Yoast Optimize WordPress Site
Transcript of Yoast Optimize WordPress Site
-
Optimize yourWordPress site
Joost de Valk,
Annelieke van den Berg,
Michiel Heijmans,
Marieke van de Rakt,
Thijs de Valk
-
Colophon 2014 Yoast
ISBN/EAN 978-90-822653-1-6
NUR 988
Publisher: Yoast
Authors: Joost de Valk, Michiel Heijmans,
Marieke van de Rakt, Thijs de Valk,
Annelieke van den Berg,
Editor: Marieke van de Rakt
Design: Mijke Peters
Illustrations: Erwin Brouwer
Edition: 1
-
3Table of Contents
Introduction 5
About this book 6
WordPress 8
Search Engine Optimization 13
Introduction to Search Engine Optimization 15
Keyword research 20
Site Structure 29
Technical SEO 38
SEO copywriting 45
Link building 50
Further reading 54
Navigation 55
Introduction to navigation 57
Top menu navigation: coming in from the North 60
Navigation in main content: the Wild West 65
Sidebar: in the East 72
Footer: in the South 75
Mobile website 78
Further reading 81
-
4Sales 82
Making money with your website 84
The checkout process 91
Further reading 94
Analytics 95
What is Google Analytics? 97
Improving your website with Google Analytics 106
Further reading 112
Conversion Research 113
A / B Tests 115
Survey research 121
Further reading 127
Social Media 128
Why use social media? 130
How to use social media? 134
Further reading 141
Speed 142
Checking your site speed 144
Increasing your site speed 146
Further reading 152
-
5Section
Introductionby Marieke van de Rakt
-
6Chapter 1
About this book
Introduction
Building a WordPress website isnt that hard. WordPress was developed
in order to make blogging easy and accessible for a very large audience.
You can figure out WordPress yourself, or use one of the numerous
manuals that will help you set up your site. Subsequently, you can up -
grade your site with many plugins, for instance allowing your website to
become a shop.
And then what? How do you make sure your site stands out from all of the
other ones on the internet? How do you make sure people find your
website? What do you have to do to make people buy your stuff?
Installing your WordPress site is only the beginning. In order to have a
website which keeps appealing to your audience, you will have an endless
job in keeping your content and design up to date. You will have to do
continuous Search Engine Optimization in order to make sure that people
find your website on Google and other search engines. You should make
sure users of your website can find the information you want them to
find. And if you have a shop, you should make sure that people can find
and (want to) buy your products.
-
7Content of this book
This book will help you to optimize your WordPress site. The book consists
of multiple sections, which can be read in any order you like. Each section
will teach you the basics of one aspect of website optimization. Well teach
you the basics of Search Engine Optimization and explain the importance
of user interface and good navigation. Furthermore, we will give the most
important insights on improving your sales and conversions. The sections
are written by experts in the field of SEO, Navigation, Conversion and
Analytics.
Search engine - terminology
In this book, we will write Google when we refer to a search engine. Of
course, there are many other search engines, like Bing and Yahoo. But
since Google pretty much dominates the search engine market, we will
only refer to Google in our texts.
-
8Chapter 2
WordPress
What is WordPress?
WordPress is an open source Content Management System (CMS) you can
use for your blog or your webshop. It was first released in 2003, by Matt
Mullenweg and Mike Little. Nowadays, it powers up to 20% of the websites
on the web. WordPress started as just a blogging system, but is since then
evolved to be used as a full Content Management System for your website.
Of course, at Yoast, we are WordPress-fans. And with good reason! Word-
Press is free and open source. It is easy to use and allows for great
flexibility. WordPress has a plugin architecture which allows users to
extend the functionality of the website beyond the core installation.
Plugins are pieces of code which extend the functionality. WordPress
ensures simplicity for users, while allows for complexity for developers.
-
9Why use WordPress?
Lets take a look at the advantages of using WordPress over other Content
Management Systems! You can read much more about the features and
requirements and find testimonials on WordPress.org.
Its very easy!
Making content in WordPress is very easy. Its just as easy as making a
document in Microsoft Word. You dont even have to be able to read or
write code in order to create a post in WordPress. Everybody with a little
computer skills is able to maintain his or her own blog using WordPress.
Its very flexible!
You can create a personal website, a photoblog or a business website.
You can make it any way you like. You can easily change appearances by
adding a different theme and give your website an entirely different look.
WordPress comes with a few default themes, but you can choose from
thousands of themes to give your website the look you want. Numerous
sites offer free and premium themes. Uploading a new theme is really
easy and can give your website a complete new look in a matter of
seconds.
WordPress core already comes with features for every user, but you
can upgrade your functionality with plugins. There are literally tens of
thousands of plugins (free and paid) which allow for social media widgets,
spam protection and so much more.
-
10
Yoast Tip
At Yoast, we offer several themes and numerous free and premium
plugins to optimize your website.
Its very free!
You do not have to pay any kind of license fee to WordPress. Its free! And
its open source. So you are free to use WordPress in any way you choose:
you can install it, use it, change it, distribute it. As the most popular CMS
on the web, WordPress has a large and supportive community. A lot of
very skilled developers work together to make WordPress even better.
You can ask questions on support forums and get help from volunteers.
WordPress is licensed under a GPL open source license, which is a pretty
complex bit of text, but it means that:
You can charge for distributing, supporting, or documenting the soft-
ware, but you cannot sell the software itself.
If you create derivative works that use pieces of code that are licensed
under the GPL, those derivative works should also be licensed under
the GPL.
That last bit is very important, it basically prevents the software from ever
becoming a proprietary piece of software.
Where to start
If you do not have a WordPress site and you would like to get started with
WordPress, you should check out WordPress.org/about.
-
11
To run WordPress your host just needs a couple of things:
PHP version 5.2.4 or higher;
MySQL version 5.0 or higher.
You can download and install a software script from WordPress.org and
then you should be able to get started. Most hosts actually have a Word-
Press installer in their backends, allowing you to install WordPress by the
click of a button.
There is a lively support community in the WordPress forums that is
eager to help you if you have questions, the WordPress codex and a site
like WPBeginner are also great places to start working with WordPress.
Yoast and WordPress
At Yoast we make money using WordPress. This might seem counterin-
tuitive. Should all the software we develop be free just because we
develop for WordPress? We offer and will continue to offer free plugins.
In order for Yoast to continue to develop our products and to give
support, we have to sell stuff. We sell consultancy and we sell (support
and updates to our) plugins and themes.
-
12
For the free plugins, there are volunteers on the WordPress forums, but
we dont often dive in. With millions of users and only 12 of us, we simply
cannot answer all the questions of individual users ourselves.
That being said, we want to stress that all of our products are open source
and we are big believers in the power of open source. In our opinion:
making money in an open source community is beneficial for the open
source community as long as you continue to invest in the open source
community. If you want to read more about our view, you can read our
post Victory of the Commons.
-
13
Section
Search Engine Optimizationby Joost de Valk
-
14
About this section
In this section, we will teach you the basics of SEO. We will tell you what
Google does and what SEO exactly is. In the following chapters we will
teach you how to do a keyword research and to set up the structure and
the internal linking structure of the website. We will give the basics of
technical SEO, tell you some things about SEO copywriting. In the last
chapter (8) of this section we will give some information about link
building.
-
15
Chapter 3
Introduction to Search Engine Optimization
What does Google do?
How does Google find your site?
Search engines like Google follow links. It follows links from one webpage
to another webpage. A search engine like Google consists of a crawler, an
index and an algorithm. A crawler follow the links on the web. It goes around
the internet 24-7 and saves the HTML-version of a page in a gigantic
database, the index. This index is updated if Google has come around
your website and finds a new or revised version. Depending on the traffic
on your site and the amount of changes you make on your website,
Google comes around more or less often. For Google to know of the exis-
tence of your website, there first has to be a link from another site to your
site. Following that link will lead to the first crawler-session and the first
save in the index.
Googles secret algorithm
After indexing your website, Google can show your website in the search
results.
Google has a specific algorithm that decides which pages in which order
are shown. How this algorithm works is a secret, nobody knows exactly
which factors decide the ordering of the search results. Moreover, factors
-
16
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.
Googles results page
Googles result page shows 7 or 10 links to sites which fit best to your
keyword. We refer to these results as the organic search results. If you
click to the second page, more results are shown. Above these 10 blue
links, often are two or three paid links. These links are ads, people have
paid Google to put these links at the top of the site when people search
for a specific term. Prices for these ads greatly vary, depending on the
competitiveness of the search term. In the column on the right of the
Google-screen, ads often appear as well.
The value of links for search engines
Its very important to have a basic understanding of how Google (and
most search engines) use links: they use the number of links pointing to a
page to determine how important that page is. Both internal (links from
the own website) as well as external links could help in the ranking of your
website in Google. Some links are more important than others: links from
websites who have a lot of links themselves are generally more important
than links from small websites.
Universal search
Next to the organic and the paid results, Google also embeds news items,
pictures and videos in its search results. This embedment is called universal
search.
-
17
What is Search Engine Optimization?
High ranking in organic search results
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the profession that attempts to opti-
mize sites to make them appear in a high position in the organic search
results. In order to do so, SEO tries to fit ones website to Googles
algorithm. Although Googles algorithm remains secret, almost a decade
of experience in SEO has resulted in a pretty good idea about the import-
ant factors. In our view, the factors in Googles algorithm can be divided
in two categories:
1 There are on-page factors which decide the ranking of your website.
These factors include technical issues (e.g. the quality of your code)
and more textual issues (e.g. structure of your site and text, use of
words).
2 There are the off-page factors. These factors include the links to your
site. The more other (relevant) sites link to your website, the higher
your ranking in Google will be.
In the following chapters, we thoroughly discuss on-page factors. The
off-page factors are much harder to influence. In chapter 8, we discuss
link building as one technique to influence your ranking via off-page
factors.
-
18
Make an awesome website!
In the following chapters, we
will teach you the basics of SEO.
At Yoast, we give SEO-advice to
(small) website owners and
large consultancy clients (the
Guardian, Facebook). Joost de
Valk began his SEO-career over
8 years ago. And although Google has changed its algorithm quite a few
times, most of the advice we give at Yoast has remained the same over
the years. And this advice is very simple: you just have to make sure your
site is damn good. Do not use any tricks, because they usually dont work
in the long run, and might even backfire. Googles mission is to build the
perfect search engine that helps people find what they are looking for.
Making your website and your marketing strategy fit for this goal is always
the way to go.
WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast
Yoast is most famous for our WordPress SEO plugin (WP SEO). Most of
the technical aspects of SEO you should do actually are covered by our
free WordPress SEO plugin. Installing the plugin and using the default
settings already improves quite a lot. It even fixes some minor issues
WordPress has. WP SEO also helps in writing SEO-friendly content (see
chapter 7). Our advice is to download and install the WP SEO plugin by
Yoast on your website. Of course, there are other SEO plugins, but our
plugin is the most complete and your website remains fast. Next to a
-
19
free plugin, we also offer a premium WP SEO plugin. In the premium
plugin extra functionality is added and customers of this premium
plugin can ask our team for support.
-
20
Chapter 4
Keyword research
Introduction
The first step in optimizing any website for a search engine is to start think-
ing about the searching strategies of your audience. What search strategies
do they have? Which search terms will they use? These questions are the
beginning of your keyword research. In this chapter, we will give practical
tips how to conduct your own keyword research. Keyword research is
actually the basis of all search marketing. You have to know which search
terms people use when looking for your website or product.
Step 1: write down your mission
What do you do?
What makes your website unique? What idea or product do you sell?
And why should people buy this from you? Make sure your mission is
clear in your mind as well as on your website.You want to be found on
the terms that fit your site. You want to be found by your (potential)
customers. Ranking on terms that dont fit your site, will result in a high
bounce rate (visitors immediately leave your site, because your site is not
what they expect it to be). A high bounce rate indeed indicates that your
website does not fit the search needs of customers and Google could
well adjust the ranking after high bounce rates. A high bounce rate could
eventually lead to a lower ranking in Google.
-
21
Competitiveness of the market
Whether or not you will be able to rank on the terms you choose, largely
depends on the market you are in. Some markets are highly competitive,
with large companies dominating the search results. These companies
have a very large budget to spend on marketing in general and SEO
specifically. Ranking in these markets is hard. Find out what differentiates
your company from these big boys and adjust your search terms to your
niche. For instance, if you sell holidays to the carribean you will have a
hard time ranking on holiday caribbean. Perhaps your focus is on travels
specifically for the elderly or for newlyweds. Ranking on holiday caribbean
elderly or holiday caribbean newlyweds would be much easier and could be
a better strategy.
Step 2: on what search terms do you want to be found?
Making a list
Make a list of all the search terms you want to be found on. This phase is
hard (as well as crucial). What terms will people use? You really have to
get inside the heads of your audience. How do people search? And what
is the problem your website (or product) resolves? Which question does
your website answer?
A few years ago, doing your keyword research was easier. You could
simply check Google Analytics to see on which terms people found your
website. That is no longer possible. So you are pretty much left in the dark
about the terms people use in search engine to end up at your website. If
-
22
you have visitors who come to your website using Bing, you should be
able to view their search terms.
Tools you could use
You may want to use some tools in order to get started:
Google Adwords Keyword Planner
This can be a very useful tool, with the slight caveat that the search
volume data in the planner is really only useful for keywords that youre
actually spending money to advertise on. Use the tool to find new and
related keywords, but neglect the search volume data!
yoast.com/suggest/
This tool uses the Google Suggest functionality you know from search-
ing in Google. It finds the keyword expansions Google gives and then
requests more of them. So if you type example, itll also give you the
expansions for example a till example z etc. Its a great way to
quickly find more niche keywords you can focus on. A similar tool is
bersuggest.
Google Trends
While you cant reliably get traffic information for keywords, Google
Trends does allow you to relatively compare the traffic for sets of
keywords. Check this query for instance, comparing the relative growth
of several WordPress SEO terms and our brand Yoast. You can even
see the difference for numerous geographical regions.
Its very important to check Google Trends if you expect that some of
your keywords are seasonal, for instance due to regulations, holiday
seasons etc.
-
23
Your internal search engine
What are people looking for on your site? A category we always find
particularly interesting is the set of keywords that didnt get any results:
this was stuff people were expecting but didnt find, its very possible
for you to give those products a different name. You can do this with
our Google Analytics for WordPress plugin.
Long-tail keywords
The tools may help you to make an extensive list of search terms people
use to end up on your site. Do also think about combinations of terms.
Make sure you dont just pick terms that consist of one word only. The
longer (and more specific) search terms are, the easier it will be to rank on
the term. These longer terms are called long-tail keywords.
Long-tail keywords are more specific and less common, and will probably
be used by potential visitors that already know what they want to find or
buy. The long-tail user will search for compare prices macbook air desktop
stand instead of doing a search for a so-called head keyword like macbook
air stand. Siri and Google Now encourage searches like: Where can I find
the best coffee in Seattle?
One of the main benefits of using long-tail keywords is that, although
these keywords may be used less in search, the visitor that finds your
website using them is more likely to buy your stuff. He or she has already
thought things over, has possibly compared products or types and there-
fore does a more specific search.
-
24
Yoast Tip
When you do a search in Google, be sure to scroll to the bottom of
the first search result page to find a list of possible long-tail keywords
for your term in the Searches related to [keyword] section.
Step 3: create landing pages
Use the list of keywords you have made and put it in a table. A table (use
for instance Excel or Google Docs / Sheets to set one up) forces you to a
structure and to make a landing page for all the search terms you came
up with. Put the search terms in the first column and add columns in
which you put the different levels of your sites structure. In chapter 5 you
can read more about site structure.
Searchterms
level 1:homepage
level 2:/subpages
level 3: /sub/subpages
level 4: sub/sub/subpages
term 1
term 2
term 3
term 4
Figure1: search terms
The more specific your search term is, the further down into your site
structure you put your landing page of this term. Make sure that you make
a landing page for every search term you come up with.
-
25
Example keyword research
The theory of keyword research can be a bit dry. We will spice things up!
Well give you an example of step 1 to 3. Lets say that I have a blog about
children. I write about childrens clothes, childrens room and childrens
toys. I blog about new products, about things that I have bought and like
and about new trends.
Step 1: mission
My mission is to describe the latest trends about clothing, decoration and
toys for children.
Step 2: keywords
childrens clothes childrens clothes trends
childrens room childrens room accessories
childrens room furniture childrens room accessories trends
childrens decorations childrens decorations trends
childrens toys childrens toys trends
-
26
Step 3: pages
Searchterms
level 1:homepage.com
level 2:/subpages
level 3: /sub/subpages
level 4: sub/sub/subpages
Childrensclothes
homepage.com/clothing
Childrensclothes trends
/clothing/ trends
Childrensroom
homepage.com/room
Childrensroom accessoires
/room/ accessoires
Childrens room accessoires trends
/room/acces-soires/trends
Figure 2: pages
Now, of course Did we make the right choice?
-
27
As you can see from this Google Trends chart, kids clothes, for instance, is
actually far more sought after. Which means we could go after the probably
less competitive, childrens clothes etc anyway, or go for kids clothes. There
are no rights or wrongs in this regard, you just have to be aware that
youre making this decision.
Cornerstone articles
Important content
Really important content deserves a page within your sites structure, not
a news item / post. It should be easily navigated to within a few clicks. We
refer to these important pages as cornerstone articles. So, you go ahead
and create these cornerstone pages within your site. Take some time
for it, this is going to be the content thats going to make you rank. Real
people will read it and you need to convince those people. So think about
search engines all you want, but think even more about the visitor that
will end up on that page and give him / her something worthwhile. This
also means youre not going to create other pages within your site that
target the exact same keyword, but if you discuss the keyword, you link to
this page! Read more about site structure in chapter 5.
-
28
Yoast Tip
Make sure that these cornerstone articles, the articles on which
people enter your site, have a clear call-to-action. This means that it
will be clear at the end of the page (and preferably on the top as well)
what you want people to do. Do you want them to keep on reading:
lead them to other, preferably related articles. Do you want them to
buy your stuff: lead them to your shop. Do you want them to
subscribe to your newsletter: offer them a form to sign up.
-
29
Chapter 5
Site Structure
Introduction
The way your site is structured will give Google important clues about
where to find the most important content. A good site structure could
thus lead to a higher ranking in Google. Your sites structure determines
whether a search engine understands what your site is about, and how
easily it will find and index content relevant to your sites purpose and
intent. In this chapter, we will explain the importance of site structure and
give practical tips which will help you set up or upgrade the structure of
your own website. This chapter is a revision of a previous article written
in 2011 and published on yoast.com.
Creating a pyramid
By creating a good structure, you can use the content youve written that
has attracted links from others. Your sites structure can help to spread
some of that link juice to the other pages on your site. On a commercial
site, that means that you can use the quality content youve written to
boost the search engine rankings of your sales pages too.
When developing a new site, or restructuring an existing one, it helps to
draw out your sites structure in something like Visio (or even putting it in
Excel). In chapter 3 we help you to create such a structure. What youll
want to do is put all the pages and sections of your website in a structure
-
30
as a tree. After drawing your sites structure, you can analyze the faults in
the structure of your website.
Based on a yoast.com structure from many years ago, you would
draw something like figure 3:
Sub-page 1
Sub-page 3
Sub-page 1
Sub-page 3
Sub-page 2
Sub-page 4
Sub-page 2
Sub-page 4
Sub-page
Sub-page
WordPress Articles Tool 1
Blog
Tool 2
Code
Etc. Project 1
Project 2
Etc.
Site 1
Site 2
Etc.
About
Home
Projects Sites Contact
Figure 3: a typical site sketch
Analyzing your pyramid
A balanced pyramid
An ideal site structure should look somewhat like a pyramid from ancient
Egypt. When working on your site structure, you thus should try to realise
a reasonably balanced pyramid for your site structure. On the top of the
pyramid is your homepage, with buttons allowing people to go down to
the second level. From the pages on the second levels, people are able
to navigate to pages on the third level (and so on). As you go down in
levels in your website, the number of pages will go up.
-
31
We would advise you to have something between 2 and 7 main sections,
depending on how content heavy your site is.
Equally large sections
You can make subsections beneath your main sections. Make sure that
sections are about equally large. If sections are too large, you should
divide them into two main sections. A good rule of thumb for the size of
sections is to make sure that no section is more than twice as large as any
other section. Large section should have a prominent place on your home-
page. Indeed, if a section is relatively large, this is apparently something
you write much content about. Dividing such a section in two separate
ones, would then result in a more accurate reflection of the content on
your website.
Looking at figure 3 clearly shows that the old yoast.com structure
was unbalenced. As you can see, the Code section constituted more
than half of the entire site. So our sections were not at all equally
large.
Sub-page 1
Sub-page 3
Sub-page 1
Sub-page 3
Sub-page 2
Sub-page 4
Sub-page 2
Sub-page 4
Sub-page
Sub-page
WordPress Articles Tool 1
Blog
Tool 2
Code
Etc. Project 1
Project 2
Etc.
Site 1
Site 2
Etc.
About
Home
Projects Sites Contact
-
32
Structure should reflect content
In making your site structure, make sure that the structure reflects the
content. Similar things should be grouped together, while things that are
in fact different should be put in another section.
The structure of the old yoast.com was unbalanced did not reflect
the content. There were three pages that were basically about
Joost de Valk: About, Projects and Websites. These three pages
were not very different in content, but were treated differently in
structure.
Sub-page 1
Sub-page 3
Sub-page 1
Sub-page 3
Sub-page 2
Sub-page 4
Sub-page 2
Sub-page 4
Sub-page
Sub-page
WordPress Articles Tool 1
Blog
Tool 2
Code
Etc. Project 1
Project 2
Etc.
Site 1
Site 2
Etc.
About
Home
Projects Sites Contact
Traffic
Pages that generate a lot of traffic should have a prominent place on your
website. Check your site statistics to see which pages are very popular.
Try to put these pages relatively high in your site structure. These pages
apparently attract a lot of traffic and need a high place on your pyramid.
-
33
In our example, we found out that the WordPress pages were
responsible for about 30% of the site traffic, but were down on the
third and fourth level.
Designing a new site structure
After you have analyzed the faults in your site structure you can rear-
range sections and make up a new and improved site structure. Make
sure you draw a balanced pyramid, giving more popular pages a higher
place in the pyramid.
At yoast.com, we did exactly that. In figure 4 you can see our new
solution.
Subpage 1
Subpage 2 Subpage 2 Tool 2 Projects
Subpage 3 Subpage 3 Etc.
Subpage 4 Subpage 4
Subpage 1 Tool 1 Websites
WordPress Articles Code About Contact
Home/Blog
Figure 4: a more refined section structure.
As you can see we decided to move some pages up the tree, and
also removed some pages. When youre rethinking your site
structure youll often find that some pages are not really beneficial
to your users. Deleting them is the best thing you can do if thats
the case.
-
34
Another choice we made was to move the blog to the home page.
The homepage was utter nonsense, and basically yet another
About Joost de Valk page. And though Joost likes himself, thats
not what we were hoping people came to our site for.
Naming your sections
Once youre satisfied with your site structure, have a look at the names
you have come up with for your sections. If you have enough content
about a subject for it to be able to have its own section, you can bet
people are searching for it as well. Thats why its very wise to make sure
your section names use the keywords people are searching for! Pick the
right names for your sections and subsections, and youre halfway there.
Now use the same techniques to pick the titles for your pages, and make
sure to keep them short and clean.
For example, if youre like us and youve written WordPress
plugins and created a section for them, you should not call that
section WordPress. What would people search for? If they want a
new plugin for WordPress, they would probably use WordPress
plugins for a search term. That would also be the term for that
section. Our sections had names as shown in figure 5.
-
35
WordPress Plugins
SEOTools
CodeSnippets
AboutJoost de Valk Contact
SEO Blog
Figure 5: sensible section names1
Internal link structure
If you did it all right with your new site structure, it should look like a pyra-
mid. Now you should consider how youre going to connect the sections
of this pyramid together. Look at those sections as small pyramids inside
your larger pyramid. Each page in the top of that pyramid should link to
all its subpages, and the other way around. So, al the subpages within a
pyramid should link to the page at the top of the pyramid.
Because youre linking from pages that are closely related to each other
content-wise, youre increasing your sites possibility to rank. Doing it like
this, will help the search engine out by showing it whats related and
what isnt.
1 we already updated our site structure again (and again), but this remains the most vivid example.
-
36
Take figure 6 as an example:
WordPress Plugins
SEO Blog
Plugin 3 Plugin 4
Plugin 1 Plugin 2
Subpage 3 Subpage 4
Subpage 1 Subpage 2
Figure 6: you also need to consider how the pages link to
each other within each section.
You should make sure you keep your links between each page
relevant to those pages. For example, if you linked from subpage
3 to plugin 2 all the time, the search engine might think that
subpage 3 was related to plugin 2, whereas its only related to
plugin 4.
From your new site structure to URLs
Once youve created your new site structure, you can go forth and create
the URLs for this structure. Each pages URL should describe the content
of that page, yet be as short as possible. If you have determined what
keywords you want to rank for, you might include the most important
ones in your URLs.
-
37
Keep in mind the following things while implementing your new URLs
If youre using multiple words, separate them with hyphens.
Mixed case URLs are an absolute no-go, as Unix and Linux servers
are case sensitive. Having mixed case URLs drastically increases the
possibility of typos - have you ever tried remember a URL that /LoOks/
LiKe/ThiS/ ?
Numbers might be easy for your CMS, but not for your users. Remem-
bering a URL with a number in it is hard, so the chance people will
remember it and link to it is smaller dont use numbers in URLs.
Make URLs guessable if you can. If people can remember your URLs
they can also talk about it with their friends more easily.
Make sure you redirect all your old pages to their new equivalents
using 301 redirects. A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect, and this
way search engines will move all the link value from the old URL to the
new one. For example, make sure http://example.com 301 redirects to
http://www.example.com, or the other way around, so people always
link to the same version of your site.
Make sure content is available under one URL and one URL only, for
example by implementing print stylesheets on your pages. Theres no
valid reason anymore to have a different page for printing purposes
because all major browsers support print stylesheets.
-
38
Chapter 6
Technical SEO
Introduction
In chapter 4 we have learned how to do a proper keyword research.
You now know what terms people use when searching for your site. In
chapter 5 we came up with a site structure and an internal linking struc-
ture. The next step is making sure that Google can index our website
properly and rank our site when people use these search terms. In this
SEO chapter we will give the very basics of the technical aspects of SEO.
If you have a WordPress website, making your website SEO friendly is not
that hard. WordPress itself is reasonably search engine friendly, as it
supports search engine friendly URLs and its default themes output
proper HTML. Our WP SEO plugin takes care of the rest. Still, there are
some major conditions your site requires to meet. Not meeting these
conditions would make ranking in Google impossible. In this chapter, we
will discuss those requirements. On yoast.com you will find numerous
articles which dive much deeper into technical SEO as we do in this
chapter. This chapter is the most nerdy chapter in this book. It could be
a bit too hard if your development skills are limited. We tried to explain
everything as comprehensible as possible and give lots of tips for further
reading.
-
39
Three stages in SEO
At Yoast, we distinguish several stages in technical SEO. First of all, you
have to make sure that Google is able to index your site (we refer to this
as crawlability). There should be no boundaries that prevent Google and
other search engines from finding your content or circumstances that
block Google from spidering your content. The second step you have to
take is to investigate whether Google knows which content there is and
that Google can it reach it. We refer to this as findability. Only the last step
is the actual optimization: what does Google see, how does it rank that
and what can we do about improving how Google ranks it. This last step
will be discussed in more detail in chapter 7.
Crawlability
A condition for your website to rank in Google is that Google can crawl
through your site. No crawling, means no saving of your site in the index
(see chapter 3) and thus no ranking. A quick way of checking whether a
page on your site can be spidered is by doing a quix SEO check. Simply
go to the quix SEO check page, enter the URL and check the results. If its
not green, youve got stuff to fix!
Having a site which Google does not crawl (sufficiently) could have several
causes. You could be:
1 blocking the specific URL with your robots.txt;
2 blocking Google through noindex tags;
3 blocking Google because the canonical is wrong.
The quix SEO check will check all these three causes.
-
40
1Robots.txt
Every website should have the file robots.txt. If you do not created such
a file yourself, WordPress will generate one for you. Robots.txt is a very
powerful file, which indicates which sections of your site are blocked from
robots including Google. Its not uncommon at all that if a developer
moves your new site from a development server to yours, copying the
robots.txt along, that he / she forgets to update it, leaving your site
blocked from crawling.
Testing a change to your robots.txt is easy: in Google Webmaster Tools
under Crawl Blocked URLs there are two textareas. The first contains
your robots.txt, you can just edit it to test your change. In the textarea
below that you can specify URLs that should be tested. Hit Test below that
and you should get the all clear.
Yoast Tip
If not, modify and test again. If you dont know how to use Google
Webmaster Tools, start reading here.
2Noindex tags
Sometimes people want some pages not to be indexed by Google. Maybe
you do not want your personal blog in the search results, but you do
want to show it on your website. You can use a noindex tag in the HTML
in order to keep Google from indexing your site. However, sometimes
these tags are written in pages where they should not have been.
-
41
Perhaps a noindex tag was added by a developer while working on your
site and was forgotten afterwards. The tag looks like this:
A noindex tag on a page results to no saving of this page in Googles
index. This page will not rank in Google on any search terms. You want
that meta robots tag to read:
The follow part in the tag tells a search engine that all links on your page
should be followed by the search engine for further indexing of your
website. If you dont specify any meta robots tags (most pages on the web
dont), the default is for that page to allow both indexation and following,
so the default is index,follow.
3Wrong canonical
If you have two pages holding the same content, thats problematic for
your rankings. To fix this problem, Google introduced the canonical link.
Matt Cutts explains this in this video. The basics are that a canonical link
is used to indicate to Google which page you would like Google to display
in the search results.
A canonical link should thus be used when two pages have the same
content. For instance, if you have two URLs that have the same (or 95%
the same) content, it would be beneficial to use a canonical link from
the duplicate page to the main page (you can do this with WordPress
SEO). If you dont know which one is the canonical one: pick one. Not
doing anything is more hurtful than just picking one.
-
42
The problem comes when youre setting the canonical wrong. This could
occur for instance by inserting a link to a 404 page or simply a non-existing
URL in that canonical link. Also, if your canonical link refers to a page
which is actually very different from the original page, Google will get
confused and your ranking may reduce as well. So make sure you use the
correct canonical links. Its a powerful tool, use it wisely.
Findability
Now that weve made sure Google can index your site, its time to tell Google
where the content is. To do that, we rely on two things: links to each page
on our website, which have been taken care of by the internal link structure
we made in chapter 5. Your sites structure determines whether a search
engine understands what your site is about, and how easily it will find and
index content relevant for your site. Findability can be increased by other
technical aspects as well. We will discuss the most important ones: XML
sitemaps, HTML sitemaps, related links & breadcrumbs.
XML sitemaps
XML sitemap contains a list of all the URLs of your website and keeps track
of its latest updates. The XML sitemap thus gives Google a kind of table of
content of your website. The XML sitemap are strictly meant for search
engines. They adhere to a standard created by the 3 big search engines
Yahoo!, Google and Bing, which you can find on sitemaps.org if you want
to see it. The good news is, if youre using WordPress, all you have to do is
install our WordPress SEO plugin and make sure XML sitemaps are
enabled within it. Our plugin will take care of the rest.
-
43
Whenever you publish a new or update an existing post or page, the
XML sitemap is then automatically updated and the search engines are
notified of this change in the XML sitemap. They will then fetch the XML
sitemap, see what changed and fetch the changed pages. This means
indexation of your content is sped up incredibly.
Do realize that for pages to rank, they need links. At a minimum, they
need internal links from your site, but if a page is important, it should
probably get high quality external links as well (see chapter 8 about link
building).
HTML sitemaps
Even if youve done the best possible job of creating a good internal link
structure, it can still be helpful to create an HTML sitemap that allows
visitors to get an overview of all the content on your site. If your site is
very big, you might need to split this up into several sitemaps to make it
workable.
The benefit to the search engines is that this page will make sure that no
page on your site is orphaned. every page has at least one link to it,
allowing search engines to rank it.
Related links
Another proven method of making sure search engines can find links to
the content on your site is by adding related links to posts and pages.
Most web hosts dont really like the related links plugins available for Word-
Press because theyre rather resource intensive for the server to run.
-
44
Yoast Tip
We recommend to use Post Connector (by former Yoast developer
Barry Kooij) to solve this problem.
Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs show the path people take when they click through your
site. They are often visualised on the top of a page so visitors can see how
they navigated. A breadcrumbs path could be Home Clothes Dresses.
Using breadcrumbs will allow Google to easily grasp the structure of
your site and this could well result in higher ranking.
Content optimization
The third and final stage in SEO is optimization. Now were sure that
search engines can find our content, its time to write copy. In writing and
structuring your text, you can actually help with indexing your page even
further. Good web copy makes sure that it is both readable and useful to
visitors as well as easy to rank for search engines. So you need all the
knowledge youve gathered about keyword research and then apply that
to your text. In the next chapter we will give you some tips on how to do
just that.
-
45
Chapter 7
SEO copywriting
Introduction
The text on your website is a very important factor in Googles algorithm.
Google spiders your text and indexes the relevant words. Your text should
thus be written in such a way that your keywords and search terms have
a prominent place. However, using your keywords too often severely
damages the readability of your text. In this chapter, we will give some
practical tips and teach you the basics of SEO copywriting.
Yoast Tip
If you want to read more about SEO copywriting, CopyBlogger is the
go to source.
Writing your text
Think before you write
Copywriting is a true profession. It can be quite hard. And copywriting in
order to optimize your website for search engines makes the job even
harder. Make sure the mission of your product (see chapter 4) is crystal
clear. Write it down. Think hard about the message of your text. What do
you want to tell your readers? And what is the purpose of your text? What
do you want you readers to do at the end of the page? Write down the
answers to these questions before you begin writing.
-
46
Use your keywords wisely
Of course, the keywords and search terms you want to be found on will
have a prominent place in your text. But make sure that you dont use
these search terms too often. If you want to rank for a certain term - say
childrens clothes - and you write a text which has the words childrens
clothes in every sentence, chances are big that your audience will be
pretty annoyed. Your text just isnt readable anymore. Keep in mind that
Google wants to facilitate its users. Users want texts that are understand-
able, well structured and easy to read.
As a general rule of thumb: try to put down your search terms in about
1 to 2 percent of your text. Make sure your articles have a minimum of
300 words. So in an article of 300 words, you should mention your search
terms 3 to 6 times. The minimum of 300 words isnt an exact science,
of course, nor is the amount of keyword mentions, but 300 is a decent
minimum number of words for an article that needs to show authority.
Use of subheadings
If you write longer texts and want people to find their way in your articles,
you should use subheadings. Headings help Google to grasp the main
topics of a long post and thus can help in your ranking. Use of subhead-
ings will probably let you get away with using the keyword less. Subheadings
will lead people, help them scan your page, and make the structure of
your articles that much clearer. Make sure that your keywords are used in
the subheadings, but do not put your keyword in every subheading (as it
will make the text unreadable). You can read more about headings in one
of Michiels posts.
-
47
Yoast Tip
Make sure you add pictures or illustrations to your text which fit the
content of your story. When you put a picture in your article, always
try to add an alt tag (containing your keyword) that is still descriptive
of the image.
Beware of over-optimization
Over-optimization in your copywriting can result in Google thinking youre
trying too hard. Google will then push your website down in the search
results. Always keep your audience in mind and write texts that are aimed
at your audience and easy to read.
Content writing with the WP SEO plugin
Our WP SEO plugin actually helps you to write a SEO-friendly text. If you
want the help of our plugin you should start by choosing your focus
keyword and entering it in the appropriate box. This is the most important
search term you want people to find this particular page for. Our plugin
actually measures many aspects of the text you are writing and helps with
making your text SEO-friendly. We will describe the most important ones:
1 The plugin allows you to formulate a meta-description. This description
has to be a short text which indicates the main topic of the page. If the
meta-description contains the search term people use, the exact text
will be shown by Google underneath your URL in the search results.
-
48
2 The plugin analyzes the text you write. It calculates a Flesch reading
ease score, which indicates the readability of your article. The Flesch
reading ease score for example takes into account the length of
sentences.
3 The plugin does a pretty big number of checks. It checks whether or not
you used your keyword in 5 important locations: the article-heading,
the title of the page, the URL of the page, the content of the article and
the meta-description. The plugin also checks the presence of links in
your article and the presence of images in the article. It calculates the
number of words and the density of usage of the focus keyword in the
article. Above that, the plugin also checks whether or not other pages
on your website use the same focus keyword, to prevent you from
competing with yourself.
If you write a text which is relatively SEO friendly (based on the aspects
mentioned before) the plugin will indicate this with a green bullet. Writing
pages with green bullets will help you improve the ranking of the pages
on your website.
Keeping your site up to date
There are many myths around having to keep your site updated for
Google. It thus is not entirely clear whether regularly updating your
website leads to a higher ranking in Google. But our advice is simple:
make sure that you regularly work on your website.
Adding an article regularly to your website will do the trick, which is why a
blog is very useful. Adding actual and functional information to your
-
49
website will give Google the idea that your website is alive. If it is not an
active website, Google will crawl it less often and it might become less
appealing to Google to include the page in the search results. Next to
that, make sure you keep your cornerstone content up to date (see
chapter 4).
-
50
Chapter 8
Link building
Introduction
Competitiveness of niche
In chapter 3 we divided the factors influencing Googles algorithm in two
categories. First, we distinguished on-page factors, which included, among
others, content and internal linking structure. And second, we distin-
guished off-page factors. Off-page factors are very hard to influence. The
niche of your business is an off-page factor. If your company operates in
the travel-industry, the competition to rank in Google is high. Other niches
are much less competitive, making ranking of your website that much
easier.
Links from other website
The most important off-page factor that helps with your ranking are links
from other websites. We know that your website will rank better if you
have more links. So, to optimize your website for search engines, it would
be very wise to collect as many high quality links to your site as possible.
How does a link help the ranking your site?
A link to your site helps in the ranking in four ways:
It adds value to the receiving page, allowing it to improve its visibility in
the search engines.
-
51
It adds value to the entire receiving domain, allowing each page on that
domain to improve its rank ever so slightly.
The text of the link is an indication to the search engine of the topic of
the website and more specifically the receiving page.
People click on links, resulting in so called direct traffic.
The value of a link for the receiving page is determined in part by the topic
of the page the link is on. A link from a page that has the same topic as the
receiving page is of far more value than a link from a page about an
entirely different topic. On top of that, a link from within an article is worth
way more than a link from a sidebar or a footer. Furthermore the more
links there are on a page, the less each individual link is worth. Read more
about how link building works in Joosts link building article.
Bad reputation
In recent years link building has gotten a somewhat nasty reputation.
Once people noticed that links from other sites resulted in higher rankings,
they began to abuse this. They got links from sites that did not have any
relation with their own site. In other cases, people bought links from other
sites. Buying links polluted the search engine. Not the best information,
but the people who buy most links would rank high in Google if buying
links would be allowed. That is why Google gives penalties to companies
who buy links or (mis)use links from non-related companies. If you get a
penalty from Google, your site will disappear from the search results. The
bad reputation of link building comes from companies who were a bit too
enthusiastic in link building and got penalties from Google. Does this
mean that you shouldnt do any link building at all? Of course not!
-
52
Link building the right way
Donts
When you decide to improve your ranking by doing some link building,
make sure you never pay for links. Never use services of companies that
tell you they can get you some links. If the links your website gets are from
sites that are unreliable (e.g. if there are only advertisements on the site),
you should get rid of them.
Its very important to keep in mind that if a link will never get natural clicks,
from people reading an article and clicking through, its not going to be a
very valuable link. Search engines are getting better and better at under-
standing which links truly connect the web and which are just there to
fool the search engine.
Outreaching PR-activity
Link building is an outreaching PR-activity. Link building should generate
visitors to your site that actually fit your site. As long as you are doing
nothing more than asking people to write about your awesome product,
it is perfectly OK. This could really increase your rankings. Link building
should feel like a normal marketing activity and not like a trick. But be
aware that link building this way takes a lot of time and it will continue
to take time. It does not have to be a hard or awkward activity. If your
product is good, there will be more than enough people who would like
to blog about it. Most bloggers need content, thus presenting your
product to them will make them happy!
-
53
Guest Blogging
Activities like guest blogging are nice link building activities as well. Guest
blogging has gotten quite some negative press in 2014. A large guest blog-
ging network was penalized by Google and the general SEO tendency
seemed to be to advise against guest blogging. This blogging network, in
the eyes of Google, abused guest blogging to create links.
The bottom line is that guest blogging as such can be good for your
rankings, if you do this occasionally and select the right websites for it. It
shouldnt be a blog post just to be linked on that website. If your posts
actually fits the guest blog and contributes to the website than its perfectly
OK. If youre going to do it at scale and reproduce the same content all
the time: that wont work.
Yoast Tip
Paddy Moogan has written an e-book about link building that we find
is one of the most comprehensive on the topic. Get it here.
-
54
Search Engine Optimization
Further reading
In this section, we have taught you the basics of Search Engine Optimi-
zation. If you want to know more about SEO we recommend you to read
our WordPress SEO article: The definitive guide to higher rankings for
WordPress sites. On yoast.com we post blogs on a regular basis with
information and tips on SEO. Read our posts on SEO!
-
Section
Navigationby Michiel Heijmans
-
56
About this section
In this section, we will teach you the basics of a good navigation. Navigation
is everything that has to do with guiding your visitors through your
website. You should help your visitors to find what they look for at your
site. In the previous section, we have told you the basics of attracting
people to your website. In this section, we will teach you how to help
people find what they look for once they are actually on your website! This
section contains a number of chapters in which we go over your website
from top to bottom. In this journey well stop at every navigational elements
we encounter and share our thoughts on this option. Sometimes we will
include insight from SEO, or effects on user experience, for using that
option. Finally, we have also included a few remarks on navigation on your
mobile website.
-
57
Chapter 9
Introduction to navigation
Why do we need navigation?
Imagine yourself being lost. Being lost without knowing how far you have
to travel. Without any sense of where you are and especially no sense of
where you need to go. Thats probably how your visitor will feel when your
website would lack any navigational features.
Many navigational elements
Luckily every website seems to have some kind of navigation. Navigational
features are not limited to your menu and submenu. There are many ways
of navigating through your website, although we do not label these as
such. In fact, we recommend making your menu as short as possible, and
trust the visitor will find the other ways to navigate your website. Under-
stand that every internal link on your website helps the visitor navigate.
That could be a single link in your text, your breadcrumbs or a footer link.
But it could also be a list of categories in your sidebar.
A top-down approach of your navigation
In this section we will analyze your navigational features, based upon an
imaginary map of your web page. This map is based upon the default
layout of a website, using a header, content area, right sidebar and a
footer. We will refer to those as respectively North, West, East and South.
-
58
Figure 7: imaginary map of your web page.
Travelling your website
In Jonathan Swifts well-known novel Gullivers Travels (1726), we find a
man that is lost at sea after shipwrecking. That totally resembles Daniel
Defoes Robinson Crusoe (1719), with one major difference: Robinson
had nowhere to go but the Island of Despair, while Gulliver travels on to
end up on four different locations before finally heading home. Fun fact is
that Gulliver visited the island with Yahoos last, where everybody is using
Google now.
On your website, you just want Gullivers, not Robinsons. Everybody that
gets lost on your website, should have a clear and visible escape route to
-
59
get to the next island, right? There are a lot of ways to give that visitor
directions to navigate your website, and while we discuss a lot of these in
this section were sure youll be able to come up with more. The following
chapters are meant to make you recognise and use the navigational
options your site has, to improve your user experience, usability and SEO
along the way.
-
60
Chapter 10
Top menu navigation: coming in from the North
Now lets imagine a visitor travelling over
your web page, entering from the upper
left the North - of your browser.
The Back button
One of the most clicked features in a
browser is probably the Back button of
the browser itself. If we end up on a page
where we cant find what we are looking
for, a simple click will bring us back to a
page we already know. Its as simple as that. The quickest escape from
an un wanted situation.
Unfortunately, the Back button is not something we can control. The use
of it however clearly tells us that we need clear crossroads in our website.
We need to have pages that redirect us to other sections of the website.
A page is never a dead end, there should always be a way back.
-
61
Yoast Tip
Make sure your visitors cant get lost. Make sure that every page
has a clear escape to get back to the previous page and to the
homepage.
Top navigation
We refer to the navigation options entirely on top of your website (above
your main menu) as top navigation. The top navigation is often over-
looked, but provides valuable background information for your website.
Some websites include home and contact links in the top navigation.
These are actually often a bit too important to put in your top navigation.
You would want a more prominent place for these.
When dividing your website in topics, you will find yourself left with a
number of menu items that do not fit the main menu (more on that later)
in any way. Lets mention a few to make this more clear:
Support
Documentation
How-to Register
RSSFeedbackContact
Terms
Sitemap
Search
Login
All these links are candidates for your top navigation. These are the links
we need, not the links we need to focus on.
-
62
Logo
Most websites give a prominent place to their logo somewhere in the
north. This is your unique feature, your lighthouse. There is no page on
your website that is not branded with your logo, if youve set up your web
pages the right way.
Logo links to homepage
It would be a wasted navigational option not to link that logo. Even on
your sales pages, where you may have reduced all noise by getting rid of
your main menu, the logo lighthouse will provide a nice, warm link back to
your homepage. Every ship lost at sea will then find its way back to that
safe harbor.
Trinity
Sometimes people make the mistake to link the logo to another page
than the homepage. Do not make that mistake! The logo should always
link to your homepage. It is part of a trinity; the first item in the main
menu, the first item in breadcrumbs and the logo. All these three
should always link to your homepage. It will be the lifeline for the
drowning visitor. Grab on to one of these and find yourself back on the
homepage.
Main menu
At this point we are crossing a border from our most northern territory
to the main section of our web page. That border, the main navigation,
-
63
is also called your global navigation. Its not always a horizontal naviga-
tion and its not always global, but that is just one of the terms introduced
to indicate the main menu on your website. Other names are top-level,
persistent or primary navigation. But in the end its your main menu,
right?
The main menu indicates the various sections of your website in a clear
and informative way. That global navigation should consist of a number
(not too much) main menu items that tell the visitor which corner of
your website should be visited for what information. In chapter 5 we
already gave practical insights in structuring your website. Your main
menu should reflect the structure of your website. Do not flood the
menu with unrelated items but think about which categories make
sense to your visitors.
Submenu
The submenu should contain details of the main menu item. When the
main item is Apple, the submenu should read something like iPhone,
iPad, Mac, iTunes. Note that these submenu items should also be present
on the Apple page.
There are many ways to add a submenu, the most common is where the
submenu drops down below the main menu item when hovering your
mouse over that item.
-
64
Figure 8: a submenu which drops down when hovering your
mouse over the main menu item. The downwards pointing
arrow shows a submenu exist.
Yoast Tip
Add an indication (like a downwards pointing arrow) in your main
menu item to show that it contains a submenu. Otherwise, visitors
will not know that a submenu exists!
-
65
Chapter 11
Navigation in main content: the Wild West
Main content
When we travel down from the North, going
counterclockwise, we enter the Wild West.
This is where the magic happens, some will
say. In a default website layout, this is
indeed your main content area. This is
where your company information is, or
where we will find your blog posts.
The main content (or the wild west) might
just be the most overlooked part of your
website when it comes to links and naviga-
tional options for your website. Yet there are many ways to offer navigation
here. The navigational options are not always prominent or obvious, but
without even knowing it yourself, this is where you can most easily guide
your visitor.
As the visitor has already decided on reading that specific page, what
would be more easy than offer related content in that main part of your
website as well? In this chapter, we will give you some navigational options
to use in the main content part of your site.
-
66
Breadcrumbs
Youll want to add breadcrumbs to your single posts and pages. Bread-
crumbs are the links, usually above the title post, that look like: Home
WordPress WordPress Plugins. They are good for two things. First of all,
they allow your users to easily navigate through your site. And secondly,
they allow search engines to determine the structure of your site more
easily.
These breadcrumbs should link back to the homepage, and the category
the post is in. If the post is in multiple categories it should pick one.
Yoast Tip
The Yoast WordPress SEO plugin actually helps you to create bread-
crumbs fairly easy.
Make sure your website has a nice internal structure, like discussed in
chapter 5. We often hear people say things like: My website only has two
layers: home and the page at hand. So breadcrumbs are useless. Our ques-
tion in this case would immediately be: Why havent you structured your
content a bit better? Breadcrumbs make valuable internal links, and
provide a simple, structural navigation. If your website has multiple levels
of content, you want breadcrumbs.
-
67
Yoast Tip
Breadcrumbs improve the navigation of your site, but are valuable
for SEO as well.
On-page navigation
At Yoast, we dont mind scrolling. We love long, textual content. If you
want to be the authority on a subject, you should be able to write a whole
lot about it. Thats also how Google will see this. If you want a page to
rank with three lines of text, even Google will smile and give you lower
rankings for the page or not rank you at all (see also chapter 7 on SEO
copy writing).
Now with long pages, there is a simple way to improve usability of that
page: by adding on-page navigation. Just create links that refer to a place
in the article below. At yoast.com, we use this for instance for our main
SEO for WordPress article. There is actually quite a lengthy index on that
page. An added benefit is that the anchors on the page itself allow us to
link directly to a chapter on that page.
Teaser blocks/Call-to-action blocks
When making a list of navigational options, we almost forgot teaser
blocks. Teaser blocks are not the first things that come to mind when listing
navigational options. Were not even sure that is the right terminology for
these blocks, but calling them teasers seems to cover their purpose.
-
68
These blocks populate your homepage or sidebar and have a distinct
navigational use. As secondary calls-to-action, for instance, they guide the
visitor to the green meadows of your website: your main or money pages.
Teaser blocks actually work very well. We sometimes wonder why web-
sites that sell a product or service are using Google Adsense to make an
extra buck instead of creating nice, appealing product banners that lure
the visitor to the right sales page. Why use valuable space on your website
for another product than your own?
Yoast Tip
New templates, such as templates from StudioPress or Woo -
Themes, and our own WordPress Themes, reserve space for these
teasers. Where old themes were mainly about sliders and widgets,
new themes seem to take calls-to-action and textual teasers in
account. When wireframing your new design, add these
teaser-blocks.
Pagination
People do not want to click through an endless collection of posts.
Suppose your blog has 1,000 articles and youre 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.
-
69
By adding a numbered pagination, linking for instance the first, second,
third, tenth, twentieth, thirtieth, up to the ninetieth and last page, you
would reduce that number of clicks to five. 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 rather simple way.
Figure 9: you dont want to click each page to get
to page 50.
Figure 10: you should be able to skip pages.
Categorizing and tagging your content
WordPress offers the possibility to create structure while writing your
posts. It has two ways of doing this: you can use categories and you can
use tags. The difference is that categories are hierarchical, so you can
have sub-categories and sub-sub-categories, whereas tags are unstruc-
tured. You can compare the categories to the table of contents of your
website, and tags as the Index.
Both of these are called taxonomies within the WordPress world and you
could add more of them if you wanted to. Category and tag themselves
dont convey much meaning. But if you added another taxonomy called
Region, itd be immediately obvious that those should hold all the keywords
related to the location of the article. You could add this as a hierarchical
taxonomy and create a Continent Country Region structure, or you
-
70
could make it free form (tags). Both have their benefits, but choose wisely,
as changing from one to the other is a painful process.
At Yoast, we prefer using categories for high level topic specification and
tags for more specific topic specification. So SEO is a category, XML site-
map or HTML sitemap would be a tag. If you use these taxonomies in a
recognizable way, people will use them to navigate your website if theyre
looking for a specific topic. And that was our goal, wasnt it?
Make taxonomies visible!
A lot of people forget to make their taxonomies visible to a visitor. What
would be the use of these taxonomies in that case? So your posts are
nicely archived for yourself? That would be a waste of that taxonomy. In
some themes, the categories and tags are instantly shown as you add
them to your post. But, some themes neglect to do so. You should make
sure these tags and categories are in fact shown, preferably at the bottom
of your article.
Taxonomies can go wrong!
A lot could go wrong with taxonomies when people start using them
randomly. The structure of your taxonomies is important. As taxonomies
group your content, you should keep in mind where these could be used,
how they are used and where they are linked. Do not create too many
categories. Do not create too many tags. Make sure tags are used more
than once or twice.
-
71
Yoast Tip
Dont go creating a list of categories longer than Rapunzels hair. That
will mean you have probably gone overboard creating categories.
We usually recommend eight to ten categories. If you need more,
you might consider adding more taxonomies, not categories. If half
of your categories is about people, why not add a People taxonomy
instead.
-
72
Chapter 12
Sidebar: in the East
For the visitor that is still lost after going
over the top and left sides of your
website, the right of your (default) website
contains a sidebar that could help him or
her find that one page theyre looking for.
The sidebar is suitable for a number of
lists and widgets.
Listings
The sidebar is especially well suited for a
few types of listings. In chapter 11 we already discussed taxonomies,
categories and tags. Taxonomies are great navigational features. People
can easily grasp the structure of your website by navigating through your
taxonomies. A list of your categories could also be added to your sidebar
providing this list is not too long. Adding a list with 100 categories in your
sidebar, would be plain stupid. Please keep the total number of links per
page around 50 max. That might seem a bit low for your website, but if
you keep your menu short and focussed and do not add a surplus of
unnecessary links to your sidebar and footer, youll really have to push to
get 50 links on that page.
-
73
Recent posts
A recent post widget is a great way to remind your visitors you also have
a blog and tell them about all the latest things you have written. It really
doesnt matter if these posts are company related or deal with market
insights. If you frequently update your blog (or news section), that recent
posts section in your sidebar will be filled with interesting reading mate-
rial for your visitors.
Recent comments
If you have an active blog, and you invite your visitors to comment on your
posts, a recent comments section could also be valuable. If youve built an
active community around your website or brand, comments could be a
way for the community to make themselves heard.
Yoast Tip
A recent comments widget can be very helpful! People might
comment on a post using keywords they use themselves in search,
which might help you rank for these as well or at least invite you to
vary your keyword use with these alternatives. But comments might
also give you ideas for new posts. Showing you have an active
community will entice others to visit your blog section as well.
-
74
Teasers and banners
The sidebar probably contains a lot more links or more teasers. These
could for instance be banners for your own products you sell on our
website.
Search option
If your website has over twenty nice, long pages, there will need to be a
search option. This search form should either be in the top of your side-
bar, or in your header. We tend to prefer the top of the sidebar. We also
recommend saving a prominent spot for your search option on your 404
page. When lost, you can find what you are looking for.
Search result page
Adding a search option to your website does come with the responsibility
to create great search result pages as well. Unfortunately this is often
overlooked. Just adding the WordPress search functionality does not
provide you with these great search result pages (nor the best results, to
be honest).
Yoast Tip
Plugins like Relevanssi or WP Search for instance order posts by
relevancy instead of date (WordPress default) and highlight the
keyword that was used in the text snippet below the title in search
result pages.
-
75
Chapter 13
Footer: in the South
The footer of your website is for all the
information that is not your main content,
but should be listed on your website. No,
lets rephrase that: There are two types of
footers, the one with just the copyright
and some extra links, and footers that
contain footer blocks with information.
That information can be an address, a
short contact form, payment options or
quality and security marks. But there most
probably will also be links.
Footer links
What not to do?
When adding links to your footer, always wonder if that link deserves to be
tucked away in that footer. Repeating your main menu items for instance.
Now why would you want to do that? Your menu is already on that page
and if you want that menu to be available for the visitor that scrolled all
the way down, why not simply stick that menu to the top of the browser?
Hence the name sticky menu. When we decided to build themes, the
(mobile and) sticky menu were the first things we decided these themes
should have. Its just very convenient to have that menu present at all
-
76
times. Repeating the menu in the footer seems a bit silly, to be honest.
Why sacrifice that space to repeat something that is already on your site.
Figure 11: sticky menu
What to do?
It would make sense to list your categories, recent posts or comments,
for instance when there is no sidebar in your design. You just have to
make sure these footer links are useful for the visitor. When in doubt, the
link probably isnt useful.
Common links that we find in footers are of course terms of delivery,
copyright links, perhaps another link to your contact page. Besides asking
yourself if that link should be added, also ask yourself if that link needs
to pass on link juice to the next page. Add a rel=nofollow to that terms
of delivery link. That page does not need to rank anyway. These links can
be found in the larger footer area with blocks, or in the final line of your
website, right after the copyright statement.
HTML sitemap
The footer is also a good place to link to your HTML sitemap. There should
be an HTML sitemap available when your website exceeds about 20
-
77
pages. Your HTML sitemap lists all the pages and posts on your website.
If you structure your HTML sitemap into clear sections for pages and
posts and more, the sitemap could be a visitors last resort. When even
search fails, the HTML sitemap could be used to find that related post, or
the category you did not list in your sidebar.
For Google, that HTML sitemap is nice to get to all your pages, but you
probably already presented it with an XML sitemap as well, right? In that
case, the focus in the HTML sitemap should really be on making it a user
friendly document that could start the journey all over again.
-
78
Chapter 14
Mobile website
Now that we have travelled the entire website map, we are left with that
one island that remains: the mobile website.
Yoast Tip
Make sure your links are clickable on a mobile phone. Were not just
referring to your telephone number. If, for instance, your sidebar
contains a list of categories, make sure one can click one link at a
time, and the sidebar is not crammed with links, so clicking one is
nearly impossible without zooming. There needs to be sufficient
white space around that link.
Mobile menu
We all know that hamburger icon, adding that as a substitute for your
menu seems logical: its a space saver. Most menus drop down to the
bottom, but some fold out to the left or right. The main advantage of the
left menu is that you can use the entire height of the screen for the navi-
gation, where for instance the much used TwentyTwelve theme by
WordPress has this drop down menu below the logo/site name, meaning
there is less vertical space to use for the menu. On the other hand, that
might help you to keep your menu short and focused.
-
79
Hamburger
icon
Figure 12: Hamburger menu;
drop down to the bottom
Figure 13: TwentyTwelve: drop
down menu below logo/name
TwentyTwelve actually does not use that hamburger image for the menu.
It just uses the word Menu. That does seem to make more sense than the
hamburger icon in the middle of your website!
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.
Mobile search
Perhaps the most important navigational option for a mobile website is
the search option. If you have a huge website with hundreds of pages or
-
80
more, why bother listing all these pages in a menu when a visitor could
just search for it in a second after arriving on your website? Make sure
the search option is clearly visible in either your mobile top bar or simply
in the website itself.
In-text links
Finally we would like to mention the links within your texts itself. We have
seen websites that have added extra padding (whitespace) around these
links as well. And why shouldnt you? Thumb-thickness is a factor in how
useful these links are on a mobile websites. Also take line height in
account.
Figure 14: two examples of line height
-
81
Navigation
Further reading
In this section we have taught you how to help your visitors through your
site. If you want to read more about Navigation and Usability, check out
yoast.com. We wrote a whole bunch of blog posts on Usability.
-
82
Section
Salesby Thijs de Valk
-
83
About this section
In the previous sections we taught you the basics of SEO and of how to
help your visitors navigate through your website. In this section we will
explain how to get sales from your website and well guide you in improv-
ing your webshop. We will use insights from psychology which are useful
in directing your visitors and give some tips about what you should think
about to close the deal. In the first chapter, we will give practical tips you
can use to easily improve the sales of your website. In the next and final
chapter of this section we will specifically look at the checkout process.
-
84
Chapter 15
Making money with your website
Creating a shop
A WordPress site can easily be transformed in a webshop. There are
numerous plugins that add the functionality you need to make your
website a webshop. We would recommend to use either Woocommerce
or Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) to create your shop.
WooCommerce
If you have, or want to start, a webshop selling physical product,
Woo Commerce is definitely the way to go. This plugin instantly converts
your WordPress based website to a shop and is fairly easy to use. This
free plugin makes it easy to display your products, adds the functionality
you need to let your customers pay for their stuff and helps you to manage
your inventory.
Yoast Tip
Easily combine your WooCommerce webshop a