Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
WordPress
Marieke van de Rakt,
Joost de Valk
Colophon
© 2016 Yoast
ISBN/EAN 978-94-92320-09-4
NUR 988
Publisher: Yoast
Authors: Marieke van de Rakt, Joost de Valk
Editor: Mijke Peters, Marieke van de Rakt
Design: Mijke Peters
Illustrations: Tim Hengeveld, Erwin Brouwer
Photography (blog examples): unsplash.com, pixabay.com
Edition: 1
Table of Contents
Where to start? 7
Formulate a mission 9
Ways to make your mission clear to your audience 12
Technical SEO 17
Keyword research 53
How to come up with ideas for your blog? 65
Content managing of a blog 71
How to handle comments on a blog 74
Site structure 80
3
UX 102
Call-to-action 104
Menus 109
Readability 114
Marketing 169
Epilogue 223
4
About this book
Your website can be a way to express your thoughts about the world.
Blogging, for instance, could be a way for you to share your knowledge
and to help people in a certain community. It could also be a strategy
to attract readers and customers to your website. But in any of these
cases, a site owner would like to attract an audience. Ranking high in
the search engines like Google is one of the most important ways to
drive traffic to your site.
In this eBook, we will take you through every aspect of Search Engine
Optimization that is important for people maintaining a site. In the
first section, we will challenge you to really think about the mission
and the purpose of your site. In the following sections, we will teach
you about all other aspects that are important in optimizing your site.
We will focus on technical aspects, on site structure, on copywriting
and on User eXperience. But also, we will help you to find topics to
blog about, give tips on marketing and finally on monetizing your site.
5
Blog examples
The example blogs are all entirely made up and not based on ‘real blogs’
(with the exception of yoast.com, which genuinely exists ). We used
our experience with blogs and transformed this experience into
fictional blogs. The kind of blogs we use as an example are in fact
fairly common. Sometimes, in order to make the example more real,
we had to really dive into the specific topic of that blog. Please
remember that all the information of these blogs is purely fictional and
should be seen solely as illustrational and not functional (so please do
not take our advice on running a marathon in section 3). Whenever we
use an example you will see this icon:
6
Section 1
Where to start?
In this section, we will help you to start optimizing your site. The
most important thing for every site is to have a clear mission. Sites
need to have purpose and focus in order to appeal to people. Any
improvements on your site should start by (re)formulating the
mission of your site. In the first chapter of this section, we will help
you do that. In chapter 2 we will help you communicate your mission
adequately towards your audience.
7
My awesome crazy life ~ Michael is a student who just likes to
write. Lots of friends like his columns and short stories and one
day he decides to write down the things that happen to him.
That’s the way his blog ‘my awesome crazy life’ had started. He
writes about his classes, about his girlfriend and about the parties
he visits.
8
Chapter 1
Formulate a mission
If you decide to start a website, you will most definitely have some
idea what your site will be about. Perhaps it will be a very personal
diary-like blog in which you offer your audience an in-depth view of
your exciting personal life. It could also be a site about a hobby or
about your profession.
And then you starting writing. Every site is born with that very first
post. Every blogger starts by writing and while you keep going, your blog
9
will gain identity. Somewhere along that way, you should really take
some time to think about what you want with your site. In order to really
make something of your blog, you should turn your idea into a mission.
Formulating a mission
Before starting with optimizing your site, you will have to think about
your mission. Do not think too lightly about this. It is really hard to
have (and keep) clearly in mind what it is you want to write about. To
show you, we’ve made a list of questions you should be able to answer
after you’ve thought it all through. A lot of people can’t answer these
questions effectively at first. So take your time:
• Who are you and what is your site about?
• What makes your site special?
• In what way will your site help, entertain or inform your readers?
• What does your site add to sites that already exist? In what way is
your site better or different than others?
• What is the reason your website exists, besides making money?
Businesses are born of ideas, some of which are great, some are not.
But they’re all born out of the idea that what you have to offer is
special, and adds something to the market. The same goes for
successful blogs. Make sure that you have a clear vision of what it is
that you are offering to your readers. That benefit, that advantage,
that promise, should be clearly reflected on your website.
So the first step in starting a successful site is thus to write down your
mission. But, also if you already maintain a site, writing down your
10
mission will be the first step in improving that site. You just have to
figure out what makes you stand out from the rest. Take the time and
literally write down your mission on a piece of paper. Of course a
computer or an iPad will do as well. You have to come up with one
mission, one message to send to your audience.
11
Chapter 2
Once your mission is clear, you should make sure that your mission
is clearly reflected on your site. Your mission should be clear and
obvious when visitors enter your website. That way, your site will be
able to attract new visitors. Be aware you have literally just seconds
to get your most important point across. People’s attention span is
really short. So you have to make sure you tell all the important stuff
first, and tell it quickly.
There are a few ways to make sure your mission is instantly clear to
your audience. You should pick or design a theme that fits your site,
come up with clear headlines and taglines, write decent introductory
content and insert nice, suitable pictures.
1 Pick a theme
12
2 Name and taglines
An important way to communicate your mission to your audience is
to make good use of your blogs name and tagline. The name is (or,
should be) in the title of every page. A tagline is a small amount of
text which serves to clarify a thought. It could be the explanation of
the name, or a description of your brand or company.
Make sure that your site’s name but mostly your tagline clearly
communicate the core goal of your site. This is most easily done by
creating a tagline for your site that immediately reflects what you do.
Your site’s name should, if it’s not related to an existing brand, be
something that’s brandable and easily remembered. You get bonus
points if it also makes clear what you write about immediately.
13
example
3 Introductory content
Your homepage and your landing pages should include a clear intro-
duction. In this introduction you explain the mission or the purpose
of your site. What is your site about? Make sure this text is really clear
and adapt to the language of your audience. This text should not be
too long (one or two paragraphs at the most)!
14
My awesome crazy life ~ The introductory content of My
awesome crazy life reads: My life is crazy. My days are filled with
studying for finals, writing essays, partying and falling in and out
of love. The lives of my goods friends Jason and Lauren are even
more crazy than mine. Frat parties, sex, drugs and rock and roll. I
will give you a peek in my world. Join me and my friends in my
awesome crazy college experience and stay tuned for the ins and
outs on my journey and struggles as a college student.
15
4 A picture is worth a thousand words
Yoast tip
If you are selling candy, make sure to put pictures of tasty candy on
your homepage. If you are selling cruises to Hawaii, you could defi-
nitely take some great shots of a tropical island and a nice cruise
ship. For those of you that sell things like consultancy or plugins for
that matter, it is more difficult to find suitable pictures.
16
Section 2
Technical SEO
17
PhotoSofy ~ The example central in this section is PhotoSofy, a
blog maintained by a young photographer. She posts photos of
her projects on her blog and writes accompanying texts. The
photographer focuses on taking pictures of nature (beaches,
forest, animals). Her blog serves as a portfolio and helps her to
find new clients.
Yoast tip
18
Chapter 3
If you want to improve the SEO of your site, you need to understand
some basics of SEO. That’s what this chapter is all about.
Note that we’ll talk about Google when we refer to a search engine. Of
course, there are many other search engines, like Bing and Yahoo. But
since Google pretty much dominates the search engine market, we
will only refer to Google in our texts.
Search engines like Google follow links. They follow links from one
web page to another. Google consists of a crawler, an index and an
algorithm. A crawler follows the links on the web. It goes around the
internet 24/7 and saves the HTML- version of a page in a gigantic
database, called the index. This index is updated if the Google crawler
comes by your website again and finds a new or revised version of it.
Depending on the traffic on your site and the amount of changes you
make on your website, Google comes around more or less often.
For Google to know of the existence of your site, there first has to be a
link from another site - one that is already in the index - to your site.
Following that link will lead to the first crawler-session and the first
time your site is saved in the index.
19
Google’s secret algorithm
After indexing your site, Google can show it in the search results.
Google has a specific algorithm that decides which pages are shown
in which order. How this algorithm works is a secret. Nobody knows
exactly which factors decide the ordering of the search results. More-
over, factors and their importance change very often. Testing and
experimenting gives us a relatively good feel for the important factors
and the changes in these factors.
Yoast tip
Google’s result page shows about 7 or 10 links to sites which fit your
search the best. We refer to these results as the organic search
results. If you click to the second page, more results are shown. The
further down the results you are, the less likely someone is going to
find your site from their search.
20
Figure 5: you’ve probably know one or two Google memes
Above the 10 links on the first page are paid links, most of the time.
These links are ads; people have paid Google to put these links at the
top of the site when people search for a specific term. Prices for
these ads vary greatly, depending on the competitiveness of the
search term.
21
Universal search
Next to the organic and the paid results, Google also embeds news items,
pictures and videos in its search results. This is called universal search.
22
What is Search Engine Optimization?
2 Off-page factors. These include the links to your site. The more
other (relevant) sites link to your website, the higher your ranking
in Google will be. We’ll talk a bit about link building in chapter 32
in section 7, Marketing.
23
Chapter 4
Before you begin: make sure you host your site on your own domain.
That will give you the best chances to compete with others in the
rankings in Google.
Figure 8: host your site on your own domain
Why WordPress?
24
It’s very easy!
WordPress core already comes with features for every user, but you
can upgrade your functionality with plugins. There are literally tens
of thousands of plugins (free and paid) which allow for social media
widgets, spam protection and so much more. Tips on how to select
plugins that are right for you can be found in the security chapter
later on in this section.
25
It’s very free!
You do not have to pay any kind of license fee to WordPress. It’s free!
And it’s open source. So you are free to use WordPress in any way
you choose: you can install it, use it, change it, distribute it. As the
most popular CMS (Content Management System) on the web,
WordPress has a large and supportive community. A lot of very
skilled developers (including some of our own best developers) work
together to make WordPress even better. You can ask questions on
support forums and get help from volunteers.
You can read much more about these and other WordPress features
and requirements and find testimonials on WordPress.org.
Yoast SEO
26
Our premium plugin offers some extra features and the help of our
support team. That could be really useful, if you have a hard time
installing our plugin. Admittedly, the plugin has quite a lot of differ-
ent settings and it could be a challenge setting up. We are currently
finishing up a training about the Yoast SEO plugin (what is does and
what the settings do). If you want to know more about what the
plugin does and what the different settings are for (and which you
should use for your specific blog) you should definitely look into the
Yoast SEO plugin training.
27
Chapter 5
Security
You cannot neglect the security of your website, especially when your
blog is getting a bit larger. Failing to take the necessary precautions
can lead to malware infections, branding issues, Google blacklists
and possibly have a huge impact on your SEO (something dear to our
hearts).
WordPress security has always been food for thought. Even though
most of the recent updates including WordPress 4.0 deal with
WordPress security issues, there is still a lot that can be done to
improve that security, even by the less tech-savvy among us. In this
chapter we’ll walk you through a number of suggestions on how to
improve security on your own WordPress website. WordPress itself
also has a list on WordPress security tips you might want to read.
Perhaps the easiest baseline step for WordPress security you can take
as a WordPress user is to stop using ‘admin’ as a username. Choose
something else please! It’ll cost you nothing, and the install makes it
really easy to do. A majority of today’s attacks target your wp-admin/
wp-login access points using a combination of admin and some pass-
word. Common sense would dictate that if you remove admin you’ll
also kill the attack outright.
28
When we say ‘admin’ we are speaking specifically to the username
only and not the role.
Simply create a new user in WordPress at Users > New User and make
that a user with Administrator rights. After that, delete the admin
user. Don’t worry about the post or pages the admin user has already
created. WordPress will nicely ask you: “What should be done with
content owned by this user?” and give you the option to delete all
content or assign it to a new user, like the one you’ve just created.
Make sure that not every user that has access to your WordPress
backend is categorized under the administrator role. Assign people to
the appropriate roles and you’ll greatly reduce your security risk.
The third thing you can do in order to increase the security of your
weblog is to choose a less common password. An easy thing to
remember is CLU: Complex. Long. Unique. This is where tools like
1Password and LastPass come into play, as they each have password
generators. You type in the length, and it generates the password.
29
You save the link, save the password, and move on with your day.
Depending on how secure you want the password to be, you set the
length of the password (20 characters is always right) and decide on
things like the inclusion of less usual characters like # or *.
The fourth thing you should do is to make sure to change the Word-
Press table prefix. By default, the WordPress table prefix is wp_. You
must have noticed by now that WordPress security is also about
replacing all default, and this is no exception. If you use zr37tm_, that
will be much harder to guess and therefore your database will be
harder to access. If you have a new site, you’ll be asked to add it in the
5 minute setup when entering database details (see image):
30
It’ll end up in wp-config.php at:
$table_prefix = ‘wp_’;
Another reason to secure that file.
31
6 Disable file editing
If a hacker gets in, the easiest way to change your files would be to go
to Appearance > Editor in WordPress. To lift your WordPress security,
you could disable writing of these files via that editor. Again, open
wp-config.php and add this line of code:
define(‘DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT’, true);
Of course you’ll still be able to edit your templates via your favorite
FTP application, you just won’t be able to do it via WordPress itself.
Another thing you can do to protect your weblog is to limit the amount
of login attempts. Attacks like a brute force attack target your login
form and try every combination of username and password they can
think of. So limiting login attempts greatly reduces the chance that
they will eventually find the right combination.
The All in One WP Security & Firewall plugin has an option to simply
change the default URL (/wp-admin/) for that login form. Next to
that, you could also limit the number of attempts to login from a
certain IP address.
32
9 Hosting & WordPress security
33
10 (Free) plugins & themes
There is one other thing you want to check. If a plugin hasn’t been
updated for two years, WordPress will tell you that. It doesn’t mean
it’s a bad plugin, it could simply be that there hasn’t been a need to
update, because the plugin just works. The ratings will tell you that,
and the compatibility with the current WordPress version, which is
also listed on the plugin page at wordpress.org. Having said that,
Sucuri strongly recommends against using any plugins that haven’t
been updated for that long. You should take their word for it.
34
Figure 11: last update and compatibility listed on the plugin
page at wordpress.org
Based upon these ratings and compatibility, you could pick your
plugins less random and have a larger chance of some kind of security
being added.
11 Contact Sucuri
We’ve already mentioned our friends at Sucuri. Sucuri has done a
tremendous job on our Yoast plugins and have helped on several
hacked websites in the past. Sucuri is a globally recognized website
35
security company specializing in bringing peace of mind to website
owners, including us here at Yoast. We’ve partnered with Sucuri
because we take security very seriously, it’s not and should not be an
afterthought.
36
Chapter 6
Speed
Site speed is one of the factors that determine whether you get a good
ranking in Google. While site speed was historically not the most
important one, it’s growing in importance more and more. A slow
website will result in a slow crawling rate, Google will be slower to
fetch pages on your site and thus might take longer to index new
content. Making your website faster will be a relatively easy way to
increase the chance of getting high rankings in Google.
Moreover, a fast site will give a much better User Experience than a
slow one. That’s is also a very important reason to make sure the
speed of your site is optimal.
37
Tools to check your site speed
In our website reviews, we always check the site speed of a website.
Obviously, site speed is different when checking it from different
locations. Just one reason why speed tools do not always provide the
same results. That is why we use all these tools in our site reviews
(and do not rely on just one):
• Google PageSpeed Insights
• Pingdom Tools
• Yslow
• WebPageTest
If you want to test your site speed, you can enter the url of your
website in these tests. They review the speed of this site and give a
list of options on how to improve your site speed. Both Google and
YSlow have reasonably good, though slightly technical, explanations
on the various aspects that you can improve. The other tools show a
little less explanation and are a bit harder to interpret.
38
Plugins you should use
There are several major caching plugins for WordPress which will
make your site much faster, the most well-known ones being W3
Total Cache, WP Super Cache and WP Rocket.
WP Super Cache does what it says on the tin: it caches your site. It
does that well, without too many bells and whistles. WP Rocket is
better, they offer a solution to speed up your site without much
hassle and without the risks of breaking things. WP Rocket is a paid
plugin though.
Yoast tip
Use WP Rocket if you don’t mind paying a little money, and choose
WP Super Cache if you don’t want to spend anything.
39
Hosting
Site speed has a lot to do with your hosting. Many problems with site
speed are actually things your hosting party could take care of for
you. Hosts like GoDaddy Pro and WP Engine will do this and more and
more hosts are start doing this as well.
40
Chapter 7
Mobile
Desktop search?
This Mobilegeddon update probably doesn’t impact desktop search
directly. But Google is known to use the click-through rate (CTR)
from the search results as a ranking factor, which we’re guessing
41
will be impacted. If your website isn’t shown in the mobile results,
people who searched for one of your keywords on their mobile
devices won’t be able to click on your site. Your total CTR will there-
fore decrease.
42
Figure 12: non-responsive site vs responsive
And when you get the message that your page is not mobile-friendly,
they’ll obviously also tell you why not. However, it only checks one
page at a time, so this is probably not the best option in case you
want to check your entire site, but might be useful when you’ve
added a new page. To get a better overview of your entire site’s
mobile-friendliness, check the Mobile Usability section in your
Google Search Console. This will give you a list of all the all the pages
Google found errors on.
43
If your website is not mobile-friendly according to this test, you
really have work to do! You see, this test actually gives a pass to a lot
of sites that aren’t even that mobile-friendly, so if your site doesn’t
pass this test, it must work really poorly on mobile devices. Chances
are very high your site will not appear anywhere near page one in the
mobile results of Google.
Yoast tip
Responsive design
What is a responsive design?
44
A responsive design automatically scales to the right format, making
sure your website looks decent on all screens.
With the mobile and desktop versions of your site designed, it is time
to decide where to ‘break’ your design.
Break it down
After you have designed your mobile and desktop website you will
have to think about breakpoints. A breakpoint is the screen size at
which your site switches between designs. At what point (at what
45
browser width) will you decide to show people the mobile version
instead of the desktop version? In order to make these choices, you
should do some testing. Look at how your website looks in different
formats. Take that iPad and judge the quality of your website, test
your website on different mobile phones and on desktops with
different resolutions. Your website should look at least decent (and
preferably awesome) on all possible devices. Keep testing, even after
you have chosen your breakpoints. Alter them if necessary.
Design your mobile blog and its structure with the mobile user in
mind. Think about the reasons visitors use their mobile phones to
check your weblog. Perhaps they want to read one of your blogs and
easily find related articles. Make sure your mobile visitor can easily
do that. Check your Google Analytics in order to know which pages
are most visited amongst your mobile audience. You can easily check
this in Google Analytics, for instance at Audience » Mobile » Devices
by adding a secondary dimension for Destination Page.
If someone finds your website and starts browsing it, make sure they
can easily find and complete what they wanted to do. The use of a
mobile phone most of the times implicates being on the go and a
lesser attention span. Distractions are everywhere. Design your
mobile UX to make sure they get things done.
46
2 Hamburger menu & sticky menu
Figure 15: sticky menu, hamburger menu and the search option always
available
Yoast tip
Your mobile menu should stay focused, especially when your website
also has a drop-down menu. Consider creating great landing pages
for your main menu items and just forget about the submenu for
your mobile website. It will be more convenient to focus on mobile
search instead. As the small mobile device does not allow you to put
everything in your mobile menu, you want the search option to
always be available.
47
3 Large touch surfaces
We already mentioned this before, and it’s so obvious, yet still not
common. Mobile websites are usually browsed with a thumb. And we
need to be able to click elements with that thumb as well. Google
Insights checks this under Size Tap Targets Appropriately.
And not just buttons, but other elements can be too small or too close
for a finger. It’s really annoying to click a link and end up somewhere
else, just because the link next to it is too close to the link you wanted.
It’s in Google PageSpeed Insights as well, like the button hit areas.
That tool is not the holy grail of mobile UX, but if Google can test it
that easily, why not keep it in mind when designing your mobile
website, especially when designing elements like a mobile menu or
footer links.
Font size is really important for mobile UX of blogs. You can’t just use
all the desktop font sizes on your mobile website as well. There are
two reasons for that:
48
1 The mobile screen size. You don’t want the title to fill the screen,
you want to make sure the article starts within the first view of the
page. Nor do you want the base font (like your paragraph font) to
be too small to read without having to pinch and zoom.
2 You’ll create a mess when using more than three font sizes. The
size differences will be much more visible. That’s why we advise
limiting the number of font sizes to two, maybe three.
Yoast tip
If you are using WordPress, you’re in luck. As per version 4.4, Word-
Press is serving images based upon the size of your screen by default.
It checks the resolution of your device, and serves an image in a size
that is most suited for that resolution. This goes one step further
than just using a responsive image; it actually uses a smaller or larger
image. Technical info: this is done by using the srcset attribute in the
image tag. The use of that tag is not limited to WordPress, by the way.
49
Section 3
50
FitnessFlorida ~ In this section a fitness blog called ‘Fitness-
Florida’ will be central. FitnessFlorida is a blog which is owned
and maintained by a personal trainer who is situated in Miami
and aims to help young people get fit. He is an expert in coaching
young, overweight people, helping them get back in shape. His
blog offers tips on how to get fit and healthy. The aim of this blog
is to inform readers about fitness and show them his expertise. In
the end, the personal trainer aspires to attract new customers to
add to his clientele.
Introduction
51
Always start with keyword research
Your content is the most important ranking factor. You should write
about the topics you want to be found for. That is why you always
start with keyword research. This can be defined as the activities you
undertake in order to compile an extensive list of keywords and
phrases which you would like to rank for.
In chapter 8 and 9 of this section, we will take you through the process
of doing keyword research. But mind you, keyword research is not
the only step in this process. In the remainder of this section we will
give tips on how to come up with new topics to write about, how to
manage the content of your blog, and how to handle comments.
52
Chapter 8
Keyword research
In this chapter we will give you practical tips on how you can execute
your own keyword research. If you want to learn more about keyword
research, you should definitely look into our Content SEO eBook, or
our Basic SEO training.
Before starting the actual keyword research, you want to think about
your mission (see section 1 chapter 1 about mission). Your mission is
the thing that makes you stand out from all the other sites. While
formulating your mission you should answer questions like: who are
you and what is your blog about? What makes it special? Take the
time and literally write down your mission.
Once you have formulated a clear mission, you can start making a list
of all the search terms (keywords) you want your site to be found for.
If your mission is clear, you should have little trouble coming up with
search terms that apply to your niche and your unique selling points.
These will be keywords you want to be found for.
53
FitnessFlorida ~ FitnessFlorida focuses on young, overweight people
in Miami. Its mission is to get these people healthy and fit. The blogger
behind FitnessFlorida starts with an extensive brainstorm. He invites
some befriended colleagues to help him with his first brainstorm. They
come up with the following list of keywords they want to rank for:
In order to come up with good terms you really have to get inside the
heads of your audience. How are they most likely to find you? What
would they search for? At the end of your keyword research, you
should have a list of all the relevant search terms people could use.
Also think of combinations and nuances within these terms.
54
Google Adwords Keyword Planner
Use the Google Adwords Keyword Planner to find new and related
keywords. But ignore the search volume data! The search volume
data in the planner is really only useful for keywords that you’re
actually spending money to advertise on. Otherwise, these volumes
are not a reliable metric.
While it’s not really helpful in deciding which keywords are most used
by your potential audience, Google Adwords Keyword Planner does
make a useful tool for coming up with ideas for potential keywords.
Google Trends
55
Figure 17: ‘Fitness’, a seasonal keyword due to new year’s resolutions
56
Creating an extensive list!
The above tools will help you to cobble together an extensive collec-
tion of keywords. The next step is to actually make a useful overview.
Making a table can help with this. Try to come up with combinations
of keywords as well. And order the keywords by some kind of priority
– which of the keywords are especially important to rank for (very
close to your mission) and which ones are less important? In choosing
which keywords to tackle first, you should also consider how likely it
will be that your site will be ranking for that specific keyword. Read
more about that in chapter 9.
Florida Miami
Running schedules
Running schedules Running schedules Miami
Florida
Figure 18: This is part of the table of the result of the keyword research
for FitnessFlorida. The bold keywords are the keywords the blogger wants
to tackle first.
57
Step 3: Construct landing pages
Even if you have a reasonably small site, you’ll still probably end up
with a couple of hundred keywords. But you don’t have to make land-
ing pages for all of these immediately. The great thing about having
a Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress is that you can
incrementally add content. Think about which set of keywords you
would like to rank for now, and which one aren’t that important (yet).
Write blog posts about the most important keywords in your near
future and leave the less important ones for later.
58
Adapting your keyword strategy
59
Chapter 9
Whether or not you will be able to rank for the keywords that fit your
site and your audience largely depends on the market you are in.
Some markets are highly competitive, with large companies domi-
nating the search results. These companies have a very large budget
to spend on marketing in general and on their SEO specifically.
Competing in these markets is hard, therefore ranking in these
markets is also hard. In these cases, focusing on long tail keyword
would be a great SEO strategy. It allows you to gradually get more
traffic and to be found by new and motivated audiences.
60
competition
Figure 19: long tail: the more specific your keyword, the less your competition
Most sites have one main topic. Mom blogs are usually about children
and family life, food blogs are about recipes, eating habits, and
restaurants. Yoast.com is all about SEO. We even named it SEO blog
in our redesign. So it makes sense that all of our blog posts are about
SEO, or SEO-related topics. SEO is definitely something we like to be
found for, so that is our number one keyword. You cannot optimize
all your posts on that number one keyword (or keyphrase). Instead,
you should write a whole number of blog posts about all kinds of long
tail variants of your number one keyword.
61
FitnessFlorida ~ F or FitnessFlorida the main topic is Fitness in
Florida. There will be blog posts about exercises, running routines
and fitness products. The blogger cannot optimize all his posts for
the keyword Fitness Florida, there is simply too much competi-
tion. But in the previous chapter, we have seen part of the result
of his keyword research. The blogger of FitnessFlorida works in
Miami. Part of his keyword strategy is to rank for search terms
containing Miami. Attracting the audience in Miami will be easier
because the competitiveness of the keywords will be much smaller
(‘running maps’ for instance is a much more common keyword
than ‘running maps Miami’).
62
Link from the tail to the head!
If you optimize different blog posts for different long tail variants,
you should make sure to link from these blog posts to your more
‘head’ category pages and from these category pages to your most
awesome landing page. Remember: always link from the ‘tail’ to your
‘head’! That way, you show Google what the structure of your blog is
and which of your pages are most important.
Make sure your most amazing pages rank high in Google! Perhaps
you have a page with your most innovative fitness exercises, which
will immediately convert passing visitors into loyal blog followers.
Make sure your different long-tail-optimized blog posts all link to
this most important ‘head’ page of your blog. These ‘head’ pages
could for instance be cornerstone content (see chapter 17) or well-op-
timized (sub)category pages.
In our view, there are two important reasons why you should focus on
long tail keywords:
1 Easy ranking. It is much easier to rank for long tail keywords than
for more common keywords, because fewer websites compete for
high rankings in the result pages of Google. The longer (and more
specific) search terms are, the easier it is to rank for the term.
63
Because of the vastness of the internet, it is easier to find your
audience for your specific niche. Focusing on a group of long tail
keywords will result in a great deal of traffic altogether.
64
Chapter 10
65
Tip 1: Reading other blogs
A great way to come up with ideas for blog posts is to read other
posts on the subject. Reading the material other people create will
most definitely provide inspiration for your own blog posts. The
pitfall of reading other people’s work however is that it is hard to
formulate your own opinion on the topic after you have read some-
one else’s.
By only reading the titles of other people’s blog posts you can still
find ideas for topics without subconsciously copying their opinion.
Browsing your way through some blogs this way should give you
enough inspiration to come up with new posts for your own blog.
Another way to come up with ideas for blog post is by referring and
writing about current events. Keep an eye on different news sites,
and write posts in which you incorporate your views on the news in
your niche. Perhaps you can set up an alert for a specific topic.
Yoast tip
If you want to know more about how to use news as a way to create
content make sure to check out Newsjacking!
66
FitnessFlorida ~ T he blogger at FitnessFlorida keeps track of all
the new fitness devices and trends. He is subscribed to other blogs
and news sites which follow the latest fitness trends. On Fitness-
Florida the blogger describes the latest fitness techniques and
explains how you can incorporate them in your personal training.
Also, he regularly gives his expert opinion about new fitness trends.
Situations from your own work could also be great inspiration for blog
posts. If your clients or colleagues are faced with a certain problem, it
could well be that other people encounter the same problem. You
should always make sure to respect the privacy of your client, friends,
or colleagues and ask for permission to use their case in your blog, but
if a lot of people have the same problem your post can quickly get a lot
of traffic.
If you are writing a blog post, make sure you are sticking to one topic.
If you notice that you are talking about many things in one post or your
post gets quite lengthy, you are creating a series without realizing it.
67
You should then divide your text over several blog posts.
At Yoast, we call this ‘pulling a Michiel’ (after Michiel Heijmans, who
always thinks he is writing one post, while in fact he is creating a
bunch of posts all at once).
Ideally, you would want to write slightly different posts around the
same keyword (focusing on different long tail keywords). This will
help you rank for that keyword. And one blog post usually leads to
inspiration for more blog posts.
Yoast tip
68
Tip 5: Interact with your audience
If you invite your audience to leave comments on your blog, you could
receive feedback and questions (maybe not right away though). While
most of the feedback will be just nice to hear (or not, we will get back
to you on how to handle that), you might receive some questions as
well. Perhaps some of these questions are easy to answer in a reply,
but some questions require a longer response. Those kinds of ques-
tions are excellent starters for your next post.
If your site offers an internal search function, your audience will use
that to look for posts or pages about certain topics. This is tremen-
dously useful for them to find related content, but it could well be
that people search for terms you haven’t yet written about. Looking
at these search terms should bring some inspiration!
69
Tip 7: Google your own keywords and see what
other people write about
Once you have executed your keyword research, you should have
some input on what words you could be found for. Make sure you
google these keywords and read the results. What do people actually
find if they search for that specific term? How does your blog idea fit
between these search results? Maybe the results inspire you to write
something similar, something that will fit in with the present results.
Trying to write something that will stand out could also be a very
smart strategy.
The internet should not be your only inspiration in your search for
new keywords. You could very well search in books as well for
instance. Enter a keyword you would like to rank for on Amazon.com
and see which books come up. What are the bestsellers? Which angle
did they pick? Make an effort to find inspiration outside your chosen
medium.
70
Chapter 11
Maintaining a site takes more than just writing a bunch of pages. You
should develop some kind of strategy and planning for your content
(especially if you are writing with multiple authors). Also, you should
interact with your audience and respond to their comments.
Content planning
If you are serious about your site, you should make a plan for your
content. If you have a personal blog, planning your content will be
fairly easy. Planning becomes much harder if you are working with
multiple authors writing about different topics, or invite guest blog-
gers. Make sure to read the chapter about multiple authors as well.
Frequency
71
Variation
If you often write about similar topics, make sure to mix things up a
little. Don’t write articles about nearly identical topics one after the
other. Of course you can still write blog series, but try to vary
between topics as much as possible. You could also make variations
in the form of your content. A video post for example really spices
things up!
If you are blogging with more than one author, planning can quickly
get complex. It is wise to create an editorial calendar in which you
plot out all the posts the different authors are going to write. This
could just be an excel sheet, but you could also use a plugin or service
for this, for instance Trello or MeisterTask.
Brainstorm
If you want to create an editorial calendar, you could start with a brain-
storm. Invite all your blog authors and sit together. Ask everyone
what their ideas are and which posts they would like to write in the
near future. Make a list of these ideas and wishes, and then plot them
72
out on a calendar. Make sure your authors finish their blogs a few
days before the post date so you can proofread, edit if needed, and
find or create accompanying illustrations or photos.
When planning content, you should take a look at your own calendar
as well! Are there any major events coming up which are worth
mentioning in your blog post? Or should you write some seasonal
posts? Make sure to mix these ‘current-events posts’ with the other
posts you have lined up.
Yoast Tip
A nice plugin which allows you to collaborate with your editorial team
inside WordPress is Edit Flow.
73
Chapter 12
74
The likelihood that people will come back to read your next post will
really increase if you are a committed and involved blogger. If people
see that the author of a post takes time to read and react to his audi-
ence, they will know that you take them and their writing seriously.
And that’s a reason to come back to your site.
Comments add content to your blog post. And Google indexes all
content on your website, including every comment in every blog post.
Do not get excited just yet, because Google will instantly recognize
comments as being just comments. Their value for the search engine
will be much lower than the original content of the blog post.
Responding to comments will therefore not instantly improve your
SEO, but it will result in higher percentages returning visitors.
The comments people leave on blogs can be divided into four types.
First, the positive feedback. Some people just want to say that they
like you, your company, or your blog post. That’s always nice to hear.
Make sure to reply to some of these (even if it’s just a quick “thanks!”)
or express general gratitude in an upcoming post, so the person
giving the compliment feels appreciated.
The second type of comment are the questions your audience has
after they’ve read your post. Perhaps something remained unclear or
75
something you wrote triggered someone to ask you about your post
or about your brand. Depending on the type of question, there are
different ways to handle these. Read more about handling questions
in the next paragraph.
And finally, some comments are just spam. People try to trick your
readers into clicking on a link, often to something unrelated, or they
just write nonsense. If your spam filter doesn’t filter these comments
out already, you should delete and optionally block them as soon as
you see them. WordPress by default comes with the plugin Akismet,
which is made for this purpose.
76
If you don’t know the answer to a question, we would advise you to
still reply to that comment. You could simply admit that you do not
know the answer, or you could state that you will dive into the matter
and come back with an answer later (and don’t forget to!).
77
dissatisfied enough, they will complain about you through other
channels, and you will look like you are censoring their concerns. So
however hard it might be, you should try to respond to their comments
and try to find the source of their dissatisfaction.
A nice discussion in which there is room for several points of view can
be a good thing. You have the opportunity to really show your audience
what your expertise and opinion about a certain subject is. As long as
the discussion is polite and respectful, it will attract readers and make
them return to your blog.
78
doctor if the pain will endure for a longer period of time and if the
knee gets swollen. But, to stop training all together will make it
that much harder for you to get back into shape for that marathon.
For more information, you can read this article by dr. Brown (head
of Medicine of Boston Medical Center)’.
Note that when sharing your article on Facebook, people can comment
on Facebook as well. Keep a keen eye on the shared article and reply to
any questions or remarks people add there. The same is true for a lot
of other social media outlets.
Yoast tip
79
Section 4
Site structure
80
Homemade-Italy ~ In this section a food blog called ‘Home-
made-Italy’ will be central. Homemade-Italy is all about
homemade Italian food. They write blog posts in which they
describe the preparation and the uniqueness of the Italian cuisine.
They offer full original recipes with pictures of your Italian dishes.
They have their very own recipe to create fresh pasta from scratch.
Every week, the bloggers write two of these blog posts with new,
unique recipes. Also, they occasionally write posts about Italian
restaurants in the United States and about Italian wines.
81
Chapter 13
In order to attract new readers, you should offer them some kind of
site structure. And on top of that, you would want to come up with a
decent site structure because it is really important for your SEO. In
this chapter, we’ll explain the importance of having a good site struc-
ture in detail.
The structure of your blog is also of great importance for the User
eXperience (UX). Attracting new readers largely depends on whether
or not people are able to find the content on your website. If people
are only able to find your latest post on your homepage, then that’s
what they will read. You should instead guide them to your most
awesome pages and give them more posts about topics they enjoy. In
other words, you should help them navigate through your site. A good
site structure will automatically help you do that.
82
Navigating through your site should be easy. You need clear, easy
to find category pages for the topics you blog about most. New audi-
ences will instantly grasp what your site is about and will be able to
find posts on a specific topic in a convenient way, and your own
audience will be able to re-read older content if they want to. In our
section about UX we will give tips on how to improve the navigation
of your blog.
1 A
decent structure makes sure Google ‘understands’ your
site.
The way your site is structured will give Google important clues about
where to find the most important content. Your site’s structure deter-
mines whether a search engine can understand what your site is
about, and how easily it will find and index the content relevant to
your site’s purpose and intent. A good structure could therefore lead
to a higher ranking in Google.
83
2 A
decent structure makes sure you do not compete with
your own content.
On your site, you will probably write multiple articles about similar
topics. At Yoast, we write a lot about SEO. If we would write eight
different articles about SEO, Google would not know which of the
articles is the most important one. If we didn’t solve this with the
structure of our site, we’d be competing with our own articles for a
high ranking in Google. Solving this problem requires a good internal
linking structure and/or taxonomy structure, resulting in higher
rankings. This means that you should pick one article (the corner-
stone article) for every major keyword you want to be found for and
link to that article from all of your other blogs about the same
keyword.
84
Chapter 14
In this chapter, we will help you to set up a good structure for your
blog. We will first explain what an ideal blog structure looks like and
then explain to you how to achieve that for your own blog.
The structure of your site should be like a pyramid. On the top of the
pyramid is your homepage, and under the homepage are a number of
category pages. For larger sites, one should make subcategories or
custom taxonomies. Within the categories and subcategories you will
have a number of webpages.
Figure 21: the structure of your site should look like a pyramid
85
Homemade-Italy ~ Homemade-Italy has category-pages like
pasta, salads, meat dishes and desserts. On these category pages
there will be links to all of your posts about different Italian dishes
within that specific category. On your homepage there will be
links to your main categories pasta, salads, meat dishes and
desserts. Your main navigation is most suitable for that.
Homepage
86
For Homemade-Italy, the recipe to make pasta from scratch is one of
the cornerstone articles. (You’ll read more about cornerstone articles
in chapter 17).
If you have not yet divided the blog posts on your site into a number
of categories, you should definitely do so (right away). Make sure to
add these categories to the main menu of your site.
87
Homemade-Italy ~ Homemade-Italy blogged a lot about pasta.
The pasta category was becoming much larger than the other
categories. Homemade-Italy had 200 posts about pasta, but only
80 about salads, 90 about meat dishes, and 87 about desserts.
That’s why the ‘pasta’ category was divided into ‘pastas from the
oven’ and ‘pasta originals’. The bloggers at Homemade-Italy
also changed the URLs into the proper category names.
Figure 23: make sure URLs are properly redirected after splitting
up a category
Once you’re satisfied with your site structure, have a look at the names
you have come up with for your categories. If you have enough content
about a certain subject for it to require its own category, you can bet
people are searching for it as well. That’s why it’s very wise to make
sure your category names use the keywords people are searching for!
(As seen before you can use Google Trends and your internal search
engine to check or come up with keywords.) Pick the right names for
your categories and subcategories, and you’re halfway there.
88
Internal link structure
Because you’re linking from pages that are closely related to each
other content-wise, you’re increasing your site’s possibility to rank.
Linking this way will help out search engines by showing them what’s
related and what isn’t.
89
On top of that, with all subpages linking to that one main page at the
very top of your pyramid, you are creating cornerstone pages (read
more about cornerstone content in chapter 17). These will make it
easy for search engines to determine what your main pages per
subject are.
Home
Category
Cornerstone 1 Cornerstone 2
Recipe 1 Recipe 2
Tags
Your site will also benefit by adding tags. Tags will give your blog
more structure (or at least Google will understand it better).
90
Homemade-Italy ~ Homemade-Italy adds the tag ‘vegetarian’
to all the dishes that do not contain meat. This makes them easy
to find, because these vegetarian dishes could appear across all
categories (although, vegetarian dishes in the meat category
would be a bit weird). Other tags on the Homemade-Italy blog
are, for example, ‘budget’ or ‘quick & easy’.
Try not to create too many tags. If every post or article receives yet
another new unique tag, you are not structuring anything. Make sure
tags are used more than once or twice. Make sure tags group articles
together that really belong together.
In some WordPress themes, tags are displayed with each post. But,
some themes neglect to do so. You should make sure your tags are in
fact available to your visitors somewhere, preferably at the bottom of
your article. Tags are really useful for your visitors (and not just for
Google) to read more about the same topic.
91
Chapter 15
The main categories of your site should all have a place in the menu
on your homepage. Visitors use your menu to find things on your
website. The menu helps them to understand how your website is
structured. In our section about user experience we will give tips on
how to improve the UX of your menu.
The structure of your site can be made even clearer by adding bread-
crumbs. Breadcrumbs are the links, usually above the title of the
post, that look like: Home » Pasta » Vegetarian lasagna.
92
Breadcrumbs improve both the user experience as well as the SEO of
your blog by showing how the current page fits into the larger struc-
ture of your site. Breadcrumbs allow your users to easily navigate
your site, and it will help them to find their way if they land directly
on a subpage, for example via Google. Above that, they allow search
engines to determine the structure of your site more easily.
The main topic or theme of your site should be the number one
keyword (or keyphrase) you want to be found for – the top of your
pyramid. This will be the most general topic. Your categories will be
more specific, or as we call it more long tail (read more about long tail
in chapter 9). Within the different categories will be a large number
of blog posts about all kinds of long tail variants of your number one
search term.
93
Chapter 16
The structure of a site will be fairly easy to maintain when your site
is small. But as your site gets bigger, you will need to do more in order
to keep the structure of your site optimal. In this chapter, we will
discuss some techniques to improve the structure of a large site. We
would like to stress the need to analyze and update the structure of
your site on a regular basis.
As your site is growing, it could well be that you are writing about one
thing far more than about other things. That’s just the way blogging
goes. As discussed in the chapter about setting up your site structure,
we advise you to have categories of about the same size. You should
94
therefore critically evaluate your categories every few months,
asking yourself whether or not one category is growing much faster
than another category. If that is the case, you could divide such a
category in two separate categories.
Tags are especially important for growing sites. If you have lots and
lots of posts, it becomes harder to make sure you link to similar
content. Blog posts will get lost in a structure that is too flat. By
making subcategories, you create an extra layer of structure and there
will be fewer posts within each group.
For larger sites, one should definitely make good use of subcategries.
This will for instance also prevent articles getting buried on page 236
of a category (who clicks to that page, right?), as there will simply be
less pages per category to begin with.
Tags could also make sure a post does not get lost and receives
enough links. Evaluate your tag structure on a regular basis and
make sure you add new tags if you are blogging about new topics.
95
Add Pagination
96
1 Delete the old content (and redirect the URL). In case you want to
delete the post, first check if there is any traffic on it these days. If
not, delete the post, let Google find the 404 page and it will vanish
from Google. If there is still some occasional traffic, redirect the
post to a similar post. If there is no other post like it, redirect to the
category page, and if that is also not available, redirect to the
homepage as a last resort.
Yoast tip
Read more about properly deleting a page from your site in one of
Joost’s posts.
97
As you will have noticed in both cases, traffic on that specific URL is
key in your decision. If a post has neither any value for your current
visitors, nor any traffic, simply delete it.
98
Chapter 17
Cornerstone articles
99
Category pages or tag pages could make great cornerstone ‘articles’
as well. If you want to optimize your category pages for cornerstone
content, it is of great importance to provide really awesome intro-
ductory content. You should make sure that this page is a compelling
overview of the subject and invites visitors to read even more articles
on your blog.
100
Incorporation in your site structure
The cornerstone articles should appear very high in your site’s pyra-
mid. If you add new content relating to the cornerstone topic, you
should link it to your cornerstone article.
Yoast tip
Make sure that the cornerstone articles, the articles on which people
enter your site, have a clear call-to-action. This means that it will be
clear by the end of the page (and preferably at the top as well) what
you want people to do. If you want them to keep on reading: lead
them to other related articles. If you want them to buy your stuff:
lead them to your shop. If you want them to subscribe to your news-
letter: offer them a sign-up form.
101
Section 5
UX
In this section we will give you advice on how to improve the User
eXperience (UX) of your site. Attractive, clear websites have a lower
bounce rate and a much higher chance to receive social media atten-
tion. These are exactly the two things that make sure your website will
keep ranking well in the long run too. Therefore making sure the UX of
your site is flawless will help for both SEO as well as for growing
towards a larger audience. We’ll discuss the importance of a clear call-
to-action (chapter 18), menus (chapter 19) and the basic principles of
readability (chapter 20).
102
Techboys ~ In this section a tech blog called ‘Techboys’ will be
central. Techboys is a tech blog on which a group of developers
share their code with other developers. Blogs tend to consists
mainly of examples and pieces of code and contain very little
‘text’. Although the blog posts of Techboys contain very valuable
information for devs, the audience of Techboys seems to have a
hard time finding that information. The bloggers of Techboys
therefore decided to make some major improvements to the UX of
their blog.
Yoast tip
If you would like to read more about UX and conversion (and the
importance for SEO), you should read our eBook: UX & Conversion
from a holistic SEO perspective.
103
Chapter 18
Call-to-action
This chapter
What is a call-to-action?
104
Most important call-to-action for blogs
For blogs, it is most important that people aren’t stuck on a page after
they have read one post. Make sure you always offer your visitors
a few posts they should read after they have finished the first post.
And, if you want people to sign up for your newsletter, follow you on
Facebook or to buy products in your shop, make clear buttons to
guide them.
105
Best practices for good calls-to-action for blogs
Making sure you show your visitors where you want them to click
does not seem like rocket science. Still, in the process of designing,
altering and redesigning your blog, the call-to-action can get lost.
Review your website on a regular basis and critically analyze the
visibility of your calls-to-action. There are a number of best prac-
tices for setting up a good call-to-action for your site.
• Size matters. Make sure people are able to view the button without
any trouble. Don’t go overboard; don’t become too aggressive.
• Be clear about the benefits. ‘Sign up now and receive weekly emails
about optimizing your website’ is a better text to accompany a news-
letter subscription option than just ‘Sign up now’.
106
Figure 31: a clear call-to-action on cheapair.com
Figure 32: two examples of a call-to-action button
First of all, you need to be sure you’re using an active voice. An active
voice is action oriented, and thus literally calls people to action. And
that’s exactly what you want. Make people want to click your button
or link!
107
Second, make sure your button or link text is specific for what
people are doing. Do not put ‘click here’ on a button. ‘Send’ is also
just too generic. Use something like ‘Sign up!’ for a newsletter, or
‘Contact us’ for a contact form. The text has to explain what the
button will do. Use small and simple words. You need to keep your
button text as simple as possible. People have to immediately
understand what it means.
Figure 33: make sure your button text is specific
Figure 34: think about the text on your CTA
108
Chapter 19
Menus
This chapter
In this chapter, we will we give practical tips to improve the menu on
your site.
Main menu
The main menu indicates the various sections of your site in a clear
and informative way. This menu is the most global navigation on
your website. Make sure it’s visible on all pages. It should consist of
a number of main menu items (not too much!) that tell your visitor
which corner of your website could be visited for what information.
Your main menu should reflect the structure of your website (see
section 4). Do not flood the menu with unrelated items but think
about which categories make sense to your visitors.
Visitors use your menu to find things on your website. The menu
helps them to understand what your website is about. So your menu
is a very important tool to communicate your purpose.
Submenu
109
Note that these submenu items should also be present on the Code
Examples page itself, for instance by linking these in the text of that
page or as a list of subsections.
There are many ways to add a submenu. The most common one is
where the submenu drops down below the main menu item when
hovering your mouse over that item. You should also add an indication
(like a downwards pointing arrow) in your main menu item to show
that it contains a submenu. Otherwise, visitors will not know that a
submenu exists!
110
Menu usability tips
Preferably, the top level items of your main menu should take up just
one line in your menu. Besides the fact that adding a second line for
your menu isn’t really user friendly, it just looks less professional as
well. If your site is not too big, create at most one sublevel. Keep it
simple and realize there are more ways to get from one page to
another. Your menu isn’t the only navigational option on your
website. If you cannot fit all your categories in your menu, perhaps
your website tries to cover too much.
For the majority of websites, the menu starts with the Home item
and ends with the Contact item. Everything between these two
items should be related somehow. If you have a website about diving,
your menu could have the items: freediving, scuba diving and spear-
fishing. It is clear that these items have a link between them, and
therefore the menu feels natural. If these menu items had been
freediving, scuba diving and Dakar Rally, that wouldn’t feel natural,
right? Keep things on-topic. If you have a diving website and want
to write about your Dakar experience, you can squeeze in a blog post
or link to a specialized, optimized site about it. It doesn’t belong in
your menu.
111
Techboys ~ Th e menu of Techboys consisted of five items (besides
home and contact): Code examples, WordPress, Tech news, About
us and LEGO. LEGO is actually a big hobby of one of the developers
and was therefore placed in their menu. But it did not have
anything to do with the mission of Techboys and was really of
topic. It did not make any sense, besides being ‘fun’. The bloggers
of Techboys therefore decided to delete it from their menu.
Yoast tip
One of the most common items in a blog menu is ‘About’. About the
blog, about the company or about the blogger. You always want to let
your visitor know who you are. What your values are, or what made
you blog in the first place. Doing so, will make the blog more personal,
and this will allow your visitors to related to your story. By making your
blog more personal, your visitors will be more willing to comment or
share your posts.
Menu visibility
For most visitors of your site, the menu will be the main navigation
on your website. If you write long posts and people have to scroll
down a lot, make sure you add a sticky menu. That way, your menu
stays in the screen while people scroll down. If you do it well, that
sticky menu also contains your logo, so your logo stays on screen all
the time. Make them remember your brand!
112
Breadcrumbs
These breadcrumbs should link back to the homepage, and the category
the post is in.
Yoast tip
113
Chapter 20
Readability
This chapter
For a site, it is of great importance that people can read the texts of
your post properly. Reading from screens is hard, so make sure you
do not make it any harder than it already is. In this chapter, we’ll
explain the importance of typography and give tips on how to improve
the typography on your site.
114
Typography
appealing.
Legibility
115
Font
Fonttype
For the best presentation of your blog, you have probably been
thinking about what kind of font to use. Fonts can set a mood,
enhance a tone of voice or totally ruin the user experience or usability
of your website.
Yoast tip
Fonts matter. And as we can basically use any font on any website
nowadays, be sure to pick the right one for your website and audi-
ence. Use Google Fonts (free) or Adobe Typekit (paid) and pick the
fonts that suit your website the most. And remember: Comic Sans is
not a font. Not even if you have a site for kids. Please, let’s teach
them better.
Font size
The preferred paragraph font size for a website has increased quite a
bit over the years. Ten years ago, a font of 10 pixels allowed you to add
more text to a page and made your page look more like a book. With
the growth of computer screens, nowadays 16 pixels is very normal.
Is there a minimum? Not really, although we recommend using at
least 14 pixels. That size is a good read on both the larger desktop
screens and our mobile screens.
116
Font color
What font color to use is largely depending on the type of site you
have and what design your website uses. In general, we say that
using a black font on a white background is still the best read. The
general thought is that outlines are sharper and letters are easier to
distinguish and identify.
The one thing you should do regarding font and background color, is
test the contrast. There are a number of tools available, all with their
own kind of contrast checker. A really easy and good one is Colorable
- it will allow you to enter the foreground (text color) and background
(background color) and it will tell you immediately if the contrast is
right or wrong and what score the combination of colors gets. Color-
able is based upon the WCAG accessibility guidelines. These same
guidelines are used to create Lea Verou’s Contrast Ratio, which will
appeal to a lot of developers as it is available on GitHub. We’ve been
using the last one for ages and love the feature where you can use the
arrow keys to brighten or darken a color to make the contrast right.
Use these tools to your advantage; your audience will thank you for it.
117
White space
Next to font size, you also want to make sure that the text has suffi-
cient room to breathe. If you are using a larger font size, but forget to
add white space for headings and paragraphs, your text will still be
unreadable. Especially on a mobile device. Make sure to use sufficient
white space.
White space isn’t just for between headings and paragraphs. White
space is also related to the line height of your text. If you neglect to
add a proper line height, your well constructed sentences become
one big block of letters. This is far from user-friendly and will make
your page very unappealing for a visitor.
White space
Because the white space of a specific text increases your text’s legi-
bility, people will actually have a better and quicker understanding of
your text. This means you’ll get your point across more quickly and
more easily.
118
Headings
The importance of headings for SEO is (as far as we can see) not very
big anymore. Does that mean that we can just stop using headings
like H1 and H2? No, most definitely not. These headings are still very
useful.
• Summarize your page. Headings make sure the visitor can simply
scan the page and grasp the general idea (and decide to read the
full article).
• Divide the page into digestible parts. Longer pages need head-
ings. Any article without headings might as well be in Chinese as it
will all be one big blur of letters.
Yoast tip
119
Typography of links
To emphasize the link you can easily combine the two options above.
Of course using an underline is always the best option; this will
immediately identify a word or combination of words as a link. Make
sure you change the style when hovering your mouse cursor over the
link. Remove the underline or change the color. The link is already
identified, just make sure there is a change in styling of the link to
confirm that.
Line length
120
In Readability: the Optimal Line Length, Christian Holt mentions a
number of suggested text lines, stating these should be 50 to 65 or 75
characters. Ilene Strizver even takes text alignment in account in her
article Line Length & Column Width. She states that non-justified
text should be 9 to 12 words per line, and justified text should be 12 to
15 words. From our experience, 10 to 15 words is indeed a good read.
121
Section 6
SEO copywriting
There are only very few of us who can write the Great American Novel.
Writing a well-structured blog post however, can be learned by
(almost) everyone. In this section, we will give you some practical
tips about writing, rewriting and structuring your articles. And who
knows? After some practice, your blog posts will read just as smoothly
as the Great American Novel did.
122
Dutchmommies ~ In this section a blog for moms is central:
Dutchmommies. A team of five moms writes about proper food for
children, education and upbringing, arts and crafts, pregnancy
and children’s parties. They try to write stories about their every-
day lives and offer tips on how to handle being a mother.
Introduction
123
Chapter 21
This chapter
Content writing requires some of your creative writing skills. And let’s
be honest, many blogs are hardly readable and not at all informative,
entertaining or inspiring.
Every blog post has some kind of a message. This message is the
purpose of that piece of writing - what do you want to say? A message
can be very small. An article on your website could for instance
inform people about the features of your product, or explain the
shipping process.
124
In poorly written pieces, chances are much larger that people will not
understand your message correctly. If your blog post is well thought-
out, nicely structured and free of misspellings and typos, chances are
much higher that people understand the message of your texts.
3 More trust
If people trust your blog, they will be much more inclined return to
your website to read your next blog, or buy your product.
125
the piece themselves. And more importantly, someone has to think
your post is awesome enough to give it their personal stamp of
approval by sharing it on their timeline on Facebook or Twitter (or
any other social media). Poorly written blog posts will never get
shared much because people will have stopped reading halfway. The
message is lost.
Two examples of blog posts: Which one would you share on your
timeline?
Trying to be the perfect mom is not in the best interest of your child.
When I first became a mother, I was so determined to do everything
‘right’, it became an obsession. I was a loving and devoted mother
and played with my son, read to him, puzzled with him and talked
with him whenever I could. He had to be dressed spotlessly, drink
from a cup (not from a bottle!) and eat the proper food. Before my
oldest son was 2 years old, he talked in full sentences and knew all
colors, numbers, letters and barn animals... but he was unable to
play by himself. He was a very sweet and intelligent child, but he
did have a hard time doing things on his own.
126
Dutchmommies ~ Blog 2: The end of my mommy perfectionism
Writing awesome blog posts will not instantly improve your ranking.
But: in the long run it will definitely have a positive effect on your
SEO! Attractive texts have lower bounce rates and higher chances to
receive social media attention.
127
Chapter 22
This chapter
Step 1: Preparing
128
1 What is the message?
Before you start to write, take some time to think about what you
want your readers to know (or do) after they have read your text. We
refer to this as the message of your text.
In order to come up with your message you could try to phrase that
knowledge in a question. We refer to such a question as the central
question of a text. The text you write will be the answer to your central
question.
Make sure that your central question is clear. Try to come up with a
summarized answer to your central question in one or two sentences.
I refer to this answer as the message of your article. Perhaps you will
not be able to phrase the message of your article until you have done
some research. You should then tend to your research first (see
question 3!).
129
that people will keep on reading. This is actually a big difference
between printed texts, in which one usually starts with a teaser and
builds up to a reveal in the end, and web texts, in which the purpose
should be clear from the start.
Before writing your text, you should take some time to think about
the people who are going to read your text. Make sure you adapt your
text to their level. You should adjust the difficulty of the information
in your piece as well as the difficulty of your style (use of jargon, long
sentences etc) to your audience.
In many cases it can be really hard to know who your readers are.
And, if your audience is a very heterogeneous group, it can be quite
hard to decide the level of difficulty for your topic and your text. It
could therefore be very helpful to do some research concerning your
audience on a regular basis. Read chapter 28 of section Marketing if
you would like to know more about getting to know your audience.
130
Dutchmommies ~ For Dutchmommies, the audience might seem
obvious: (Dutch) moms with young children. And this is true,
though ‘moms with young children’ is still quite a heterogeneous
group. It wouldn’t hurt to think about things like level of educa-
tion and the age of the mothers. Focusing on stay-at-home moms
or working moms could for instance call for a different approach.
In some cases all the information you need to write your text is already
in your head. If Joost de Valk writes an introductory piece about SEO,
he doesn’t need to open any books. In many other cases, you will need
some sources (the internet, books, newspapers) to provide the infor-
mation you need for your text. You should take the central question of
your piece and come up with a number of subquestions.
131
After this phase, the (central) message of your article should be
entirely clear. Take some time to phrase or to rephrase your message
(the summarized answer to your central question) in one or two
sentences.
The final step in the preparation process is the most important one.
You have to give some kind of structure to the information you want
to transfer to your readers. In chapter 23, we will give practical tips to
create structure.
After the initial preparation you can start the actual writing
process. This will take about 20 % of the entire time you spend on
your blog post.
Just do it!
The most important tip for this phase is: just write. People often
have trouble coming up with the first sentence (or the first para-
graph for that matter). You can skip writing that first paragraph all
together. Just put down a couple of words referring to the content
that first paragraph should have and start writing the second para-
graph. Beginnings and endings are easier to write once you’ve
fleshed out the body of your post.
132
If a sentence isn’t grammatically correct or sounds awkward, just
keep going and don’t worry about it just yet. You can rewrite these
things in the next phase, which is editing. In the writing phase, it is
important to stay in the flow of writing.
Yoast tip
The order in which you write the paragraphs does not have to be the
same order as you will present them in your final text. It can be very
helpful to write ‘easy’ or ‘fun’ paragraphs first, just to get you started.
Marieke for instance isn’t able to write for more than 20 minutes (but
to be honest, her attention span is quite sad). At that point she gets
up to take a walk, look at her Facebook timeline or make a cup of tea.
Even a minute-long break can be enough to return to your writing
with a fresh and renewed level of concentration and creativity.
133
Step 3: Editing
After step 2 of your writing process you will have a first draft of your
blog. In most cases, you have now done about 60 % of all the hard
work. The final step will still take much of your time…
This final step is the part in which you should ‘kill your darlings’. You
should read and re-read and re-re-read your post and correct your
awkward formulations, unclear phrasing and jumbled paragraph
structure.
Re-reading
You can start this phase by reading your piece slowly (and maybe even
out loud, this can really help). Each sentence should be grammatically
correct and the spelling must be flawless. You should be very critical
of your own work.
134
Chapters 23 (about structure) and 24 (about style) should give you
plenty of practical tips to use in the correcting phase of your writing
process.
After editing your text, you should ask people for feedback. At Yoast
all the posts we write are read by at least two or our colleagues before
we publish them online. Feedback allows for the perspective of
someone other than the writer(s) and almost always leads to large
improvements in the post.
Yoast tip
135
Chapter 23
Structure
This chapter
In this chapter we will give practical tips to help you set up a nice and
clear structure for your blog posts. The structure is the skeleton of
your text: it will help the reader grasp the main idea of your post.
In this chapter, we will help you setup your structure while preparing
your post, guard your structure while writing, and improve your
structure in pieces already written.
Before you begin setting up your structure, you should have a clear
formulation of the central question you would like to answer in your
post. I would advise you to put this answer (the message of your text)
in the first paragraph of your blog post. One way or another, you
should introduce the message of your text within the first few
sentences. This will make it much easier for your reader to quickly
understand your text, and that is very important for web texts.
136
Setting up a structure of your text can be done following these three
steps:
If you have gathered all the information you want to use, you can
start structuring it. You can for instance write down a list of all the
topics you plan to discuss (or phrase subquestions/ short sentences).
Whatever works to make some kind of list of everything your text
should cover.
If you have a clear overview of all the topics you want to discuss in
your article, you can start bundling topics. Topics which are similar
should of course be grouped together.
137
Dutchmommies ~ In the post about early pregnancy signs, one
could for instance bundle the purely physical signs (sensitive
breast, acne, stomach ache, tired), the food signs (weird cravings,
dislike of coffee, morning sickness) and the emotional signs
(crying, getting in arguments, easily upset).
If you are done bundling, you should decide the order in which you
want to present the topics in your article. In most cases you can
decide to order thematically. For instance, if you want to discuss
various aspects or angles of a certain topic in order to answer your
central question. You should then present every aspect in a new
paragraph.
138
Type of ordening
After you have ordered the topics you want to address in your article,
you should make a new list. This list is actually kind of a summary of
the article you are about to write. You could write a short sentence or
a few words for every paragraph you plan to write. This list is the
skeleton of your article and you should keep it in mind during the
remainder of the writing process.
139
After you have set up your structure, you start phase 2 of the writing
process, in which you start the actual writing. Use the following tips
in order to guard your structure while writing.
In your first paragraph you should make clear what your readers can
expect in the text. Readers on websites are easily distracted. Take
them by the hand. The final sentence of my first paragraph usually is:
“In this post I will explain…”
Creating paragraphs
In the structure you have set up, you have bundled topics together.
You can then start to write paragraphs around those topics. But what
makes a good paragraph? A paragraph can be defined by three things.
Remember these things while writing!
140
Paragraphs can be short or long, it really depends on the amount of
information you want to communicate. It could be two sentences,
or it could be fifteen sentences, whatever seems right to you. For
writing on websites, we would advise to create short paragraphs
(stick to about five or six sentences). The attention span of people
reading from a screen is very short. Short paragraphs helps people
to easily grasp the essence of your text.
We would advise you to always start your paragraph with the most
important sentence. This is your core sentence, it is what you want
to state in that specific paragraph. Then explain or elaborate on
that sentence. A reader will be able to grasp the most important
content from your article by just reading the first sentences of each
paragraph. And that’s the way lots of people will scroll through
your post, deciding whether or not to read your post entirely.
141
Yoast tip
142
Type of relation Examples of signal words
cause and effect because, so, due to, while, since, therefore, thus
fuzzy signals seems like, might, probably, almost, kind of, I guess
143
Headings
Headings are important for SEO purposes. Google uses your head-
ings to determine the topic of the content on your website. Your
headings should thus be used to optimize your posts. However,
headings are of great importance for your readers as well. Headings
allow your readers to quickly scan through your text and to decide
whether or not they would like to read your article (or which parts).
Therefore headings should be attractive and should clearly state the
content of the paragraph below it.
We would advise you to put a header above every long paragraph (or
above a group of paragraphs which are thematically similar).
144
Chapter 24
Style
This chapter
Read a lot
If you want to develop a nice style, you should read a lot; novels, blogs,
magazines, whatever. Reading will inspire you to write your own
awesome articles. You will learn how other people form their
sentences and how they built their paragraphs. Finally, lots of read-
ing allows you to develop a gut feeling about what makes a nicely
readable text.
145
Dutchmommies ~ A sentence like:
Our most important tip in trying to get your baby to sleep through
the night is having some patience.
or:
If you are trying to get your baby to sleep through the night, our
most important tip is to have some patience.
If you vary the way you construct your sentences, your text will be
much more attractive to read.
Mix it up!
146
very important because eventually all babies will sleep through
the night. Having some patience is harder for some people than
for others, though.
Into this:
Our most important tip in trying to get your baby to sleep through
the night is: have some patience. This is harder for some people
than it is for others, but it is very important, because eventually
all babies will sleep through the night.
Yoast tip
You probably would like to use your focus keyword (the keyword on
which you want your post to rank) a great number of times. This could
make your text very unattractive. And more importantly, using your
focus keyword too often could also lead to over-optimization (eventu-
ally resulting in a penalty from Google). If you want good synonyms
for your focus keyword you should Google your focus keyword.
For instance: if you Google ‘Baby cot’ and look in the results, you will
see that Google also bolds the term ‘Infant Cot’. This means that you
can use Infant Cot as a proper synonym. Read chapter 25 about our
Yoast SEO plugin for more info.
147
Do not write too abstract
If you are writing a blog post, you should try to use clear terms. You
should try to use words that have meaning to people, words people
can visualize. Writing about your ‘employees’ is fairly abstract, while
writing about your secretary and the handyman has more meaning to
people. Of course, at some point you will need some abstract terms
and words in your post, but make sure to explain these terms by using
concrete examples as well, in an aside for instance.
148
that has a different literal meaning. If we say someone is cold as ice,
we all know we do not literally mean the person is made of ice. Using
metaphors or expressions can make your text more concrete and
more fun to read. Do not go overboard though: writing a blog post
with twenty metaphors is too much.
The employees are informed about The manager informs his employees
their financial contribution. about their financial contribution.
149
Use a writing / grammar tool
Another way to make sure your blog is any good it to ask your neigh-
bor, friend or a colleague to read it before you post it online. If
someone gives you fair feedback you will be able to make large
improvements in your writing skills.
150
Chapter 25
This chapter
The Content Analysis Tool in the Yoast SEO plugin measures many
aspects of the text you are writing. It helps you to make your text
SEO-friendly. We’ll first describe the most important features of the
Content Analysis Tool, and how to use and interpret these features.
151
2 The plugin analyzes the text you write. It calculates a Flesch
reading-ease score, which indicates the readability of your article.
The Flesch reading-ease score takes the length of sentences and
words into account. In the future, we will add more checks on
readability, making it easy to check SEO and readability of your
text simultaneously.
152
Two warnings before you start!
While optimizing your post for a certain keyword, you should keep
two things in mind:
The first thing is that in this phase (the final, optimizing phase) you
should not change any major things in your article. You have put
effort into writing an attractive, structured and readable text, and the
optimization process should in no way jeopardize that.
The second thing is that you should not change your keyword strat-
egy in this phase. If you have done your keyword research properly
and you have written your post or your article with a focus keyword
in mind, don’t go changing your focus keyword now! Read The
temptation of the green bullet article for more in-depth information
about that.
You have written your article or your blog post. You can write directly
in the backend of WordPress or write in any kind of text editor and
copy your text into the WordPress backend; do whatever you like!
153
Make sure to set subheadings into heading 2, sub sub headings to
heading 3 and so on. Then put the title of your post in the title box.
Yoast tip
154
Figure 47: Yoast SEO plugin, Content Analysis Tool
Yoast SEO premium offers the possibility to optimize one article for
more than one focus keyword. Optimizing your post for more than one
search term allows you to rank on more keywords and to retrieve
traffic to your site through more keywords. You can use this for
multiple related terms and for synonyms.
155
Step 3: Write a meta description
Enter the meta description of your post. Make sure you use the exact
phrasing of your focus keyword in the meta description and give a
clear description of what your post or article is about. The meta
description will be shown by Google below the URL if people search
for your focus keyword.
156
Step 4: Fine-tune your headings
Look critically at your title, the headings and subheadings or your
article. Do these contain your focus keyword? Can you alter them
(without changing the structure or content of your article) in such a
way that they will contain your focus keyword? Do not put your focus
keyword in all of your headings! That is too much! Using your focus
keyword in one heading and in your title should be enough. You can
read more about headings in one of Michiel’s posts.
Clicking on the Content Analysis tab will allow you to see which
aspects of the search engine optimization process were successful.
The green bullets show which aspects are good, while orange and
red bullets indicate where you can improve your SEO strategy. You
don’t have to keep on optimizing until all of your bullets are green.
157
In posts on yoast.com, we
often have a few orange
bullets and sometimes even
one or two red bullets left.
The important thing is that
the overall bullet (the one
on the upper right in the
backend of your post) should
be green. The overall traffic
light will become green if
the majority of your SEO
aspects are covered.
Figure 49: the overall traffic light
158
Step 7: Fill out the Social data
The final step to take in the Yoast SEO meta box is filling the Social
data. If you fill out a description or title for a social network on this
tab, it’s shown in the metadata for the page. This means this
description, title or image will be shown when sharing the page on
this social network. These descriptions basically have the same
requirement as the meta description (which is what they fall back
to), but can usually be longer. They should tell people what to expect,
why they should click.
159
Chapter 26
This chapter
Blogging with more than one author is (in most cases at least) a
really great thing. So before we give any advice on how to work
together, we really want to emphasize the positive side of working
with multiple authors. It means that you can blog more frequently
than when you are alone. You can learn from each other and give
feedback on each other’s writing, making your post that much better.
Everyone has their own expertise, making the scope of topics you
can blog about larger.
Style guide
Composing a style guide for your blog is a great way to make sure
everyone writes and spells in the same way. In a style guide you can
agree to write words in a certain way. Of course, we all should write
160
proper English, but use of capitals and brand names could differ. You
could also discuss what proper English is: American English, British
English? As all authors write for the same blog, it will create more
unity if everyone spells the important words in the same way.
In the style guide you could also agree on the length of posts, the use
of paragraphs and headings, and the use of images. It should be a
document in which you write down all the things you want the blogs
to be similar in. If you work with an occasional guest blogger, a style
guide could be a great document to help them write a post that fits
the style of your blog as well.
However, the five bloggers did make a list of words and agreed
upon the spelling of this words. For instance, Dutchmommies will
always be written as Dutchmommies with a capital D. They also
made agreements on other words that were used very often. And,
they decided to not use the real names of their children in the
blogs, but refer to them with their initials.
161
Editorial calendar
Conclusion
162
Chapter 27
This chapter
If you choose a photo or an illustration for your post, make sure that
the image actually fits the topic of your blog. A picture should make
people want to read your blog or explain something you have written
about in your blog. Text and picture should be about the same topic,
should reinforce one and other.
You cannot just use any picture or photo you find on the internet.
Illustrations have copyright (just like text, software or any other
creation of someone) and should not be used without consent of the
creator. No worries, though, because there are plenty of databases
containing pictures you can either buy or use freely.
163
Photos
If you really want original pictures that fit your post, you should make
your own photos. Taking your own photos ensures you to have an
original picture, one that can never be found on another blog. Also,
you could shoot a photo that really fits the content of your post. If
you are blogging about your day-to-day life, taking your own pictures
is definitely the way to go. That also goes for food blogs. For a company
blog or a technical blog, or for yoast.com for that matter, it is much
harder to take pictures that actually fit the content of the posts you
are writing.
164
Use photos from platforms
Figure 52: Facebook page Ariane - The Overexposed Stock Image Model
Illustrations
Hire an illustrator
If you have specific ideas about what illustrations for your blog
should look like, but you are not able to create or buy them yourself,
you could also work with a professional illustrator (as we do at Yoast).
We would like to emphasize that you really need a budget for that, but
that it could pay off. Working with a professional illustrator will get
you original and on-topic content. Above that, if you work with the
165
same illustrator for multiple blogs, you will also get come continuity
between posts and within your blog. People will recognize your posts
just by looking at the illustration.
If you see illustrations you like (e.g. on Facebook), make sure to check
out who the artist is. Googling the name will probably lead you to
their portfolio (if they did their SEO well!). Lots of illustrators and
artist work freelance. On Facebook you can also find collectives of
artist offering their services. Again, these professionals need to be
paid. You should also be aware that the copyright of the illustration
stays with the artist, make sure to make clear arrangements about
the use of illustrations on your blog.
166
Yoast tip
Optimizing images
In order to optimize your blog more and make it accessible for blind
and visually-impaired people, you should make use of alt tags. The
alt tag describes what’s on the image and the function of the image
on the page. So if you have an image that’s used as a button to buy
product X, the alt tag would say: “button to buy product X”.
167
How to set up alt tags
When you upload an image in WordPress, you can set an alt attribute.
By default it uses the image filename in the title attribute, which, if
you have no alt attribute, it copies to the alt attribute. It’s better than
nothing, but it’s still rather bad, because ‘DCIM_0054’ doesn’t really
tell you anything about the image. You really should take the time to
craft a proper alt text for every image you add to a post. The interface
makes it easy: click an image, hit the edit button, and find the alt
attribute field.
168
Section 7
Marketing
169
Yoast.com ~ In this section our very own blog yoast.com will be
our central example. Yoast.com started as an SEO blog. In the
beginning, Yoast (which was only Joost de Valk at that time)
wrote posts about SEO and WordPress. Also, Yoast offered a
number of free SEO plugins, which were eventually merged into
what is currently known as Yoast SEO. As Yoast started growing
an audience and Joost de Valk was speaking at conventions and
doing more and more SEO consultancy, the site started to change
a bit. The SEO blog still is a huge part of the website, but the site
also has the character of a webshop as we offer eBooks, SEO
courses, premium plugins and site reviews.
170
Marketing and mission
171
We make sure that these posts fit our brand; We like to come across
as enthusiastic, young, hardworking and fun. We post pictures of
the Yoast team doing sports, having lunch or building LEGOs
together.
We feel that these pictures fit the brand of Yoast. We would never
place drunken party-photos, or promiscuous photos of Yoast team
members, as we feel these would not fit the Yoast brand.
172
Chapter 28
The first step in marketing is to find out what your audience looks
like right now. Who are your visitors? Where are they from? Who do
I currently engage with my blog posts? In order to answer these
questions, there are different kinds of research you can do.
Conducting a survey
173
And what consequences would that have for the marketing of our
products? Perhaps a technically skilled developer is more easily
convinced of the use of one of our plugins than someone without
the ability to read code. These kinds of questions were the starting
point of our research.
The questions you ask your audience depend on the things you want to
know from them of course. Asking some simple background questions
(gender, age, level of education, profession) is always a good idea. This
background characteristics allow for a nice profile of your audience.
Also make sure to ask your audience about their preferences in social
media and ask them whether or not they read your newsletter. This
information can be really useful in planning your marketing and
growth strategy.
Setting up a questionnaire
It seems so easy. You just put some questions in a survey and present
them to your audience. They’ll choose between some answers you
made up. Creating survey questions however, is complicated.
174
the answers is better than the rest. Also questions should be reliable,
meaning that they should be answered in the same way by the same
people, regardless of other factors (read more about validity and
reliability in this post).
You should think about the type of questions you want to formulate.
The type of questions you choose largely depend on the number of
people you’ll reach. Open questions (in which you will allow people
to type their answers) will give much more information, but the
information can become overwhelming if you have many respon-
dents. Imagine yourself having to analyze hundreds of open answers.
If your survey contains more than 30-40 persons, we would advise
multiple choice questions.
Here are some guidelines you should bear in mind if you’re formu-
lating questions for a survey:
1 Make sure your question isn’t too vague. For instance, don’t ask
“have you ever visited my website?” but “how often did you visit my
website in the last year?”.
175
3 Make sure you ask only one thing in your question. For example,
don’t ask people whether they like your products and your service.
It could well be that they like your products but they don’t like your
service, which makes the question impossible to answer.
5 Make sure that your question is applicable. You should only ask
people what they thought of your products if these people have
actually used your products. So you’d have to ask whether they’ve
ever bought one of your products before asking such a question.
6 Think about which answers you let people choose from. Try to
present them with all the possible answering possibilities. This
isn’t easy, but try to look at all the angles. Be aware that answering
possibilities give context to your respondents.
7 Think about the order in which you ask your questions. You want
people to fill out the entire questionnaire. Give everybody the
same clear introduction. Begin with easy and non-threatening
questions. Asking for income at the beginning of a survey is not
wise. Make sure the questions follow a logical order. Pay attention
to context! If you ask people about their opinion of your products
after you asked them about your service, you could have influenced
people with your previous questions.
176
9 Make sure your questionnaire is not too long, as this could scare
people off. Test how long it takes to complete the survey (and
inform people about this). If you have to delete some questions to
make your questionnaire shorter, you’d want to keep the questions
of which the answers will definitely help you to improve your blog/
marketing activities.
Yoast tip
Don’t let people think the questionnaire will never end. Inform them
about the number of questions they can expect.
1 2 3 4 5
177
Think about where you want to deploy your questionnaire. You could
set it to pop up when people enter a certain page on your website, or
you could send a link to it in your newsletter. Whichever works best
for you and your audience.
Once people fill out your questionnaire you will have a lot of data
stored in the online application of your choice. Now comes the time
to analyze it. Some services allow you to export the results to an Excel
file, and you can subsequently do analyses in any statistical package
of your choosing. Excel works fine, but we would recommend using
SPSS or R. If you are not such a statistics nerd, most services offer a
built-in way to visualize the results too.
178
Chapter 29
As we’ve just seen, you can analyze the audience your website
currently has. You can put them into hard numbers. The audience to
which you want to grow is not measurable, however. Nevertheless, it
is really important to have a clear picture in mind of the audience you
would like to reach with your blog. In this chapter, we will give tips
on how to formulate this goal and how to adapt your growth strategy
to that desired audience.
It could also be that your current audience and your desired audience
are somewhat different. Your growth question will then be: where do
I find my new audience?
179
Defining a desired audience
In order to define your desired audience you should ask yourself the
following questions:
• what does my audience look like in terms of gender, education, age
and income?
• what kind of websites (other than yours) would your desired audi-
ence frequent?
• what kind of activities does your desired audience partake in online
(do they read blog posts, watch videos, play online games)?
• what kind of social media does your desired audience use?
180
Adapt your choices!
Having a clear vision of the people you want to reach is important for
every choice you will make concerning marketing. Trying to reach a
30+ audience via Snapchat is simply not a good marketing strategy.
Both the content of your blog posts as well as the channel you choose
should be adapted to the audience you are aiming to reach.
181
Commenting on other blogs!
A very good way to get exposure for your site is by reacting and
commenting on other blogs. Make sure to adapt the choices of the
blogs you comment on to the audience you would like to address. If
you read something interesting on such a blog, something you may
have written about yourself as well, you should comment. In the
comment you should share your view on the matter. You could also
place a link to one of your own blogs. Make sure your comments are
always nice and polite and make sure you only comment if your own
blogs genuinely applies to the piece you are reading. You don’t want
to end up in the spam filter.
Advertising
If you have a budget, you could also decide to place ads on for instance
Facebook or Google to promote your site. Facebook also has the
possibility to boost your post, making sure it’ll get more exposure.
182
Figure 57: boost your post in Facebook
183
Chapter 30
Social media
Social media are a necessity for the growth and marketing of your
site. It depends on your (desired) audience and on your content which
social media are best suited for your site. In this chapter, we will
explain the importance of social media, describe the minimum for
every blog and give practical tips. For more information, you should
definitely check our posts about social media on yoast.com.
Social media are a necessary part of any marketing strategy, but they
should also be a part of your SEO strategy. As social media become
more popular, Google and other search engines can’t ignore them
any longer.
184
Social media is the new marketplace, where people share questions
and reviews about products and events, and you’d better make sure
those are your products and events, right? Partaking in these conver-
sations can be great for your brand and could lead to growth.
Tweets and Facebook posts don’t get the highest rankings in Google,
but Facebook pages and profiles for sure do. See what happens when
you do a search for Yoast:
185
Which social media suits your business?
Social media like Facebook and Twitter offer a lot of ways to advertise
and make your brand and company known beyond the scope of your
followers. With other social media, this will be a bit more difficult.
Make sure to think about what presence on the considered social
media would mean for your company. Make sure that this aligns with
how you want your business to be branded.
Yoast tip
186
Which social media does your (desired) audience
use?
% of users in each age group – US data – users aged 18 and over – December 2014
Source: comScore, image source: Business Insider, BI Intelligence
187
Social media you can’t ignore
At the moment there’s basically only one social medium you really
can’t ignore and that’s Facebook. Why? Let us show you:
Facebook currently has over 1.5 billion active users every month.
That’s over 20% of the entire world population being on Facebook at
least once a month. So you can see why this is one bandwagon you’ll
want to get on.
188
A blog should thus definitely have its own Facebook page. And your
posts should all be shared on Facebook. That way, all the people who
follow your page see new posts in their timeline. WordPress can do
this automatically for you when you publish an article. Some people
will like, share or comment on the Facebook posts, giving them even
more exposure.
Below are some tips you can use in order to set up or to improve your
social media strategy.
189
the introduction of the blog post if you feel that is captivating
enough. You want it to get people to click on the link and read the
whole post. And do make sure that people can easily navigate to
other pages on your website once they are there.
3 diversify
Make sure you write different types of posts on your social media
account. As mentioned in point 1, you could share your blog posts,
but you could also share short news items, videos or simply some
(behind-the-scenes) pictures.
190
Yoast.com ~ At Yoast we really think about the types of posts we
make on Facebook and Twitter. The main focus of our social
media posts should be on information about SEO. We share new
posts, and repost older content from yoast.com when it is relevant
or gets updated. Next to that, we share pictures about what we do
at our office. These pictures show that we are working on a new
plugin, brainstorming about new products or simply that we are
having fun together. These personal posts should make our brand
more ‘fun’. And they receive a lot of likes!
4 Handle comments
If you share your posts on social media, you could also receive
comments. You should handle these comments swiftly. Read
chapter 12 of section What to write about? for more tips on this.
191
6 Be part of the community
If you are active in a certain community or niche, you will soon
discover other important people in that area that your audience
follows. Follow them too and interact with them, this could help
your and their audiences grow.
7 Add metadata
Smart use of (hash)tags can also help your growth immensely. For
instance if you are at an event, include the hashtag for that event
in your post, so everyone searching for that term will come across
it. There are also hashtags for certain interests or technology.
Some people might even retweet everything that is posted in a
certain hashtag, which is a great way to boost your post. But don’t
go overboard! Nobody likes a post that is filled with all kinds of
random hashtags.
If you think about it, social media and blogging are very similar in
many aspects!
192
Chapter 31
Email marketing
People who sign up for a newsletter expect and want to receive your
information. So this part of your audience is very committed. And it
really pays off too. As the costs of email marketing are very low, email
marketing has a relatively high return-on-investment.
193
A newsletter is relatively easy to set up through a service like
MailChimp or TinyLetter. It is also easy to target specific subgroups
within your entire audience with a newsletter. It is a great way to
inform your readers that you have written new blogs and that they
should come and visit your blog.
People will not open your email or will unsubscribe from your news-
letter if they do not like your content. It is very important not to
annoy people with content they do not want, or have already seen.
194
How to set up a newsletter?
4 Tone of voice
The people who have signed up to receive your newsletter actually
like your products, your blog or your company. So your tone of voice
should be friendly and enthusiastic, not too aggressive or sales-y.
195
Your newsletter should make your audience even more fond of you
and your products. You are telling them something other people
will not hear. Make them feel special.
5 Make it visual
If a newsletter is just a wall of text it could become a bit boring.
Illustrations and pictures can make the newsletter look much more
attractive and pleasing to read.
1 MailChimp
There are a number of helpful tools that make sending out emails
that much easier. At Yoast, we love MailChimp. MailChimp allows
you to send out emails to 2000 subscribers for free, and has a great
interface to write content and manage your subscribers.
2 Test!
You should test which topics converts best into sales or new read-
ers. Simply follow the signups of your newsletter, the shares of
your posts on social media etc. as you post new content. It’s
harder to evaluate this for old content, but you could still track
the referring page for signups. To do this you have to make sure
that when people sign up for your newsletter, the thank-you page
is hosted on your own site and has your Google Analytics code,
otherwise tracking the signup is going to be hard.
196
You should also look into the time and day of the week you are
sending your newsletter. For some blogs, the weekend could be a
time to draw people to your blog, while for other (more company
related or professional blogs) a weekday and an office hour would
be most profitable.
197
4 Make sure your newsletter is mobile friendly
Mobile is also really growing in the email market (see chapter 7 in
the section about technical SEO). You should really make sure your
newsletter is as mobile friendly as possible. A lot of the mailing
services offer default templates that are mobile friendly and will
scale down nicely. If you don’t want to spend too much time or
money on your newsletter, this is a good option.
198
Chapter 32
Link building
Links from other sites (or backlinks) are a really important ranking
factor. But link building done the wrong way can easily backfire. It
can result in lower rankings instead of higher rankings in Google.
Link building just isn’t that easy. That doesn’t mean it’s rocket
science, it means it takes a lot of work. In this chapter, we will discuss
the importance of link building and explain how link building should
be conducted in both a holistic SEO strategy as well as a growth
strategy.
The value of a link for the receiving page is determined in part by the
topic of the page the link is on. A link from a page that has the same
topic as the receiving page is of far more value than a link from a
page about an entirely different topic. On top of that, a link from
199
within an article is worth way more than a link from a sidebar or a
footer. Furthermore, the more links there are on a page, the less
each individual link is worth.
Bad Reputation
In recent years, link building has gotten a somewhat nasty reputation.
Once people noticed that links from other sites resulted in higher
rankings, they began to abuse this. They got links from sites that did
not have any relevance to their own site. In other cases, people bought
links from other sites. Buying links polluted the search engine. That
way, not the best information but the people who bought most links
ranked highly in Google. That is why Google started giving penalties
to companies who buy links or (mis)use links from non-related
companies. If you get a penalty from Google, your site will disappear
from the search results. The bad reputation of link building (and our
hesitation to write about link building) comes from companies who
were a bit too enthusiastic in link building and got penalties from
Google. Does this mean that you shouldn’t do any link building at all?
Of course not!
200
links were invented was to send you to other pages you might also
enjoy. And that is exactly the way you should handle your link building
strategy. Place links on sites that will actually generate traffic to your
own site because they are about related subjects.
Every time you write an awesome blog post, you should dive into this
list of websites. Choose sites from it that might link to the article you
have written. If you have a long tail keyword approach (chapter 9,
section 3) the number of websites which will be fit to link to your blog
post will be small. Make an effort to find those websites that really fit
the specific topic of your blog post or article. These websites will
probably be very willing to link, as your blog post really fits their
content. More importantly, the traffic that will come to your website
via that link will really fit the topic of your article (making chances of
conversion and recurring visits much higher).
If you really have put an effort in both the writing of your content as
well as in finding websites that fit the content of your article, you
should contact the website you would like a link from. Tell them
about your content or your product and ask them to write about it and
201
link to it. You can use email, but in many cases Twitter or even the
telephone is a great way to contact people as well. Make sure to reach
out in a personal way, never send out automated emails.
In the old days, link building meant putting links on as much external
pages as possible, often by buying or trading links. Since Google
Penguin came out these tactics have become a risky SEO strategy. If
your link building tactics include spamming, your site risks a Google
Penalty and could be banned from Google’s results completely.
Placing a lot of links will probably help the ranking of your site for a
short while, but probably not in the long run. I suspect most of you
will know quite some of the link building tactics you should definitely
avoid, so I’ll sum up the most obvious link building don’ts and will
then discuss some less well known – but equally important don’ts.
202
Obvious link building don’ts
You should:
• not buy large amounts of links,
• not exchange links,
• not use any automated programs to get links,
• not partake in guest blogging with very thin and off-topic content,
• not comment on blogs or forums if your only purpose is to leave a
link in the comment,
• not over optimize your anchor text.
• not have links that are unrelated to the topic of your website,
• not have links from sites that have no real content,
• not have links from spammy sites whose only purpose is to adver-
tise for gambling, viagra and porn (unless your website is about
gambling, viagra and porn).
203
Don’t link everything to the homepage
You should make sure to get links to different pages on your website
and not solely to your homepage. If you only – or mainly – receive
links to your homepage, your link building will look spammy. Of
course, if someone is writing about your brand, a link to your home-
page is appropriate. But if a website writes about products or about
news of your company, they usually link to your product, news or
blog pages. That is just the natural way people link to other pages.
You should make sure your link building strategy resembles the
natural way people link to websites. Extra benefit: linking to a more
specific page will probably lead to a better conversion on your website!
So you should work on getting links for important product pages, or
for your cornerstone content pages. Get links to those pages where
the deal is closed! It will get your website a trustworthy link profile
and will increase the conversion at the same time!
Another link building don’t is buying links. You probably all know
that buying links in large bulks from companies claiming to get you
ranked fast is not something we would promote at Yoast. But what
about a link from an individual company? From a high quality website
right in your niche? Is it wrong to buy one link from such a company?
How will Google ever find out about that?
204
Google won’t know about one link you buy from one company. Still,
we would recommend not to do so. If this company has sold one link
to you, they could sell more links to more people. And although one
link will not alarm Google, as the amount of questionable links on a
website rises, the risk of getting hit by Penguin or a manual penalty
rises as well.
205
Section 8
Just writing a blog post every day does not pay the bills. For some
website owners, the ultimate goal is to be able to live off the earnings
of just their website. Making money with your site appears to be a
dream for many. In what ways could one make money with a site? In
this section we will give some tips on how to make money with your
site (chapter 33). We will also give a short introduction in how to
change your site in a shop (chapter 34). Finally, we will teach you the
basics of doing conversion optimization (chapter 35).
206
Hiking Time ~ Hiking Time is a blog on which a group of friends
write about their hiking trips, tips to spend a weekend hiking, and
good hiking gear. Hiking Time started out as a hobby for the
authors, the blog was intended for friends and family. But along
the way, Hiking Time got quite an audience, with over 1.200
unique visitors each day. So the bloggers of Hiking Time started
thinking about making some money with their hobby project.
207
Chapter 33
In this chapter, we will talk you through the different ways you can
make money with your site. We will give some practical tips and
discuss the upsides and downsides of these different ways of mone-
tizing your site. In our opinion, there are five ways to make money
with your site:
1 Advertising
You can set up an area on your site’s homepage (or another page)
dedicated to running advertisements. You will get paid based on the
number of clicks on the banner, or on the number of times the ad is
shown to your audience. Google Adsense has a relatively easy pay-
per-click model you can set up in just a few steps. Google Adsense
will then decide which ads are shown on your webpage.
Advertising is simple to set up, but it won’t make you rich unless you
have a lot of visitors. Also, ads can make your site much slower and it
can potentially annoy your readers if you place too many. And more
importantly, ad blocking has become more and more prevalent.
A growing group of people uses software that will hide all advertise-
ments. This trend is making advertising with Google Adsense more
difficult. It is hard to predict how ad blocking will develop from here.
Of course, if you have a site with a large audience, perhaps there are
companies who want to put an ad on your website directly. You will
208
have to do some reaching out and communication in that case. The
major advantage of communicating directly with the companies that
place ads on your website, is that you will have complete control over
the types of advertisements that are shown on your website. There-
fore you can make sure that the ads fit your blog and that you agree
with the content of the ads. Advertising in such a way will not make
your site much slower as running Adsense does and ad blockers will
not as easily hide these advertisements from your audience, as they
are not generated by a specific program like Google Adsense.
Yoast tip
2 Promoted Posts
If your site has a large (and loyal) audience, companies may be inter-
ested in reaching your audience, telling them about their products or
services. They could ask you to write about these things. And they
could pay you to do so. Lots of bloggers receive free products to
review, but some companies also pay bloggers to write about their
products. Writing posts in which you promote a product can be a nice
way to make money with your site.
209
Writing promoted posts also has a downside. Your objectivity as a
blogger could become the object of speculation. It could be wise to
make clear to your readers when you are being paid for your opinion
(in writing, or by making it clear in the design). It all depends on your
blogging style and subjects.
He then got some critical remarks about this review. Some of his
readers wondered why he was reviewing these boots and not
other types of boots. Other readers were surprised that the author
was recommending such expensive boots, while his other posts
were mainly about cheap hiking trips. People got a bit suspicious
about the author’s objectivity.
210
Yoast tip
Another way to make money with your site is via affiliate products.
An affiliate product is a product that you recommend or write about
in a blog post, or for which you place a banner or an ad on your
website. If someone clicks on the link on your website they will go to
the webshop of the company which product you are promoting. If
people actually buy that product, you will receive a percentage of the
amount they are paying. You will not receive money just by showing
the ad to your audience, but only in case your audience actually buys
something after they’ve clicked on the banner on your site.
There are a number of affiliate networks you could join, large ones
like CJ and Shareasale, but there are also company-specific networks,
211
like Amazon’s affiliate network and the eBay partner network. Which
one fits your blog the best really depends on your niche and what
type of product you could sell to that niche.
Affiliation can be a really good way to make money with your site. As
with promoted post, the risk with affiliation could be that the objec-
tivity of the author could become object of speculation. In our view,
you should make sure that the products you promote are products
you really like. Products you would recommend to your friends and
family. That way, you will make sure that you are not promoting
things to your beloved audience that do not fit you or your website.
Yoast tip
Of course, you could also make money with your site by selling your
own products. The moment you start selling your own products, your
site will also become a shop. In the next chapter of this section, we
will discuss just how to turn a site into a shop. Selling products does
not necessarily mean selling physical products. You could also sell
digital products such as eBooks or apps.
212
Hiking Time ~ One of the authors of Hiking Time makes digital
hiking maps. He designed a special app for mobile phones that
allows people to find their way through the rough outdoors.
This app is something that can be bought through the Hiking
Time shop.
213
Chapter 34
WooCommerce
Yoast tip
214
Easy Digital Downloads
Before you can start selling anything on your website, you’ll have to
have a very clear picture of what it is you want to do with your
website. Before you do anything, you should write down your mission
(remember section 1?).
What do you sell? Why should people buy it from you? What makes
your product unique? Make sure your mission is clear in your mind as
well as on your website. What will you be offering exactly?
215
enthusiastic. The development of an app with hiking maps and
tips on the routes was something they all agreed upon really
corroborated with everything they and Hiking Time stood for.
Payments
Make sure a visitor feels safe enough to submit personal details like
their address on your website. That doesn’t mean your online shop
should just contain a lot of security signs. Yes, these should be added,
but a secure feeling is also enhanced by other things, such as testi-
monials and contact details. That large telephone number in your
header makes sure I know I can contact someone if things go wrong.
That address in the footer tells me you have an actual location I can
go to with my complaint or damaged goods. It sometimes seems as
though some online shop owners just want to sell and prefer not to
be contacted afterwards at all.
216
Also be clear about refund policies and Money Back Guarantees. Most
of the times these are required by your local law, so why not display
these clearly on your website? Sometimes having a more lenient
Money Back Guarantee can really help persuade people. Especially
for digital products, the cost of refunds is usually only the labor
involved in doing the refund, so why not be lenient? A lot of your
customers don’t realize they are protected in this way and have very
little to worry about when purchasing something from your shop.
Listing these policies and guarantees near checkout buttons is a great
way to take away that last bit of doubt.
Yoast tip
Now that we’re talking about legal stuff: as soon as you start selling
stuff, you should really compose a Terms Of Service. It’s probably
smart to have a lawyer draft this for you based on some ideas. One
of the things that’s usually a part of this is explicitly choosing a
jurisdiction in which you reside. For instance, Yoast is a Dutch
company. If, god forbid, you bought something from us and want
to sue us, that would have to happen in the Netherlands, because
that’s what you agreed to when you agreed to our terms of service.
If you don’t define this, people might sue you in their country,
which could become a big problem very quickly.
217
Chapter 35
If you have a webshop, you want people to buy your products. You
want to guide your visitors towards a desired end point (the check-
out): that’s what we call funneling. You are aiming to convert your
visitors to a sale.
218
In this chapter we will give you some tips how to optimize your
conversion. If you would like to learn more about conversion rate
optimization, you can buy our eBook on UX & Conversion.
Call-to-action
The most important thing when trying to funnel your visitors is that
you have focus on your website. Focus means that new visitors should
be able to see what your website is about within 5 seconds. This can be
achieved using so called call-to-actions. A call-to-action is an element
on your website – usually a button – which shows your desired result
for the visit immediately (see section 5 about UX, chapter 18).
You’ll have to make sure that these calls-to-action actually stand out
in the design of your website. The buttons have to be eye-catching. A
button that doesn’t stand out is at risk of visitors completely missing
it. And if people miss it, it obviously won’t call anyone to action.
Make your call-to-action stand out by giving it a bright color you
haven’t used in your website yet.
219
Product pages
Visitors should become more and more informed about your product
when they’re moving towards your product page. If you’re selling
physical products, you should try to make it as much as the ‘real
thing’ as you can. What are the odds you’d buy a product in a physi-
cal shop based on a piece of paper with a small picture and sloppy
description? You should attempt to mimic the experience of viewing
a product in a store. Offer high resolution images, from all angles,
which people can zoom in on. Possibly even videos or 3D images that
people can turn around themselves, mimicking the experience of
inspecting a product in a store.
220
Social proof
Yoast tip
Testimonials
221
Having decent testimonials and reviews will definitely convince
people to click on your call-to-action.
Conversion research
222
Epilogue
You have reached the end of this eBook. In it, we tried to teach you
about all aspects of Search Engine Optimization for WordPress sites.
If you are reading this, you will now have all the knowledge you need
to really make the audience of your blog grow. We have presented all
the information from a holistic SEO perspective, focusing on all
aspects of optimizing your site, from UX to marketing, from content
writing to technical SEO.
If you want to read more about optimizing your site, you could check
out our eBook about UX & Conversion or you could read our eBook
about Content SEO. If you want to make sure all angles of your SEO
and user experience are covered, you should definitely check our
website reviews as well. Also, we have a really amazing online train-
ing about SEO which will give you very many tips about optimizing
your website for search engines.
While writing this eBook, we had a lot of help and feedback from
many of our colleagues of the Yoast-family! A special thanks to
Michiel Heijmans for his great input, Tim Hengeveld for the amazing
illustrations and to Mijke Peters for the design of this eBook and for
her ability to critically review and edit all of our texts.
223
About the authors
Joost de Valk
224
Marieke focuses on marketing and
product management. Besides that,
she loves to write texts and posts for
yoast.com. Together with Joost and
Michiel Heijmans, she runs Yoast.
225