Metadata is all the information about a page that you send to a search engine that isn’t visible to your visitors. There seems to be some misunderstanding about this, as most of the articles I read about SEO metadata seem to imply that it’s just the title, description, keywords and robots declaration in the <head> of …
Read: "Metadata and SEO part 1: the head section"
At Yoast, we sometimes receive the question how to remove www from your website’s URL – or add it. In this post, I’ll show you how you can enforce either a www or non-www URL by tweaking your .htaccess file (or nginx.conf if you’re running on an Nginx server). Does using one or the other …
Read: "How to remove www from your URL"
We used to consult for sites that monetize, in part, with affiliate links. We normally advised people to redirect affiliate links. In the past, we noticed that there wasn’t a proper script available online that could handle this for us, so we created one to tackle this problem. In this post, IÂ explain how you can …
Read: "How to cloak your affiliate links"
A revolution is currently going on in the underpinnings of the web. HTTP, the protocol your browser uses to connect to your site, has a new version: HTTP/2. This is not something that should concern the average user, but for web developers, it changes how we do performance optimization entirely. In this short article, I want to …
Read: "Performance optimization in an HTTP/2 world"
Something that’s always up for discussion is how to load new content on your archive, category or search results pages. You can do this in a number of ways. You can list a certain amount of posts or products and add a ‘next’ link at the bottom of that list. You can add a ‘load more’ button at …
Read: "Pagination or infinite scrolling: which is best for SEO?"
Many blogs use date-based archives for their archive pages. These long lists of links, sorted by month and year, group posts made during that period. Although this initially might make sense, it can have an adverse impact on your archive pages’ SEO. Your archives could be an important part of your site structure. So, how …
Read: "Archive SEO: archive by topic, not by date"
There are many ways to let Google and other search engines know what your page is about. In addition to writing awesome content, which should always be your starting point, we have previously written about structured data with Schema.org. JSON-LD is a way to present Schema.org data about your content to search engines. It has …
Read: "Use JSON-LD to add schema.org data to your website"
At WordCamp Milano, I gave a talk with the enticing title Why every developer should read Plato. The short answer to that question: to learn Socratic thinking. In this post, I will share some of my personal journeys as a philosopher in software development. In doing so, I will also introduce a few philosophical concepts that might help you …
Read: "Why every developer should read Plato"
There is a significant difference between a real estate site and a ‘regular’ website. Real estate sites have temporary content: when an estate is up for sale, there is a page for it online. But when it’s sold, it tends to leave the internet. In this post, I’ll tell you how to deal with that. First …
Read: "How to optimize your real estate site"
Today we’re releasing Yoast SEO 3.1. It’s a release we’re truly very proud of in terms of functionality but also in the process we’ve gone through. Yoast SEO 3.0 was arguably our biggest release ever, with a lot of changes that needed to happen but it also lead to issues. Yoast SEO 3.1 aims to keep the …
Read: "Yoast SEO 3.1: Improved snippet editor and primary category"