explanation of
the name, or a description of your brand or company.

My awesome crazy life ~ Michael took the mission he formulated

for his blog and rephrased it a bit making it the tagline of his blog.
The tagline of his blog became: ‘ Be part of my awesome crazy life’.

Figure 1: tagline on ‘My awesome crazy life’

Make sure that your site’s name but mostly your tagline clearly
communicate the core goal of your site. This is most easily done by
creating a tagline for your site that immediately reflects what you do.
Your site’s name should, if it’s not related to an existing brand, be
something that’s brandable and easily remembered. You get bonus
points if it also makes clear what you write about immediately.

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 example

Figure 2: homepage pawedu.com

In the above homepage for PawEdu, it is very clear what the

purpose of the website is. The three larger words could apply
to more websites, but the tagline below it and the image add
nuance to these words. In most cases, that could indeed mean
getting back to a boring business tagline. Vague descriptions
just won’t tell your audience what you are doing.

3 Introductory content

Your homepage and your landing pages should include a clear intro-
duction. In this introduction you explain the mission or the purpose
of your site. What is your site about? Make sure this text is really clear
and adapt to the language of your audience. This text should not be
too long (one or two paragraphs at the most)!

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My awesome crazy life ~ The introductory content of My
awesome crazy life reads: My life is crazy. My days are filled with
studying for finals, writing essays, partying and falling in and out
of love. The lives of my goods friends Jason and Lauren are even
more crazy than mine. Frat parties, sex, drugs and rock and roll. I
will give you a peek in my world. Join me and my friends in my
awesome crazy college experience and stay tuned for the ins and
outs on my journey and struggles as a college student.

Figure 3: introductory content on

‘My awesome crazy life’

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4 A picture is worth a thousand words

A third way to make sure your mission is clear to your audience is to

make good use of pictures. For most sites, it is relatively easy to find
a picture that reflects their purpose. Think about what you want to
tell your audience, keep your mission in mind, while choosing
pictures.

Yoast tip

Be original and make or buy your own photo’s instead of relying on

stock image that everybody uses.

Figure 4: don’t rely on stock image that everybody uses

If you are selling candy, make sure to put pictures of tasty candy on
your homepage. If you are selling cruises to Hawaii, you could defi-
nitely take some great shots of a tropical island and a nice cruise
ship. For those of you that sell things like consultancy or plugins for
that matter, it is more difficult to find suitable pictures.

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 Section 2

Technical SEO

In this section, we will introduce the most important aspects of

technical SEO in order to understand what Google does and how
to tweak your site accordingly. We’ll convince you to use both
WordPress and the Yoast SEO plugin. After you have installed our
Yoast SEO plugin, most important technical SEO issues are actually
already taken care of (without you doing anything at all). In this
chapter, we then cover the three most important technical aspects:
security, speed and mobile.

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PhotoSofy ~ The example central in this section is PhotoSofy, a
blog maintained by a young photographer. She posts photos of
her projects on her blog and writes accompanying texts. The
photographer focuses on taking pictures of nature (beaches,
forest, animals). Her blog serves as a portfolio and helps her to
find new clients.

Yoast tip

If you are a developer and want to know more about technical

SEO, at the time of publication of this eBook, we are working on a
technical SEO training (expected fall 2016).

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 Chapter 3

The very basics of SEO

If you want to improve the SEO of your site, you need to understand
some basics of SEO. That’s what this chapter is all about.

Note that we’ll talk about 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.

What does Google do?

How does Google find your blog?

Search engines like Google follow links. They follow links from one
web page to another. Google consists of a crawler, an index and an
algorithm. A crawler follows the links on the web. It goes around the
internet 24/7 and saves the HTML- version of a page in a gigantic
database, called the index. This index is updated if the Google crawler
comes by your website again and finds a new or revised version of it.
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 existence of your site, there first has to be a
link from another site - one that is already in the index - to your site.
Following that link will lead to the first crawler-session and the first
time your site is saved in the index.

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Google’s secret algorithm

After indexing your site, Google can show it in the search results.

Google has a specific algorithm that decides which pages are shown
in which order. How this algorithm works is a secret. Nobody knows
exactly which factors decide the ordering of the search results. More-
over, 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.

Yoast tip

To keep up with changes to Google’s algorithm, you can read Joost’s

weekly SEO recap. Joost (one of the authors of this book and the
founder of Yoast) blogs about all the changes that he has seen and
the changes that Google has announced. Very often, these two things
are not one and the same. Google has good reasons to want to keep
its secret sauce secret.

Google’s results page

Google’s result page shows about 7 or 10 links to sites which fit your
search the best. We refer to these results as the organic search
results. If you click to the second page, more results are shown. The
further down the results you are, the less likely someone is going to
find your site from their search.

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Figure 5: you’ve probably know one or two Google memes

Above the 10 links on the first page are paid links, most of the time.
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 vary greatly, depending on the competitiveness of the
search term.

The value of links for search engines

It’s very important to have a basic understanding of how Google

and most other search engines use links: they use the number of
links pointing to a page to determine how important that page is.
Both internal links (coming from the same website) as well as
external links (from other websites) could help in the ranking of a
webpage in Google. Some links are more important than others:
links from websites that have a lot of incoming links themselves
are generally more important than links from small websites with
only a few incoming links.

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Universal search

Next to the organic and the paid results, Google also embeds news items,
pictures and videos in its search results. This is called universal search.

Figure 6: Google embeds news items, for example

PhotoSofy ~ For PhotoSofy, universal search is of great impor-

tance. The photos on the website are the things that the
photographer of PhotoSofy would like to sell. Next to optimizing
the accompanying text in the blogs the photographer writes, she
also makes sure to give all pictures names that correspond with
keywords she would like them to be found on. Also, the photogra-
pher makes sure to put the brand name ‘PhotoSofy’ in every photo.
That way, people will instantly know where the photo came from
if it will turn up in the universal search results .

Figure 7: brand name ‘PhotoSofy’ in every picture

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What is Search Engine Optimization?

High rankings in organic search results

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing sites

to (attempt to) make them appear in a high position in the organic
search results. In order to do so, SEO tries to shape a website accord-
ing to Google’s algorithm. Although Google’s algorithm remains
secret, over a decade of experience in SEO has resulted in a pretty
good idea about the important factors. In our view, the factors in
Google’s algorithm can be divided into two categories, which decide
the ranking of your website:

1 On-page factors. These 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). The textual issues will receive in-depth
attention later on in this book. The technical aspects are covered
in our Yoast SEO plugin or discussed in this section.

2 Off-page factors. These include the links to your site. The more
other (relevant) sites link to your website, the higher your ranking
in Google will be. We’ll talk a bit about link building in chapter 32
in section 7, Marketing.

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 Chapter 4

WordPress & Yoast SEO

Building a WordPress website isn’t that hard. WordPress was devel-

oped in order to make blogging easy and accessible for a very large
audience. We won’t tell you how to use WordPress. You can figure
that out yourself, or use one of the numerous manuals that will help
you setup your site. But we will tell you why to use WordPress.

Before you begin: make sure you host your site on your own domain.
That will give you the best chances to compete with others in the
rankings in Google.


Figure 8: host your site on your own domain

Why WordPress?

At Yoast, we are WordPress-fans. And with good reason! WordPress is

free and open source. It is easy to use and allows for great flexibility.
Let’s take a look at the advantages of using WordPress over other
Content Management Systems.

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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 skill 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 differ-
ent 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. Tips on how to select
plugins that are right for you can be found in the security chapter
later on in this section.

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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 (Content Management System) on the web,
WordPress has a large and supportive community. A lot of very
skilled developers (including some of our own best developers) work
together to make WordPress even better. You can ask questions on
support forums and get help from volunteers.

You can read much more about these and other WordPress features
and requirements and find testimonials on WordPress.org.

Yoast SEO

If you want to make sure your site is SEO-

friendly, you should install our Yoast SEO
plugin. That pretty much does all important
SEO things for you (without you having to do a
thing). WordPress actually is a really SEO-
friendly platform, so most technical things
are already covered. For all things not covered, you install the (free)
Yoast SEO plugin, it does fix some minor issues WordPress has.
Installing the plugin and using the default settings already improves
your SEO quite a lot. If you make sure to run all updates of our SEO
plugin, all major technical SEO things will already be covered.

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Our premium plugin offers some extra features and the help of our
support team. That could be really useful, if you have a hard time
installing our plugin. Admittedly, the plugin has quite a lot of differ-
ent settings and it could be a challenge setting up. We are currently
finishing up a training about the Yoast SEO plugin (what is does and
what the settings do). If you want to know more about what the
plugin does and what the different settings are for (and which you
should use for your specific blog) you should definitely look into the
Yoast SEO plugin training.

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 Chapter 5

Security

You cannot neglect the security of your website, especially when your
blog is getting a bit larger. Failing to take the necessary precautions
can lead to malware infections, branding issues, Google blacklists
and possibly have a huge impact on your SEO (something dear to our
hearts).

WordPress security has always been food for thought. Even though
most of the recent updates including WordPress 4.0 deal with
WordPress security issues, there is still a lot that can be done to
improve that security, even by the less tech-savvy among us. In this
chapter we’ll walk you through a number of suggestions on how to
improve security on your own WordPress website. WordPress itself
also has a list on WordPress security tips you might want to read.

1 Don’t use ‘admin’ as a username

Perhaps the easiest baseline step for WordPress security you can take
as a WordPress user is to stop using ‘admin’ as a username. Choose
something else please! It’ll cost you nothing, and the install makes it
really easy to do. A majority of today’s attacks target your wp-admin/
wp-login access points using a combination of admin and some pass-
word. Common sense would dictate that if you remove admin you’ll
also kill the attack outright.

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When we say ‘admin’ we are speaking specifically to the username
only and not the role.

Simply create a new user in WordPress at Users > New User and make
that a user with Administrator rights. After that, delete the admin
user. Don’t worry about the post or pages the admin user has already
created. WordPress will nicely ask you: “What should be done with
content owned by this user?” and give you the option to delete all
content or assign it to a new user, like the one you’ve just created.

2 Employ Least Privileged Principles

Make sure that not every user that has access to your WordPress
backend is categorized under the administrator role. Assign people to
the appropriate roles and you’ll greatly reduce your security risk.

The principles of Least Privileged state that you give permissions to

those that need it, when they need it and only for the time they need
it. The WordPress.org team put together a great article in the Codes
regarding Roles and Capabilities. We encourage you to read it and
become familiar with it because it applies to this step.

3 Use a less common password

The third thing you can do in order to increase the security of your
weblog is to choose a less common password. An easy thing to
remember is CLU: Complex. Long. Unique. This is where tools like
1Password and LastPass come into play, as they each have password
generators. You type in the length, and it generates the password.

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You save the link, save the password, and move on with your day.
Depending on how secure you want the password to be, you set the
length of the password (20 characters is always right) and decide on
things like the inclusion of less usual characters like # or *.

4 Change the table prefix

The fourth thing you should do is to make sure to change the Word-
Press table prefix. By default, the WordPress table prefix is wp_. You
must have noticed by now that WordPress security is also about
replacing all default, and this is no exception. If you use zr37tm_, that
will be much harder to guess and therefore your database will be
harder to access. If you have a new site, you’ll be asked to add it in the
5 minute setup when entering database details (see image):

Figure 9: WordPress security: changing the table prefix

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It’ll end up in wp-config.php at:
$table_prefix = ‘wp_’;
Another reason to secure that file.

This action is best taken early in the installation process, because

once it’s installed things get incrementally harder and can cause a
lot of issues depending on the site. Changing the table prefix for
better WordPress security can also be done using plugins like Sucuri
Scanner or All in One WP Security & Firewall. These plugins do a lot
more than just changing the table prefix, and are actively maintained
by the makers.

5 Use WordPress Security Keys for Authentication

Authentication Keys and Salts work in conjunction with each other to

protect your cookies and passwords in transit between the browser
and web server. These authentication keys are basically set of random
variables, used to improve security (encryption) of information in
cookies. Changing this in wp-config.php can be simply done by getting
a new set of keys here and add these. These keys change on refresh of
that page, so you’ll always get a fresh set.

Syed Balkhi at WPBeginner did an article on these WordPress security

keys, in case you want some more background information. The
Sucuri plugin mentioned can help you with these keys as well.

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6 Disable file editing

If a hacker gets in, the easiest way to change your files would be to go
to Appearance > Editor in WordPress. To lift your WordPress security,
you could disable writing of these files via that editor. Again, open
wp-config.php and add this line of code:

define(‘DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT’, true);

Of course you’ll still be able to edit your templates via your favorite
FTP application, you just won’t be able to do it via WordPress itself.

7 Limit login attempts

Another thing you can do to protect your weblog is to limit the amount
of login attempts. Attacks like a brute force attack target your login
form and try every combination of username and password they can
think of. So limiting login attempts greatly reduces the chance that
they will eventually find the right combination.

The All in One WP Security & Firewall plugin has an option to simply
change the default URL (/wp-admin/) for that login form. Next to
that, you could also limit the number of attempts to login from a
certain IP address.

8 Add two-step verification

Adding two-step verification will also improve the security of your
website. The essence of two-step verification for WordPress security
is exactly as implied in the name: to log in you have to go through two
forms of authentication. It’s the recognized standard today for
enhanced security on the web.

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9 Hosting & WordPress security

A very important part of taking care of the security of your website is

the choice of your hosting company. There is no simple rule to decide
on your WordPress hosting company. But the choice of a hosting
company does matter when optimizing your WordPress security.
Every article written on the subjects seems to start by telling you that
the cheapest one is probably not the best one. Most cheaper hosting
plans won’t have support to help you out with a hacked site. Shared
hosting implies that your hosting server is also populated with other
websites. These might have security issues of their own, which in
turn could affect your own website’s security as well.

WordPress security seems to be one of the main USP’s offered in

specialized WordPress hosting products, like the one offered by
GoDaddy. They offer backups, redundant firewalls, malware scanning
and DDoS protection and automatic WordPress updates for very
reasonable pricing.

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10 (Free) plugins & themes

You should really be careful in installing all kinds of plugins and

themes. There could be serious security flaws in these plugins or
themes. Free plugins and themes can be a possible vulnerability.
When adding a plugin (or theme for that matter), always check the
rating of that plugin. WordPress.org shows ratings, but one five star
rating won’t tell you anything, so also check the number of ratings.
Depending on the niche, a plugin should be able to get multiple
reviews. If more people think a plugin is awesome and take the time
to rate it, you could decide to use it too.

Figure 10: check both rating and number of ratings

There is one other thing you want to check. If a plugin hasn’t been
updated for two years, WordPress will tell you that. It doesn’t mean
it’s a bad plugin, it could simply be that there hasn’t been a need to
update, because the plugin just works. The ratings will tell you that,
and the compatibility with the current WordPress version, which is
also listed on the plugin page at wordpress.org. Having said that,
Sucuri strongly recommends against using any plugins that haven’t
been updated for that long. You should take their word for it.

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Figure 11: last update and compatibility listed on the plugin
page at wordpress.org

Based upon these ratings and compatibility, you could pick your
plugins less random and have a larger chance of some kind of security
being added.

PhotoSofy ~ On PhotoSofy, nothing on the matter of security was

set up until the photographer heard about the site of a colleague
being hacked. She instantly changed some of her passwords and
installed a two-factor authentication plugin. Also, she installed
the Sucuri scanner plugin for WordPress. These small and simple
steps really improved the security of PhotoSofy.

11 Contact Sucuri
We’ve already mentioned our friends at Sucuri. Sucuri has done a
tremendous job on our Yoast plugins and have helped on several
hacked websites in the past. Sucuri is a globally recognized website

35
security company specializing in bringing peace of mind to website
owners, including us here at Yoast. We’ve partnered with Sucuri
because we take security very seriously, it’s not and should not be an
afterthought.

A lot of the suggestions in this article can be dealt with by installing

and configuring their Sucuri Scanner plugin for WordPress (see
video) or hiring them to monitor your website(s) for vulnerabilities.
At Yoast, we don’t consider this as an ‘extra’, but as an absolute
necessity. Visit their website at sucuri.net for more information, and
check your site now to see if you have been infected with malware or
have been blacklisted.

36
 Chapter 6

Speed

Why is site speed important?

Site speed is one of the factors that determine whether you get a good
ranking in Google. While site speed was historically not the most
important one, it’s growing in importance more and more. A slow
website will result in a slow crawling rate, Google will be slower to
fetch pages on your site and thus might take longer to index new
content. Making your website faster will be a relatively easy way to
increase the chance of getting high rankings in Google.

Moreover, a fast site will give a much better User Experience than a
slow one. That’s is also a very important reason to make sure the
speed of your site is optimal.

37
Tools to check your site speed
In our website reviews, we always check the site speed of a website.
Obviously, site speed is different when checking it from different
locations. Just one reason why speed tools do not always provide the
same results. That is why we use all these tools in our site reviews
(and do not rely on just one):
• Google PageSpeed Insights
• Pingdom Tools
• Yslow
• WebPageTest

Google PageSpeed Insights splits mobile and desktop, Pingdom Tools

allows for multiple locations and Yslow segments their checks nicely.
WebPageTest has a few main checks it grades nicely. We would recom-
mend to use all of these tools to check your site speed. Together, they
give the most complete overview of the site speed of your site.

If you want to test your site speed, you can enter the url of your
website in these tests. They review the speed of this site and give a
list of options on how to improve your site speed. Both Google and
YSlow have reasonably good, though slightly technical, explanations
on the various aspects that you can improve. The other tools show a
little less explanation and are a bit harder to interpret.

38
Plugins you should use

There are several major caching plugins for WordPress which will
make your site much faster, the most well-known ones being W3
Total Cache, WP Super Cache and WP Rocket.

While W3 Total Cache is technically a very good plugin and can do

almost all of the things we’ve mentioned that you should be doing,
we’ve also found it to be dangerous. It’s as though you’re giving a kid
a butchers knife. Things might (and relatively often does) go wrong,
so we no longer endorse W3 Total Cache for every user.

WP Super Cache does what it says on the tin: it caches your site. It
does that well, without too many bells and whistles. WP Rocket is
better, they offer a solution to speed up your site without much
hassle and without the risks of breaking things. WP Rocket is a paid
plugin though.

Yoast tip

Use WP Rocket if you don’t mind paying a little money, and choose
WP Super Cache if you don’t want to spend anything.

39
Hosting

Site speed has a lot to do with your hosting. Many problems with site
speed are actually things your hosting party could take care of for
you. Hosts like GoDaddy Pro and WP Engine will do this and more and
more hosts are start doing this as well.

It’s important to realize though, that it’s absolutely worth it to invest

in good hosting, both for site speed as well as for security reasons.
$5 a month for hosting is, if you’re serious about your website, just
not enough. If you can afford it, go for managed WordPress hosting
and you’ll get a lot more help in improving your site.

PhotoSofy ~ Ph otoSofy was originally hosted on a friend’s server.

It didn’t cost a thing. The large photos that the photographer
placed on her blog seriously slowed down the blog though.
Although the design of the blog was flawless and the photos
magnificent, the user experience of PhotoSofy was terrible
because the blog was so slow. The photographer decided to go for
managed WordPress hosting. She had to pay some money, but the
hosting party made sure her images were served from a specifi-
cally optimized content delivery network, and optimized the
images themselves too, making them load faster. All in all, the
site speed increased tremendously!

40
 Chapter 7

Mobile

The importance of Mobile UX for SEO

In April 2015 Google announced a new update which included the
performance of websites on mobile devices as a ranking factor. In the
SEO world this update is known as ‘Mobilegeddon’. The consequences
of this update are rather simple: if your website isn’t deemed mobile-
friendly, it won’t rank well in mobile search results.

Whether mobile search is important for your company depends on

the market you’re in. Numbers differ, but it seems in most western
countries 50-60% of searches is conducted on a mobile device now,
with that number rising every year. Not ranking well in those search
results thus means you’re not ranking well for the majority of
people searching.

Also, the more location-dependent your business is, the more

important mobile search becomes. People use their mobile device
especially when searching for local businesses. For restaurants, bars,
shops etc. the impact of this change is hard to dismiss.

Desktop search?
This Mobilegeddon update probably doesn’t impact desktop search
directly. But Google is known to use the click-through rate (CTR)
from the search results as a ranking factor, which we’re guessing

41
will be impacted. If your website isn’t shown in the mobile results,
people who searched for one of your keywords on their mobile
devices won’t be able to click on your site. Your total CTR will there-
fore decrease.

Also: if 50% of searches happens on mobile devices, it’s a major

discovery method. People can only share URLs or link to them when
they’ve actually found your site. This ties back to rankings, so this
will impact desktop search quite heavily in the long run.

PhotoSofy ~ The blogger and photographer of PhotoSofy was

very reluctant to create a mobile version of her website. Her beau-
tiful photos just looked so much better on a full desktop screen,
people should look at her portfolio on a desktop and not on a small
mobile screen. Perhaps the photographer was right, but more and
more people started to visit her weblog from a mobile device.
Pictures weren’t adapted to small screen and it was impossible to
scroll through her portfolio. The photographer simply needed a
mobile version of her website, because a large part of the visits
came from mobile devices. It was not a matter of choice or taste,
people simply use their mobile phones for browsing more and
more. So the photographer made a full responsive design for her
blog and made sure her portfolio was easily browsable on a mobile
device. The gallery navigation buttons were made extra large so
you could easily tap on them on a touchscreen.

42
Figure 12: non-responsive site vs responsive

Check whether or not your blog is mobile-friendly

Google made a complete guide to mobile-friendly sites. There’s also

a mobile-friendly test, which will give you either of these responses:

Figure 13: Google mobile-friendly test results

And when you get the message that your page is not mobile-friendly,
they’ll obviously also tell you why not. However, it only checks one
page at a time, so this is probably not the best option in case you
want to check your entire site, but might be useful when you’ve
added a new page. To get a better overview of your entire site’s
mobile-friendliness, check the Mobile Usability section in your
Google Search Console. This will give you a list of all the all the pages
Google found errors on.

43
If your website is not mobile-friendly according to this test, you
really have work to do! You see, this test actually gives a pass to a lot
of sites that aren’t even that mobile-friendly, so if your site doesn’t
pass this test, it must work really poorly on mobile devices. Chances
are very high your site will not appear anywhere near page one in the
mobile results of Google.

Yoast tip

Even if your site does appear to be mobile-friendly, you should keep

on top of it and evaluate your mobile website very regularly.

Responsive design
What is a responsive design?

A responsive website will scale to any

size screen automatically, without
trying to show the entire website on a
much smaller screen (such as a
smartphone). We use internet on our
smartphones, on our tablets and on
our desktop. These screens have very
different sizes and therefore ask for
different features. On your desktop
you click with your mouse, while on
tablets and phones you tap with your
thumb, which is much less accurate.

Figure 14: theguardian.com

example of a responsive website

44
A responsive design automatically scales to the right format, making
sure your website looks decent on all screens.

For most of you, developing a responsive design yourselves will not

be possible. That requires some serious coding and developing. If
you choose a (WordPress) theme, make sure to choose one that’s
responsive. If you work with a developer or a web development
agency, you should ask them to make your website responsive. And
when designing a website, make sure to design different mobile
interfaces.

Make a mobile version!

The first step in making a responsive design is to design the mobile

version of your website. Don’t just take the desktop website, reduce
browser width to 320 pixels and see how you can make that look good.
That won’t do. The mobile version (phone and perhaps also a
tablet-version) has to have some different features and often less
content. In 2016 Google rolled out AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages).
Make sure to stay tuned on yoast.com/amp. We will inform you about
all the implications

With the mobile and desktop versions of your site designed, it is time
to decide where to ‘break’ your design.

Break it down

After you have designed your mobile and desktop website you will
have to think about breakpoints. A breakpoint is the screen size at
which your site switches between designs. At what point (at what

45
browser width) will you decide to show people the mobile version
instead of the desktop version? In order to make these choices, you
should do some testing. Look at how your website looks in different
formats. Take that iPad and judge the quality of your website, test
your website on different mobile phones and on desktops with
different resolutions. Your website should look at least decent (and
preferably awesome) on all possible devices. Keep testing, even after
you have chosen your breakpoints. Alter them if necessary.

Tips in designing a mobile-friendly blog

1 Use a task-based design

Design your mobile blog and its structure with the mobile user in
mind. Think about the reasons visitors use their mobile phones to
check your weblog. Perhaps they want to read one of your blogs and
easily find related articles. Make sure your mobile visitor can easily
do that. Check your Google Analytics in order to know which pages
are most visited amongst your mobile audience. You can easily check
this in Google Analytics, for instance at Audience » Mobile » Devices
by adding a secondary dimension for Destination Page.

If someone finds your website and starts browsing it, make sure they
can easily find and complete what they wanted to do. The use of a
mobile phone most of the times implicates being on the go and a
lesser attention span. Distractions are everywhere. Design your
mobile UX to make sure they get things done.

46
2 Hamburger menu & sticky menu

Add a sticky menu with a search option and a hamburger icon. We

all know the hamburger icon, and adding that as a substitute for
your menu seems logical: it’s a space saver. Most menus fold out
vertically, but some fold out to the left or right. Sometimes the word
‘menu’ is shown instead of the hamburger icon.

Figure 15: sticky menu, hamburger menu and the search option always
available

Yoast tip

Your mobile menu should stay focused, especially when your website
also has a drop-down menu. Consider creating great landing pages
for your main menu items and just forget about the submenu for
your mobile website. It will be more convenient to focus on mobile
search instead. As the small mobile device does not allow you to put
everything in your mobile menu, you want the search option to
always be available.

47
3 Large touch surfaces

We already mentioned this before, and it’s so obvious, yet still not
common. Mobile websites are usually browsed with a thumb. And we
need to be able to click elements with that thumb as well. Google
Insights checks this under Size Tap Targets Appropriately.

In the article Designing for Mobile Part 3: Visual design, Elaine

McVicar mentions these numbers:
“Ideally, buttons should be between 44px and 57px on a standard screen
and 88px to 114px on a high-density (retina) screen. This allows enough
area for the average fingertip to easily activate a button.”

And not just buttons, but other elements can be too small or too close
for a finger. It’s really annoying to click a link and end up somewhere
else, just because the link next to it is too close to the link you wanted.
It’s in Google PageSpeed Insights as well, like the button hit areas.
That tool is not the holy grail of mobile UX, but if Google can test it
that easily, why not keep it in mind when designing your mobile
website, especially when designing elements like a mobile menu or
footer links.

4 Make your fonts large enough

Font size is really important for mobile UX of blogs. You can’t just use
all the desktop font sizes on your mobile website as well. There are
two reasons for that:

48
1 The mobile screen size. You don’t want the title to fill the screen,
you want to make sure the article starts within the first view of the
page. Nor do you want the base font (like your paragraph font) to
be too small to read without having to pinch and zoom.
2 You’ll create a mess when using more than three font sizes. The
size differences will be much more visible. That’s why we advise
limiting the number of font sizes to two, maybe three.

Test your mobile weblog again. And again.

When serving a responsive website to your visitors, you need to make
sure that every change on your desktop site is also tested on the
mobile version of your site. That is the only way you can make sure
your mobile blog is always up to date.

Yoast tip

If you are using WordPress, you’re in luck. As per version 4.4, Word-
Press is serving images based upon the size of your screen by default.
It checks the resolution of your device, and serves an image in a size
that is most suited for that resolution. This goes one step further
than just using a responsive image; it actually uses a smaller or larger
image. Technical info: this is done by using the srcset attribute in the
image tag. The use of that tag is not limited to WordPress, by the way.

49
 Section 3

What to write about?

A successful site publishes new content on a regular basis. That does

not mean you have to write a new blog post every day though. For
some sites, writing a post every week can be enough. Whatever it
takes to get people to keep coming back and finding interesting new
content. In this section we will give practical tips to come up and
keep coming up with ideas for blog posts.

50
 FitnessFlorida ~ In this section a fitness blog called ‘Fitness-
Florida’ will be central. FitnessFlorida is a blog which is owned
and maintained by a personal trainer who is situated in Miami
and aims to help young people get fit. He is an expert in coaching
young, overweight people, helping them get back in shape. His
blog offers tips on how to get fit and healthy. The aim of this blog
is to inform readers about fitness and show them his expertise. In
the end, the personal trainer aspires to attract new customers to
add to his clientele.

Introduction

In order to publish new content on a regular basis, you’ll have to keep

coming up with new ideas for blog posts. However, this can be quite
a challenge. You have to keep writing about topics your audience will
like. But you don’t want to write about the same thing every week, as
that might get boring. On top of that, you want to write content that
will help your site to rank.

51
Always start with keyword research

Your content is the most important ranking factor. You should write
about the topics you want to be found for. That is why you always
start with keyword research. This can be defined as the activities you
undertake in order to compile an extensive list of keywords and
phrases which you would like to rank for.

In chapter 8 and 9 of this section, we will take you through the process
of doing keyword research. But mind you, keyword research is not
the only step in this process. In the remainder of this section we will
give tips on how to come up with new topics to write about, how to
manage the content of your blog, and how to handle comments.

52
 Chapter 8

Keyword research

In this chapter we will give you practical tips on how you can execute
your own keyword research. If you want to learn more about keyword
research, you should definitely look into our Content SEO eBook, or
our Basic SEO training.

Step 1: Formulate your mission

Before starting the actual keyword research, you want to think about
your mission (see section 1 chapter 1 about mission). Your mission is
the thing that makes you stand out from all the other sites. While
formulating your mission you should answer questions like: who are
you and what is your blog about? What makes it special? Take the
time and literally write down your mission.

FitnessFlorida ~ The FitnessFlorida blog has the following mission:

to help young people in Miami get (and stay) healthy and fit.

Step 2: Make a list of relevant keywords

Once you have formulated a clear mission, you can start making a list
of all the search terms (keywords) you want your site to be found for.
If your mission is clear, you should have little trouble coming up with
search terms that apply to your niche and your unique selling points.
These will be keywords you want to be found for.

53
 FitnessFlorida ~ FitnessFlorida focuses on young, overweight people
in Miami. Its mission is to get these people healthy and fit. The blogger
behind FitnessFlorida starts with an extensive brainstorm. He invites
some befriended colleagues to help him with his first brainstorm. They
come up with the following list of keywords they want to rank for:

Fitness Florida, Fitness Miami, Exercises Florida, Fitness exercises,

Fitness exercises Florida, Fitness exercises Miami, Fitness exercises
abs, Fitness exercises back, Fitness exercises legs, Fitness exercises
arms, Running schedules, Running schedules Florida, Running
schedules Miami, losing weight Florida, losing weight Miami, health
Florida, health Miami

In order to come up with good terms you really have to get inside the
heads of your audience. How are they most likely to find you? What
would they search for? At the end of your keyword research, you
should have a list of all the relevant search terms people could use.
Also think of combinations and nuances within these terms.

Tools you can use

Making a list of possible keywords can be a difficult process. Up until a

few years ago, doing your keyword research was much easier in terms
of getting keywords that you were already ranking for. You could simply
check Google Analytics to see on which terms people found your
website. That is no longer possible. So you’re pretty much left in the
dark about what people who ended up on your website searched for.
Luckily, there are still other tools which can make your keyword
research a bit easier:

54
Google Adwords Keyword Planner

Use the Google Adwords Keyword Planner to find new and related
keywords. But ignore the search volume data! The search volume
data in the planner is really only useful for keywords that you’re
actually spending money to advertise on. Otherwise, these volumes
are not a reliable metric.

While it’s not really helpful in deciding which keywords are most used
by your potential audience, Google Adwords Keyword Planner does
make a useful tool for coming up with ideas for potential keywords.

Google Trends

Google Trends allows you to compare the traffic between keywords.

You can even see the geographical differences. 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.

Figure 16: compare traffic for sets of keywords in Google Trends

55
Figure 17: ‘Fitness’, a seasonal keyword due to new year’s resolutions

FitnessFlorida ~ One of the keywords the blogger of FitnessFlorida

would like to be found for is ‘running schemes’, or some related
term. Google trends shows him (Figure 16 the search volumes on
different search terms (running schemes, running schedule,
running plan). The search volumes clearly show that ‘running
schedule’ is the keyword that generates the most traffic. So that will
be the most useful keyword to start optimizing his blog posts for.

Your internal search engine

Of equal importance is what people are looking at once they are on

your site. These search terms represent the words that are already in
the vocabulary of your actual audience and should definitely be added
to your keyword list. Especially look at the keywords people filled in
that didn’t yield any search results: these are terms that people were
expecting to find your content with, but didn’t.

56
Creating an extensive list!

The above tools will help you to cobble together an extensive collec-
tion of keywords. The next step is to actually make a useful overview.
Making a table can help with this. Try to come up with combinations
of keywords as well. And order the keywords by some kind of priority
– which of the keywords are especially important to rank for (very
close to your mission) and which ones are less important? In choosing
which keywords to tackle first, you should also consider how likely it
will be that your site will be ranking for that specific keyword. Read
more about that in chapter 9.

Florida Miami

Fitness Fitness Florida Fitness Miami

Exercises Exercises Florida Exercises Miami

Fitness Exercises Fitness exercises Florida Fitness exercises Miami

Fitness Exercises abs Fitness Exercises abs

Fitness Exercises abs
Florida Miami

Fitness exercises back Fitness exercises back

Fitness exercises back
Florida Miami

Fitness exercises arms

Fitness exercises arms Fitness exercises arms
Florida

Running schedules
Running schedules Running schedules Miami
Florida

Losing weight Losing weight Florida Losing weight Miami

Figure 18: This is part of the table of the result of the keyword research
for FitnessFlorida. The bold keywords are the keywords the blogger wants
to tackle first.

57
Step 3: Construct landing pages

The final step of keyword research is to create awesome landing pages

for the keywords you want to be found for. A landing page is a page
which is tailor-made to draw in visitors who reached your blog
through a specific keyword. This could be a dedicated page, or a blog
post optimized for a specific keyword. Do make sure your visitors can
find their way through your blog from every landing page (read more
about landing pages in our UX section). And make sure you make a
landing page for every relevant keyword you come up with.

How many keywords?

It is very hard to give an exact number of keywords one should focus

on. As a rule of thumb you could say that the list shouldn’t be too
large. Ranking for an overwhelming number of keywords simply will
not be feasible. 1,000 keywords for instance are probably more than
anyone can chew off on his/her own.

Even if you have a reasonably small site, you’ll still probably end up
with a couple of hundred keywords. But you don’t have to make land-
ing pages for all of these immediately. The great thing about having
a Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress is that you can
incrementally add content. Think about which set of keywords you
would like to rank for now, and which one aren’t that important (yet).
Write blog posts about the most important keywords in your near
future and leave the less important ones for later.

58
Adapting your keyword strategy

A keyword strategy is never static. It should change and evolve as

your site grows. If it doesn’t, you’re doing it wrong. You should be
on top of the changes in your industry and adapt your strategy
accordingly. We therefore advise you to repeat your keyword research
every now and then to stay on top of things!

59
 Chapter 9

Long tail keywords

Whether or not you will be able to rank for the keywords that fit your
site and your audience largely depends on the market you are in.
Some markets are highly competitive, with large companies domi-
nating the search results. These companies have a very large budget
to spend on marketing in general and on their SEO specifically.
Competing in these markets is hard, therefore ranking in these
markets is also hard. In these cases, focusing on long tail keyword
would be a great SEO strategy. It allows you to gradually get more
traffic and to be found by new and motivated audiences.

What are long tail keywords?

The term long tail keyword comes from the

book The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. In
this book, Chris Anderson shows there is a
market for virtually every product. In some
cases, however, this market is really, really
small. The broadness of the internet can
make your niche product or blog post
profitable though. Long tail keywords are
more specific and less common than other
keywords. They focus more on a niche.

60
 competition

less specific keywords more specific

Figure 19: long tail: the more specific your keyword, the less your competition

One head theme, lots of tail topics

Most sites have one main topic. Mom blogs are usually about children
and family life, food blogs are about recipes, eating habits, and
restaurants. Yoast.com is all about SEO. We even named it SEO blog
in our redesign. So it makes sense that all of our blog posts are about
SEO, or SEO-related topics. SEO is definitely something we like to be
found for, so that is our number one keyword. You cannot optimize
all your posts on that number one keyword (or keyphrase). Instead,
you should write a whole number of blog posts about all kinds of long
tail variants of your number one keyword.

61
FitnessFlorida ~ F or FitnessFlorida the main topic is Fitness in
Florida. There will be blog posts about exercises, running routines
and fitness products. The blogger cannot optimize all his posts for
the keyword Fitness Florida, there is simply too much competi-
tion. But in the previous chapter, we have seen part of the result
of his keyword research. The blogger of FitnessFlorida works in
Miami. Part of his keyword strategy is to rank for search terms
containing Miami. Attracting the audience in Miami will be easier
because the competitiveness of the keywords will be much smaller
(‘running maps’ for instance is a much more common keyword
than ‘running maps Miami’).

The blogger at FitnessFlorida therefore decided to develop specific

running schedules for Miami and wrote a blog post aiming to
rank for the long tail keywords ‘running schedules Miami’ and
‘running schedules Southern Florida’. As these keywords are less
competitive than the head variant ‘running schedules and
‘running schedules Florida’, the blogger at Fitness Florida has a
much higher chance to start ranking. At the same time, he will be
attracting an audience much more likely to become customers.
European visitors will never hire a personal trainer from Miami,
nor will people living in the North of Florida. However, people
actually living in Miami might just do.

62
Link from the tail to the head!

If you optimize different blog posts for different long tail variants,
you should make sure to link from these blog posts to your more
‘head’ category pages and from these category pages to your most
awesome landing page. Remember: always link from the ‘tail’ to your
‘head’! That way, you show Google what the structure of your blog is
and which of your pages are most important.

Make sure your most amazing pages rank high in Google! Perhaps
you have a page with your most innovative fitness exercises, which
will immediately convert passing visitors into loyal blog followers.
Make sure your different long-tail-optimized blog posts all link to
this most important ‘head’ page of your blog. These ‘head’ pages
could for instance be cornerstone content (see chapter 17) or well-op-
timized (sub)category pages.

Why are long tail keywords important for

blog SEO?

In our view, there are two important reasons why you should focus on
long tail keywords:

1 Easy ranking. It is much easier to rank for long tail keywords than
for more common keywords, because fewer websites compete for
high rankings in the result pages of Google. The longer (and more
specific) search terms are, the easier it is to rank for the term.

63
 Because of the vastness of the internet, it is easier to find your
audience for your specific niche. Focusing on a group of long tail
keywords will result in a great deal of traffic altogether.

2 Higher conversions. The benefit of blogs focusing on long tail

keywords is that visitors who find your website are more likely to
become regular readers of your blog, maybe they even subscribe to
your newsletter. The longer and more specific the search terms are,
the higher the chances of conversion are. People who use a very
specific term have a more clear idea of what they are looking for.
And people who know what they’re looking for are much more
prone to become frequent visitors! So long tail keywords focus on a
specific and dedicated audience. And that makes focusing on long
tail keywords a very, very profitable SEO tactic.

64
 Chapter 10

How to come up with ideas for your blog?

Coming up with keywords will give you much direction on what to

write about. You will have to unlock content around a specific word.
A word is not yet a topic though. Next to a keyword (or keyphrase),
you will need an angle, a specific story around that keyword. The
following tips will give you inspiration to come up with a story around
the keywords.

FitnessFlorida ~ FitnessFlorida made an extensive list of

keywords (see chapter 8). The blogger at FitnessFlorida should
write posts about each one of these keywords. These keywords,
however, are not topics for his blog posts. He needs an angle, an
idea or a story to write around these keywords. For example: “Top
10 running schedules for beginners in Miami.”

65
Tip 1: Reading other blogs

A great way to come up with ideas for blog posts is to read other
posts on the subject. Reading the material other people create will
most definitely provide inspiration for your own blog posts. The
pitfall of reading other people’s work however is that it is hard to
formulate your own opinion on the topic after you have read some-
one else’s.

By only reading the titles of other people’s blog posts you can still
find ideas for topics without subconsciously copying their opinion.
Browsing your way through some blogs this way should give you
enough inspiration to come up with new posts for your own blog.

Tip 2: Current events

Another way to come up with ideas for blog post is by referring and
writing about current events. Keep an eye on different news sites,
and write posts in which you incorporate your views on the news in
your niche. Perhaps you can set up an alert for a specific topic.

Yoast tip

If you want to know more about how to use news as a way to create
content make sure to check out Newsjacking!

66
 FitnessFlorida ~ T he blogger at FitnessFlorida keeps track of all
the new fitness devices and trends. He is subscribed to other blogs
and news sites which follow the latest fitness trends. On Fitness-
Florida the blogger describes the latest fitness techniques and
explains how you can incorporate them in your personal training.
Also, he regularly gives his expert opinion about new fitness trends.

Tip 3: Get inspiration from your own work

Situations from your own work could also be great inspiration for blog
posts. If your clients or colleagues are faced with a certain problem, it
could well be that other people encounter the same problem. You
should always make sure to respect the privacy of your client, friends,
or colleagues and ask for permission to use their case in your blog, but
if a lot of people have the same problem your post can quickly get a lot
of traffic.

FitnessFlorida ~ T  he blogger at FitnessFlorida uses questions and

problems from real clients in his blog. He always asks permission
first and changes names and some details to make sure readers
won’t know whose problem is discussed. One example is a women
struggling with losing weight. Her battle forms the inspiration of
an ongoing series of posts.

Tip 4: Continuing blog series

If you are writing a blog post, make sure you are sticking to one topic.
If you notice that you are talking about many things in one post or your
post gets quite lengthy, you are creating a series without realizing it.

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You should then divide your text over several blog posts.
At Yoast, we call this ‘pulling a Michiel’ (after Michiel Heijmans, who
always thinks he is writing one post, while in fact he is creating a
bunch of posts all at once).

Ideally, you would want to write slightly different posts around the
same keyword (focusing on different long tail keywords). This will
help you rank for that keyword. And one blog post usually leads to
inspiration for more blog posts.

Yoast tip

Make it visually clear to your readers when a blog post is part of a

series. This will help visitors to find their way around your blog and
read more about a certain topic.

Figure 20: example of blog post series

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Tip 5: Interact with your audience

If you invite your audience to leave comments on your blog, you could
receive feedback and questions (maybe not right away though). While
most of the feedback will be just nice to hear (or not, we will get back
to you on how to handle that), you might receive some questions as
well. Perhaps some of these questions are easy to answer in a reply,
but some questions require a longer response. Those kinds of ques-
tions are excellent starters for your next post.

Tip 6: Internal search of your site

If your site offers an internal search function, your audience will use
that to look for posts or pages about certain topics. This is tremen-
dously useful for them to find related content, but it could well be
that people search for terms you haven’t yet written about. Looking
at these search terms should bring some inspiration!

FitnessFlorida ~ In the internal search of FitnessFlorida, the term

‘running routines’ is used rather often. The blogger at Fitness-
Florida hasn’t written any pages or blog posts about that topic yet.
He did write some posts about running maps and exercises. But
apparently, the audience would like to read about routines as well.
And so in his next post he shared his own ideal running routine,
and invited the readers to share theirs in the comments.

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Tip 7: Google your own keywords and see what
other people write about

Once you have executed your keyword research, you should have
some input on what words you could be found for. Make sure you
google these keywords and read the results. What do people actually
find if they search for that specific term? How does your blog idea fit
between these search results? Maybe the results inspire you to write
something similar, something that will fit in with the present results.
Trying to write something that will stand out could also be a very
smart strategy.

Tip 8: Search for books and read them!

The internet should not be your only inspiration in your search for
new keywords. You could very well search in books as well for
instance. Enter a keyword you would like to rank for on Amazon.com
and see which books come up. What are the bestsellers? Which angle
did they pick? Make an effort to find inspiration outside your chosen
medium.

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 Chapter 11

Content managing of a blog

Maintaining a site takes more than just writing a bunch of pages. You
should develop some kind of strategy and planning for your content
(especially if you are writing with multiple authors). Also, you should
interact with your audience and respond to their comments.

Content planning

If you are serious about your site, you should make a plan for your
content. If you have a personal blog, planning your content will be
fairly easy. Planning becomes much harder if you are working with
multiple authors writing about different topics, or invite guest blog-
gers. Make sure to read the chapter about multiple authors as well.

Frequency

You should blog regularly. It is hard to give exact numbers. For a

company blog, a daily post will be totally acceptable. For a personal
blog this will probably not be doable at all. Try to establish some kind
of frequency and stick to it. Your readers will appreciate a reliable
schedule. Once you know you can commit to your chosen schedule,
make sure to communicate it to your audience somehow, so they
know what they can expect.

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Variation

If you often write about similar topics, make sure to mix things up a
little. Don’t write articles about nearly identical topics one after the
other. Of course you can still write blog series, but try to vary
between topics as much as possible. You could also make variations
in the form of your content. A video post for example really spices
things up!

FitnessFlorida ~ The blogger at FitnessFlorida is able to write two

blog posts a week. To avoid monotony, he tries to write a general
post about health as well as a practical post with new running or
exercise routines in any given week. At the end of a month he does
a live Q&A session with his readers over Google Hangout.

Creating an editorial calendar

If you are blogging with more than one author, planning can quickly
get complex. It is wise to create an editorial calendar in which you
plot out all the posts the different authors are going to write. This
could just be an excel sheet, but you could also use a plugin or service
for this, for instance Trello or MeisterTask.

Brainstorm

If you want to create an editorial calendar, you could start with a brain-
storm. Invite all your blog authors and sit together. Ask everyone
what their ideas are and which posts they would like to write in the
near future. Make a list of these ideas and wishes, and then plot them

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out on a calendar. Make sure your authors finish their blogs a few
days before the post date so you can proofread, edit if needed, and
find or create accompanying illustrations or photos.

News & current events

When planning content, you should take a look at your own calendar
as well! Are there any major events coming up which are worth
mentioning in your blog post? Or should you write some seasonal
posts? Make sure to mix these ‘current-events posts’ with the other
posts you have lined up.

FitnessFlorida ~ The blogger at FitnessFlorida likes to write

about local fitness events. While creating his editorial calendar,
he made sure to plan a post about the Florida 10K (a major
running event), and a series of posts about how he prepared for
this event. He also included seasonal posts; After the holidays, he
scheduled a post about ‘how to get back in shape’. And in the
summer, he writes about running in the heat.

Yoast Tip

A nice plugin which allows you to collaborate with your editorial team
inside WordPress is Edit Flow.

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 Chapter 12

How to handle comments on a blog

When blogging regularly, people will start responding to what you

write. Maybe not right away, but as your blog is growing, you will have
to deal with comments. Especially when you write about your world
view or opinions, some people will disagree with you. You therefore
have to deal with the responses and opinions of your readers.
But how?

Why handling comments is important

Handling comments is important because it shows your readers that

your are committed and involved. Of course, you do not have to
respond to each and every comment. Lots of people just want to say
that they like your new post. But others will have questions. Answer-
ing those questions will lead to real interaction with your audience.

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The likelihood that people will come back to read your next post will
really increase if you are a committed and involved blogger. If people
see that the author of a post takes time to read and react to his audi-
ence, they will know that you take them and their writing seriously.
And that’s a reason to come back to your site.

Value of comments for SEO

Comments add content to your blog post. And Google indexes all
content on your website, including every comment in every blog post.
Do not get excited just yet, because Google will instantly recognize
comments as being just comments. Their value for the search engine
will be much lower than the original content of the blog post.
Responding to comments will therefore not instantly improve your
SEO, but it will result in higher percentages returning visitors.

Four types of comments

The comments people leave on blogs can be divided into four types.

First, the positive feedback. Some people just want to say that they
like you, your company, or your blog post. That’s always nice to hear.
Make sure to reply to some of these (even if it’s just a quick “thanks!”)
or express general gratitude in an upcoming post, so the person
giving the compliment feels appreciated.

The second type of comment are the questions your audience has
after they’ve read your post. Perhaps something remained unclear or

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something you wrote triggered someone to ask you about your post
or about your brand. Depending on the type of question, there are
different ways to handle these. Read more about handling questions
in the next paragraph.

The third type of comment is the negative feedback. Sometimes,

people disagree with what you wrote and sometimes people are
unsatisfied with your product or service. Sometimes people are just
plain mean about it. These kind of comments are the hardest to
handle. Further below we will give you a few tips for this.

And finally, some comments are just spam. People try to trick your
readers into clicking on a link, often to something unrelated, or they
just write nonsense. If your spam filter doesn’t filter these comments
out already, you should delete and optionally block them as soon as
you see them. WordPress by default comes with the plugin Akismet,
which is made for this purpose.

How to handle questions

Responding to questions shouldn’t be that hard. If the answer to the

question is short (and you actually know the answer!) you can just
leave a direct reply.

If a question is harder to answer, or needs some more explanation,

you could decide to write a new post about it. If so, you should still
definitely leave a quick reply to let people know that you are planning
to address their question soon.

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If you don’t know the answer to a question, we would advise you to
still reply to that comment. You could simply admit that you do not
know the answer, or you could state that you will dive into the matter
and come back with an answer later (and don’t forget to!).

Sometimes questions in the comments of a blog post are totally

unrelated to the subject. If you can answer them quickly, feel free
to do so. But try not to get caught up in discussions about unrelated
topics. These topics do not belong on your blog, and discussions
about them should be held elsewhere. If someone keeps bringing
up unrelated things in your comments, try to ask him kindly if he
can stop, or point him to a place where the discussion is
appropriate.

How to handle negative feedback

Handling negative feedback is challenging. But, if you do this

correctly, your blog can actually benefit from it. A spicy discussion
could very well be something your audience likes. Moreover,
responding to negative comments also offers a possibility to show
your audience what you are made of. Negative feedback isn’t all the
same, so the way to handle negative comments varies.

If comments are really hurtful and indecent (e.g. violent or racist)

We would advise you to delete them altogether. Name calling does
not have a place on your blog. But, we wouldn’t delete comments
from dissatisfied customers or readers. Not responding to these
comments or deleting them could seriously backfire; if people are

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dissatisfied enough, they will complain about you through other
channels, and you will look like you are censoring their concerns. So
however hard it might be, you should try to respond to their comments
and try to find the source of their dissatisfaction.

If commenters are dissatisfied with your product or service, ask them to

get in touch by phone or email to solve their problem. If they are simply
dissatisfied with your blog, or perhaps disagree with your point of view,
try to discuss the matter with them in a respectful manner. Perhaps you
can convince them with solid arguments or explain your point of view
with an example. And perhaps you have to agree to disagree.

A nice discussion in which there is room for several points of view can
be a good thing. You have the opportunity to really show your audience
what your expertise and opinion about a certain subject is. As long as
the discussion is polite and respectful, it will attract readers and make
them return to your blog.

FitnessFlorida ~ The blogger at FitnessFlorida wrote a blog post

about how to handle a specific knee injury while training for a
marathon. He advised his readers to keep training, but to use a
certain brace and to make the training far less extensive. One of his
readers really disagreed, leaving the following comment: ‘Your
advice is not helpfull at all! Having such a knee injury should mean
immediate and total bed rest! You could really hurt your knee if
you keep on exercising!’ Our personal trainer actually knows what
he’s talking about though, and responds: ‘If the knee isn’t swollen,
exercising will not hurt at all. Of course, you should always go to a

78
 doctor if the pain will endure for a longer period of time and if the
knee gets swollen. But, to stop training all together will make it
that much harder for you to get back into shape for that marathon.
For more information, you can read this article by dr. Brown (head
of Medicine of Boston Medical Center)’.

Reserve some time for handling comments

Answering questions and providing correct responses in a discussion

can take a lot of time. Make sure you have the time to monitor and
respond to the comments you receive on your blog. You do not have to
respond to a comment within the hour, but make sure to respond
within a day or two. This shows your readers you are actually involved.

Note that when sharing your article on Facebook, people can comment
on Facebook as well. Keep a keen eye on the shared article and reply to
any questions or remarks people add there. The same is true for a lot
of other social media outlets.

Yoast tip

A useful plugin that makes handling comments a bit easier is Yoast

Comment Hacks. This plugin makes sure that people leave a real
message by allowing you to set a minimum length and prevent people
from leaving a comment if the message is under that. The plugin also
helps you to do some other things, such as making
comment emails look better and redirecting first-time
commenters to a thank you page.

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 Section 4

Site structure

In this section we will give you advice on how to set up or improve

the structure of your site. We will explain why it is important to
structure your website wisely, and show you how to set up your ideal
structure. And, we will provide practical tips on how to (quickly)
improve the structure of your site without totally disrupting the core
of your website. Additionally, we will also help you to manage a
growing site. And finally, we will give some special attention to
cornerstone articles.

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Homemade-Italy ~ In this section a food blog called ‘Home-
made-Italy’ will be central. Homemade-Italy is all about
homemade Italian food. They write blog posts in which they
describe the preparation and the uniqueness of the Italian cuisine.
They offer full original recipes with pictures of your Italian dishes.
They have their very own recipe to create fresh pasta from scratch.
Every week, the bloggers write two of these blog posts with new,
unique recipes. Also, they occasionally write posts about Italian
restaurants in the United States and about Italian wines.

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 Chapter 13

The importance of site structure

Structuring your site is of great importance for both usability and

findability. A lot of sites do not have any categories, no tags, no link-
ing from one post to the other. Posts seem to be written just to be
read once, making it hard or nearly impossible for new visitors to
find the content on your blog.

In order to attract new readers, you should offer them some kind of
site structure. And on top of that, you would want to come up with a
decent site structure because it is really important for your SEO. In
this chapter, we’ll explain the importance of having a good site struc-
ture in detail.

The importance of site structure for UX

The structure of your blog is also of great importance for the User
eXperience (UX). Attracting new readers largely depends on whether
or not people are able to find the content on your website. If people
are only able to find your latest post on your homepage, then that’s
what they will read. You should instead guide them to your most
awesome pages and give them more posts about topics they enjoy. In
other words, you should help them navigate through your site. A good
site structure will automatically help you do that.

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Navigating through your site should be easy. You need clear, easy
to find category pages for the topics you blog about most. New audi-
ences will instantly grasp what your site is about and will be able to
find posts on a specific topic in a convenient way, and your own
audience will be able to re-read older content if they want to. In our
section about UX we will give tips on how to improve the navigation
of your blog.

The importance of site structure for SEO

The structure of a website or a blog is of great importance for its

chances to rank in search engines. In our opinion, there are two main
reasons for this:

1 A
 decent structure makes sure Google ‘understands’ your
site.

The way your site is structured will give Google important clues about
where to find the most important content. Your site’s structure deter-
mines whether a search engine can understand what your site is
about, and how easily it will find and index the content relevant to
your site’s purpose and intent. A good structure could therefore lead
to a higher ranking in Google.

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2 A
 decent structure makes sure you do not compete with
your own content.

On your site, you will probably write multiple articles about similar
topics. At Yoast, we write a lot about SEO. If we would write eight
different articles about SEO, Google would not know which of the
articles is the most important one. If we didn’t solve this with the
structure of our site, we’d be competing with our own articles for a
high ranking in Google. Solving this problem requires a good internal
linking structure and/or taxonomy structure, resulting in higher
rankings. This means that you should pick one article (the corner-
stone article) for every major keyword you want to be found for and
link to that article from all of your other blogs about the same
keyword.

Homemade-Italy ~ Homemade-Italy writes a lot of blog posts

with homemade pasta recipes. One of the keywords Homemade-
Italy especially wants to rank for is ‘homemade pasta’. They have
one major article in which they describe in detail how to make
your own pasta from scratch. If they add another pasta recipe on
their blog, they always link to this major pasta article. That way,
the different pasta recipes do not compete with each other in
their rankings!

84
 Chapter 14

How to set up a site structure

In this chapter, we will help you to set up a good structure for your
blog. We will first explain what an ideal blog structure looks like and
then explain to you how to achieve that for your own blog.

Ideal site structure

The structure of your site should be like a pyramid. On the top of the
pyramid is your homepage, and under the homepage are a number of
category pages. For larger sites, one should make subcategories or
custom taxonomies. Within the categories and subcategories you will
have a number of webpages.

Figure 21: the structure of your site should look like a pyramid

85
 Homemade-Italy ~ Homemade-Italy has category-pages like
pasta, salads, meat dishes and desserts. On these category pages
there will be links to all of your posts about different Italian dishes
within that specific category. On your homepage there will be
links to your main categories pasta, salads, meat dishes and
desserts. Your main navigation is most suitable for that.

Figure 22: homepage Homemade-Italy, links to the main categories

If your Italian Food blog becomes extraordinary large, you should

add subcategories. The category ‘pasta’ could for instance be
divided in ‘lasagna’, ‘spaghetti’, ‘penne’ and ‘cannelloni’.

Homepage

Appetizers Pasta Meat dishes Salads Desserts Restaurants Wine

Lasagna Spaghetti Penne Cannelloni

Cornerstone content and tags

Important for site structure is to have a couple of prominent arti-
cles which really showcase the important parts of your site. These
most valuable articles or posts are what we call cornerstone content.
These are the pages that should appear high up in your pyramid.

86
For Homemade-Italy, the recipe to make pasta from scratch is one of
the cornerstone articles. (You’ll read more about cornerstone articles
in chapter 17).

However, this pyramid-structure is just one part of your site struc-

ture strategy. The other thing you should be doing is creating structure
by adding tags. Quality tag pages create center pieces to build your
cornerstone content around. Tags offer users as well as Google a more
granular view of your site structure. They link content together on a
more detailed level than categories. By combining cornerstone
content and tag pages, you are creating an ideal site structure.

Dividing your pages into categories

If you have not yet divided the blog posts on your site into a number
of categories, you should definitely do so (right away). Make sure to
add these categories to the main menu of your site.

Equally large categories

Make sure that categories are about equally large. If a category

becomes too large because you are blogging a lot about a certain topic,
you should divide that category into two main categories. A good rule
of thumb for the size of categories is to make sure that no category is
more than twice the size of any other category. If you have one such
category, dividing it into two separate ones would result in a more
accurate reflection of the content on your website. Note that if your
category name is reflected in your website’s permalink structure, you
should make sure URLs are properly redirected after splitting up a
category.

87
 Homemade-Italy ~ Homemade-Italy blogged a lot about pasta.
The pasta category was becoming much larger than the other
categories. Homemade-Italy had 200 posts about pasta, but only
80 about salads, 90 about meat dishes, and 87 about desserts.
That’s why the ‘pasta’ category was divided into ‘pastas from the
oven’ and ‘pasta originals’. The bloggers at Homemade-Italy
also changed the URLs into the proper category names.

Figure 23: make sure URLs are properly redirected after splitting
up a category

Naming your categories

Once you’re satisfied with your site structure, have a look at the names
you have come up with for your categories. If you have enough content
about a certain subject for it to require its own category, you can bet
people are searching for it as well. That’s why it’s very wise to make
sure your category names use the keywords people are searching for!
(As seen before you can use Google Trends and your internal search
engine to check or come up with keywords.) Pick the right names for
your categories and subcategories, and you’re halfway there.

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Internal link structure

Your linking structure is of great importance. Each page in the top

of a pyramid should link to its subpages. And vice versa, all the
subpages should link to the pages on top of the pyramid. There
should be really important content (cornerstone articles) at the top
of your pyramid, and these should be the articles you link to from all
of your blog posts.

Figure 24: make sure your cornerstone articles

are 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.
Linking this way will help out search engines by showing them what’s
related and what isn’t.

89
On top of that, with all subpages linking to that one main page at the
very top of your pyramid, you are creating cornerstone pages (read
more about cornerstone content in chapter 17). These will make it
easy for search engines to determine what your main pages per
subject are.

Home

Category

Cornerstone 1 Cornerstone 2

Recipe 1 Recipe 2

Figure 25: internal linking

Tags
Your site will also benefit by adding tags. Tags will give your blog
more structure (or at least Google will understand it better).

In WordPress there are two standard ways of adding taxonomies: you

can use the aforementioned categories (which will give you the pyra-
mid-like structure) and you can use tags. The difference has to do with
structure. Categories are hierarchical; you can have subcategories
and sub-subcategories, whereas tags don’t have that hierarchy. Think
of it like this: categories are the table of contents of your website, and
tags are the index.

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 Homemade-Italy ~ Homemade-Italy adds the tag ‘vegetarian’
to all the dishes that do not contain meat. This makes them easy
to find, because these vegetarian dishes could appear across all
categories (although, vegetarian dishes in the meat category
would be a bit weird). Other tags on the Homemade-Italy blog
are, for example, ‘budget’ or ‘quick & easy’.

Figure 26: tags on Homemade-Italy

Try not to create too many tags. If every post or article receives yet
another new unique tag, you are not structuring anything. Make sure
tags are used more than once or twice. Make sure tags group articles
together that really belong together.

In some WordPress themes, tags are displayed with each post. But,
some themes neglect to do so. You should make sure your tags are in
fact available to your visitors somewhere, preferably at the bottom of
your article. Tags are really useful for your visitors (and not just for
Google) to read more about the same topic.

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 Chapter 15

Practical tips to improve your site structure

In this chapter we will explain how to improve your site structure.

The structure you set up for your blog should be reflected on your
site. You can do a number of things to accomplish just that.

Reflect structure in your menu

The main categories of your site should all have a place in the menu
on your homepage. Visitors use your menu to find things on your
website. The menu helps them to understand how your website is
structured. In our section about user experience we will give tips on
how to improve the UX of your menu.

Reflect structure by adding breadcrumbs

The structure of your site can be made even clearer by adding bread-
crumbs. Breadcrumbs are the links, usually above the title of the
post, that look like: Home » Pasta » Vegetarian lasagna.

Figure 27: breadcrumbs

92
Breadcrumbs improve both the user experience as well as the SEO of
your blog by showing how the current page fits into the larger struc-
ture of your site. Breadcrumbs allow your users to easily navigate
your site, and it will help them to find their way if they land directly
on a subpage, for example via Google. Above that, they allow search
engines to determine the structure of your site more easily.

Reflect structure in topics

The main topic or theme of your site should be the number one
keyword (or keyphrase) you want to be found for – the top of your
pyramid. This will be the most general topic. Your categories will be
more specific, or as we call it more long tail (read more about long tail
in chapter 9). Within the different categories will be a large number
of blog posts about all kinds of long tail variants of your number one
search term.

Homemade-Italy ~ The bloggers of Homemade-Italy would

like to be found for the search term ‘homemade Italian food’.
That is the most general topic and that is also reflected on their
homepage. Their main categories were pasta, salads, meat
dishes and desserts. These categories are more long tail than
the topic of your homepage. Their blog posts are even more
long tail. They write about: homemade Italian spaghetti
bolognese, homemade Italian lasagna, homemade Italian
penne carbonara and so on. In order to get the linking
structure right: in every blog post they place a link back
to the main category page the specific post belongs to.

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 Chapter 16

Managing a growing site

The structure of a site will be fairly easy to maintain when your site
is small. But as your site gets bigger, you will need to do more in order
to keep the structure of your site optimal. In this chapter, we will
discuss some techniques to improve the structure of a large site. We
would like to stress the need to analyze and update the structure of
your site on a regular basis.

Evaluate your categories

As your site is growing, it could well be that you are writing about one
thing far more than about other things. That’s just the way blogging
goes. As discussed in the chapter about setting up your site structure,
we advise you to have categories of about the same size. You should

94
therefore critically evaluate your categories every few months,
asking yourself whether or not one category is growing much faster
than another category. If that is the case, you could divide such a
category in two separate categories.

Adding sub categories and tags

Tags are especially important for growing sites. If you have lots and
lots of posts, it becomes harder to make sure you link to similar
content. Blog posts will get lost in a structure that is too flat. By
making subcategories, you create an extra layer of structure and there
will be fewer posts within each group.

For larger sites, one should definitely make good use of subcategries.
This will for instance also prevent articles getting buried on page 236
of a category (who clicks to that page, right?), as there will simply be
less pages per category to begin with.

Tags could also make sure a post does not get lost and receives
enough links. Evaluate your tag structure on a regular basis and
make sure you add new tags if you are blogging about new topics.

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Add 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.

By adding a numbered pagination, linking for instance the first,

second, third, tenth, twentieth, thirtieth, up to the ninetieth and
last page, you reduce the number of clicks. Jumping every 20 pages
will already lower that number to 10, of course. Pagination will
allow your users to click through your archive in a much easier way.

Figure 28: you don’t want to click each page to get

to page 50

Figure 29: you should be able to skip pages

What to do with outdated posts?

In case your site has grown into a monster, you probably have a
number of posts that contain outdated information, or are simply
never read (anymore). There are two options:

96
1 Delete the old content (and redirect the URL). In case you want to
delete the post, first check if there is any traffic on it these days. If
not, delete the post, let Google find the 404 page and it will vanish
from Google. If there is still some occasional traffic, redirect the
post to a similar post. If there is no other post like it, redirect to the
category page, and if that is also not available, redirect to the
homepage as a last resort.

Yoast tip

Read more about properly deleting a page from your site in one of
Joost’s posts.

2 Rewrite the outdated post. This is of course only valuable when

there is still traffic on the post. If you can rewrite the post to match
current information on the subject, you will be able to benefit from
the built-up ranking. This is what we call new wine in old bottles:
the information is fresh, the location on the web isn’t. Make use of
this, it is a valuable content strategy.

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As you will have noticed in both cases, traffic on that specific URL is
key in your decision. If a post has neither any value for your current
visitors, nor any traffic, simply delete it.

Homemade-Italy ~ In the beginning of ‘Homemade-Italy’ the

bloggers also wrote about Italian ice cream. However, techniques
on how to make ice cream have really gone through some
changes in the last few years. The bloggers found out that they
got quite some traffic on their old posts. They decided to update
their experience and rewrite the ice cream blogs, making them
state-of-the-art again.

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 Chapter 17

Cornerstone articles

Really important content pages are called cornerstone content. These

cornerstone articles were already mentioned in the previous chap-
ters. This chapter is entirely dedicated to these articles. We will first
describe what cornerstone articles actually are. Then we will discuss
what kind of content these cornerstone articles should contain.
Finally, we will explain how one should incorporate cornerstone
content in the site structure.

What are cornerstone articles?

Cornerstone articles are the most important articles on your website.

This is the content that exactly reflects your business or the mission
of your business. But focusing on the field around your business could
also be a fine strategy to increase your audience and potential buyers.

As we’ve discussed before, cornerstone articles should be relatively

high in your pyramid, focusing on the most ‘head’ and competitive
keywords. If you think of four specific pages you would like someone
to read in order to tell them about your site or company, these would
need to be the cornerstone articles. In most cases, the homepage
would link to these articles.

Websites should have a minimum of one or two cornerstone articles

and a maximum of eight to ten. If you want to write more than ten
cornerstone articles, you should probably start a second website.

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Category pages or tag pages could make great cornerstone ‘articles’
as well. If you want to optimize your category pages for cornerstone
content, it is of great importance to provide really awesome intro-
ductory content. You should make sure that this page is a compelling
overview of the subject and invites visitors to read even more articles
on your blog.

Homemade-Italy ~ Homemade-Italy is very proud of their very

own original recipe to make pasta. That recipe is used in every blog
post about pasta. The original recipe is their cornerstone article. It
is placed on the category page of ‘pasta original’. The visitor can
also find links there to all the blog posts that use the recipe.

Type of content of cornerstone articles

Cornerstone content should always contain actual original content.

We recommend it being a page and not a blog post. Posts can contain
comments, and comments - being additional content to your post -
can change the entire focus of an article. You should make your
cornerstone articles timeless and check them very regularly to make
sure these pages are up to date.

Cornerstone articles should be explainers, they should be informative

articles. Even on a webshop, the cornerstone content should be infor-
mative articles. Perhaps you can write about the use of the products
you sell, or their history. Think about all the places you can link this
cornerstone content, like in a blog post on new developments and in
the actual product description in your shop!

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Incorporation in your site structure

The cornerstone articles should appear very high in your site’s pyra-
mid. If you add new content relating to the cornerstone topic, you
should link it to your cornerstone article.

Homemade-Italy ~ As mentioned before, for Homemade-Italy,

one of their cornerstone articles is the recipe for the pasta origi-
nal. It contains all the information that is needed to prepare the
pasta original. And that recipe is needed for all dishes in the ‘pasta
original’ category. If the bloggers of Homemade-Italy write a
post about pasta with olives and mozzarella, they link from this
post to their recipe to make pasta (which is the cornerstone arti-
cle in that category). Also, when they place a post about winter
wonderland pasta, they will link to that cornerstone article again.

Yoast tip

Make sure that the cornerstone articles, the articles on which people
enter your site, have a clear call-to-action. This means that it will be
clear by the end of the page (and preferably at the top as well) what
you want people to do. If you want them to keep on reading: lead
them to other related articles. If you want them to buy your stuff:
lead them to your shop. If you want them to subscribe to your news-
letter: offer them a sign-up form.

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 Section 5

UX

In this section we will give you advice on how to improve the User
eXperience (UX) of your site. Attractive, clear websites have a lower
bounce rate and a much higher chance to receive social media atten-
tion. These are exactly the two things that make sure your website will
keep ranking well in the long run too. Therefore making sure the UX of
your site is flawless will help for both SEO as well as for growing
towards a larger audience. We’ll discuss the importance of a clear call-
to-action (chapter 18), menus (chapter 19) and the basic principles of
readability (chapter 20).

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Techboys ~ In this section a tech blog called ‘Techboys’ will be
central. Techboys is a tech blog on which a group of developers
share their code with other developers. Blogs tend to consists
mainly of examples and pieces of code and contain very little
‘text’. Although the blog posts of Techboys contain very valuable
information for devs, the audience of Techboys seems to have a
hard time finding that information. The bloggers of Techboys
therefore decided to make some major improvements to the UX of
their blog.

Yoast tip

If you would like to read more about UX and conversion (and the
importance for SEO), you should read our eBook: UX & Conversion
from a holistic SEO perspective.

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 Chapter 18

Call-to-action

This chapter

In this chapter we explain the importance of proper calls-to-action.

Next to that, we will give some practical tips on how to improve upon
the calls-to-action on your website.

What is a call-to-action?

A call-to-action (CTA) is the element – usually a button – you want

people to click on when they enter your website. In order to guide your
visitor into or through your blog, you should give him directions. You
give out signs. These signs are your calls-to-action. The most import-
ant signs should be made the biggest. Make it as big as possible. Make
it stand out.

Although a call-to-action is especially important on a homepage,

there should be a call-to-action on every page of your blog. The
contact form has a call-to-action, of course. Buttons for your news-
letter for instance are also calls-to-action. Make sure you give your
visitors directions, show them where you want them to click.

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Most important call-to-action for blogs

For blogs, it is most important that people aren’t stuck on a page after
they have read one post. Make sure you always offer your visitors
a few posts they should read after they have finished the first post.
And, if you want people to sign up for your newsletter, follow you on
Facebook or to buy products in your shop, make clear buttons to
guide them.

Figure 30: different calls-to-action at the end of a post

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Best practices for good calls-to-action for blogs

Making sure you show your visitors where you want them to click
does not seem like rocket science. Still, in the process of designing,
altering and redesigning your blog, the call-to-action can get lost.
Review your website on a regular basis and critically analyze the
visibility of your calls-to-action. There are a number of best prac-
tices for setting up a good call-to-action for your site.

• No clutter. If you add a call-to-action, there shouldn’t be other

elements demanding the visitors’ attention. For instance, make
sure to avoid social share buttons right below your call-to-action
button.

• Size matters. Make sure people are able to view the button without
any trouble. Don’t go overboard; don’t become too aggressive.

• Be clear about the benefits. ‘Sign up now and receive weekly emails
about optimizing your website’ is a better text to accompany a news-
letter subscription option than just ‘Sign up now’.

• Color is important. If your entire design is using blue and orange,

your call-to-action will stand out a lot more if it’s green. Using
blue will make the call-to-action blend in too much.

• Be concise. If your call-to-action is a button, don’t use ‘Buy this

product now and get a 20% discount’ as the main button text. Use
‘20% OFF’. Make sure your text fits your buttons.

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Figure 31: a clear call-to-action on cheapair.com


Figure 32: two examples of a call-to-action button

Text on your call-to-action

Your call-to-action will be either a button or a link. You will have

some text on it. We already gave some tips about the text in the
previous paragraph (like: be concise). When thinking about button
or link texts, a few other things are important:

First of all, you need to be sure you’re using an active voice. An active
voice is action oriented, and thus literally calls people to action. And
that’s exactly what you want. Make people want to click your button
or link!

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Second, make sure your button or link text is specific for what
people are doing. Do not put ‘click here’ on a button. ‘Send’ is also
just too generic. Use something like ‘Sign up!’ for a newsletter, or
‘Contact us’ for a contact form. The text has to explain what the
button will do. Use small and simple words. You need to keep your
button text as simple as possible. People have to immediately
understand what it means.

Contact us » Click here »




Figure 33: make sure your button text is specific

Techboys ~ Techboys sends out a newsletter every week in which

they share their latest posts and offer their view on recent events in
the developers-community. They hardly had any subscribers to
their newsletter. The button on which people were supposed to
click did not stand out on their site. It was kind of hidden in the
footer of the site and had the text ‘Send’. When one of the develop-
ers of Techboys designed a new button which was bright and
orange and said ‘Sign up for our awesome newsletter now’, their
newsletter subscriptions went up from 50 a week to 250 each week.



Figure 34: think about the text on your CTA

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 Chapter 19

Menus

This chapter
In this chapter, we will we give practical tips to improve the menu on
your site.

Main menu

The main menu indicates the various sections of your site in a clear
and informative way. This menu is the most global navigation on
your website. Make sure it’s visible on all pages. It should consist of
a number of main menu items (not too much!) that tell your visitor
which corner of your website could be visited for what information.
Your main menu should reflect the structure of your website (see
section 4). Do not flood the menu with unrelated items but think
about which categories make sense to your visitors.

Visitors use your menu to find things on your website. The menu
helps them to understand what your website is about. So your menu
is a very important tool to communicate your purpose.

Submenu

The submenu should contain details of a main menu item. When

the main item is Code Examples, the submenu should read some-
thing like Examples in PhP, Examples in Javascript, Examples in HTML.

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Note that these submenu items should also be present on the Code
Examples page itself, for instance by linking these in the text of that
page or as a list of subsections.

Figure 35: main item Code Examples and submenu

There are many ways to add a submenu. The most common one is
where the submenu drops down below the main menu item when
hovering your mouse over that item. You should also 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!

Figure 36: an arrow indicates a submenu

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Menu usability tips

Main level and sublevel

Preferably, the top level items of your main menu should take up just
one line in your menu. Besides the fact that adding a second line for
your menu isn’t really user friendly, it just looks less professional as
well. If your site is not too big, create at most one sublevel. Keep it
simple and realize there are more ways to get from one page to
another. Your menu isn’t the only navigational option on your
website. If you cannot fit all your categories in your menu, perhaps
your website tries to cover too much.

Menu items should be related

For the majority of websites, the menu starts with the Home item
and ends with the Contact item. Everything between these two
items should be related somehow. If you have a website about diving,
your menu could have the items: freediving, scuba diving and spear-
fishing. It is clear that these items have a link between them, and
therefore the menu feels natural. If these menu items had been
freediving, scuba diving and Dakar Rally, that wouldn’t feel natural,
right? Keep things on-topic. If you have a diving website and want
to write about your Dakar experience, you can squeeze in a blog post
or link to a specialized, optimized site about it. It doesn’t belong in
your menu.

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 Techboys ~ Th e menu of Techboys consisted of five items (besides
home and contact): Code examples, WordPress, Tech news, About
us and LEGO. LEGO is actually a big hobby of one of the developers
and was therefore placed in their menu. But it did not have
anything to do with the mission of Techboys and was really of
topic. It did not make any sense, besides being ‘fun’. The bloggers
of Techboys therefore decided to delete it from their menu.

Yoast tip

One of the most common items in a blog menu is ‘About’. About the
blog, about the company or about the blogger. You always want to let
your visitor know who you are. What your values are, or what made
you blog in the first place. Doing so, will make the blog more personal,
and this will allow your visitors to related to your story. By making your
blog more personal, your visitors will be more willing to comment or
share your posts.

Menu visibility

For most visitors of your site, the menu will be the main navigation
on your website. If you write long posts and people have to scroll
down a lot, make sure you add a sticky menu. That way, your menu
stays in the screen while people scroll down. If you do it well, that
sticky menu also contains your logo, so your logo stays on screen all
the time. Make them remember your brand!

Figure 37: sticky menu

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Breadcrumbs

People who have clicked on an item on your menu, should be able to

find their way back. Guide them with the use of breadcrumbs. Bread-
crumbs are the links, usually above the title post, that look like:
Home » Code Examples » Examples in HTML. 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.

Figure 38: breadcrumbs

Yoast tip

Using the breadcrumbs functionality provided by the Yoast SEO

plugin makes sure that the search engines can understand your
breadcrumbs just as well as your visitors can. Yoast SEO does this by
adding microdata markup to the breadcrumb links, something most
themes don’t do themselves.

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 Chapter 20

Readability

This chapter

For a site, it is of great importance that people can read the texts of
your post properly. Reading from screens is hard, so make sure you
do not make it any harder than it already is. In this chapter, we’ll
explain the importance of typography and give tips on how to improve
the typography on your site.

Typography, readability and legibility

The readability of a particular text depends both on its content (for

example, the complexity of its vocabulary) and its typography. Read-
ability is about arranging words and groups of words in a way that
allows the readers eye to access the content easily and in a way that
makes sense.

Typography is the science of arranging your letters in order to make

written text readable and appealing. Before digitization kicked in,
typography was a specialized occupation, nowadays typography is
something everybody has to deal with, at least everybody who owns
or maintains a website. Typography involves selecting typeface (font
family), font size, line length, line-spacing and letter-spacing.
When choosing a typeface you have to take legibility into account.
Legibility is the ease with which a reader can recognize individual
characters in text.

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 Typography

Typography is the science of Ty p o g r a p h y i s t h e

arranging your letters in order
to make written text readable
and appealing.
science of arranging your
letters in order to make
written text readable and

appealing.

Legibility

Legibility is the ease with Legibility is the ease with

which a reader can recognize which a reader can recognize
individual characters. individual characters.

Figure 39: the difference between typography and legibility

Why is typography important?

Easy reading helps learning and enjoyment, so what we write should
be easy to understand (source:Wikipedia). Research shows that you
should limit the length of your post as people tend to stop reading if
a web text is too long. However, for SEO purposes, your blogs or
articles should not be too short (minimum of 300 words). A lengthy
post has more chances to rank in the search engines. If you choose
to write a lengthy post, one should focus even more on choosing the
right typography.

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Font

Fonttype

For the best presentation of your blog, you have probably been
thinking about what kind of font to use. Fonts can set a mood,
enhance a tone of voice or totally ruin the user experience or usability
of your website.

Yoast tip

Fonts matter. And as we can basically use any font on any website
nowadays, be sure to pick the right one for your website and audi-
ence. Use Google Fonts (free) or Adobe Typekit (paid) and pick the
fonts that suit your website the most. And remember: Comic Sans is
not a font. Not even if you have a site for kids. Please, let’s teach
them better.

Font size

The preferred paragraph font size for a website has increased quite a
bit over the years. Ten years ago, a font of 10 pixels allowed you to add
more text to a page and made your page look more like a book. With
the growth of computer screens, nowadays 16 pixels is very normal.
Is there a minimum? Not really, although we recommend using at
least 14 pixels. That size is a good read on both the larger desktop
screens and our mobile screens.

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Font color

What font color to use is largely depending on the type of site you
have and what design your website uses. In general, we say that
using a black font on a white background is still the best read. The
general thought is that outlines are sharper and letters are easier to
distinguish and identify.

The one thing you should do regarding font and background color, is
test the contrast. There are a number of tools available, all with their
own kind of contrast checker. A really easy and good one is Colorable
- it will allow you to enter the foreground (text color) and background
(background color) and it will tell you immediately if the contrast is
right or wrong and what score the combination of colors gets. Color-
able is based upon the WCAG accessibility guidelines. These same
guidelines are used to create Lea Verou’s Contrast Ratio, which will
appeal to a lot of developers as it is available on GitHub. We’ve been
using the last one for ages and love the feature where you can use the
arrow keys to brighten or darken a color to make the contrast right.
Use these tools to your advantage; your audience will thank you for it.

Techboys ~ The bloggers of Techboys used to write their articles

using a very small font. Working on code themselves the entire
day, they were very used to read small fonts from screens them-
selves. However, their audience mainly consists of starting
developers, or people who write code just for fun. These people
sometimes had a hard time reading the posts on Techboys. The
bloggers of Techboys therefore decided to enlarge their font size
to 16 pixels (instead of the 11 they were using).

117
White space

Next to font size, you also want to make sure that the text has suffi-
cient room to breathe. If you are using a larger font size, but forget to
add white space for headings and paragraphs, your text will still be
unreadable. Especially on a mobile device. Make sure to use sufficient
white space.

White space isn’t just for between headings and paragraphs. White
space is also related to the line height of your text. If you neglect to
add a proper line height, your well constructed sentences become
one big block of letters. This is far from user-friendly and will make
your page very unappealing for a visitor.

White space

White space is also related White space is also related

to the line height of your
to the line height of your
text. If you neglect to add a
text. If you neglect to add a proper line height, your well
constructed sentences become
proper line height, your well
one big block of letters.
constructed sentences become
one big block of letters.

Figure 40: make sure you use enough white space

Because the white space of a specific text increases your text’s legi-
bility, people will actually have a better and quicker understanding of
your text. This means you’ll get your point across more quickly and
more easily.

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Headings

The importance of headings for SEO is (as far as we can see) not very
big anymore. Does that mean that we can just stop using headings
like H1 and H2? No, most definitely not. These headings are still very
useful.

From a usability point of view, we use headings to:

• Summarize your page. Headings make sure the visitor can simply
scan the page and grasp the general idea (and decide to read the
full article).

• Divide the page into digestible parts. Longer pages need head-
ings. Any article without headings might as well be in Chinese as it
will all be one big blur of letters.

• Identify sections on a page, like in your sidebar or footer, or even

in the main part of your web page.

Yoast tip

Besides these usability reasons, the use of headings also allows

for better accessibility, increasing user experience for the visually
challenged visitors of your website as well.

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Typography of links

The importance of links for SEO is covered in our previous eBooks.

The design of the links in your texts itself however, is important as
well. Make absolutely clear what’s a link and what isn’t. You can do
so by:

• using a different color

(make sure you pick a whole different color!)
• adding an underline
(very user friendly for the visually challenged visitors)

To emphasize the link you can easily combine the two options above.
Of course using an underline is always the best option; this will
immediately identify a word or combination of words as a link. Make
sure you change the style when hovering your mouse cursor over the
link. Remove the underline or change the color. The link is already
identified, just make sure there is a change in styling of the link to
confirm that.

Line length

Another thing to consider when it comes to readability is the length

of your text lines. You can find a number of studies about this online,
but there doesn’t seem to be a default solution for this. It all depends
on the font type used, and the size of your font.

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In Readability: the Optimal Line Length, Christian Holt mentions a
number of suggested text lines, stating these should be 50 to 65 or 75
characters. Ilene Strizver even takes text alignment in account in her
article Line Length & Column Width. She states that non-justified
text should be 9 to 12 words per line, and justified text should be 12 to
15 words. From our experience, 10 to 15 words is indeed a good read.

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