Archive for category: SEO

A tutorial to higher rankings for WordPress sites

This is the original WordPress SEO article since 2008, fully updated for 2022!

WordPress is one of the best content management systems for SEO. But even though it gets a lot right “out of the box,†there’s much more that you can do to improve your performance. It’s time to focus on WordPress SEO!

Optimizing your site using the tactics and best practices outlined in this article will help you improve your rankings, gain more subscribers or sales, and have a better website.

Because you should ingrain proper SEO in all aspects of your online marketing and PR, this guide covers quite a lot of ground! It’s a long read, so feel free to use the table of contents below to jump around.

Before we start…

This article assumes that you’re using our Yoast SEO plugin, which adds more features and SEO tools to WordPress. If you’re not already using it, you can set it up right away with our beginner’s guide to Yoast SEO. Please check out the Yoast SEO for Shopify app if you are running a Shopify online store.

Read more: How much does Yoast SEO cost? »

Most of the principles will still apply if you’re using another SEO plugin. Of course, we’d prefer you to switch over and use our powerful WordPress SEO plugin, which is why we’ve written a migration guide for you. It’s a straightforward process!

Table of contents

• Get your basic WordPress SEO right
• Optimize your content
• Optimize your site structure
• Speed up your WordPress website
• Secure your WordPress website
• Cater to your mobile visitors
• Analyze and improve your performance
• Promote your site
• Conclusions

Get your basic WordPress SEO right

Want to learn how to build your own WordPress site?

We have an epic article on that — including hours of video. Find out how to make a WordPress website.

Out of the box, WordPress is a pretty well-optimized content management system. A basic setup can provide a strong foundation without extensive customization, theme optimization, and plugins. Beginners can get started pretty quickly with WordPress SEO. That said, you can do a few things with WordPress SEO to increase your chances of ranking, refine your workflow, and make sure your website is perfectly optimized.

By putting the correct basic settings in place and applying a few simple techniques, you can ensure that you have a solid foundation to build upon!

1.1. Check your site health

Before you make any changes to your site, it is good to see where you are now. There’s a lot to gain from getting it right: running your website on a server with updated software at a web host that offers excellent performance. So ask yourself: on what hardware and software are your sites running? What is your hosting plan? Are you using a budget shared hosting provider, or have you invested in a dedicated hosting plan at a well-known web host that fine-tuned its servers with WordPress?

To find out what’s going on behind the scenes of your site, you can visit the Site Health section in WordPress. Also, you could choose to install the Health Check plugin. This plugin gives you loads of technical insights and helps you get information that outside parties can use to help you improve your site. Eventually, all features of the Health Check plugin will move to WordPress core.

1.1.1 Check you’re using suitable hosting

According to WordPress’s technical requirements page, the recommended hosting plan to run WordPress should include a modern version of PHP, MySQL or MariaDB, and HTTPS support. It is possible to work with older server software, but that is not recommended. If you check your Site Health, you can see the technical details of your installation. In addition, if you open your hosting provider’s dashboard, you should be able to see what type of plan you are on.

Remember, paying for good WordPress hosting pays dividends. Upgrading your hosting plan is one of the easiest improvements you can make.

1.1.2. Upgrade to a recent version of PHP

While the numbers are going down quickly, many WordPress sites still run on outdated versions of PHP. One look at the WordPress stats reveals that some sites still run on a PHP version in the five series, while PHP 8.0 and up have been available for years. These old PHP versions don’t receive any more security fixes and are thus increasingly vulnerable to attacks.

Luckily, the WordPress team has dropped support for anything older than PHP 5.6.20. Today, the project recommends running WordPress on at least PHP 7.4.

So, one of the most important things you can do to improve the performance and security of your site — and thus, your WordPress SEO –, is to upgrade your hosting environment to a modern version of PHP. There are a lot of benefits to this:

• PHP 7+ offers an incredible speed boost.
• It runs a lot more efficiently, meaning less stress on your server.
• Bring loads of modern development features.
• It’s a much safer and more secure environment.
• It’s future-proof.

Now, this is something we all want. If you’ve checked your current hosting set-up in the previous section, you have an idea of what your site runs on now. If this shows outdated server software like PHP 5.5, it is good to update this. However, take special care before doing so. Ask for help if you’re not sure what you are doing — especially if you are a beginner working on your WordPress SEO.

Here are some steps to take:

• (Always!) Back up your website.
• Make a local staging environment based on a modern version of PHP.
• Install the backup of your site on that server.
• Test thoroughly to see if everything works properly.
• Upgrade your live site — most of the time, your hosting provider can do this for you.

We have a post that shows you how to set up a test environment for your WordPress site. WordPress.org has a post on the advantages of updating your PHP version and what to consider when doing that.

1.1.3. Make sure you’re using SSL and HTTPS

Adopting SSL (getting an HTTPS URL and a green padlock icon in the browser URL bar) was an optional tactic in the past. Many sites, arguably, didn’t need the extra level of security that SSL provides.

Today, having a valid SSL certificate installed is mandatory — search engines may ‘penalize’ sites without valid SSL certificates and setups (and/or show warnings next to their search results). Google has mentioned that HTTPS is a ranking signal. In addition, it’s generally good practice for all websites to use SSL to prevent hackers and third parties from intercepting requests and data.

Many modern site speed and performance techniques require a valid SSL/HTTPS setup. To take advantage of faster web technologies like HTTP/2 and the upcoming HTTP/3, browsers like Google Chrome and Firefox need the website to have a valid SSL certificate.

If you want to move to SSL and ensure that your site is served correctly over HTTPS, we have a handy guide with tips & tricks for moving to HTTPS. Since version 5.7, WordPress comes with a basic tool to make the detection of and moving to HTTPS easier.

1.2. Check your site settings

It’s worth spending some time clicking through all of the sections in the WordPress Settings menu, as many of the options there can impact the SEO of your WordPress site.

In particular, it’s worth double-checking your visibility settings in Settings → Reading to ensure that you’re not accidentally preventing search engines from indexing your website. That’d hurt your visibility and your WordPress SEO!

You should also ensure that your Writing and Reading settings are all set correctly; these control your default categories and what should be displayed on your homepage. Don’t forget to give your site a strong tagline in Settings → General!

1.3. Pick the right permalink structure

Your permalink settings define what format your page and post URLs will take, which can significantly impact WordPress SEO. So if you’re creating a new site, one of the first things you should do is change your permalink settings, which you can find in Settings → Permalinks.

If you don’t change your settings from the default, all of your pages and posts will have URLs that look like example.com/?p=123. While this is perfectly okay, it’s not particularly nice, and it might impact how users and search engines perceive the quality and relevance of your pages.

Changing the permalink structure alters your website’s URLs, components, ordering, and structure. Therefore, selecting the correct format when setting up your website is essential, as changing it later can cause SEO issues.

We usually recommend that people use a structure that creates URLs that look like example.com/post-name/, or example.com/category/post-name/, depending on how much importance they anticipate placing on categorizing their content. Choosing either of these options will be perfectly suitable for most WordPress sites.

For the first option, you can just change the permalink setting to /%postname%/, like so:

To include the category, you can select “Custom Structure†and change the value to /%category%/%postname%/.

If you previously had ?p=<postid> as your permalink, WordPress will take care of all the redirects for you. This is also true if you change from /%postname%/ to /%category%/%postname%/.

If you have an established site and change from any other permalink structure, you might want to consult our article on changing your WordPress permalink structure and the tool you’ll find.

1.3.1. Choose WWW or non-WWW

It would help if you thought about what you want your site to show as www.example.com, or simply example.com. Make sure that in your general settings, in Settings → General, the version you want to show up is properly reflected:

From an SEO perspective, there’s little difference either way. Additionally, most hosting and server setups will automatically redirect requests for the ‘wrong’ version to your selected version. That makes this primarily a branding consideration — which approach feels best for your site?

There’s not a massive amount of difference from a technical perspective, either. Some setups might have minor headaches if they omit the ‘www’ component, but these are increasingly rare.

2. Optimize your content

WordPress SEO also means your site should provide the best content on your chosen subject. People are looking for engaging, authoritative articles and trustworthy answers to their questions. Writing high-quality content for your WordPress site begins with your unique ideas or distinctive take on a particular topic. But it also means presenting these ideas in a well-structured and accessible manner. This will help you attract the audience you’re looking for and keep them engaged.

2.1. Research what your users want and need

Curious about the WordPress block editor?

Still haven’t tried the new block editor? Tried, but found it confusing? We’re here to help: our free WordPress block editor course explains everything you need to know!

Before writing your content, you should think about what search terms you want to be found for. Then, you should optimize every page or post for a specific keyphrase.

But how can you determine what keyphrase you want to be found for? To find out, you need to do keyword research. In this process, you should ask yourself questions: what terms do I want to rank for? How realistic is it that I can rank for these terms?

Imagine you have a baking blog, and you’re passionate about sharing your favorite recipes and baking techniques. Optimizing a post for a term like [best cake recipe] isn’t a realistic goal because it’s a very general term. There’s a lot of competition for such general terms. Instead, it would help if you thought about finding your niche. This niche could be [healthy, low-sugar cake recipes] or [French patisserie you can make at home].

Within a niche, you can become an expert. Your expertise enables you to create content that goes beyond that of your competitors. You can go deeper than others or shed light on different angles of the same topic. For this, you’ll want to focus on long-tail keyphrases. For example, a long-tail keyphrase might be [how to make a low-calorie vegan blueberry cheesecake]. A keyphrase like this is more specific and easier to rank for. Also, it’ll be more suitable for your particular niche topic.

Focus on search intent

It’s also essential to think about what your audience wants to achieve by searching for a specific term. This is called search intent. For example, they could be looking for the answer to a particular question, and you can provide the necessary information. Or they might want to buy a specific product that you can offer them. Think about the needs of your visitors and address them by creating content accordingly.

Need a hand doing keyword research properly? Our Keyword research training can help. This course is part of our Yoast SEO academy. You’ll get access to Academy for free once you sign up for Yoast SEO Premium — two essential products for one low price.

2.2. Write great content for your users

After you’ve done your keyword research and know the topics you want to write about, you need to get to the actual writing. Most of the time, that’s easier said than done. To get from an idea to a great piece of content, most likely, you’ll have to follow a cycle of drafting, writing, editing, and rewriting.

Your first draft can be an outline of your structure. You don’t have to write out everything in perfect prose at this point, but make sure that you follow a logical structure. Most pieces will include an introduction, your main points of argument, and a conclusion. Of course, this will vary per genre – a recipe will have a completely different structure.

You can further flesh out the points in the writing phase, where you try to develop a first complete version of your text. Finally, you should check whether your piece is engaging and easy to read in the editing phase. You might be an expert on your topic, but your audience probably isn’t (yet). So try to make your writing as accessible as possible. Readability is essential. The readability analysis in Yoast SEO helps you improve your writing.

Beginners can find writing hard, but there’s help around the corner. When in doubt, it’s always best to ask a friend or colleague for some feedback. Another helpful trick is to read your text out loud to yourself. You can even let your computer speak it. It will give you a better idea of whether everything flows nicely.

2.3. Optimize your individual posts and pages

When writing or editing your post for your WordPress site, you need to pay special attention to some elements to make it SEO-friendly. These elements include your subheadings, your SEO title, and your meta description — all of these need to reflect the topic of the specific post.

Don’t forget, SEO-friendly doesn’t just mean that it’s easy for a search engine to grasp a page’s topic. More importantly, it means that your visitors can get the gist of your page at a single glance.

Your meta description and your SEO title might be a deciding factor for whether visitors click on your page in the search results in the first place. And once they’ve visited your site, elements like subheadings can be critical for visitors to decide whether they want to stay on your site.

2.3.1. Set your focus keyphrase(s)

One important rule is not to use a focus keyphrase on more than one page. Otherwise, you might end up cannibalizing yourself. Most of the time, you don’t want to rank for multiple pages on the same keyphrase because it means that you’re setting yourself up as your competition.

It’s also essential to include the focus keyphrase in crucial elements of your post, such as the SEO title, the introduction, your subheadings, and your meta description. All of these elements are signals for what your post is about. Since your focus keyphrase is, in fact, the main topic of your page, it’s a logical consequence that you should make sure this topic is reflected in all of these elements.

The same logic holds for your text overall: you need to make sure that you don’t stray off-topic; if you stay on-topic, it should follow naturally that you use your keyphrase multiple times throughout your text. But avoid stuffing your writing with your keyphrase. If you find it hard to include your keyphrase in your text a sufficient number of times, it might be a sign that you should take a different approach to the topic.

To avoid repetition, you can use synonyms and related keyphrases. Synonyms mean the same or more or less the same as your keyphrase. An example of this is the words film and movie. Search engines will recognize that they have the same meaning, which you can also check by looking at the search results: if you search for movie, film will also be highlighted in the results, and vice versa.

You can also use related keyphrases to optimize a single page for similar, related terms. You can use these to give context to your keyphrase. For example, if your keyphrase is [pumpkin soup], your related keyphrase might be [winter weeknight dinners]. This second, broader term gives additional information about your topic. It can also create coherence by establishing a link to similar pages on your post.

The Yoast SEO Premium analysis makes it easier to optimize your post thanks to word forms, synonyms, and related keyphrases. Not only that, but Yoast SEO also comes with a Semrush integration that helps you find related keyphrases — including volume and trend data.

2.3.2. Optimize your permalink

In most cases, your post’s URL should probably contain your focus keyphrase so that it’s obvious what your page is about from the link. You should always try and keep your permalinks short, descriptive, and clean — don’t put unnecessary words in for the sake of it!

Before you publish new posts or pages, you may also wish to consider removing ‘function words‘ from your permalink. These are words like “aâ€, “andâ€, and “theâ€. This may make your permalinks more readable and easier to use or link to when done carefully. Posts with incredibly long titles may benefit from this approach.

We recommend being careful when changing permalinks for posts you have already published. If people have already linked to your pages, changing the URLs may make a mess. Even though WordPress will sometimes redirect users to the new location (the redirect manager in Yoast SEO Premium handles this automatically and more reliably), changing URLs can impact performance.

2.3.3. Optimize your page title

Each page’s title — the contents of the HTML <title> tag — can be one of the most critical factors for ranking well in search results. Not only is it the literal title of the tab or browser window, but it’s also the first line people see in the search results. It describes what your page is or is about and acts as an advert that encourages users to click.

On many websites, the default structure for posts and pages isn’t necessarily the most optimal approach for SEO. An title like “My blog » Cooking » Carbonara recipe†isn’t as compelling as “My 20-minute delicious carbonara recipe | My Blogâ€.

You must think about the structure of your titles and the content of the title on each page. Typically, it’s worth considering that:

• Search engines may put more weight on the early words, so getting your keywords near the start of the title might make you more likely to rank well.
• People scanning result pages see the early words first. If your keywords are at the start of your listing, your page is more likely to get clicked on.

Keep in mind that search engines can rewrite things like SEO titles and meta descriptions if they think they can better describe your content.

For more info on how to create enticing titles for your posts, read our article on crafting good titles for SEO.

Did you know? You can use Yoast SEO to structure your SEO titles! You can control the default structure of your page titles and descriptions in your Yoast SEO plugin. There are two parts of the plugin that control these. First of all, as soon as you install and activate the plugin, you get an ‘SEO’ section in your WordPress admin.

Navigate to SEO → Search Appearance, and you’ll see a bunch of tabs for different types of pages on your site. For each post type and taxonomy, you can set a so-called Title Template — as well as meta description templates. For example, for posts on our site, this looks like this:

This allows you to use components and variables to control how your page titles should behave by default. Of course, these can be overridden on a page-by-page basis. For example, in the image above, you can see how we’re automatically grabbing elements like the page’s title to stop us from having to write titles from scratch for every page manually.

There are all sorts of variables you can use in the SEO titles and meta description, and they’re all listed and explained in the help tab on the page.

For advanced users, there are some additional cool features. For instance, you can use cf_<custom field name> to drop in any custom field — either from a post meta value or a user meta value.

NOTE: When you use these templates, check that your title tags behave as expected when viewed on the site. If they don’t, you may have a problem with the way your theme is built, and you might need to check the “Force rewrite†checkbox in our options. You can also follow these instructions to modify your templates.

2.3.4. Use headings correctly

Headings are great for structuring your content and helping readers process information in bite-sized chunks. They can also help describe a page’s layout and focus on search engines.

WordPress transforms the headings you put in your content into their respective HTML tags (<h1>, <h2>, <h3> and so on). That makes it important to think about which type of headings you use and in which order. Getting that wrong can make your content harder to understand.

Although most themes for WordPress get the basics right, it’s worth making sure that your template sets your post title is an <h1> tag, and that you’re not using <h1> tags anywhere else on your page or in your post content. Your post content should then ‘flow’ naturally; for example, large, significant headings should use <h2> tags, subsections should use <h3> tags, and then subsequent new sections should use <h2>.

Please read this article on headings and SEO to learn why proper titles are essential. In addition, you can read our article about the heading structure for your blog — from which a lot applies to non-blog WordPress sites.

2.3.5. Optimize your meta description

We don’t recommend automated descriptions

Some themes and plugins try to produce descriptions automatically, by taking the first sentence or so of a post. This is a clever shortcut, but it rarely produces good descriptions. The first sentence of a post is often introductory information, which doesn’t provide a great summary or an enticing advert!

The only well-written description is a handwritten one, and if you’re thinking of auto-generating the meta description, you might as well not do anything, and let the search engine pick and control the snippet.

NOTE: Search engines may choose to ignore your meta description if they think that it’s unsuitable for the page, or they might choose to show a custom description from the page content if they think it’s a better fit. There’s no way of forcing them to use your specific snippet.

Search engines primarily use a meta description to describe your page in the search engine results, usually below your page title. Tailoring and writing a descriptive meta description can encourage users to click your results in the search engine, even if you’re not necessarily ranking in the top position. It’s an advert, and your opportunity to impress.

Writing compelling, informative descriptions of your page content for every page on your site is best practice and allows you to attract more visits. While it might feel like a lot of work to craft descriptions for every page and post, it’s worth the effort.

If you don’t provide a meta description, the search engine will generally try to find the keyword searched for on your page and automatically pick a string around that — and highlight the searched phrase in bold on the results page. In some cases, Google will generate its meta description for you.

Automatically generated snippets (whether by plugins or search engines) are rarely as descriptive or as compelling as hand-written ones. So, we recommend that you use the meta description field you find in the Yoast SEO plugin to write a meta description. Make sure it entices the reader to click through and make sure that it contains the focus keyword of your post or page at least once.

2.3.6. Optimize your images and media

An often overlooked part of WordPress SEO is handling your images, videos, and media content. To ensure that search engines can understand your images, you need to think about how you name and format your files. Make sure to pick the correct format and optimize every image. Also, try to see if you can use next-gen image formats like WebP — which WordPress is starting to support. Writing descriptive accessible text descriptions helps to make your images more understandable and can improve your performance significantly. As an added benefit, you’re also helping out readers who rely on assistive technologies like screen readers.

Using the proper alt attributes for images and transcripts of videos are also something that we check in the content analysis functionality of our Yoast SEO plugin. We have a longer article on image SEO and one writing alt tags, which can give you more tips to fine-tune your image optimization!

2.4. Maintain your content quality

2.4.1 Keep your content fresh and up to date

As Google strives to show its users the best and most up-to-date information, you should keep track of your content and revise it regularly because you don’t want to show your website visitors outdated, redundant or incorrect information.

If you publish regularly and have hundreds or thousands of blog posts, this is easier said than done. That’s why we’d advise focusing on two specific areas for content maintenance: updating cornerstone content and preventing keyword cannibalization.

2.4.2. Update your cornerstone content

Some pages on your site are more important than others. The most valuable content of your site is called cornerstone content. We’ve written extensively about cornerstone articles and how they can improve your rankings.

In short, these posts or pages:

• contain essential information for your audience;
• are complete, up-to-date, and well-written;
• show authority;
• get the most links from related posts within your site;
• rank higher than your other articles on the same topic;
• get the most organic traffic to your site.

When you’re in doubt about where to start updating your site’s content, always prioritize your cornerstone content. Your business relies on them, and they should never go stale!

2.4.3. No outdated cornerstones with Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO makes it a little easier to keep your cornerstones up to date. If you use Yoast SEO on your site, you can mark a post as a cornerstone article. In doing so, these articles will undergo a more rigorous SEO analysis. In addition, they’ll appear in a separate list in your post overview, which makes it easy to browse through them and check if they’re still up to scratch.

Keeping track of them is even easier if you’re on Yoast SEO Premium. The Stale cornerstone content filter only shows your cornerstone articles that haven’t been updated in the last six months. You’ll find this filter in your post overview. If it doesn’t show any posts, you’re good, and if there are one or more posts in it, make sure you check and update them!

2.4.4. Keyword cannibalization

Keyword cannibalization means you’re eating away your rankings by creating too many articles for the same or similar keywords. For example, if you have a dozen articles on the same topic, search engines don’t know which one they should rank highest. As a result, you’ll compete with your articles for a high position in the search engines.

If you frequently publish, as we do at Yoast, you’re bound to run into keyword cannibalization issues someday. That’s why we’ve created a framework for dealing with keyword cannibalism. In short, you’ll have to:

• Find out for which keywords it’s happening;
• Analyze which content performs best for those keywords;
• Keep the best performing posts;
• Decide if you should merge the other posts into the better performing one;
• Or delete and redirect them.

Check out this detailed guide on how to fix keyword cannibilization issues on your site to learn how to go about this.

2.5. Avoid accidental duplicate content

2.5.1. What is duplicate content?

Duplicate content issues arise when search engines encounter multiple URLs with the same or very similar content. As a result, search engines don’t know which URLs to rank higher, resulting in lower rankings.

We’ve already addressed keyword cannibalization caused by writing about the same topic too often in the previous section. But most of the time, the root of duplicate content is technical and can happen without you even noticing. For instance, some content management systems add session IDs or parameters for tracking URLs. Or, you might have www and non-www versions of a particular page indexed. Accordingly, you’ll have multiple URLs showing the same content.

Besides the technical reasons, your articles can get scraped or copied by other parties. So, there are many different causes for duplicate content, as you can read in this extensive article on duplicate content.

If you want to find out if your site suffers from duplicate content, you can use these duplicate content tools to check your site for issues.

2.5.2. Solutions for duplicate content

How you should solve your duplicate content issue depends on the cause of the problem. In general, there are three ways to go about this — in order of preference:

• Whenever possible, avoid creating duplicate content. If your system creates session IDs in the URL, try to turn that off.
• Can’t avoid creating them? Redirect those URLs with a 301 to the original version.
• Need to keep a duplicate article? Make sure to add a canonical link to the original version in the <head> section of the duplicate article. It will show search engines what the original version of the article is to pass the link juice on to the original version. In the next section, you’ll find out how easy this is with Yoast SEO.

If you want to learn how to solve specific duplicate content issues, check out Joost’s ultimate guide on causes and solutions for duplicate content.

2.5.3. Set a canonical link with Yoast SEO

With Yoast SEO, it’s straightforward to add a canonical link to a post or page. No need for a developer! Just go to the Advanced tab in the Yoast SEO metabox below your post or page or the sidebar of the block editor. There, you’ll find the Canonical URL field where you can enter the URL of the original article — the one you want to point search engines to:

If you don’t set a canonical, Yoast SEO will set a self-referencing canonical for you. This means that the article will point to itself. Learn why self-referencing canonicals are beneficial for SEO.

2.6. Support international audiences

To optimize your site for audiences in several countries or language regions, you’ll need to optimize your content and your technical setup. Let’s start with the content aspects of international SEO.

Doing targeted keyword research and writing fresh content for each audience is crucial. Take items of clothing, for example. An American vest is an entirely different garment from a British vest, a Dutch vest, a French vest, or a Spanish vest… you get the point. We don’t recommend using automated translations. Invest time and resources in proper research and translations to optimize your keywords and copy.

Another important aspect of international SEO is picking the proper domain structure. Generally, a different ccTLD (e.g., www.yoast.de) for every variation is only a good option for huge companies with big budgets. In most cases, subdirectories (e.g., www.yoast.com/de) are the way to go.

Search engines want to display the correct language version of your site to each visitor, whatever country they’re from. To help them, you need to implement hreflang. hreflang is code that tells the search engines what language variations of a page are available and helps prevent duplicate content problems. It’s quite a complex piece of code, but our hreflang guide helps you along the way — or you can take our Multilingual SEO training. This course is part of our Yoast SEO academy that’s free with a Yoast SEO Premium subscription.

2.7. Add Schema.org structured data

Structured data is kind of like a dictionary for search engines. By describing your content in code, you can instantly clarify what that particular piece of content is about. Plus, you can tell who wrote it, published it, and when on what site. Also, if this article featured recipe, FAQ, or how-to content, you could let search engines know about this. This way, search engines get a better understanding of your site. They can use this to help your site get rich results.

Structured data is essential for WordPress SEO. It used to be hard to add structured data to your site, but we set out to make it easy with structured data in Yoast SEO. Today, we generate the code search engines need to automatically make sense of your site and its connections. You only need to make a couple of choices in SEO > Search Appearance. Select Person if your site is a personal site or Organization if it is a business or professional site. Don’t forget to pick or upload the correct logo or avatar.

That’s not all: you can also quickly build specific types of content pages with our structured data blocks. These blocks work in the block editor, and at the moment, we have two types: FAQs and how-tos. These blocks help you visually build the content while generating valid structured data in the background. Plus, the Schema controls allow you to specify what type of page the one you’re working on is. So, you can quickly add structured data to your contact page by picking that specific type.

3. Optimize your site structure

A solid site structure helps your users and the search engines navigate your site. On top of that, it will make clear what pages on your website are most important. There are two pillars to a good site structure: organizing your site and internal contextual linking.

3.1. Organize your site

Organizing your site will help you set up a navigation path from your homepage to your posts and pages. Adding categories and subcategories will bring order to chaos. Ideally, your site should be organized as such:

You should always make sure your homepage is straightforward to navigate. Cluttering the homepage with too many options will make your site more difficult to understand. Adding a clear menu and breadcrumbs helps your user navigate your site wherever they are.

3.2. Connect your content with contextual internal linking

Besides organizing your site, you need to link your content within your copy. We call this contextual internal linking because these links always appear within the context of a text. Internal linking is one of the most important aspects of WordPress SEO.

Contextual internal links set up a network of pages, pointing your users to related content. For example, in a post on keyword research, linking to an article on SEO copywriting makes a lot of sense. For search engines, these links provide insight into how pages are related to each other.

Always make sure that the number of links to a page reflects the importance of that page. Our ultimate guides get a lot of links from individual posts about related topics. This helps users and search engines understand that these guides are crucial pillars of our site.

When adding a contextual internal link, make sure the link makes sense within the current page’s context. Moreover, always use anchor texts which accurately describe the page you’re linking to. This provides users and search engines with the context to assess whether the link is valid. The internal linking tool in Yoast SEO Premium helps you connect your content by automatically suggesting relevant links.

3.3. Manage your categories and tags

WordPress has two default ways of structuring your content: categories and tags. Categories add hierarchy to your content and group topics broadly. On a website about cooking, pasta could be a category. Tags are non-hierarchical and can be used to describe your post in more detail. Dinner party themes, for example, could be a tag.

When setting up your site structure, pick several main categories. Adding them to your menu can be a good idea, especially if you only have a blog. A different setup might make more sense if you have a blog and several products. Make sure your categories are roughly the same size. If your categories become too big, make subcategories. Your category pages can be great landing pages, especially for ecommerce sites — more on that in our ecommerce SEO guide.

Tags are helpful for users exploring topics, but they are often misapplied. It’s important not to use too many tags and use them more than once or twice. Remember, you want to group your content, not just give it a description.

If you want to structure your content differently, WordPress also allows you to create custom taxonomies. Always consider carefully whether your custom taxonomy groups content in a way that makes sense and helps your visitors.

3.4. Manage your archive pages

If you use categories and tags, you will automatically create archive pages. These pages contain a list of the posts and pages within a specific category or tag. Besides categories and tags, there are date-based archive pages and author archives. These archive pages need managing because they cause SEO problems if you don’t.

First, you want to prevent search engines from indexing archive pages that don’t make sense on your site. You can use the Yoast SEO plugin for this. You do this under SEO → Search Appearance, where you’ll find the following options on the “Archives†tab:

The settings above are the settings for our site. We’ve disabled the date-based archives, as we don’t use those. Any date-based link will redirect to our homepage because of this setting. We’ve left the author archives untouched, but we have set the subpages of those archives to be noindex, follow by default. This way, you’ll never land on page two of an archive on our site from the search engines.

If your blog is a one author blog, or you don’t think you need author archives, use Yoast SEO to disable the author archives. Also, if you don’t think you need a date-based archive: disable it as we have. Even if you’re not using these archives in your template, someone might link to them and thus break your WordPress SEO…

There is one type of archive that is noindex,follow by default in the Yoast SEO plugin: your own internal search function result pages. This is a best practice from Google.

3.4.1. Pagination

If you have many posts on your WordPress site, you might want to think about how your pagination looks and works. Otherwise, your best content is ‘buried’ deep in your site, and users and search engines may struggle to find it. It would help if you also considered customizing how your pagination looks and works to be more helpful for users and search engines.

3.5. Configure your breadcrumbs

You’ll probably want to add breadcrumbs to your posts and pages. Breadcrumbs are the links, usually above the title post, that look like “Home > SEO blog > WordPress SEO“. Breadcrumbs are good for two things:

• They allow your users to navigate your site easily.
• They allow search engines to determine the structure of your site more easily.

These breadcrumbs should link back to the homepage and the post’s category. If the post is in multiple categories, it should pick one.

To get breadcrumb navigation to show you on your pages, you may need to adapt your single.php and page.php files in your theme and include the code for breadcrumbs from the Yoast SEO plugin. You find the settings and instructions on doing that in the SEO → Search Appearance section. Also, we have a unique breadcrumbs block for the block editor that makes it easy to drop in breadcrumbs on any page — without writing code.

3.6. Manage your XML sitemaps

You can use XML sitemaps to tell Google and the other search engines that your site has been updated. While WordPress finally has native XML sitemaps, our solution is more powerful. Our WordPress SEO plugin automatically configures your XML sitemaps, so you don’t have to worry about anything. We generate sitemaps for your different post types, including your images, and make sure that it generates and loads quickly.

We intelligently split your sitemaps up into smaller bits, so Google only has to fetch one new XML “subâ€-sitemap when a post is published.

You can check and manage which types of content, archives, and templates should be included in your XML sitemaps in your SEO → Search Appearance settings. Content types that are set to not show in search results will be automatically excluded from your XML sitemaps.

Lastly, our XML sitemaps support has a complete API, allowing developers to add or change functionality through their plugins and themes. Our Local SEO, News SEO, and Video SEO extensions (which generate their specific sitemaps) are built on this API. Other plugins frequently develop their solutions on top of our system.

4. Speed up your WordPress website

If your website is slow, you risk frustrating your users. That makes them less likely to engage, browse, convert, or visit again. That, in turn, can make them less likely to share your content, link to your pages, or recommend your brand. In short, speed is an essential part of WordPress SEO, and a huge part of the overall user experience. That means that it’s critical to measure and manage your performance — especially for users on mobile or slower connections!

With Google’s Page Experience update, page speed and user experiences are front and center. Offering outstanding performance will continue to become more critical by the day.

4.1. Measure your site speed

Measuring the speed of your site can be confusing. Different tools give different scores and results and sometimes even give conflicting information. That’s why we’ve put together this helpful guide on how to measure your speed — it’ll walk you through the basics of picking the right metrics to use the right tools for the job when it comes to monitoring and diagnosing issues.

4.2. Improve your site speed

Once you’ve identified what and where your bottlenecks are, the next challenge is to make hosting, theme, plugin, and performance tweaks to speed things up.

Page speed optimization is a discipline in its own right and spans well-beyond WordPress SEO. That means that the most significant opportunities will vary from site to site and situation to situation. For some sites, the easiest wins might come from changing hosting or utilizing a CDN; for others, it might mean re-assessing their use of plugins, or, altering how they load CSS and JavaScript.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t get started, though. We’ve put together a guide on some page speed tools and easy wins that you can use to get the ball rolling.

5. Secure your WordPress website

WordPress is the most-used platform for website management in the world. It powers almost 42% of the web (June 2021). While that is awesome, it also means that WordPress is the most targeted platform for hackers. When running a WordPress website, basic security is dealt with by the CMS, but there are things you can do yourselves to make your website more secure.

That starts with your login. The default username in WordPress is admin, so change that first. Otherwise, a hacker’s first guess for your username is too easy. The same goes for your password. Passwords like 123456 and welcome01 are just not enough. Use a password manager like 1Password or LastPass and pick a 20+ character password instead. WordPress also has several plugins for two-factor verification, so adding that to your website is easy as pie as well. Please do it.

Of course, there is more you can do; please read our article detailing WordPress security in a few easy steps. We’ll highlight some of the recommendations below.

5.1. Make regular backups

The next thing we’d like you to do is create regular backups. In case your site gets hacked, or something else goes wrong — for instance, when updating a plugin or theme —, it’s important that you revert that change in a heartbeat. Regular backups make sure that this can be done.

In WordPress, there is a wide range of backup options to choose from. Several plugin developers have created excellent software solutions for you, so you don’t have the technical hassle of that backup.

5.2. Harden your setup

Hardening your setup starts with picking the right hosting company for your WordPress website. That’s just the start, as every host will do its best to help you out, but it’ll still be your responsibility to harden your setup. Also, tools like Cloudflare are good friends for any company/website.

An easy first step is to limit login attempts. By limiting the number of times, people can try to log in to your website — closing your login form after five false logins, for example — you are hardening your installation against brute force attacks and other malicious acts targeting that form.

The next thing you need to do is make sure that your WordPress install, including plugins and themes, is always up-to-date. Updates might fix security issues as well. Make sure to check for updates and keep your WordPress installation up-to-date regularly.

Another essential thing to realize is that you deal with security every time you add a new user or writer to your WordPress install. There’s an article in the WordPress Codex regarding Roles and Capabilities you should read. It comes down to giving permissions only to those that need it when they need it and only for the time they need it. There is no need to provide a guest blogger administrative rights to your website, right?

Authentication Keys and Salts work in conjunction to protect your cookies and passwords in transit between the browser and web server. Make sure to change these keys when installing a new WordPress instance.

Another easy fix that we’d like to mention is to make sure your template files can’t be edited from the WordPress backend. You can do this in Appearance → Editor. When a hacker gets past your login form, this is the easiest way to add malicious code to your website. Hardening this involves changing your wp-config file.

5.3. Use monitoring and logging

Security is an ongoing process. You need to keep a keen eye on any breaches and keep your website as secure as possible. You could put part of your WordPress security in the hands of, for instance, a company like Sucuri. In case of a hack, they’ll fix this asap. You could check your site regularly with their Sitecheck tool for your monitoring. A couple of plugins can help you secure your WordPress site by, for instance, monitoring files on your server, like WordFence, iThemes, or Sucuri. Pick your plugin of choice as long as you make sure that security is monitored.

It can also be helpful to keep track of everything that’s happening on your websites, like file changes and logged-in users. There are several plugins and tools for that, like WP Security Audit Log. Keeping track of these things makes sure that you can find irregularities in your installation and act on these or find what happened when in case of a security issue.

6. Cater to your mobile visitors

Take one look around, and you’ll notice that our mobile devices are becoming the de facto way of browsing the web, even when we’re at home, lying on our couch. But we don’t visit mobile websites — we visit websites. See your mobile and desktop site as one entity. You, as a website owner, need to cater to your visitors.

Some years ago, the mobile market share surpassed the desktop market share. If you are only optimizing for desktop visitors, you are not optimizing for most of your visitors. Of course, it depends on your specific niche since those numbers could be different. Google Analytics can give you the exact numbers for your site.

With a market share like this, there is no way you can consider your mobile website an ‘extra’. It’s time for mobile SEO.

6.1. Make sure your theme is mobile-friendly

After making sure that your site is fast, make sure your website, or rather your theme, is mobile-friendly. Making your website mobile-friendly starts with ensuring the links are not too close together, and buttons are easily clickable. Your font should be consistent and shouldn’t be too small, and your images are not too big, both in file size and dimensions.

We’d like to highlight two specific mobile theme optimizations below.

6.1.1. Use a responsive design

In 2022, having a responsive design is a no-brainer. Responsive design means that the design of your website adapts to the screen size your visitor is using. You can do this by using specific CSS media queries. You have to address particular ranges of screen widths and plan for those. Most WordPress themes are now responsive.

Depending on the part of the world you are targeting, no, how fast their mobile internet is, you might want to change a couple of things. Think about how you use images on your site. Are you using any text enhancements or font variations that might hinder the excellent performance of the mobile website? Responsive design helps you build a more focused website. That brings us to the second optimization.

6.1.2. Prioritize what’s important to mobile users

Take a step back and look at your website: what do your users want to do here? Define the four to six main tasks your user performs on your website and focus on these. Maybe even give the most crucial task a big fat call-to-action button.

Here’s an example: If you have a local business, the two main tasks might be calling you or finding the directions to your business. That means you could add these as a unique mobile menu, for instance, some visible all the time. Focus on your visitor’s main tasks and make their life as easy as possible. How to find these top tasks? Ask your visitors! Also, check Google Analytics for the most visited pages on your mobile website. More about Analytics further down this article.

6.2. Consider using AMP

Using WordPress, you could serve Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). AMP is a 2015 initiative by Google and some major publishers. It allows for fast mobile pages and does so by stripping some of the design. If you are looking to kick-start the AMP version of your WordPress website, be sure to check the official AMP plugin. This will add an AMP version of your website after installing the plugin.

7. Analyze and improve your performance

A good SEO campaign relies not only on implementing changes but also on measuring the impact of those changes, seeing what works, and doing more of that. Google has developed two unique tools to analyze your website’s results and identify new opportunities that you could focus on in the future.

The first one for analyzing results is Google Analytics. By adding Google Analytics to your website, you ensure all user data will be stored in your account. You can, for instance, check how many visits your pages get, how many of your visitors convert, how many visitors immediately leave your website after landing on a specific page, and much more. Within Google Analytics, you can see how visitors behave on your website. Here’s how to track your SEO with Google Analytics.

The second tool is meant to analyze how your website performs and see how visitors find you in the search engine. That tool is Google Search Console. By exporting and sorting through your search queries and impression data, it’s easy to identify opportunities where you could focus on improving clickthrough rates, content, and/or rankings.

7.1. Set up and integrate Google Analytics

To start with Google Analytics, you need to create an account. Click the ‘Start for free’ button to start. To set up your account, you need to add an Account Name first. This could be your company name. However, when you add other websites to your account, we recommend choosing a more generic Account Name. Also, you can always change your Account Name later when you want to.

After setting up your account, it’s time to add a property: the website you want to add. Insert the Website Name and the Website URL. Make sure you add the precise URL: http:// or https:// and with or without www for collecting the correct data.

After setting up your property, you can choose to enable some of the data-sharing settings. Each data sharing option gives you a clear explanation of what you will be sharing, allowing it.

Now you’re almost ready to go! The last step to connecting your website to your new Google Analytics account is adding the tracking code to your website. After successfully creating your account and adding a new property, you’ll see this screen with your Google Analytics tracking code on top:

This tag needs to be added to your website. The easiest way to do this within WordPress is by installing a Google Analytics plugin such as the MonsterInsights Plugin for WordPress. By installing this plugin, you don’t need to touch the actual code of your website to connect with Google Analytics. Install and activate the plugin, insert your tracking ID, and set! You can also use Google’s Site Kit WordPress plugin to get data from Analytics and Search Console in your backend.

For more technical readers, it’s also possible to add the tag manually to every web page’s head or add the tag to Google Tag Manager.

Your website is connected to Google Analytics; it will start collecting your users’ data. Start clicking around to see what all can be found within the data, or start reading one of our blog posts about Google Analytics for helpful tips.

7.2. Set up your Google Search Console account

The second tool we think is essential to set up is Google Search Console. We recommend going through all steps, and you will be all set! In brief, these are the steps you’ll need to follow:

• Create or sign in to your Google Search Console account.
• Click ‘Add a property’ under the search drop-down.
• Enter your website URL in the box and click ‘Continue’.
• Verify your website — within the Yoast SEO plugin, you can easily copy and paste the meta tag to make it work.

After connecting your website to Google Search Console, it will start collecting data about the performance of your website.

7.3. Other useful tools

Of course, there are plenty of other valuable tools to get valuable insights into your website and find SEO opportunities. Everyone has their favorite tools, so it’s important to start playing with different tools to find out what tool brings you what you need most.

There are all-in-one SEO tools that give you a complete overview of your performance, and there are more in-depth tools that give you more specific data. Think about site speed tools, duplicate content tools, analysis tools, keyword research tools, etc.

Some tools we use besides Google Analytics and Google Search Console:

Microsoft Clarity

Microsoft Clarity is another tool that provides valuable insights into the behavior of your website’s visitors. Its features, such as the session replays or the heat map, can help you understand how your audience interacts with your website. That information is precious if you want to improve your site’s user experience! On the Microsoft Clarity dashboard, you’ll also find information on session counts, total users, page view details, etc.

Microsoft Bing Webmaster Tools

Within the Source/Medium section of Google Analytics, you can see what percentage of your traffic is coming from Bing. When this is a sufficient amount of traffic, you might want to create a Bing Webmaster Tools account. Microsoft Bing Webmaster Tools is the Google Search Console variant for Microsoft Bing. It shows you your site’s health and performance in the Bing search results.

Semrush

Semrush is another internet marketing and SEO suite that does an incredible amount of stuff. In addition, Semrush powers the related keyphrase feature in Yoast SEO. Thanks to this feature, you can easily find powerful keyphrases to rank for.

Google Lighthouse

Google Lighthouse is a Chrome extension that you can download for free. With the Lighthouse tool, you can quickly generate a report with Performance, Progressive Web App, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO scores. This report will give you a quick overview of how your site is doing. Plus, you can immediately start working on the areas that need attention. You can also use the web-based version on web.dev/measure. Very helpful if you are working to improve your Page Experience scores.

Hotjar

To get insights into how your visitors move, scroll and click on your web pages, you could use a tool like Hotjar. This user research tool also has options to add polls or surveys to your site to start doing research. You can try it for free, and the paid packages have competitive prices.

Interested in more valuable tools? Check our list of favorite SEO tools here!

8. Promote your site

Thanks to WordPress SEO, you put a lot of time and effort into your site’s content and ensure that readers can find it via search engines. But there are other ways to get people to visit your WordPress site and read your posts. But how do you get and grow such an audience? Simply writing posts and putting these out there won’t do the trick: you need to promote your site!

8.1. Encourage engagement

It’s always fun to interact with your readers, but how do you get them to engage? We mean all the different ways people can interact with your post with engagement. It could be leaving a comment, sharing it on social media, or taking action on the topic.

But how do you get people to engage? You can always ask them! Write engagingly, and then ask your readers for their opinion. Then respond to these comments to keep the conversation going and build a relationship with your readers.

Engagement also benefits WordPress SEO, showing that your site is alive and active. If you want to dive deeper into blog engagement, you can read our post on how you can increase blog engagement.

8.2. Grow your reach

Using social media is the best way to reach and grow your blog’s audience. You should be active on the social media channels where your (potential) audience is present. Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter are examples of popular social media. It might be a lot to decide on, so you can find out more in our blog post on social media strategy: where to begin?

8.3. Build a mailing list

In addition to using social media to promote your blog, it’s often a good idea to invest in a newsletter. Let people sign up for it and send emails with your latest blog posts and other fun facts.

Ensure that you offer a subscribe field beneath your posts and other visible places on your website. Make sure that your newsletter is mobile-friendly. But, most of all, make sure your newsletter is truly something special!

8.4. Amplify your content

The number of blog posts published every day is enormous, so it’s becoming much harder to stand out. Your articles have a big chance of getting lost in the vast sea of content. To help your content reach its full potential, you need to amplify it.

If your content is original and well-structured, you’re probably able to reach new audiences. Take a look at how you can get new audiences beyond your organic reach.

Maybe advertising on Facebook or Instagram might be a good way to reach new audiences for your content? Analyze what channels you already use and decide where you can do more to broaden your audience.

9. Conclusions

This guide gives you a lot of stuff you can do on WordPress SEO for your site. It goes from technical SEO tips to conversion tips, content tips, conversation tips, and a lot in between. There’s a catch, though: if you want to rank for highly competitive terms, you’ll have to do most of it and create great and compelling content.

You’re competing with every other website and business for attention, visitors, and outcomes. That means you have to put in a lot of hard work and keep your site SEO fit. Have you neglected your SEO for a while? Don’t worry; it can happen to the best of us! Check out Marieke’s post for excellent advice about getting your SEO back on track.

If you want to keep updated on the latest news about WordPress, SEO, and our plugins, you can subscribe to our newsletter and stay one step ahead of the competition!

When looking for information about keywords in relation to SEO, you get bombarded with information about keyword research. And of course, this is crucial if you’d like your page to rank. But it’s also important to understand what the basic principle of a keyword is. And that’s the thing I’ll explain here. I’ll also share some suggestions about how and where to add keywords for SEO.

In this post:

• What are keywords?
• Why are keywords important?
• How to use keywords

What are keywords?

A keyword, or a focus keyword as some call it, is a word that describes the content on your page or post best. It’s the search term that you want to rank for with a certain page. So when people search for that keyword or phrase in Google or other search engines, they should find that page on your website.

Let’s say you’ve got a website about pianos: you sell all sorts and types of pianos. You blog about what to look at when buying a piano and you share reviews about the pianos you offer on your online shop. You sell digital pianos so you’ve created a product category page about digital pianos. Ask yourself this:

• What kind of search term do you want to be found for?
• Which words do you think people will use in search engines to find you?
• What would the search query look like?

Probably [digital piano], right? Because this keyword reflects what’s on the page best. If you’d have to explain the bottom line of your content, how would that look? What words would you use? That’s your keyword or keyphrase – if it consists of multiple words.

We use the word ‘keyword’ all the time; this does not mean it consists of only one word. A lot of times it consists of multiple words. So when talking about keywords, a lot of times we mean a phrase instead of just one word.

Read more: Keyword research for your online shop »

Why are keywords important?

One of the things Google looks at when ranking a page is the content on that page. It looks at the words on the page. Now picture this, if every word on, for instance, a blog post about a digital piano is used 2 times, then all words are of equal importance. Google won’t have a clue which of those words are important and which aren’t. The words you’re using are clues for Google; it tells Google and other search engines what the page or post is about. So if you want to make Google understand what your page is about, you need to use it fairly often.

But Google isn’t the only reason why keyphrases are important. Actually, it’s less important, because you should always focus on the user: on your visitors and potential clients. With SEO you want people to land on your website when using a certain search term or keyphrase. You need to get into the heads of your audience and use the words they use when they are searching.

If you use the wrong keyphrase, you’ll never get the visitors you want or need, because your text doesn’t match what your potential audience is searching for. But if you do use the words people are searching for, your business can thrive. So if you see it like that, your keywords should reflect what your audience is searching for. With the wrong keyphrase, you’ll end up with the wrong audience, or none at all. That’s why having the right keywords is really important.

How to use keywords

There used to be a time where you could add a lot of keywords to your pages and posts, do some old-fashioned keyword stuffing, and you’d rank in search engines. But a text with a lot of the same words in it is not a pleasant read. And because users find this kind of copy terrible to read, Google finds it terrible too. That’s why ranking in Google by doing keyphrase stuffing, fortunately, became hard to do. Nowadays, you’ll need to add your keyphrase in a natural way by writing focused content.

Use them in moderation

Getting the right amount of keywords onto your page is a balancing act. If you don’t use your keyword enough, you will find it hard to rank for that phrase. But if you use your keyphrase too much, your page will become spammy and unreadable, and that will also make it hard to rank.

You need to find that sweet spot where you’re using your keyword enough, but not excessively. Make sure you don’t stuff it into almost every sentence. In general, if your keyphrase makes up 1 or 2% of all words of your copy, then you’re not overdoing it.

Use them naturally

Aside from trying to add enough-but-not-too-many keywords, you need to make sure you include them in a natural way. Your keywords should be part of logical, coherent sentences that tell users something about that topic. Don’t force keyphrases into text (or headings) where they don’t make sense, or where they’re not adding any value for your readers.

And, that’s not all. Make sure your keywords are all well-distributed throughout your text. Don’t put all your keywords in the first paragraph thinking you’re done with that part of the optimization. Naturally spread them throughout your page or post.

Where to add your keyword

As well as distributing your keyphrase throughout your text, there are some other places that you should also add your keyword. Remember, always add keywords in moderation and put readability first!

• Page title and SEO title
  You should always add your keyword in your page title. Ideally you want to add it at the start of your title, especially if your title is long. The same goes for your SEO title, or meta title.
• Subheadings
  You should add your keyword to some of your subheadings (H2 and H3), but not all. It’s just the same as with the keyphrases in your main text. Use your keyword in a heading or a couple of subheadings, depending on the length of your page or post.
• Introduction
  The introduction is the first paragraph of normal text on the page. Your introduction should get straight to the point, so Google and your readers know what you’ll be talking about. This is a great opportunity to include your keyphrase!
• Image alt text
  Hopefully, your page or post includes an image related to the topic you’re writing about. Add some alt text to your images and see if you can find a natural way to include your keyword.
• Meta description
  Your meta description is part of the text Google displays in its search results. It should contain a short description of what users can find on your page. It’s another great place to add your keyphrase, too!
• URL slug
  The slug is the second part of a URL (web address) that identifies a specific page. For instance, the URL for this post is https://yoast.com/what-is-a-keyword/. The slug is the ‘what-is-a-keyword‘ part. You should try to create clear, descriptive slugs for each page you make, and if possible you should include your keyphrase in them too.

The Yoast SEO plugin checks all this for you

Want to get the right amount of keywords in all the right places? The Yoast SEO plugin makes it much easier! Simply add your focus keyphrase and the plugin will automatically check the points listed above — including whether you’re using it too much, too little, and whether it’s distributed well throughout your text.

These super helpful features are available in both the free and Premium versions. However if you upgrade to Premium you’ll be able to add more related keyphrases in addition to your focus keyphrase, too!

Up next: doing keyword research

Now you have a common understanding of what a keyword or keyphrase is. This knowledge will really help you with your keyword research, which of course is the next and vital step!

If you want to do high-quality keyword research, you’ll need invest the time. Keyword research is a process which requires you to get inside the heads of your audience. You want to find out which words they are using. After that, you’ll need to analyze which keywords you should go after first. Doing all that is difficult, as well as time-consuming. Luckily, there are several tools out there to make things a little easier — including Yoast SEO itself. This post will give you some handy tips and keyword research tools to boost your keyword research.

Repeat keyword research regularly!

Keyword research is an activity you should undertake every now and then. If you have a clear definition of the product or service you offer on your website, you should be able to come up with keywords, related keywords, and even more relevant keywords to make your awesome website (more) findable. As your product and the market will evolve, your keyword strategy should, too.

Resemble the vocabulary of your audience

The keywords you want to focus your SEO on should closely resemble the vocabulary of your audience. In order to come up with the proper keywords you really have to get inside the heads of the people who search for your website. What terms will people use? How do people search and what is their intent? Which question does your website answer? You should create a list of all search terms people could use and think of combinations and nuances within these search terms.

Keyword research tools to use

Making a list remains hard. Years ago, doing your keyword research was much easier. You could simply check Google Analytics to see which terms people used to find your website. That is no longer possible. So you’re pretty much left in the dark about the terms people use in search engines to end up at your website. Luckily, there are some other tools which can make your keyword research a bit easier, and could help you speed up the process a bit:

Yoast SEO related keyphrases (powered by SEMrush)

At Yoast, we wanted to make keyword research a bit easier so we built our own free keyword research tool. That’s right, Yoast SEO comes with its own tool to help you do keyword research. Now, it’s not the one tool to rule them all, but it is a very helpful nonetheless. Right below the focus keyphrase field you’ll notice a button that says Get related keyphrases. Hitting this button brings up a screen with a number of suggestions for keyphrases related to the main keyphrase of your article.

You’ll not only get valuable keywords that you might not have thought about, but you’ll also get important metrics on that. For every keyword found, you’ll see how many times that keyword is searched for (Volume) and what the search trend looks like. You can search in every country that SEMrush supports: over a hundred at the time of writing.

This feature is available for free, but if you have Yoast SEO Premium you have the benefit of using it in the related keyphrase feature. This feature allows you to add related keyphrases to a related keyphrase field in the Yoast SEO sidebar or meta box. This helps you optimize your content for multiple keyphrases and synonyms. If you want to know more on this integration, we have an article on how to use the SEMrush related keyphrase feature.

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 on to advertise. Otherwise, these volumes are not reliable. While not really helpful to decide which keyword is most used by your potential audience, Google Adwords Keyword Planner is a useful tool to help find ideas for potential keywords!

Yoast Suggest

Joost developed his own keyword research tool to come up with keywords as well! Yoast Suggest uses the Google Suggest functionality you know from searching in Google. It finds the keyword expansions Google gives and then requests more of them. So if you type ‘example‘, it’ll also give you the expansions for ‘example a…’ till ‘example z…’ etc. Just go on and try it! Fill out some of your potential keywords and see what comes up. It’s a great way to quickly find more long tail keywords you can focus on.

Answer the public

Another tool we love is Answer The Public. It’s a bit like our suggest tool, but it really focuses on questions people have about a certain topic. It shows all kinds of combinations with prepositions and comparisons. And its visualization is pretty awesome! You can do free keyword research on Answer The Public, but there’s a paid version available if you want more data.

Google Trends

Google Trends allows you to compare the traffic for sets of keywords. You can even see the difference between keywords for numerous geographical regions. It’s very important to check Google Trends if you expect that some of your keywords are seasonal, for instance, due to regulations, holiday seasons etc. As a free keyword research tool, this is one of the easiest to use.

Moz

Moz has a very nice tool which gauges how competitive your keyword is. Keywords that are very difficult to rank for, are probably not the ones you want to go after (unless you have a very authoritative, high-ranking website already). The Moz tool will probably help you speed up your keyword research. This paid keyword research tool does come with a price tag, however.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console can help gain content insights as well? The data in the Search Results section won’t suggest new or related keyphrases for you, but you can find queries that your pages rank for that might surprise you. Plus, you can find out if particular keyphrases aren’t performing well or that you have the ‘wrong’ pages ranking for a keyphrase. Google Search Console can be a powerful free keyword research tool, but it takes a bit of effort to use.

Your internal search engine

What are people looking for on your site? These terms are keywords in the vocabulary of your actual audience and should definitely be added to your keyword list. Do not forget to look at the keywords people filled in that didn’t yield any results: this was stuff people were expecting but didn’t find. You can look into the results of your internal search in Google Analytics at Behavior → Site Search → Search Terms.

Conclusion

These keyword research tools should make it easier to create a list of relevant search terms. You should make sure to create awesome landing pages for keywords you want to be found on. You should also think about cornerstone content articles and a great internal linking structure in order to make your SEO strategy complete. In our keyword research training, we dive much deeper into keywords, landing pages, and long tail keywords.

Your site needs to have a defined structure, because without it, it’ll just be a random collection of pages and blog posts. Your users need this structure to navigate on your site, to click from one page to another. Google also uses the structure of your site to determine what content is important and what is less relevant. This guide tells you everything you need to know about site structure.

Why is your site structure important?

Structuring your website is crucial for both its usability and findability. Many sites lack a sound structure to guide visitors to the information they’re looking for. Having a clear site structure also leads to a better understanding of your site by Google, so it’s incredibly important for your SEO. Let’s take a closer look at how this works.

Importance for usability

The structure of your website has a significant impact on the experience for your visitors (UX). If visitors can’t find the products and information they’re looking for, it’s not very likely they’ll become regular visitors or customers. In other words, you should help them navigate your site. A good site structure will help with this.

Navigating should be easy. You need to categorize and link your posts and products so they are easy to find. New visitors should be able to instantly grasp what you’re writing about or selling.

Importance for SEO

A solid site structure vastly improves your chances of ranking in search engines. There are three main reasons for this:

a. It helps Google ‘understand’ your site

The way you structure your site will give Google vital clues about where to find the most valuable content on your site. It helps search engines understand what your site mainly is about or what you’re selling. A decent site structure also enables search engines to find and index content quickly. A good structure should, therefore, lead to a higher ranking in Google.

b. It prevents you from competing with yourself

On your site, you might have blog posts that are quite similar. If, for example, you write a lot about SEO, you could have multiple blog posts about site structure, each covering a different aspect. Consequently, Google won’t be able to tell which of these pages is the most important, so you’ll be competing with your own content for a high ranking in Google. You should let Google know which page you think is most important. You need a good internal linking and taxonomy structure to do this, so all those pages can work for you, instead of against you.

c. It deals with changes on your website

The products you sell in your shop likely evolve over time. So does the content you’re writing. You probably add new product lines as old stock sells out. Or you write new articles that make old ones redundant. You don’t want Google to show outdated products or deleted blog posts, so you need to deal with these kinds of changes in the structure of your site.

Are you struggling with setting up your site’s structure? Don’t know what the best strategy is to link from one post to another? Check out our Site structure training, part of our Yoast SEO academy training subscription. Before you know it, you’ll be able to improve your rankings by creating the best structure for your site!

How to set up the structure of your site

So, how do you construct a solid site structure? First, we’ll look at an ideal site structure; then we’ll explain how to achieve this for your own site.

Ideal site structure

Let’s start by looking at an ideal situation: if you’re starting from scratch, how should you organize your site? We think a well-organized website looks like a pyramid with a number of levels:

1. Homepage

2. Categories (or sections)

3. Subcategories (only for larger sites)

4. Individual pages and posts

The homepage should be all the way at the top. Then, you have some sections or category pages beneath it. You should be able to file all of your content under one of these categories. If your site is larger, you can divide these sections or categories into subcategories as well. Beneath your categories or subcategories are your individual pages and posts.

Your homepage

On top of the pyramid is the homepage. Your homepage should act as a navigation hub for your visitors. This means, amongst others, that you should link to your most important pages from your homepage. By doing this:

1. Your visitors are more likely to end up on the pages you want them to end up on;
2. You show Google that these pages are important.

Further down this article, we’ll help you determine which of your pages are essential to your business.

Beware not to try to link to too many pages from your homepage, because that will cause clutter. And a cluttered homepage doesn’t guide your visitors anywhere. If you want to optimize your homepage further, there are a lot of other things you can do. Read Michiel’s article on homepage SEO to find out what.

Navigation

In addition to having a well-structured homepage, it’s also important to create a clear navigation path on your site. Your site-wide navigation consists of two main elements: the menu and the breadcrumbs.

The menu

First, let’s take a look at the menu. The website menu is the most common aid for navigation on your website and you want to make the best possible use of it. Visitors use your menu to find things on your website. It helps them understand the structure of your website. That’s why the main categories on your site should all have a place in the menu on your homepage.

Furthermore, it’s not always necessary to put everything in just one menu. If you have a big site with lots of categories, this may clutter your website and makes your main menu a poor reflection of the rest of your site. Where it makes sense, it’s perfectly fine to create a second menu.

For instance, eBay has one menu at the top of the page – also called the top bar menu – and in addition to that, a main menu. This top bar menu links to important pages that aren’t categories in the shop, like pages that have to do with the visitor’s personal account on the site. The main menu reflects the most important product categories on eBay.

Finally, just like on your homepage, you shouldn’t add too many links to your menu. If you do, they will become less valuable, both for your users and for search engines.

Read all about optimizing your website’s menu here or take our site structure training that includes lots of examples!

Breadcrumb trail

You can make your site’s structure even clearer by adding breadcrumbs to your pages. Breadcrumbs are clickable links that are usually visible at the top of a page or post. Breadcrumbs reflect the structure of your site. They help visitors determine where they are on your site. They improve both the user experience as well as the SEO of your site, as you can read in Edwin’s guide on breadcrumbs.

If you use a WordPress site, you can use one of the many breadcrumb plugins that are available. You can also use our Yoast SEO plugin, as we’ve implemented a breadcrumb functionality in our plugin as well.

Taxonomies

WordPress uses so-called taxonomies to group content (other CMSs often have similar systems). The word ‘taxonomy’ is basically a fancy term for a group of things – website pages, in this case – that have something in common. This is convenient because people looking for more information on the same topic will be able to find similar articles more easily. You can group content in different ways. The default taxonomies in WordPress are categories and tags.

Categories

You should divide the blog posts or products on your site into a number of categories. If these categories grow too big, you should divide these categories into subcategories, to clear things up again. For example, if you have a clothing store and you sell shoes, you can decide to divide this category into a number of subcategories: ‘boots’, ‘heels’, and ‘flats’. All of these subcategories contain products, in this case shoes, of that specific type.

Adding this hierarchy and categorizing to your pages helps your user and Google make sense of every single page you write. When implementing your category structure, make sure to add your main categories to the main menu of your site.

Read more: Using category and tag pages for SEO »

Tags

Your site’s structure will also benefit from adding tags. The difference between a category and a tag mostly has to do with structure. Categories are hierarchical: you can have subcategories and even sub-subcategories. Tags, however, don’t have that hierarchy. Tags just say: “Hey, this article or product has a certain property that might be interesting for a visitor.” Think of it like this: categories are the table of contents of your website, and tags are the index. A tag for the online clothing store mentioned above could be a brand, for instance, Timberlands.

Keep reading: What is the difference between tags and categories? »

Try not to create too many tags. If you add a new unique tag to every post or article, you’re not structuring anything. Make sure each tag is used at least twice, and that your tags group articles that genuinely belong together.

Some WordPress themes display tags with each post, but some don’t. Make sure your tags are available to your visitors somewhere, preferably at the bottom of your article or in the sidebar. Google isn’t the only one that likes tags: they are useful for your visitors too, who may want to read more about the same topic.

Read on: Tagging post properly for users and SEO »

Contextual internal linking

Site structure is all about grouping and linking the content on your site. Until now, we mostly discussed so-called classifying links: links on your homepage, in your navigation and taxonomies. Contextual links, on the other hand, are internal links within the copy on your pages that refer to other pages within your site. For a link to be contextual, the page you link to should be relevant for someone reading the current page. If you look at the previous paragraph, for instance, we link to a post about tagging, so people can learn more about it if they’re interested.

Your most important pages are probably often very relevant to mention on several pages across your site, so you’ll link to them most often. Just remember that not only the page you’re linking to is relevant, the context of the link is important as well.

Google uses the context of your links to gather information about the page you’re linking to. It always used the anchor text (or link text) to understand what the page you’re linking to is about. But the anchor text isn’t the only thing Google looks at. Nowadays, it also considers the content around the link to gather extra information. Google is becoming better at recognizing related words and concepts. Adding links from a meaningful context allows Google to properly value and rank your pages. Yoast SEO Premium makes internal linking a breeze by automatically suggesting relevant content from your site to link to.

Contextual linking for blogs

For blogs you should write extensively on the topics you’d like to rank for. You should write some main articles (your cornerstone articles) and write various posts about subtopics of that topic. Then link from these related posts to your cornerstone articles, and from the cornerstone articles back to related posts. In this way, you’ll make sure that your most important pages have both the most links and the most relevant links.

The following metaphor might help you understand this principle: Imagine you’re looking at a map of a state or country. You’ll probably see many small towns and some bigger cities. All towns and cities will be interconnected somehow. You’ll notice that small towns often have roads leading to the big cities. Those cities are your cornerstones, receiving the most links. The small towns are your posts on more specific topics. There are some roads (links) leading to these smaller towns, but not as much as to the big cities.

Keep on reading: Internal linking why and how »

Contextual linking opportunities for online shops

Contextual internal linking works differently on an online shop with very few to no pages that are exclusively meant to inform. You don’t explore a specific topic on your product pages: you’re selling a product. Therefore, on product pages, you mostly want to keep people on a page and convince them to buy the product. Consequently, contextual linking is far less prominent in this context. You generally shouldn’t add contextual links to your product descriptions, because it could lead to people clicking away from the page.

There are just a couple of meaningful ways of adding contextual links to your product pages:

1. link from a product bundle page to the individual products
2. a ‘related items’ or ‘compare with similar items’ section
3. a ‘customers also bought’ section
4. a ‘product bundles’ or ‘frequently bought together’ section.

Learn all about setting up a great (internal linking) structure for your online store with our Site structure training, part of our Yoast SEO academy training subscription. We’ve included lots of examples from real websites!

Landing pages

Landing pages are the pages you want your audience to find when they search for specific keywords you’ve optimized for. For instance, we want people who search for ‘free SEO training’ to end up on the page about our free training called ‘SEO for beginners’. You need to approach the content of your most important landing pages differently than your other, regular pages.

Here, we’ll discuss two types of landing pages: cornerstone pages and product landing pages. They’re both pages you’d like people to land on from the search engines, but they require quite a different approach. But first, we’ll shortly go into search intent, because you have to know what your audience is really looking for.

Search intent

When setting up your site structure, you need to think about search intent. It’s about what you think people are looking for when they enter a query into a search engine. What do people want to find? And: what do they expect to find?

Take the time to think about different possibilities in search intent, as you might want to cater to different types on your site. Are people just looking for an answer to a question or a definition? Are they comparing products before purchase? Or, are they intending to buy something right away? This is often reflected in the type of query they make. You can also use Google’s search results to create great content that fits someone’s needs.

When you have idea of the search intent it’s essential to make sure your landing page fits the search intent of your audience. Pages can answer more than one search intent, but you need a clear view for at least your most important pages.

Read all about search intent and why it’s important for SEO.

Cornerstone content pages

Cornerstone articles are the most important informational articles on your website. Their focus is to provide the best and most complete information on a particular topic, their main goal is not to sell products.

Because of this focus, we usually think of blogs when talking about cornerstone content. Of course, that doesn’t mean it can only be a blog post. All different kinds of websites have cornerstone articles! Rule of thumb: if an article brings everything you know about a broad topic together, it’s a cornerstone content article.

In this article, Marieke explains what cornerstone content is and how to create it. Want to set up your own cornerstone content strategy? Our new Internal linking SEO workout makes the cornerstone content approach easy to implement!

Product landing pages

Product landing pages significantly differ from cornerstone articles. The latter are lengthy, where product landing pages shouldn’t be that long. Rather than complete articles, they should be focused. These pages only need to show what your visitors need to know to be convinced. They don’t need to hold all the information.

You obviously want to rank with these pages though, and that means they need content. Enough content for Google to understand what the page is about and what keyword it should rank for. Where cornerstone articles could be made up by thousands of words, a couple of hundreds could be enough for product landing pages. The main focus of the content should be on your products.

Michiel listed all the essentials of your product landing page here.

Maintaining your site structure

Structuring or restructuring your content doesn’t always have high priority within everything you have to do. Especially when you blog a lot, or add other content regularly, it might feel like a chore. Although it isn’t always fun, you have to do it, or your website might become a mess. To prevent that from happening, you need to not only fix your site structure but keep an eye on it while adding new content. Site structure should definitely be part of your long-term SEO strategy.

Evaluate your menu

When your business goal or website changes, your menu also needs to change. When you start thinking about restructuring your site, planning things visually will pay off. Make a flowchart.

Start with your new menu one or two levels deep and see if you can fit in more of the pages you have created over the years. You’ll find that some pages are still valid, but don’t seem relevant for your menu anymore. No problem, just be sure to link to them on related pages and in your sitemaps, so that Google and your visitors can still find these pages. The flowchart will also show you any gaps in the site structure.

Read more: Optimizing your website menu »

Rethink your taxonomy

Creating an overview of your categories, subcategories and products or posts will also help you to rethink your site’s taxonomy. This could be a simple spreadsheet, but you can use more visual tools like LucidChart or MindNode too.

Do your product categories and subcategories still provide a logical overview of your product range or your posts and pages? Perhaps you’ve noticed somewhere down the line that one category has been far more successful than others, or maybe you wrote a lot of blog posts on one subject and very few on others.

If one category grows much larger than others, your site’s pyramid could be thrown off balance. Think about splitting this category into different categories. But, if some product lines end up much smaller than others, you might want to merge them. Don’t forget to redirect the ones you delete.

In the unlikely event you have built your HTML sitemap manually, update that sitemap after changing your site structure. In the far more likely event you have an XML sitemap, re-submit it to Google Search Console.

Keep reading: The structure of a growing blog »

Clean up outdated content

Some outdated articles you might be able to update and republish, to make them relevant again. If an article is outdated but no one reads it anyway, you might opt for getting rid of it altogether. This could clean up your site nicely.

What you should know in that case, is that you should never just delete a page or article. If Google cannot find the page it serves your user a 404 error page. Both the search engine and your visitor will see this error message saying the page doesn’t exist, and that is a bad experience and thus, bad for your SEO.

Be smart about this! You need to properly redirect the URL of the page you’re deleting, so your user (and Google) lands on a different page that is relevant to them. That could even improve your SEO!

Got some old content to clean up on your site? Sort out hidden pages and dead ends in four easy steps with our orphaned content SEO workout, available in Yoast SEO Premium.

Avoid keyword cannibalization

Your website is about a specific topic, which could be quite broad or rather specific. While adding content, you should be aware of keyword cannibalization. If you’re optimizing your articles for keywords that are all too similar, you’ll be devouring your own chances of ranking in Google. If you optimize different articles for similar key terms, you’ll be competing with yourself, and it’ll make both pages rank lower.

If you suffer from keyword cannibilization you’ll have some work to do. In short, you should research the performance of your content, and probably merge and redirect some of it.  When merging posts, we recommend creating a new draft by cloning one of the original posts with Yoast Duplicate Post plugin. This gives you the freedom to work on your merged post without making these changes to a live post. Read the guide by Joost to learn more about keyword cannibalization and how to fix it.

Internal linking with Yoast SEO

Feeling a bit overwhelmed by all this advice? Yoast SEO has some handy tools to make internal linking so much easier.

Yoast SEO’s text link counter visualizes your links so you can optimize them. It shows the internal links in a post and the internal links to a post. You can use this tool to enhance your site structure, by improving the links between your related posts. Make sure your cornerstones get the most (relevant) links!

Yoast SEO Premium helps you with your internal linking as well. Our internal linking suggestions tool will show you which articles are related to the one you’re writing, so you can easily link to them: just by dragging the link into your editor!

Moreover, our tool allows you to indicate which articles you consider to be cornerstone content on your site. This way those articles will be shown at the top of the internal linking suggestions. You’ll never forget to link to them again.

Read on: How to use Yoast SEO for your cornerstone content strategy »

Site structure: in short

As we have seen, there are several reasons why site structure is important. Good site structure helps both your visitors and Google navigate your site. It makes it easier to implement changes and prevents competing with your own content. So use the tips and pointers in this guide to check and improve your site structure. That way, you’ll stay on top of things and keep your website from growing out of control!

Want to improve your site structure, but don’t know where to start? Get Yoast SEO Premium and get loads of helpful tools and guidance, including free access to Yoast SEO Academy and our Site structure training, as well as our SEO workouts!