Technical SEO archives

Your robots.txt file is a powerful tool when working on a website’s SEO – but you should handle it with care. It allows you to deny search engines access to different files and folders, but often that’s not the best way to optimize your site. Here, we’ll explain how we think site owners should use their …

Sometimes Google does announcements about new features and we go “huh, why did they do that?” This week we had one of those. Google introduced a new set of robots meta controls, that allows sites to limit the display of their snippets in the search results. There is a reason for that, but they buried …

WordPress is huge. According to the latest stats, WordPress powers almost 35% of the web — and keeps on growing. With many sites staying true to the CMS and many new sites bursting onto the scene, there are a lot of new users taking their first steps into the wonderful world of WordPress. People from …

If your website is important to your business, it’s essential to schedule time to keep it running smoothly. Therefore we regularly write about the things you should do to keep your site in shape. In this post, we’ll write about the most basic of all: checking for 404 errors. Note: this post does not cover the required elements of a …

Whenever you delete a page (or post) from your site, you also delete one or more URLs. That old URL, when visited, will usually return a ‘404 not found’ error, which is not the best thing for Google or your users. Is that what you really wanted to happen? You could redirect that deleted page …

Duplicate content is much-dreaded in the world of SEO. If your content lives on multiple pages on your site, or other websites, Google might get confused and won’t know what to rank first. You’ll want to prevent duplicate content as much as possible. So, what can you do, yourself? Here, I’ll explain how to perform …

This post explains what AMP is and aims to do, who should implement and why, how to get your WordPress site ready for AMP and how to make sure Yoast SEO integrates nicely with it. What are Accelerated Mobile Pages/AMP? The Accelerated Mobile Pages project aims to make pages load instantly on mobile. The web is slow …

Once upon a time, there was a little robot who came to a website to try to figure out what it was all about. The robot read some words and followed some links and thought: “Well, there are a lot of mentions of this particular word, so the page must be about that!” She sent …

Have you read my post on image SEO? On that post, I got this comment from Jerry, a professional photographer: “In galleries, do you have any suggestions about what the ALT text should look like? The main concern is that we don’t want to be perceived as keyword spamming; using the same keyword in all the …

If you want to keep your page out of the search results, there are a number of things you can do. Most options aren’t hard and you can implement these without a ton of technical knowledge. If you can check a box, your content management system will probably have an option for that. Or allows …