XML sitemaps are essential for every site’s SEO strategy and are a big part of our core Yoast SEO product. Both Google and Bing have recently renewed emphasis on properly using the lastmod (last modified) tag in XML sitemaps. The leading search engines now advise site owners to use this feature properly for better crawling …
Read: "Google and Bing stress the importance of lastmod in XML sitemaps"
In this post, we’ll go into the basics of technical SEO. Now, discussing the basics of technical SEO might seem like a contradiction in terms. Nevertheless, some basic knowledge about the more technical side of SEO can mean the difference between a high-ranking site and a site that doesn’t rank at all. Technical SEO isn’t …
Read: "What’s technical SEO? 8 technical aspects everyone should know"
A good XML sitemap acts as a roadmap of your website that leads Google to all your important pages. XML sitemaps can be good for SEO, allowing Google to find your essential pages quickly, even if your internal linking isn’t perfect. This post explains what they are and how they help you rank better. What …
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You probably want Google and other search engines to show most of your content in the search results. But most websites also have a few pages or posts that don’t need to be featured in those search results. So how do you tell Google what pages to show and which ones not to? This is …
Read: "Indexing in Yoast SEO: What pages to show in Google’s search results"
Say hi to Yoast SEO 14.7, chock-full of enhancements to help you with your site’s SEO. Have you heard about the addition of XML sitemaps in WordPress 5.5? The Yoast SEO plugin is completely prepared for this. We also have some great news for users of the Web Stories plugin. But most importantly, we’re releasing …
Read: "Yoast SEO 14.7: Smarter and faster internal linking suggestions in Premium"
When you roll out the red carpet on a new website, you might be expecting visitors to start coming eagerly. In reality, before people start visiting your site, search engines need to find, index and rank it. In this article, I share some tips that could help you get your site indexed faster. A quick note …
Read: "How to get your new WordPress site indexed"
It can happen to anyone: You’re working on your site, fiddling on some posts here and there, and hit update when you’re done. After a while, you check back on how a post is doing and, to your dismay, it disappeared completely from the search engines! It turns out you’ve accidentally set a post or …
Read: "Help, I’ve accidentally noindexed a post. What to do?"
On March 6, we released a major update of our Yoast SEO plugin. This update was aimed at making SEO easier and more understandable for our users. We removed quite a few settings and options. In other cases, we changed the names of settings making them easier to understand for non-technical users. All in all, …
Read: "Why we changed so many things in the 7.0 update"
An HTML sitemap (as opposed to an XML sitemap) is often mentioned as being useful for SEO. They certainly are if you use them wisely (and especially Bing seems to like them at times), but I like them even more for the fact that users like them a lot. There’s plenty of plugins out there …
Read: "HTML Sitemap for WordPress"